Birth by GPA in France: a complaint has been filed

Ukraine is one of the few countries that tolerate surrogacy on its soil. In recent years, many foreigners, often through agencies, have resorted to it, even when this practice is tolerated in their own country, because the prices there are attractive. The number of GPAs is estimated to be between 2000 and 2500 per year. Precariousness and economic difficulties have led many Ukrainian women to submit to this form of reproductive exploitation. The health crisis, then the war, have brought to light the inextricable injustices and difficulties that this practice induces. The contract signed by the surrogate, in effect, gives the Agency and sponsors complete control over her life and body. The surrogate mother no longer belongs to herself. In addition, the tragic population displacements and the interruption of the administrative services of the Birth Registration Office have shattered the framework in which these GPAs operated on Ukrainian soil. The legal resources used by the sponsors to bring their surrogacy project to fruition are thus undermined and force them to find other ways to obtain the baby that was the subject of the contract.

In France, it is estimated that two babies are born each week in Ukraine for French customers. Investigations, including that carried out by Le Figaro , revealed that Ukrainian surrogate mothers had been repatriated to France. Like Katarina, for example, who arrived in March, came without her children, two girls aged ten and three, who had to stay with their grandmother. Two “GPA babies” have already been born, one in the Lyon region and the other in Vendée.

But this practice is prohibited on our soil. To circumvent this, French clients who bring their surrogate mother to France then have her “give birth under X”, the man who provided his gametes for conception proceeds to recognize the child, then his or her spouse subsequently initiates an application for adoption.

The Juristes pour l'Enfance association has just filed a complaint against X for incitement to child abandonment. Indeed, “the sponsors of surrogacy are guilty of the offense of incitement to child abandonment, punishable by law [i] . The offense being committed in France, it is subject to French law and the French judge has jurisdiction. These people must therefore be prosecuted”.

Furthermore, Juristes pour l'Enfance stresses that childbirth under X is thus diverted from its purpose and used to allow the sponsors of surrogacy to achieve their ends: namely to obtain a child "without mother", a child whose maternal line is deliberately left blank. There is therefore a clear fraud against the law.

In addition, according to the association, the adoption thus planned constitutes a diversion of the institution of adoption: "accepting the adoption of the child after surrogacy would allow the circumvention of the Hague Convention on Adoption international law, by which States have undertaken to protect children against trafficking by refusing adoption when the consent of the biological parents has been obtained before the birth and/or for a fee. However, this is precisely what the surrogacy contract organizes: the commitment of the mother to abandon the child, a commitment made before birth and even before the conception programmed for this purpose, here against remuneration”.

Juristes pour l'Enfance therefore asks the prosecutor to refuse to register the acknowledgment of paternity subscribed by the parent of the child, as the French courts have already judged, approved in this by the European Court of Human Rights man on April 7, 2022: indeed, the fact of having fathered the child does not confer all the rights with regard to him and, in particular, does not confer the right to buy from the mother his abandonment.

These situations show the impossibility of confining practices that are illegal in our country but legal elsewhere. The reproduction market becomes global and the lowest bidder ends up spreading beyond its original borders. These facts also question the "red line" reaffirmed by the President on the practice of surrogacy during the recent election campaign.

For Alliance VITA, which has been warning for many years and again expressly in the context of the 2022 national elections , the global abolition of surrogacy is a measure of urgent need.

.