The Association Juristes pour l’Enfance filed five complaints against X with various courts, denouncing the delivery under X of bearing mothers, which it considers as a way of bypassing the prohibition of gestation for others.
Le Monde with AFP
This is one of the realities of war in Ukraine. That of surrogate mothers who came to give birth abroad, especially in France. Denouncing childbirth under X of Ukrainian bearing mothers, the lawyer for childhood has filed five complaints against X with various French courts. The association considers that these deliveries constitute a way of bypassing the prohibition of gestation for others (GPA).
Since 2015 and the gradual closure of GPA to foreigners in Thailand and India, Ukraine has become a privileged destination for this practice, prohibited in France. Direct consequence of the conflict in Ukraine, many foreign citizens using substitution maternity – between 2,000 and 4,000 children would be born each year in this context in the country, according to imprecise estimates – are found today impossible to join their newborn.
For the lawyer for childhood, opposed to GPA, the war in Ukraine serves as a “pretext” to allow the childbirth in France of Ukrainian carrying mothers who have passed a GPA contract with French couples. She filed a complaint with the public prosecutor in Aix-en-Provence, Amiens, La Roche-sur-Yon, Lyon and Saintes for “provocation to the abandonment of a child”, after having read, via the press, of five cases.
“a fairly indecent communication operation”
In Charente-Maritime, on the basis of a report from social assistance to the child’s childhood, the Saintes prosecutor’s office opened, Tuesday, May 10, a preliminary investigation for “provocation to the abandonment of child “,” intermediaries between a couple and a person accepting to bring the child “and” voluntary substitution, simulation or concealment having resulted in a child’s civil status “, announced the public prosecutor, Benjamin Alla, in a press release.
For couples who have signed a GPA contract with a Ukrainian surrogate mother who arrived in France due to the war, “it is expected that the mother falsely gave birth under X, that the father will do a prenatal recognition and that his or His spouse files a request for plenary adoption of the child of the spouse “, describes the association in the complaints, consulted by the agency France-Presse (AFP).
“We hope to contribute to the justice to seize these cases, that surveys are opened, that prosecution is carried out. These facts constitute a criminal offense,” the legal director told AFP Jurists for childhood, Aude Mirkovic. She thus wishes to “contribute to put an end to impunity in France” in the affairs of GPA.
“It was the war situation in Ukraine who led these couples to make this” exceptional decision to bring and give birth to the surrogate mother in France, explained to AFP M e Clélia Richard, lawyer of five couples concerned. “There is no desire to import GPA.” She described complaints as lawyers for the childhood of “fairly indecent communication operation”. “These complaints are doomed to technically failure. To file a complaint, you have to be a direct victim”, which is not the case with the association, she said.