Leo van Doesburg

Redefining family in Holland I received a lot of questions on whether same-sex marriages have an influence on the redefinitions of the institute of family in the Netherlands and if so, to what extent.  The Dutch Government believed that the Dutch society had changed considerably during the past decades. For this reason, they established a State Committee to re-evaluate parenthood. The report of the State Committee called "Child and Parents in the 21st century" was presented in 2016. The most important aim of this report was to equal the genetical bond between the parents and the child with the intention to parenthood. Therefore, they called for a redefinition of parenthood. Besides this, the reports calls for the establishment of juridical frameworks for different forms of families. Additionally, the report calls for the legalization of multiple parenthood (but with a limit to four parents with two different households) and for a regulation of surrogacy. The ...

On Tuesday the 11 th of October, the last debates and votes  on a controversial recommendation on surrogacy took place in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). This recommendation was based on a rejected resolution that asked for a legal framework for the so-called “not-for profit surrogacy”. Interestingly, the first report was rejected in its entirety  by the Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development (SOC) of PACE last March, forcing the rapporteur to draft another report. However, the resolution of the new report was also rejected in a Committee meeting last September.  Strangely enough, a  recommendation that was  based on the r ejected resolution was adopted. This was a mistaken decision. This became evident by  the fact that before the plenary debate, the SOC voted with a large majority two amendments (24 against 16 for the first amendment and 27 against 16 for the second) to  this controversial...

On the 15th of March, a large demonstration took place in Paris against surrogacy. The protests took place at the entrance of the building where the Health and Social Affairs Committee (SOC) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) convened to discuss a controversial report on surrogacy. A crowd of a few hundreds of people had gathered outside the building where the meeting was taking place in Paris. Later, a few meters away, feminists from the feminist group Collectif pour le Respect de la Personne (CORP) also organized a demonstration that called the Council of Europe to say NO to all forms of surrogacy and to respect the rights of women and children. Lesbians carried a banner with the slogan “no surrogacy for heterosexuals, nor for homosexuals”.

Petra De Sutter collaborates directly with a commercial surrogacy clinic in India On the 15 th of March, the Social Affairs and Health Committee (SOC) of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) will convene again to vote and discuss on the Report: “Human rights and ethical issues related to surrogacy”. As we saw in a previous post on my blog, the author of this report, Mrs Petra De Sutter, a Belgian parliamentarian and the head of the Department for Reproductive Medicine at the University Hospital of Ghent (a country where surrogacy is legal) is campaigning for creating a legal framework on surrogacy for surrogacy activities she is conducting herself. De spite the fact that these facts have long ago been made public, Mrs De Sutter still remains the rapporteur for this report as an attempt to have a secret vote on the suspicion of conflict of interest failed to gather the necessary majority at SOC.  New information that was revealed in a Huffington pos...

A short review of the ethical and human rights issues related to surrogacy Introduction   On the 2 nd and the 3 rd of May the organization ‘Men having Babies’ (MHB) organized a controversial meeting in Brussels. MHB is an LGBTI (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual and Intersex) friendly organization that wants to enable gay couples to have children. Of course this is naturally impossible, so they use the services of surrogate mothers who carry the child of one of the men. Simply by browsing on their website  you can see that for a bit more than 100000 US dollars you can proceed with 'obtaining' your own child. Usually these processes take place in developing countries like India. Lately, many groups and movements (especially those that are LGBTI related) are pushing for a legal framework that allows and facilitates surrogacy. For example, the rapporteur on a report on surrogacy by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE); someone who supposedly ha...

The Council of Europe's Health Committee postpones discussion of a Report on Surrogacy Last Monday, PACE’s Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development decided to postpone a discussion of a draft report on Surrogacy Motherhood, “Human Rights and ethical issues related to surrogacy” . Th is is good news, b ecause there are many questions bout the pos ition of the rapporteur .  The rapporteur, Belgian senator Petra de Sutter [1] openly confirms that she is involved in surrogacy practices in the Belgian hospital where she works [2] . The motion of the resolution asked the rapporteur to actually investigate dangers that surrogacy pose to human dignity, e.g. of the woman carrier as her body and its reproductive function is commercialized. Additionally, the same resolution states that “the practice of surrogacy also disregards the rights and human dignity of the child by effectively turning the baby in question into a product” and that therefore “the Parl...