In Greece, a country at the forefront of progressive legislation moving LGBTQ+ rights forward in Europe, the country’s justice minister made a surprising announcement on Tuesday.

Giorgos Floridis said proposed changes to Greece’s civil code will clarify that only women will be able to start a family through surrogacy, disenfranchising single straight men, single gay men and same-sex male couples from benefiting from the procedure.

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The move is part of far-right Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s quest to purge gay parents from the country.

“We are now clarifying unequivocally that the concept of inability to carry a pregnancy does not refer to an inability arising from one’s gender,” Floridis told reporters. “In other words, a woman may be unable to carry a pregnancy whether she is in a male-female couple, a female same-sex couple or on her own.”

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The changes mean gay women — single or couples — will still be able to use surrogacy to start a family, while gay men won’t.

Greece legalized same-sex marriage last year despite fierce opposition from the Orthodox Church, becoming the first Orthodox Christian-majority country to do so.

The marriage equality law will “boldly abolish a serious inequality,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of the center-right New Democracy party said at the time.  

Gay opposition leader Stefanos Kasselakis of the left-leaning Syriza party was instrumental in passing the landmark bill, despite opposing a prohibition on surrogacy for gay couples included in the bill. Current law does grant gay spouses — women and men — the right to adoption.

In 2022, Greece banned conversion therapy, joining a list of 14 other countries that bar the debunked practice. The same year, Greece passed a law banning “sex-normalizing” surgeries for babies born intersex.

In 2017, the Greek Parliament passed the Legal Gender Recognition Law, which allows transgender people to change their legal gender without needing prior medical interventions or tests.

The legal landscape for surrogacy varies widely. Many countries ban it outright while others impose restrictions on its use. Commercial surrogacy is common in the U.S. but barred in other countries, including Spain and Italy.

The far-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had already banned both surrogacy and domestic or international adoption by same-sex couples in Italy before the Italian Senate pushed forward the West’s most restrictive ban on international surrogacy in 2024, making it a crime punishable by prison time for Italians to use surrogates in another country.

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