According to the ruling pronounced this Monday, June 8 by the Second Family Court of Santiago, Emma de Ramón was legally recognized as the mother of the son she has with her civil partner, Gigliola Di Giammarino. The judicial strategy was led by lawyer Juan Enrique Pi, director and former president of Fundación Iguales.
For the first time in Chile, a court declares that a family made up of two women who participated in an assisted reproduction technique must be legally recognized as mothers of their child. With this, the child has the recognition and protection of the same rights that children born in heterosexual families enjoy.
The couple, Emma de Ramón and Gigliola Di Giammarino, celebrated their civil union in 2015. The following year they underwent an assisted reproduction procedure in order to have their child; however, when trying to register the child as son of both of them in the Civil Registry, the office refused, considering only Gigliola Di Giammarino as his mother.
The historic opinion constitutes an unprecedented resolution in our country regarding the rights of homo-parental and lesbian-maternal families, establishing that “the duty of the Chilean State is to grant protection, without discrimination, to all forms of family that exist, and to strive to integrate them into national life. For this, it is essential that the marital status of a child born and raised in a family headed by people of the same sex, who have expressed a will to procreate, coincides with their legal affiliation and is reflected in their identification documents. ”
Regarding the sentence, Emma de Ramón, national archivist and director of Fundación Iguales, who from now on is legally recognized as the mother of her son and will be registered as such, stated that “this child has been my son of heart and soul since the day he was born and will remain so until the day I die, but with this sentence something changed: now I am his mother before the State, with the same obligations to him as any other mother, as it should be for all mothers and parents, sons and daughters, regardless of the family they have constituted. "
The judicial strategy was led by the lawyer, director and former president of Fundación Iguales, Juan Enrique Pi, who together with the legal director of the institution, Jorge Lucero, represented Gigliola Di Giammarino; while Emma de Ramón was represented by attorney Claudia Sarmiento, from the Sarmiento & Walker Abogados law firm.
Regarding the failure of the case that began on December 31 of last year, Juan Enrique Pi declared that “this is a historic triumph for diverse families, it is a further step in their recognition and protection. With this ruling, the State has ratified that same-sex couples are family, and both the couple and their children deserve the same protection under the law . ” "We celebrate the fact that the family courts defend and protect the rights of the child, while our Constitutional Court closes its eyes to reality and international jurisprudence on Human Rights," added Pi.