Putin signs bill banning surrogate maternity services to foreigners into law
MOSCOW. Dec 19 (Interfax) - Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a bill, which prohibits foreigners from using surrogate maternity services in Russia, into law.
According to the document posted on the official legal information website, only a Russian citizen can be a surrogate mother. However, the ban will not apply to cases when it is an officially registered marriage between a Russian citizen and a foreigner "in order to prevent discrimination against the rights of a Russian citizen because of the spouse's citizenship," the law's co-author, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Security and Corruption Control Vasily Piskaryov, said earlier.
An explanatory note to the law said that one of the most important factors of the high latency of crimes against children in this sphere is that children born to surrogate mothers in Russia do not acquire Russian citizenship because both persons who are a child's biological parents and are named on the birth certificate are not Russian citizens.
Under the law, such children shall acquire Russian citizenship if they were born to or were carried by a surrogate mother as of the day when the ban on foreigners and non-citizens using the services of surrogate mothers in Russia entered into force.
These rules will apply to situations where potential parents or a single woman unable to carry a pregnancy to term or give birth for medical reasons are foreign citizens or stateless persons.
A child born to a surrogate mother in Russia will also receive Russian citizenship if the potential parents or a single woman lost Russian citizenship as of the day of the state registration of the child's birth.
The new rules will not hamper the departure of such children and their parents to their countries of residence, because the sole goal is to create additional mechanisms to protect Russian underage citizens, including those affected by crimes outside Russia, the explanatory note said.
The mandatory Russian citizenship of these children will allow respective Russian authorities to exercise the necessary control over the fate of children taken out of the country, the bill authors said.
The proposed ban is a measure of last resort, which is needed because after a child born to a surrogate mother in Russia leaves the country, the Russian state can no longer protect his or her rights, Piskaryov said. Besides, Russia cannot take all measures to ensure that potential foreign parents have no convictions for crimes against minors and to "make sure that their intentions are good."
"And many reports have been received from foreign countries about the unfortunate fate of children born to surrogate mothers who ended up in sexual slavery or were simply abused," he said.
State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said when the State Duma heard the bill that "only a few countries permit surrogacy on a commercial basis and allow citizens of other countries to use this service. And the number of such countries decreases every year. India and Thailand, which just recently were international surrogacy centers, banned foreigners from using these services several years ago."
The co-authors of the law are State Duma Deputy speakers Pyotr Tolstoy and Anna Kuznetsova, Piskaryov, State Duma Committee on Civil Society Development head Olga Timofeyeva, and Federation Council member Margarita Pavlova.