Germaine Greer has taken a shot at Elton John and David Furnish, for listing Furnish as the ‘mother’ on the birth certificates of their two children.

Australian theorist Germaine Greer has said that listing David Furnish as the ‘mother’ on the birth certificates of his and Elton John’s children shows how motherhood has “been deconstructed”.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, 76 year-old Greer said: “Sometimes I think that really the problem is the concept of motherhood, which we can’t give any real structure to.”

“Sir Elton John and his ‘wife’ David Furnish have entered on the birth certificate of their two sons that David Furnish is the mother. I’m sorry. That will give you an idea of how the concept of motherhood has emptied out. It’s gone. It’s been deconstructed.”

Germaine Greer wrote the best-selling book The Female Eunuch in 1970, before spending the rest of her time criticising people’s personal life choices.

Greer went on to criticise the process of IVF, by which the couple’s children were born. Earlier this year, Elton John and David Furnish were targeted by Dolce and Gabbana, criticising the couple’s “synthetic” children.

“We now have a ‘genetic’ mother, who supplies eggs. It depends entirely on where she is if she is going to be allowed to know what happens to the eggs. And women tend to care.”

Do we?

“In some places you are allowed to know what happens to them [eggs], in other places you are not. What you get is a reduced bill for IVF because a child is being born by the people involved using your eggs.”

Greer then went on to make the claim that she suspects the 1967 Abortion Act was only introduced in the UK because of lobbying from the fertility industry.

“The whole discourse has been distorted from the beginning by the fertility industry. I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I’ve got a suspicion, which I need to investigate properly, that we got legalised abortion precisely because the fertility industry needed it.”

“They were the ones who wanted to be able to terminate pregnancies and manipulate the products of conception at will.”

She has previously made a number of problematic comments, including believing that transgender women are not ‘real women’ and that transphobia doesn’t exist.