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.
The protesters, many of whom marched against same-sex marriage last year and have grown increasingly frustrated with President François Hollande, took to the streets of Paris and Lyon on 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 in tow or in prams – together with far-right radicals and anti-Semites who held a violent anti-Hollande protest in Paris the previous week.
"Mr Hollande doesn't listen to us or want to talk to us [and] Mr Valls ... will do everything to shut us up," one Paris protester remarked. Many of Sunday’s protesters were Catholics mobilised by their local parishes, but there were also women in Muslim headscarves in the crowd.
Yesterday the Government tried to reassure the protesters that the new law would not legalise assisted procreation for lesbian couples or surrogate motherhood for gay men who wanted children.
But when Socialist MPs insisted they would amend the planned bill to include those reforms, the Government announced the draft law needed more work. “The Government will not submit a family reform bill before the end of the year,” the prime minister's office said.
Assisted procreation is legal in France only for infertile married couples. Surrogacy is not legal and polls say a large majority of French reject it as exploitation of women.
The protesters, notably Lyon Cardinal Philippe Barbarin in a television interview, said they did not believe government ministers who played down their concerns. “We are not naive,” he said at the march he headed along with Grand Mosque Rector Kamel Kabtane.
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