Who Gets to Ignore the Rules?
What example are these two men setting as members of the legislature? In his classic Animal Farm, George Orwell has the ruling class declare: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” By analogy, one might now add sarcastically: “All men are equal, but gay men are more equal.”
Spahn and Streeck offer a textbook demonstration that laws may be made, but apparently do not apply to everyone. Let the public obey them. We have money, so we can buy children abroad.
Across the world, the tide is already turning against the deeply troubling practice of surrogacy. For years, lobby groups, lawyers, doctors and profiteers have transformed it into a global market worth billions, openly trampling on the interests and rights of women and children in the process.
Within the EU, exploitative surrogacy has been classified alongside human trafficking and organized crime. Only recently, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls condemned the global practice as the exploitation of women and the trafficking of children.
Spahn and Streeck have now shown in practice what they think of Germany’s ban: using women as human incubators is acceptable, provided it is done abroad and not on German soil. For elected representatives, and members of a Christian party at that, it would be difficult to imagine greater opportunism or narcissism.
Does God Rejoice over Every Child?
Jens Spahn in particular has repeatedly made a point of publicly emphasizing his Christian faith. One would like to believe him. Yet, as the Bible says, by their deeds you will know them.
Now he is once again pressing God into service to make something appear acceptable that could never be condoned on Christian grounds.
In an act of self-absolution, Spahn even enlisted God to justify his purchase of a child. He told the press that he and his partner were aware that surrogacy was often accompanied by “uncertainty” and “some prejudice”, but that the great Franz Beckenbauer had, after all, once said: “The good Lord rejoices over every child.”
That is an argument that will delight every rapist. After all, has he not also created life through the abuse of a woman?
There is no record of God instructing people to impregnate women and then tear their children away from them so that they can be raised by two men on the assumption that mothers are unnecessary.
Invoking God after the fact to legitimize one’s own wrongdoing is not only presumptuous, but remarkably alien to the faith one professes.
How a child is conceived says nothing about its inherent dignity, which, according to Christian belief, is bestowed by that same God. But how the child is treated – whether as a bearer of human dignity, as a human being or merely as an item ordered for delivery – says a great deal about the buyer.
The CDU’s Credibility Crisis
There was a time, one that people now seem reluctant to remember, when the Christian Democrats opposed surrogacy. So did Jens Spahn, now the CDU’s parliamentary leader in the Bundestag.
In 2020, Spahn was health minister and rejected a proposal by the Free Democratic Party (FDP) to legalize surrogacy in Germany under certain conditions. Today, the same man, together with his party colleague Streeck, has plunged the CDU into yet another crisis of credibility.
The protection of life is one of the last causes the Christian Democrats still like to claim as their own, at least in their lofty resolutions. The party is now being tested on how much those principles are worth when its own politicians are involved.
When Hendrik Streeck announced his “baby joy” in Bild in April 2026, his party colleagues across the country responded with embarrassed silence. Nobody congratulated him. Nobody criticized him. MPs who were asked about it offered only the same awkward silence. They would not comment. It was a private matter. A family affair.
The message in political Berlin was evidently that nobody should say anything, presumably in the hope that the controversy would die down. The MPs did not know then that their own parliamentary leader would place them in precisely the same position three months later.
Jens Spahn remained silent too. Or rather, he kept quiet, knowing full well that, on the other side of the Atlantic, “his” child was already being carried by another woman and that he and his partner had already made their first payments.
Back in 2020, the same Jens Spahn had at least publicly taken a different position on surrogacy. Even the division of motherhood resulting from egg donation and the implantation of a donated egg into another woman’s body was considered problematic, according to a federal government response issued while Spahn was health minister.
“From the legislature’s perspective, the particular difficulties this could create for the child in developing a sense of identity raised concerns about adverse effects on its development that could endanger its welfare.”
This was not the only position the CDU adopted on the issue, at least until it was forced to confront what happened when its own politicians personally circumvented the very principles and laws the party claimed to uphold.
What the CDU Once Believed
In 2017, the CDU Women’s Union had already adopted a resolution stating: “Surrogacy violates fundamental value judgments of our legal order!” Its 32nd federal delegates’ conference declared that it “continued to support a ban on surrogacy in Germany”.
