German Social Affairs Minister Jens Spahn announced his resignation as parliamentary group leader of the governing coalition after accusations of hypocrisy over his use of a surrogate mother in the United States to father a child. Surrogacy is prohibited in Germany under the 1990 Embryo Protection Act, although parents may accept children born abroad, creating a legal loophole that Spahn has exploited.
Surrogacy is banned in Germany and other EU countries such as France, Spain and Italy, but Spahn’s own CDU has repeatedly reaffirmed the ban. The party even rejected a 2020 appeal from the liberal FDP to relax the ban. In 2015, Spahn said as a gay Christian that he found the concept of a rented womb very hard to warm to. These earlier statements collided with his personal choice to use a surrogate mother abroad, drawing criticism from within his own party.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who heads the CDU, said the decision was "right" and "inevitable", calling for the party’s credibility. He pledged to begin the process of appointing Spahn’s successor. Alexander Hoffmann, the Christian Social Union parliamentary group head, has been named as the interim leader of the CDU and Christian Social Union parliamentary group.
The controversy follows a month-long debate in German media about the ethics of surrogate motherhood when personal convictions clash with political obligations. Spahn cited increasing "relentlessness" in public discourse and a "deep pause for thought" as reasons for stepping down, stressing that politicians should keep a human tone.
Spahn’s resignation underlines the difficulty faced by German politicians in reconciling personal reproductive choices with the party’s strict stance on surrogacy—a debate that continues as other European governments wrestle with similar legal and moral questions.
