High Court of Justice: In the birth certificate of a child born to a couple of mothers, both must be noted

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Population Authority must issue a birth certificate that reflects the status of both mothers, in cases where lesbian female couples bring children into the world with the help of anonymous sperm donation.

As part of the procedure, nine female couples petitioned against the Minister of the Interior and the Population and Immigration Authority, demanding that they be issued amended birth certificates indicating both the birth mother and her co-parent whose parental status was settled in a legal process (adoption order or judicial parentage order) as mothers. The Population Authority has so far refused to do so on the grounds that the birth certificate is a document that reflects the biological parentage at the time of birth, and as a rule is a document “frozen in time”.

Acting President, Judge Uzi Fogelman, accepted the position of the Population Authority according to which the birth certificate is intended to document the identity of the newborn at the first point in time of his life, at the moment of birth. However, he rejected the claim that the certificate was intended to reflect ‘biological parentage’ only. The judge noted that this position has no hold in the language of the law, and that it may even harm the principle of the child’s welfare.

Judge Fogelman emphasized that as many as seven births the baby had two legally recognized parents, the exclusion of the non-biological parent from the birth certificate means a preference for the status of biological parentage over legal parentage. According to him, after the legal arrangement of parental status – the status of both parents, biological and non-biological, is completely equal and includes the same basket of parental rights and obligations. Therefore, he stated that there is no place to distinguish between the parents in the registration on the birth certificates, and even added that such discrimination may be accompanied by an offensive message according to which these relationships are different in nature and essence, and that while biological parentage is ‘real’ parentage, non-biological parentage is inferior and suspect, a kind of “superior” parentage. -terms of”. According to him, this type of message should not be accepted.

For the most part, the status of the non-biological mother is determined through a judicial parentage order that applies retroactively from the day of birth. In these cases, the Population Authority is required to issue amended birth certificates that include the names of both mothers. Until 2014, the status of non-biological mothers was regulated through adoption orders, and even in these cases the court noted that the Population Authority would be required to issue amended birth certificates. Only in the rare cases where the parentage order is not retroactive – the Population Authority will not be required to issue corrected birth certificates.

Justices Ruth Ronen and Alex Stein joined the ruling of the Acting President. Judge Stein even added that in his opinion, parents should be allowed to register themselves on the birth certificate in the format of ‘parent/parent’, ‘father/father’ or ‘mother/mother’ according to the request of the newborn’s legal parents. According to him, this is required by the principle according to which the state is supposed to be neutral in its relationship to the patterns of marriage and family that its adult citizens choose for themselves, and “it should not dictate to its citizens one monolithic pattern of marriage and family”.