Does India need a new independence struggle?

The fight this time would not be against British colonialism, but rather against the United Kingdom's approach to regulating reproductive medicine. At a time when India is considering a sort of match-making service for Western couples seeking to hire Indian surrogate mothers, the UK government has announced the abolition of two leading medical regulatory agencies.

Meanwhile, as these countries move farther down the road to free markets in reproductive medicine, France is debating all of its bioethics laws - and continuing to stand up for a different model - focused on social justice and protection of vulnerable women. There is an alternative simply to letting the market decide, the French Assembly insists. ...

Proponents of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Regulation Bill 2010, now before the Indian Parliament, employ a similar rhetorical twist. They say that the bill actually protects surrogate mothers - for example, by limiting the number of pregnancies they can undergo. But the law would make surrogacy contracts legally binding, requiring the mother to give up the baby even if she changes her mind.

Opponents say that the agencies making the arrangements will be the biggest winners - that the huge profits they reap will dwarf the fees paid by foreign couples to the women bearing their children. As NB Sarojini and Aastha Sharma wrote in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, "The Bill actively promotes medical tourism in India for reproductive purposes."

Labels: donor conception, economics, Europe, France, India, poverty, surrogate motherhood, United Kingdom

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...Hasslauer and Cestino, who are in their 40s, in 2000 entered into a civil union known as the Civil Solidarity Pact — PACS by its French acronym — mostly useful for its tax benefit and other financial advantages, said their lawyer Emmanuel Ludo.

Marriage, on the other hand, confers "the responsibility to help each other in times of sickness or financial difficulty, inheritance rights (and) the joint custody of goods — and that's without talking about the benefit for children, who are what we call 'legitimized by marriage'," he said. ...

Hasslauer is the natural-birth mother of eldest daughter, Millie, 16, conceived in a previous relationship with a man. Hasslauer's 10-year-old twin boys and Cestino's 6-year-old son were conceived through artificial insemination.

The three boys, conceived with the sperm of anonymous fathers, have only one legal parent — so if anything happened to Hasslauer or Cestino, those children would become orphans under the law.

Labels: civil unions, France, gay marriage

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Some are divorced and disenchanted with marriage; others are young couples ideologically opposed to marriage, but eager to lighten their tax burdens. Many are lovers not quite ready for old-fashioned matrimony.

Whatever their reasons, and they vary widely, French couples are increasingly shunning traditional marriages and opting instead for civil unions, to the point that there are now two civil unions for every three marriages.

When France created its system of civil unions in 1999, it was heralded as a revolution in gay rights, a relationship almost like marriage, but not quite. No one, though, anticipated how many couples would make use of the new law. Nor was it predicted that by 2009, the overwhelming majority of civil unions would be between straight couples. ...

...But the attractiveness of civil unions to heterosexual couples was evident from the start. In 2000, just one year after the passage of the law, more than 75 percent of civil unions were signed between heterosexual couples. That trend has only strengthened since then: of the 173,045 civil unions signed in 2009, 95 percent were between heterosexual couples. ...

France is not the only European nation to allow civil unions between straight couples, but in the few countries that do — Luxembourg, Andorra, the Netherlands — they are not as popular. In the Netherlands in 2009, for example, there was just one civil union for every eight marriages.

Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, civil unions, cohabitation, Europe, France, heterosexual couples, Marriage, religion

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A heterosexual Austrian couple have embarked on a court battle to have their relationship legally recognised as a "registered partnership" - a new form of civil union for same-sex couples.

Helga Ratzenboeck and Martin Seydl say they don't want a traditional marriage and insist that the law should be blind to gender and sexuality.

Meanwhile, the kind of pared-down marriage they want is proving a huge hit with straight couples in France, where 95% of couples taking up the pacte civil de solidarite (Pacs) in 2009 were heterosexual.

As the number of straight French couples opting for Pacs has grown, the number of marriages has shrunk, to the point that there are now two couples entering into a Pacs for every three getting married.

'A little bit equal'

In both Austria and France, some gay couples are fighting for the right to full marriage. Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Norway are currently the only European countries allowing same-sex marriages. ...

Austria is the eighth EU country to have introduced partnerships for same-sex couples. They are very similar, but not the same as marriage. The others are Britain, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary and Slovenia.

Austria's "registered partnerships" do not bring adoption rights or access to fertility treatment, but despite more than 70 differences, gay and lesbian groups tended to see their introduction on 1 January as significant progress for a conservative, Catholic country.

Some, like Kurt Krickler of Viennese gay rights group HOSI, were pleasantly surprised at how far the partnerships went. Particularly surprising, he says, is that that it offers non-Austrian partners a right to work in Austria, where fears about immigration run very high.

Supporters cite a number of reasons why registered partnerships are better than marriages. Dissolving a marriage can take up to six years, while for registered partnerships it takes three at most. The law also puts more emphasis on openness and honesty than on strict sexual fidelity.

