Law banning ‘sex-change’ surgery proposed in Lithuania

by Thaddeus Baklinski

VILNIUS, Tue Mar 22, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Lithuanian parliament is looking at a proposal to amend the country’s Civil Code to prohibit sex-change surgery.

The bill was proposed in the Seimas (Lithuania’s parliament) on March 8 by the chairman of the Committee on Health Affairs, MP Antanas Matulas. It would ban doctors and surgeons from performing so-called “gender reassignment” operations so that “the state will be protected from any preconditions which create grounds for the appearance of claims against Lithuania at the European Court of Human Rights.”

In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Lithuania had infringed on a plaintiff’s right under EU law to gender reassignment surgery because the country had no legislation regulating the procedure and conditions of such surgery. However, the Civil Code did provide that an unmarried adult was entitled to undergo “gender reassignment” surgery if it was medically possible.

In that decision the ECHR ruled that Lithuania must pass legislation regulating the procedure in order to comply with the European Convention of Human Rights.

The draft amendment proposes that the existing Civil Code provisions be deleted and replaced by a provision making clear that gender reassignment surgery is prohibited in Lithuania. The amendment also proposes that civil registry entries concerning persons who have undergone sex-change procedures abroad be amended only by court decision.

Lithuania is leading Europe in implementing legislation that protects the family, natural marriage, and the country’s children from the more detrimental effects of the sexual revolution.

In 2009, the Seimas passed the Law on the Protection of Minors Against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information, which went into effect in March of 2010.

That law prohibits the dissemination, in a public forum accessible to youth under 18 years, of information recognized to have a negative effect on the mental, intellectual, and moral development of youth. Specifically, it measure bans “the portrayal of physical or psychological violence, displaying a dead or mutilated body, [and] information that arouses fear or horror or that encourages self abuse or suicide,” and forbids individuals and organizations from “encouraging the sexual abuse of minors, sexual relations between minors and other sexual relations.”

It also prohibits the spreading of information that “denigrates family values” or “encourages a concept of marriage and family other than stipulated in the Constitution and the Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania.”

Since Lithuania’s civil law defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman, this legislation also proscribes campaigning for same-sex “marriage” in public places accessible to youth.