Ecuador: New Adoption Law Entrenches Bias

Click to expand Image Ecuador's National Assembly in Quito on October 23, 2024. © 2024 Rodrigo Buendia/AFP via Getty Images A new adoption law in Ecuador contains discriminatory provisions targeting lesbian, gay, and bisexual people and threatens to strip many parents of transgender children of their parental rights, Human Rights Watch said today. The Reform Law of Various Legal Bodies for the Streamlining of Adoption, which entered into force on August 14, 2026, purports to remove inefficiencies in adoption processes and reduce the amount of time children spend in institutional care. But the law compounds an existing ban on adoption by same-sex couples by explicitly barring single lesbian, gay, and bisexual people from adopting. It also makes a parent’s “promotion” of gender-affirming medical care for a transgender child grounds for the loss of their parental rights. “Improving the adoption system is a legitimate legislative goal, but it should not be used as a pretext to entrench discrimination and undermine children’s health,” said Cristian González Cabrera, senior LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “By legislating on the basis of bias and misinformation rather than e