BACKLASH: German politician resigns amid outrage at use of surrogate to conceive child

A German politician who historically opposed surrogacy recently stepped down from his position after announcing the birth of his son Georg, conceived through an American surrogate.

Key Takeaways:

• Jens Spahn, leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, resigned July 18 after announcing the birth of his son through an American surrogate — a practice he had publicly opposed, personally criticized, and voted to keep illegal in Germany just five months earlier.

• German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called on Spahn to go, telling reporters “credibility is the highest asset in politics.”

• Spahn’s departure leaves Merz without his most experienced parliamentary operator ahead of three German state elections in September, with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) already leading the CDU by eight points in national polling.

The Details:

Jens Spahn spent years on record opposing surrogacy, writing in 2015 that he found it “personally very hard to warm to the idea of a rented womb,” and voting as recently as February 2026 to keep the practice illegal in Germany.

On July 15, he announced the birth of his son Georg, conceived through an American surrogate, and by July 18, he had stepped down as parliamentary leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) bloc.

Spahn is legally married to another man, journalist Daniel Funke. Spahn announced the birth of Georg on July 15: “Georg is our greatest joy. This feeling is almost impossible to put into words,” Spahn said.

In February, Spahn had shepherded a CDU resolution through the Bundestag formally codifying the party’s opposition to legalizing surrogacy in Germany, a practice the Catholic Church has consistently condemned. Pope Leo XIV specifically said surrogacy “reduces a child to a ‘product’” while “exploiting” the mother’s body and “distorting the original relational calling of the family.”

Five months later, Spahn announced that he had become a father, using a surrogate in the United States, where there is no prohibition on surrogacy.

The reaction was swift. Within three days, Chancellor Merz had consulted with CDU state leaders and called on Spahn to resign, the AfD’s Alice Weidel had declared the departure “overdue,” and Bishop Oster of Passau had called it a “scandal.”

Why It Matters:

Spahn responded with a statement that acknowledged the gap between his words and his actions without closing it.

“The balancing act between my private decision and the understandable expectations that politicians should live by what they advocate has become greater than I had anticipated,” Spahn wrote.

Spahn’s departure creates a practical problem for Chancellor Merz at at a politically precarious moment. 

As leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group since 2023, Spahn served as the operational backbone of Merz’s legislative agenda, the figure responsible for holding together the CDU, CSU, and Green Party coalition, and moving legislation through the Bundestag. Whoever inherits that role will do so with three German state elections approaching in September.

Jens Spahn voted to protect children from being commissioned and women from being contracted, yet did both.

The CDU has accepted his resignation and reaffirmed its opposition to surrogacy, but neither gesture addresses the child at the center of it. 

The Bottom Line:

In a 1987 Vatican Instruction approved by St. John Paul II, the Holy See declared that surrogacy “offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents” and “sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families.”

While Spahn’s resignation may have answered the political question, for the Church and the pro-life movement, the deeper question was never political to begin with.