By Beatrix von Storch, Member of the Bundestag

That the German federal government shows no interest in enforcing the current ban on surrogacy while being keen to teach lessons about the rule of law and human dignity to those whose thinking differs from its own does it no credit whatever.

It has answered a question tabled by the AfD group in the Bundestag about surrogacy in Germany (Bundestag printed paper 19/21019). Surrogacy is prohibited in Germany, both by the Embryo Protection Act (Embryonenschutzgesetz – ESchG) (Section 1, para. 1, no. 7) and by the Adoption Placement Act (Adoptionsvermittlungsgesetz – AdVermiG). The latter (in its Section 13c) prohibits not only the arrangement of surrogacy relationships, but even the use of advertisements in seeking persons to enter into them (§ 13d AdVermiG). The federal government’s only comment on the latter is that the “health risks for the surrogate mother are undisputed”, but that it has “no knowledge” about the fate of the children.

This testifies to the federal government’s lack of interest in enforcing the current ban on surrogacy. Such a response does no credit whatever to a government that is otherwise keen to teach lessons about the rule of law and human dignity to those whose thinking differs from its own.

Merkel & Co. are quite happy to invoke the rule of law when instructing the governments of other countries, such as those of Hungary or Poland, who want to retain their national sovereignty while remaining in the EU. That they are less interested in enforcing the rule of law in their own country is evident in every policy area; not only in its toleration of large-scale abuse of the right of asylum and its laxity in matters of financial oversight, but also in its downright encouragement of left-wing extremists who hold law and order in contempt.

The intention of the legislators was to prohibit surrogacy on the grounds that surrogate motherhood “in any form” was to be rejected. That much appears perfectly clear. Unfortunately, there is a wide gap between what the law says and what actually happens. For years, there have been no convictions for contraventions of the laws cited above. The Federal Government said as much in its answer. It is no secret, though, that the ban on surrogacy is being undermined overturned by the importing of children, which has become a veritable industry. At “assisted reproduction conventions” (like the “Kinderwunsch-Tage” held in Berlin in 2019), surrogacy and the buying of children from abroad are openly advertised. This is happening even though Germany signed the Hague Convention on Adoption Procedures, which was intended to prevent the trafficking of children.

The inhumanity of the international trade in children was recently documented by a video showed dozens of babies crying alone in their beds in a Kiev hospital. The video was produced by the surrogacy company “BioTecCom”. It makes for sad viewing and was intended to put pressure on the Ukrainian government to lift the entry bans imposed during the lockdown and allow the customers in to collect the babies they had ordered. According to reports in the media, around 1,500 children were born to surrogate mothers in Ukraine last year. The federal government told the “dpa” press agency that at least 137 of them were reported to have a parent with German citizenship. We wanted to know more about this. We wanted to know what had become of the children. Where are they? Were the persons who ordered the babies legally recognised as parents despite the ban on surrogacy? According to the law as it stands, the Ukrainian “surrogate mothers” are the children’s legal mothers, for Section 1591 of the German Civil Code (BGB) states that the mother of a child is “the woman who gave birth to it”. The Embryo Protection Act was also intended to prevent “split motherhoods” in which the genetic and birth mothers are not one and the same person, on the grounds that this “could make it much more difficult for the child to establish its own identity”.

“Multiple parenting” involving three or more “parents”, as called for by Green ideologues, is not something that should be imposed on children; under no circumstances whatever should any child be reduced to being a consumer good termed a “desired child” and hence treated as a commodity to be bought and sold, and it is no less inhumane to exploit women as being nothing more than incubators.

As originally published in The Free World- the internet & blog newspaper for civil society: https://www.freiewelt.net/blog/die-bundesregierung-sieht-beim-kinderhandel-tatenlos-zu-10082026

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