On Tuesday 11th October, from 5.00 p.m. in the Assembly of the Council of Europe, the draft recommendation entitled “Children’s rights related to surrogacy” will be examined. The Collective No Maternity Traffic calls for a dismissal of the text, or for amendments to prohibit surrogacy in all its forms.

The report, which was supposed to address the crucial question of human rights and ethics of surrogacy had a chaotic path (the Rapporteur was suspected of conflict of interest, the procedure was in camera, the draft resolution was rejected but the recommendation was discussed and voted…). The Rapporteur, the Belgian Senator Petra de Sutter, whose first report had been dismissed last spring, re-entered the fray with a new and modified report, limiting itself to “Children’s rights related to surrogacy”, completely obliterating the evaluation of the practice of surrogacy itself.

The Committee of Social Affairs dismissed once again the draft resolution of the Rapporteur during an in camera meeting in Paris on 21 September, while adopting a draft recommendation which actually is very dangerous and opposed to the interest of children who were born through surrogacy. This text which is only two paragraphs long pretends to protect the children from the consequences of surrogacy but does not condemn this practise.

For No Maternity Traffic, “Pretending to deal with the consequences of an injustice without condemning its practice equals to justifying it.

Surrogacy, whether it be called “altruistic” or “commercial”, whether it is legal or not, is in all cases a violation of the rights of children, who thus become the object of a contract of sale or transfer. Moreover it is intolerable that for a question of such importance, no one mentions the use that is made of women, who are considered as surrogates or gestational carriers. The reification of the human being is absolutely opposed to the human rights and that is the reason why the Parliament of the European Union clearly condemned surrogacy in 2015 (§114).

No Maternity Traffic request the members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to take hold of this vote to clearly condemn the practice in all its forms, for it is contrary to human rights, which the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe should be the protector of.

A petition, of more than 100,000 signatures lead by our collective was declared admissible by the Bureau of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to be taken into account in the debates concerning this report. These European citizens demand the prohibition of surrogacy in all its forms.