(Strasbourg) Angelika Weichsel Mitterrutzner, Vice-President of FAFCE, spoke on today’s vote by the European Parliament on the European Parenthood Certificate backed by the majority. “A majority of MEPs refused to take a stand in favour of human dignity and used cross-border parenting for ideological purposes, against the principle of subsidiarity”. The principle of subsidiarity “is a founding principle of the European Union, governing the exercise of the respective competences of the EU and its Member States”, also ensuring that “powers are exercised as close to the citizen as possible, in accordance with the proximity principle”, as set out in Article 10(3) of the EU Treaty.
According to FAFCE, “several MEPs expressed concern about the indirect recognition of surrogacy through this report and stressed that surrogacy is a violation of the dignity of women and children”. Indeed, this legislative initiative provides for an automatic cross-border recognition of “parenthood”, which is a concept “that goes beyond national established categories of filiation, and which leads – according to FAFCE – to automatically extend the legal effects of filiation to all types of parenthood”, legally acquired in a Member State, “also through surrogacy, in all EU Member States”.
FAFCE also makes it clear that “this vote is not binding for EU Member States, that can only adopt the regulation unanimously in the Council”. FAFCE calls on EU Member States to reject this proposal. “We will continue to remind everyone of common sense: motherhood and children are not a commodity, but a gift, the source of our humanity’s future”, FAFCE President Vincenzo Bassi remarked.