DM -Italy erases names of gay mothers from birth certs

I think civil partnership/marriage should be considered primarily, as the spouse is the next of kin, in the terrible situation you described, there would also be evidence of what was already planned and that parental responsibility had already been applied for. All these things considered would mean that the spouse would get custody of the baby.

I know that any changes around donors and birth certificates would cause a bureaucratic hell for a few years, but I do think it all needs proper ethical scrutiny, especially since donors and methods to circumvent the adoption process through surrogacy are becoming increasingly normalised. We need the damn truth documented and we need to stop all these unethical practices racing ahead at the demand of desperate or wealthy people.

I know that the OP is about Italy and lesbians, but I am interested in the wider discussion which includes anyone who uses donor gametes, etc.

That's fair enough - so what are your thoughts on this? Can you imagine the chaos and heartbreak caused if we suddenly removed all the men who are not the biological fathers from their children's birth certificates? Imagine the backlog in the adoption processes and the potential for awful outcomes if the mother died while the couple were scrabbling to get the paperwork in order.

I can actually see an argument for changing the information on birth certificates for all sorts of reasons but going back and stripping existing parental rights seems like a dreadful thing to do to families.

I know that the OP is about Italy and lesbians, but I am interested in the wider discussion which includes anyone who uses donor gametes, etc.

The goalposts are now being moved by people with an agenda - claiming that because it was possible for a man (or mother) to lie at registration and claim to be the father in the absence of paternity tests, that means that genuine paternity was never assumed to be the truth or inferred by marriage when registering a birth, therefore the ’father’ on a birth certificate only ever meant ‘second parent with parental responsibility’. It’s not true. It’s not how it was intended. It serves a certain narrative to make that claim

Again though, this applies (in terms of absolute numbers) to far more men who aren't genetically related to the child than women. Even setting aside lies at registration, there are many more heterosexual couples having fertility treatment involving doner gametes than lesbian couples.

But it's lesbians who have received the ire - I wonder why that might be.

It was always taken on good faith that the husband was the father since you couldn’t prove paternity.

The goalposts are now being moved by people with an agenda - claiming that because it was possible for a man (or mother) to lie at registration and claim to be the father in the absence of paternity tests, that means that genuine paternity was never assumed to be the truth or inferred by marriage when registering a birth, therefore the ’father’ on a birth certificate only ever meant ‘second parent with parental responsibility’. It’s not true. It’s not how it was intended. It serves a certain narrative to make that claim.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Human beings, like all other mammals are currently gestated within the mother’s womb.

God forbid it will ever happen. I hope that we get a handle on this. Currently it seems that the bar for ethics is set by the country with the lowest standards. Then everyone else wrings their hands and says “well if they do it in North Korea, then people will only travel there to do it, so we need to get rid of our own values”. I wish we’d take a bloody stand about bio ethics.

So the child has an incubator for a 'mother' or doesn't have one?
I suppose as long as the adults are happy?

I also think we need to put the brakes on some of this technology.

Its so obvious that a man with access to hundreds of women’s vaginas, wombs and eggs is going to give into his primal impulse to impregnate them all.

We need a diversity of genes, it’s not healthy our species for one man to sire so many children.

Yes, the documentation should reflect the truth, not just what is convenient and gives people fluffy feels. This does means catching up with technology. But technology mustn’t be allowed to keep advancing at the behest of desperate people and those who wish to exploit them and/or have a pervy interest in advancing it.

I was unaware that being a spouse carried more rights than being a biological parent, so I am certainly one person whose opinion has been changed by this thread.

I suspect it’s a common misconception as father is more generally used nowadays to mean biological father. But when the laws were written, being legally married was more significant. It may have been unspoken that the spouse and the father were not always the same man, but it is clear in the law that the mother’s spouse could be added readily, while listing the biological father was actually more complicated.

