Gay Couple Fate Hangs In Balance Over Surrogate Babies

Maya and Paula, new-born twins, lie peacefully on a mattress in a Johannesburg home on a quiet autumn afternoon, blissfully taking turns to bottle-feed and sleep, oblivious to the confusion about their citizenship status.

They are the daughters of a gay Namibian-Mexican couple, and Namibian authorities have been slow to issue documents allowing the children, who were born to a South African surrogate mother, to move to Windhoek.

They want proof that the parents, Phillip Luehl, 38, and his wife, Guillermo Delgado, 36, have a biological link to the children.

The men are now pinning their hopes on a Namibian High Court ruling, scheduled for Monday, to at least allow the infants to secure temporary documents to travel to Windhoek and join Delgado and their two-year-old brother Yona.

For now the gay couple’s daughters are stuck in Johannesburg
LUCA SOLA

Before the babies arrived, the couple had applied for papers to ensure they would be able to travel home to Namibia shortly after birth.

“To our surprise that… very innocent request was denied,” Luehl told AFP.

Now “I’m here in South Africa with the girls and cannot travel, cannot enter Namibia,” he said as the girls’ 70-year-old grandmother, Frauke Luehl, bottle-fed one while the other slept.

For now, a house in Johannesburg’s leafy suburb of Auckland Park is the girls’ temporary home.

Luehl and Delgado argue that there is no legal basis to require DNA proof of a biological relationship, and that they are being targeted and “discriminated” against because they are a same-sex couple.

Luehl says he is optimistic that the courts will allow him to bring his daughters home to Namibia
LUCA SOLA

“This requirement would never be asked from a heterosexual couple… (or) from a single mother who gave birth in South Africa, and comes to Namibia,” Luehl said.

Similarly, parents of adopted children would not be subjected to such requirements, he said.

But the Namibian government has rejected accusations of discrimination.

Homosexuality is illegal in Namibia under a rarely-enforced 1927 sodomy law dating back to its period of South African rule.

Luehl dubs the government’s refusal to allow his daughters to travel an “active act of discrimination… state-sanctioned homophobia that is still very much in place”.

South Africa is the sole African nation which allows gay marriage, legalised in 2006.

Elsewhere, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Angola and the Seychelles have decriminalised homosexuality.