High Court orders Population Authority to issue birth certificates with 2 women listed as moms

The High Court of Justice orders the Population and Immigration Authority to issue birth certificates with the names of two women listed as mothers of their children

The case involves nine lesbian couples who had children through anonymous sperm donations and who requested that the Population and Immigration Authority issue new birth certificates on which the names of both women would appear as the mothers of the children.

The authority refused, stating that a birth certificate reflects biological parentage at the time of birth, and is a document that is “frozen in time.”

Acting Supreme Court President Justice Uzi Vogelman rejects the argument regarding biological parentage, writing that if at the time of birth the child had two parents, excluding the non-biological parent from the birth certificate would constitute preferential treatment to biological parentage over legal parentage.

Vogelman also writes that this would give “a harmful message… that while biological parentage is ‘real’ parentage, non-biological parentage is inferior and suspicious parenting, a sort of ‘conditional’ parentage.”

“Therefore it was determined that there is no place for distinguishing between [different types of] parents in the field of certification when in the field of substantive law there is equality between parents,” the court says in a statement on the ruling.