A leading German center-right politician is facing widespread condemnation from across the political spectrum, including members of his own party, over accusations of blatant hypocrisy after he confirmed he and his husband welcomed a child via a surrogate mother in the United States.
Jens Spahn, 46, who currently serves as parliamentary group leader for the joint Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc, made the announcement Wednesday that his son Georg had been born through international surrogacy. “Georg is our greatest joy. This feeling is almost impossible to put into words,” Spahn told German tabloid *Bild*. His husband Daniel Funke later shared a photo of the couple walking with a pram on Instagram, captioning the post “We Are Family.”
The controversy stems from Germany’s longstanding national ban on surrogacy, a policy that Spahn has repeatedly and publicly supported for years. Enshrined in the 1990 Embryo Protection Act, commercial and altruistic surrogacy within Germany carries penalties of up to three years imprisonment or significant fines. While German law does not criminalize raising a child born to a surrogate abroad, the CDU reaffirmed its unwavering support for the domestic ban as recently as this February, arguing the prohibition is necessary to prevent surrogacy from becoming a exploitative commercial industry.
Critics have highlighted two key past positions Spahn has taken that contradict his recent personal choice: In 2020, while serving as Germany’s Federal Minister of Health, Spahn rejected a proposal from the free-market Free Democratic Party (FDP) to relax the country’s surrogacy ban. Five years earlier, in 2015, he wrote publicly that “as a gay man and a Christian I find it personally very hard to warm to the idea of a rented womb.”
Spahn is not the first CDU politician to face this controversy: Earlier in 2025, fellow party member Hendrik Streeck also revealed he had become a father via a U.S.-based surrogate.
Across Germany’s political landscape, figures from multiple parties have called out Spahn’s actions as a breach of political credibility. Greens parliamentary leader Felix Banaszak offered personal well wishes to the new parents but argued Spahn has an obligation to publicly address the significant ethical questions at hand, noting that surrogacy’s moral complexities are “not trivial.” His Green colleague Janosch Dahmen, the party’s health spokesperson, went further, emphasizing that the dispute is not about the child’s birth, but about political consistency. “Anyone who advocates for rules politically should be able to explain clearly why those rules apparently do not apply to them personally,” Dahmen said.
FDP politician Henning Höne echoed the criticism, saying he cannot respect politicians who pass domestic laws only to “evade them internationally with money and contacts.”
The most damaging rebuke has come from within Spahn’s own conservative bloc. Marion Rosin, a CDU member of the Thuringia state parliament and activist with the party’s Women’s Union, argued that “politicians who set standards for others must be measured by them too. If that credibility is gone, resignation is a matter of consequence.” Daniel Peters, a senior CDU politician in the northern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, went on the record to *Bild* stating that Spahn’s position as parliamentary leader is “no longer tenable and he must resign,” arguing it is fundamentally wrong for a lawmaker to disregard the legal framework he upholds politically by acting one way in private while supporting different rules for the public.
Klaus Holetschek, a senior leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister party the CSU, told Germany’s DPA news agency that while the party respected Spahn’s private choice and congratulated the couple, the bloc’s political stance remains unchanged: “what is banned in Germany remains banned – and we won’t waver on that.”
Surrogacy, an arrangement where a woman carries and gives birth to a child for intended parents who cannot conceive on their own, is banned across multiple major EU member states including Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Policy on the recognition of international surrogacy has shifted in recent months: France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, ruled earlier in July 2025 that children born via surrogacy abroad must be legally recognized as the children of their intended parents in France. By contrast, Italy’s right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni introduced a new law in 2024 that criminalizes Italian citizens pursuing surrogacy abroad, even in countries where the practice is legal.
For many German couples, both same-sex and heterosexual who cannot conceive through traditional means, international surrogacy has become a common workaround for the country’s strict domestic ban.