Ecuador just banned single gay people from adopting. the vote was 118 to nothing.

via Human Rights Watch, PinkNews and LGBTQ Nation.

Ecuador's National Assembly passed the Reform Law of Various Legal Bodies for the Streamlining of Adoption on July 28. The vote was 118 in favor, zero against, with 25 abstentions. President Daniel Noboa signed off on August 13 and it became law the next day.

the bill was sold as efficiency

The bill was sold as efficiency. Kids wait too long in institutional care, the paperwork is slow, let's fix the pipeline. Nobody argues with that. Then you read what else is in it.

Ecuador's constitution already blocked same-sex couples from adopting. What the old children's code did not do was tell a single person they had to be straight. This one does. A single lesbian, gay or bisexual person in Ecuador can no longer adopt a child, full stop, and that is new.

the part about trans kids

The second piece is worse, and it does not stop at us. The law makes a parent's "promotion" of medical, surgical or pharmaceutical procedures to "modify the biological sex" of a child grounds for losing parental rights. Read that as written. A mother in Guayaquil who takes her trans kid to a doctor has handed the state a file on herself. Most of the parents this will hit are heterosexual. They just have a trans child.

And there is a carve-out that gives the whole thing away: none of it applies to parents who authorise "normalising" surgery on an intersex infant. Surgery on a child too young to speak is fine. Listening to a teenager who can is the crime.

Cristian González Cabrera, senior LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, put it plainly: "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."

The Ecuadorian LGBT Federation was blunter. "Being heterosexual does not demonstrate parental fitness. Being LGBT+ does not constitute parental incapacity either." And on the custody clause: "Supporting trans kids does not make a family an enemy of childhood."

married in 2019, banned in 2026

This is a country where we can get married. The Constitutional Court did that in 2019. Seven years later the legislature voted 118 to nothing to say we still cannot be trusted with a child, and nobody in the chamber thought it was worth a no.

Marriage was never the finish line. It was one room in a house they still own the keys to.