**GPA: The French Supreme Court Opens the Door to Recognition of Foreign Parentage**

The plenary assembly of July 3, 2026, mandates the recognition of foreign judgments. France prohibits surrogacy in Paris but validates it as soon as it has been carried out in Kyiv or Los Angeles.

The Fact

On July 3, 2026, the Court of Cassation, sitting in plenary session, ruled that France must henceforth fully recognize parentage resulting from surrogacy carried out abroad, provided that a foreign judgment has been issued. This decision removes one of the last legal barriers in French domestic law, which still prohibits surrogacy on its soil under Article 16-7 of the Civil Code.

Our Interpretation (in Light of Magisterial Teaching)

In our previous edition, we had interpreted surrogacy as an undertaking contrary to natural law. Today’s decision does not invent anything new. It completes what the Strasbourg jurisprudence had outlined in the case of Mennesson v. France (ECtHR, June 26, 2014, No. 65192/11). The magisterial teaching is firm. The 1987 instruction Donum Vitae (II, A, 3), followed by Dignitas Personae in 2008 (No. 25), classifies surrogate motherhood among procedures "offensive to the dignity of the human person." The Catechism of the Catholic Church (No. 2378) reminds us that "a child is not something owed to one, but a gift." By legalizing the recognition of parentage resulting from a practice prohibited on its soil, France enshrines a contradiction. It prohibits the commodification of women and children in Paris while validating it when committed in Kyiv, Los Angeles, or Tbilisi. The internal legal boundary becomes a fiction. Surrogate mothers remain invisible in the ruling.

For Reflection

Article 3 of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child states that the best interests of the child must guide all decisions. The Court invokes this. But the child’s best interests cannot erase the moral law that prohibits making a human being the object of a contract. We will pray for the instrumentalized surrogate mothers and for the children born of these contracts, whose mothers of origin are erased by the law today.