The resolution made no distinction between different forms of surrogacy, but categorically rejected everything from so-called altruistic arrangements to commercial ones.
In June 2023, the CDU’s family policy spokeswoman, Sylvia Breher, was equally unequivocal. A child – a human being – must never become a commercial object, she said, and its dignity must always be protected. She did not believe that surrogacy could reliably guarantee that.
Surrogate mothers were exploited in many countries, Breher said. They were contractually forced to surrender the child even if they wanted to keep it and were sometimes required to terminate the pregnancy if the unborn child was ill. So much for the theory.
In January 2025, the Women’s Union went further. The politically driven debate in Germany was increasingly shifting toward legalizing at least the “altruistic” form of surrogacy, which supporters were attempting to sell as ethically clean.
Here too, the organization remained unequivocal. It passed a resolution reaffirming the ban on supposedly altruistic arrangements, arguing that no reliable distinction could be drawn between altruistic and commercial interests. Emotional or familial pressure on women could not be ruled out with any certainty. Financial dependencies could exist even in the absence of formal commercial payments.
England has shown for 25 years how easily the distinction can be blurred, with payments simply classified as “expenses” rather than “fees”. The Women’s Union also made a coherent case against instrumentalizing pregnancy and childbirth for the benefit of third parties while leaving the physical and psychological risks entirely with the surrogate mother. Nor, it argued, should the interests and rights of the child be overlooked.
As recently as January this year, the CDU reaffirmed its opposition to so-called “altruistic” surrogacy at its party conference. On a motion from the Women’s Union, the party backed the ban as a means of “preventing abuse, exploitation and health risks”.
By then, the process of producing Jens Spahn’s child was already well under way. A similar process had already been completed for Hendrik Streeck, the CDU’s health policy spokesman, who announced in April that he and his partner had become the parents of a baby born in the United States.
The Wrong Debate
A common mistake in the surrogacy debate is to confuse personal sympathy for an individual with the substance of the issue, as though a gay couple could not be criticized simply because they are likable, or because one happens to be their friend, colleague or neighbor.
Allowing personal sympathy to corrupt one’s judgment is the surest route to the destruction of every ethical standard.
Nor does it matter whether two men, four women or any other constructed family arrangement might be equally capable parents, or perhaps even better for a child than divorced heterosexual parents from a working-class background.
Even a bad mother remains the child’s mother. Even a father who walked out long ago remains someone his child deeply needs and cannot simply be replaced by another man stepping into the “father’s role”.
Life is not a play in which parts can simply be assigned to different performers. Motherhood is not a role, but an existential condition. A woman whose child is taken from her, or whose child dies, remains a mother forever. Perhaps more than ever.
Parenthood is hardware. Interchangeable parental roles, by contrast, are merely an attempt to install the wrong software on arbitrarily chosen bodies.
What “Baby Joy” Conceals
The issue in the surrogacy debate is not whether the adults involved might make good parents. It is the attempt to sanitize a reproductive practice that necessarily requires the use of a woman’s body and psyche to manufacture a child. It “gives” that child the trauma of separation at birth while the child itself is ordered, paid for and brought home like an expensive high-end product.
This is not a story of “baby joy”, as the tabloids would have us believe. Its true vocabulary is far darker: exploitation and human trafficking.
Two good, or at least well-intentioned, fathers cannot replace the child’s unique relationship with its mother.
And no, maintaining contact with a “surrogate mother” on another continent in order to soothe one’s conscience is not enough. Nor is it enough to tell oneself that the child has not been denied access to or knowledge of its origins.
None of that can replace what has been taken from the child: attachment, closeness and the right to a daily and enduring relationship with the person it knows best because it grew inside its mother’s body.
Anyone who currently feels sympathy for surrogacy because they like the people circumventing the law should quietly ask themselves whether they would find it equally likable and acceptable if the same politician had procured an adult abroad, paid for that person and brought him home to fulfill his own vision of personal happiness.
And if the unspoken answer is “no”, then the answer has been found.
Small human beings do not have smaller human rights than large ones, because human dignity is not measured by the kilogram of live weight.
In a civilized country that regards the abolition of slavery and human trafficking as an achievement, there should be nothing more to say about surrogacy.
