Up until last week, Jens Spahn was, by all accounts, a model of political success in Germany. At just 22, he was elected to the Bundestag for the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), and rose steadily through the ranks of the party. He was a leading official in the finance ministry, led the ministry of health through Covid and, in 2025, became his party’s leader in parliament, arguably the second-most powerful post in the country. Controversies – and there were many in more than two decades in politics – did not seem to stymie his rise to power.

So when Spahn was made to resign after announcing that he had become a father after he and his husband used a surrogate mother in the US, there was a moment of disbelief among those who thought him a Teflon political operator immune to scandal. Why was surrogacy the issue that finally brought him down? That this was the final straw for his party revealed how, in the conservative Germany of today, reproductive politics can mark a red line.

Surrogacy in Germany is illegal, and the CDU is clearly opposed to the practice. The German public is evenly split on the issue (although 20% of voters in a recent poll said that they did not have an opinion), and the opposition Green party is the only one in the Bundestag proposing to legalise unpaid, “altruistic” surrogacy. But when a fellow CDU member, Hendrik Streeck, announced the birth of his son, also via surrogacy in the US, earlier this year, it........

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