Early February 2020, the Federal Chamber of Representatives approved the amendment to the Act of 10 May 2007 on combating discrimination between women and men. Articles 3 and 4 of this Act already explicitly included the following protected grounds: gender, pregnancy, childbirth, maternity, gender change, gender identity and gender expression. These are now further expanded to include the grounds of paternity, co-motherhood, breastfeeding, gender characteristics, adoption and medically assisted reproduction.
The most striking addition is the ground "fatherhood". The legislator attaches great importance to the father's role and involvement in the family and is concerned that many fathers fear that they would jeopardise their career opportunities if, for example, they were to take their paternity leave or if they were to take on a greater care tasks for their children. Studies show, for example, that many fathers do not dare to take full paternity leave of 10 days. Parliament is also considering making paternity leave compulsory or increasing the number of days, but this does not address the root of the problem, in particular the detrimental treatment of fathers, who at the moment do not dare to make full use of their rights. The same reasoning can be applied to co-motherhood.
Furthermore, the addition of medically assisted reproduction (ivf) and adoption offers a similar protection to these forms of ‘family extension’ as already existed for childbirth. The legislator has also chosen to explicitly include breastfeeding, although this was already implicitly covered by the protected ground of "motherhood". Finally, the ground "sexual characteristics" was added in the case of gender reassignment and gender expression in order to give a clear protection to "intersex" persons (e.g. those who have sexual characteristics of both women and men).
The amendment of the law has yet to be published in the official gazette, the date of entry into force is not yet known at the time of publication.
UPDATE: The Act of 4 February 2020 has been published in the Belgian Official Gazette on 28 February 2020: NL / FR