Cristina Ibars and Cecilia Vera are closely following the debate on the equal marriage bill that is currently being processed in the Chilean Congress. Both opened a pulse in international justice against the State of Chile for refusing to recognize their marriage, celebrated in Spain in 2012.
The women tried to register their union in the Civil Registry when Cristina became pregnant after an assisted fertilization process, but the body rejected it. It was also refuted by the constitutional Court and then the Supreme Court which, in practice, assumed that in addition to ignoring the marriage, they never considered Cecilia as the mother of their child. “It was extremely painful and humiliating for us, but also for the entire Chilean LGTBI community. The Supreme Court ruling confirmed that we were unprotected against the system and that no one cared about the well-being and rights of our son,” recalls the couple .
Piñera: “We must delve into the value of freedom, including the freedom to love and form a family with the loved one”
The equal marriage bill was proposed in 2017, at the end of the former president’s term Michelle bachelet, but it was left in the drawers of Parliament until, surprisingly, the conservative president Sebastian Piñera decided to give it a course a few weeks ago: “We must delve into the value of freedom, including the freedom to love and form a family with the loved one. And also the value of the dignity of all relationships of love and affection between two people” , announced the president during the Public Account a month ago.
The new legal text that is now being discussed is a modification of the Civil Code that replaces the expression that marriage is celebrated between a man and a woman to indicate that it is between two people. One of the most controversial points of the project and that right-wing parliamentarians tried to eliminate from the text – without success (for now) – has been the filiation rights, which unite children with their parents. It also wants to protect the recognition in Chile of equal marriages contracted abroad or the possibility that same-sex couples may decide to establish themselves under a regime of separate or shared property.
Filiative rights
Three years spent sleeping the equal marriage bill in the Senate until in 2020 the upper house approved the idea of legislating it. Since then there had been no progress in its processing, but rather fierce opposition from conservative sectors and some Christian Democrats. President Piñera himself had refused in 2019 to give urgency to the same project.
“Degrading our Spanish marriage to a civil union is highly discriminatory”
Without the possibility of recognizing their marriage, Cristina and Cecilia were subject to a Civil Union Agreement (AUC), a formula similar to the “de facto couple” that regulates patrimonial and hereditary aspects among others, but does not contemplate filiative rights between people of the same sex. “Degrading our Spanish marriage to an AUC is highly discriminatory,” they criticize.
“The Chilean civil marriage law recognizes marriages celebrated abroad as long as they are between a man and a woman, but it relegates egalitarian nuptials celebrated in other parts of the world to an AUC, which means loss of presumption of parentage of our son with respect to the non-pregnant mother, “they add. A situation that they describe as” surreal “because their son, who was born in early 2020 in Santiago,” today has two mothers in Spain, but he is the son of a single mother in Chili”.
The LGTBI community had been pressing for years to advance in the processing of the project, which became one of the main flags for a large part of the movement. However, for some groups the initiative falls short: “Although equal marriage is a great opportunity for those couples who want their bond to be recognized by the State, our central concern is that the recognition of the sons and daughters of couples in the same sex is protected only through a marriage contract “, points out Erika montecinos, founder and coordinator of the Lesbian Association Rompiendo el Silencio.
Together with other organizations, in 2016 they promoted a project to guarantee the rights of filiation to all lesbian and homoparental families “without the obligation that they have to sign a marriage contract”, a figure that they describe as “patriarchal”. In 2019 the idea of legislating was approved and for the next few days the start of its discussion is expected and its correspondence with the equal marriage project will be studied.
Accused of “treason”
Piñera’s bid to accelerate the approval of equal marriage took his entire political sector by surprise, but also the rest of the political and social world. Within the right-wing coalition Chile Vamos, of which the president’s party is a part, there is no agreement on this matter and, although some more liberal forces support the proposal, for the most conservative bloc it was interpreted as a “betrayal”. The president’s decision also impacted the presidential campaign, in which the right-wing competes with four candidates who will be measured in two weeks in a primary.
“If this project ends in law, it will be late for us,” say Cristina and Cecilia, who decided to return to Barcelona at the beginning of this year due to the “unprotected” situation in which their son was left, even more so with the arrival of the pandemic . “We are happy for all the people who will benefit from it – they say – but undoing the path taken after almost two years of struggle because politically for Piñera it is time to take up this project and pretend that nothing has happened is inconceivable for us, “they consider.
The president’s change of mind regarding same-sex marriage has been interpreted as an attempt by the government to resume its own political agenda and save the last months of a mandate in which public disapproval of Piñera has reached record numbers. The latest polls indicate that more than 70% of the population is in favor of same-sex marriage.
If, finally, the project is approved, in the next few weeks Chile would become the eighth Latin American country to legalize equal marriage, after Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Ecuador and Costa Rica.
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