I would question whether it might be better to go back to first principles and work out what information is useful to the child to have on that paper, and why, but if it has always been the case that a spouse can be added, without question, then adding the spouse, whatever their sex, may well have been “in the spirit of the law” in a way that I hadn’t appreciated before.

I would be quite glad for my daughter to be on the birth certificate if she was married to the mother, in some format or other. I can’t see what harm that would do and I can see that it would be useful in some circumstances. But it might also be useful to have the biological father listed as well. So I’m somewhat on the fence about who should be listed and what format that should take. This entire conversation has opened up for me just how complicated parenthood has become.

I don’t think medical science will get there. I think it is more likely that babies will be fully gestated in incubators than trying to fit such a device inside a man’s body.

Maybe you should read the thread or do some research, two women are not registered as the mother, there is one mother (the woman who gave birth) and one legal parent, there is not incorrect or fictitious about it, it removes the need for adoption of the child for married couples which would result in the same outcome.

Don't be so ridiculous.

If there is a potential for the two parents to be different to the two genetic donors then that absolutely should be recorded, it doesn't matter what sex the two parents are. But the documentation hasn't caught up yet.

Hows about trying to campaign for a factual birth record to be updated to reflect modern medical society instead?

It really hasn’t.

Father = provider of small gametes.
Mother= provider of large gametes + possessor of the womb within which the baby gestates, and the body which supplies the stable conditions and necessary nutrients to grow to eventually be born from.

You can’t take that essential function away from motherhood even though there’s no equivalent for men. It’s part of being a mammal -the centrality of the mother’s body in bringing young into existence.

Although the language has changed to call surrogate mothers just ‘surrogates’ now, in order to downplay its importance, for the comfort and convenience of those who want to separate the mother and baby dyad and pay to play mum with a human toy. From the baby’s perspective, the mother is the one it grew inside. For the purposes of registering births, the mother is the one who gave birth to the baby.

@Coconaut
I did not know that non-genetically related husbands could be listed - I do not agree with that either. I think that the birth certificate should be a matter of biology only and a child/adult has the right for a certificate that details this.

I am taking a slightly more optimistic view that some people on here were unaware of the existing status of spouses in doner situations and thought (weirdly, admittedly) that lesbians had been given special extra rights to be on birth certificates.

If people are fine with non-genetically related husbands being listed but not OK with non-genetically related wives then that really can only be because they are against same sex couples having children.

I don't agree with the view that this step is anti female - if we apply the same to two male partners I would say the same, biologically there needs to be a male and a female to create a baby.

I think a child has an fundamental right to a birth certificate that is factual and follows the biology.

I agree, it’s sad that some women on a feminist are in favour of removing rights from other women and support a clearly homophobic law.

As I’ve already explained, but I will explain it again for you.

Say a woman and her wife decide to have baby, she conceives through donor sperm then her wife decides she doesn’t want to be with her anymore, how does the pregnant woman get any financial support from her wife for the child they decided to create if her wife then refuses to adopt the child? What if the birth mother dies during labour? Who is the legal guardian of the child that is born? What if the woman is pregnant with her wife’s egg then decides she doesn’t want to be with her wife any more? How does the biological mother of the child adopt a child if she has no legal rights to the child and the birth mother refuses the adoption?

You also have not answered the question, what is the benefit to making the wife adopt the child after the birth? The current situation in the Uk is that anyone married to the birth mother automatically has legal parental status of the child, you seek to remove this right, for what benefit?

Elsiebear I agree with you and I found it quite upsetting to see this on a Feminism and Women’s Rights board. But here we are.

I did not know that Italy had a different way of recording births.
My view is that a birth certificate should record the names of the biological parents ie mother and father - it has to be a male and female - although it might well just record the mother's name as this is also the case and has been over the centuries. Two female's cannot produce a child.
The family unit is different and not the same as the birth. I therefore agree with this latest action in Italy.

It’s all been pointed out previously on the thread.