France: mass demonstrations against surrogate parenthood for same-sex couples
October 06, 2014
Enormous crowd of demonstrators marched in Paris and Bordeaux, France, on October 5, demanding that the government uphold policies that prohibit assisted reproduction and surrogate parenthood for same-sex couples.
The mass demonstrations were an echo of last year’s Manif pour Tous protests, in which hundreds of thousands of French citizens expressed their opposition to the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. The government went ahead with plans to legalize same-sex marriage despite those protests.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls vowed that on the issue of surrogate parenthood, the demonstrators would have no reason to worry. The practice, he said, “is and will remain banned in France.”
Estimates of the number of demonstrators involved in the Sunday protests varied wildly. Organizers claimed to have assembled 500,000 people in Paris and 30,000 in Bordeaux; police put the numbers at 70,000 and 7,500, respectively.
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