Labels: adultery, Austria, civil unions, culture, discrimination law, divorce, Europe, France, gay marriage, heterosexual couples, Marriage

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WHEN police stopped a woman driving with a full face-covering Islamic veil, little did they know what they would uncover. It turned out that her husband, a halal butcher, practised polygamy, which is illegal in France—or, rather, he was living with four women, one of whom he was married to. Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister, wildly overreacted, demanding that he be stripped of his French nationality. The affair has exposed both the reality of polygamy and the difficulty of doing anything about it.

France considers polygamy “a grave infringement of the principle of equality between men and women”. The practice was forbidden in 1993, when immigration laws were tightened to stop husbands bringing extra wives into the country. Yet there are an estimated 200,000 people, including children, living in 16,000-20,000 polygamous families in France. Most are of African origin, particularly from Muslim parts of the Maghreb and Sahel, where polygamy is accepted.

Over the years, notes Sonia Imloul in a study for the Institut Montaigne, a think-tank, the authorities have turned a blind eye to what she calls life “like a prison for the wives”, many of them forced into marriage. Polygamy is widely blamed for social ills ranging from school absenteeism to street violence. Politicians say it is exploited to maximise welfare and housing benefits. Such fraud is hard to detect, since polygamists “marry” various wives under Islam, all of them claiming single-parent payments, while officially being married to just one.

Labels: France, Islam, polygamy, religion

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...That, at least, is the view of Elisabeth Badinter, a French philosopher who has shaken her fellow feminists with a frontal assault on the breastfeeding, pumpkin-peeling, earth motherhood ideologists who she believes are a threat to women’s liberation.

Her latest book, Le Conflit, La Femme et La Mère (The Conflict, The Woman and The Mother), which is topping the bestseller lists in France amid intense debate, maintains that women have thrown off the shackles of male domination only to impose a far more pernicious tyranny on themselves — that of their own children.

She advocates a return to the old French model, which involved whatever necessary — powdered milk, baby minders, nurseries, you name it — to prevent les enfants from taking over their mothers’ lives. ...

But Badinter backs her arguments up by contrasting the fertility rate in France (2.0 children per woman) with that of Germany (1.3 children). The explanation she gives is that France is more resistant to earth motherhood, with only just over half of mothers breastfeeding, for example, compared with almost 100 per cent in Germany.

“We’ve always been mediocre mothers here,” Badinter said (pointing out that in the 18th century French women farmed their children out to nurses “so that they could continue to have social lives and sex with their husbands”). “But we’ve tended to have happier lives.” In other words, you can still be une mère and une femme as well — even if the tension between the two is rising in France as it is elsewhere.

For die mutter, on the other hand, “once you become a mother, you are only a mother” — an unacceptable choice for the quarter of young German women (more than double the French proportion) who are opting not to have children at all.

Britain is somewhere in between, she says — pulled by tradition towards the French model and by fashion towards a touchy-feely, child-centred future. We should stop before it is too late. “The English tradition of sending children to boarding school from a young age is like the 18th-century French tradition of sending them to nurses — a way of getting rid of them.”

And that, to Badinter, is no bad thing.

Labels: breastfeeding, demographics, feminism, France, gender differences, Germany, motherhood, United Kingdom

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Labels: abortion, culture, France

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A French court on Tuesday allowed a lesbian woman to adopt a child with her partner after 11 years of legal battle, in what gay rights campaigners said was an unprecedented victory.

French law allows single people to adopt but not same-sex couples, a position that has been criticized by the European Court of Human Rights. ...

DOUBLE STANDARDS

Emmanuelle B. had been fighting to assert her right to adopt with her partner since 1998, when the authorities rejected her first application. She had taken her case to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in her favor in January 2008.

The Court said France was applying double standards because on the one hand it allowed single people to adopt, while on the other hand it was denying that right to Emmanuelle B. on the basis that there was "no father figure" in her home.

Labels: adoption, Fathers, France, gay parenting, single parenting

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Like a used car, must a groom take his bride "as is" – with no warranty implied as to the woman's chastity?

That was the question at the heart of a legal case that recently worked its way through the French courts.

The drama began on a Muslim couple's wedding night. Apparently, the bride wasn't the virgin the groom thought she was. He immediately brought suit to annul the marriage on the grounds that his wife's virginity was an essential condition of the marriage. French contract law states that if one of the parties to a contract is mistaken as to some essential element, then the contract is void.

The question was whether the woman's virginity was an essential element of the marriage contract. If it was, then the contract could be annulled. If it was not, then the couple was validly married.

As neither party objected, the trial judge saw no harm in granting the annulment. He failed to foresee the media storm that would ensue. Prominent members of the French government, including the dynamic minister of justice, Rachida Dati, were outraged. She ordered the government to intervene and appeal the decision. ...

The government argued that the wife's virginity was not an essential condition because her unchaste past has no effect on married life. The judges agreed. Even if she had lied, they said, it did not matter, as a woman's lies about her past love affairs are not matters essential to her married life. In short, a woman's past is her own.

Labels: France, Marriage

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