Law reforms delayed after big protest

France’s Socialist Government has put off plans to reform family laws this year after well over 100,000 people protested against extending assisted procreation to lesbians and allowing surrogate motherhood to gay men who want children, writes Tom Heneghan.

The protesters, many of whom marched against same-sex marriage last year and had grown increasingly frustrated with President François Hollande, took to the streets of Paris and Lyons last Sunday to show they remained mobilised against further social reforms and government attempts to dismiss them as extremists.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls further raised the stakes in a Sunday newspaper interview lumping the protesters, many of whom were middle-class families with children, together with far-right radicals and anti-Semites who held a violent anti-Hollande protest the previous week.