Spanish actress, presenter and producer Ana Obregón, 68, gave birth to a baby girl through surrogacy. The little girl was born in Florida on March 20th and the news of her birth was broke by Spanish gossip magazine ¡Hola! which published a photo of Obregón exiting a Miami clinic with the baby on his lap on the cover.
The actress had kept her decision to have a daughter through surrogacy a secret and the revelation sparked immediate reactions, including political condemnation from the centre-left parties in government.
Ana Obregón, who is very well known in Spain and also starred in Italian films and TV series (“Car Crash” and “Voglia di canto”) in the 80s, later confirmed the news on her Instagram account. “A light full of love has come into my darkness. I will never be alone again, I’m alive again,” she wrote. The girl is her second daughter: the first, Álex Lequio, born from the relationship with Italian-Spanish Alessandro Lequio, died of cancer in May 2020 at the age of 27.
The political controversy
The birth of the child was greeted with very harsh words by the Minister for Equal Opportunities Irene Montero (Podemos): “As you know, in Spain it is an illegal practice, considered a form of violence against women – she said – let’s forget not the women behind these cases, victims of clear discrimination based on poverty”.
“It seemed like a Dantesque image to me,” commented Pilar Alegria, education minister and spokesperson for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party, on the photo of the actress holding her daughter. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party Psoe is indeed against pregnancy for others.
Instead, the centre-right opposition has opened the discussion: The issue “deserves a deep and serene debate because it touches on many moral, ethical and religious issues,” said Cuca Gamarra, number two in the People’s Party, a Catholic conservative party that supports he is opposed to paid surrogacy (as practiced in Florida) but has more nuanced stances on the altruistic.
Instead, it’s supported by the liberal Ciudadanos party, which in 2017 tabled a bill to legalize pregnancy for others, including reimbursement for surrogate mothers’ “loss of earnings” during pregnancy. Quite different positions from the centre-right parties in Italy, which instead are unequivocally opposed to any form of pregnancy for others and have proposed making it a criminal offense in Italy, even if practiced abroad in countries where it is legal is.
The surrogacy ban in Spain
Surrogacy, whether paid or not, has been banned in Spain since 2006 and was counted among the “manifestations of violence against women” in a law on abortion passed last February, which – similar to what is envisaged in Italy – also includes any “advertising by recruitment agencies”.
Spain’s center-left government had also speculated about the possibility of making them criminals abroad, but then gave up because the law would have had unconstitutional profiles (you can’t legalize something in countries where it’s criminal). Finally, the new code of conduct for Spanish doctors allows altruistic surrogacy.
Children’s Rights
However, the ban on surrogacy in Spain does not mean that children born abroad with this technique are not recognized. On the contrary: the Supreme Court (the highest court of the Spanish judicial system) stigmatized surrogacy, but reiterated that the “best interests of the minor” must always be taken into account and that this consists in recognizing the intentional parents, that is, those who they wanted to bring him into the world by instructing the surrogate mother to carry the pregnancy to term. The path proposed by the Spanish Supreme Court is therefore adoption: upon arrival in Spain, the child born with a surrogate mother is “entrusted” to his intended parents, who then adopt him.
recognition at birth
In practice, however, this route rarely occurs because there is a much faster one: recognition at birth, made possible by the establishment on October 5, 2010 of a system of registering the parentage of children born through surrogacy. This system allows children of Spanish citizens born abroad through surrogacy to be registered in the civil status registers of the Spanish consulates in the countries where they were born and where surrogacy is legal. The process is a simple copy of the birth or adoption certificate – the type of certificate varies depending on the country where the surrogate is made – and the children acquire Spanish citizenship immediately. Thanks to this system, Spain (unlike Italy) recognizes children born with surrogacy: from 2010 to the first half of 2022, 3,400 were born in 12 countries.
American “private adoptions”.
In Florida, like most of the United States, the laws governing surrogacy are based on those of adoption, which differ greatly from Italian and European adoption laws in general. In the United States, as also recounted in the film Juno, a woman who chooses to put her child up for adoption at birth can choose prospective adoptive parents. It’s called “private adoption” and provides reimbursement in almost all states for the mother or parents who put the child up for adoption, legal fees and for the agencies involved in the transaction: the average cost of an adoption in the US is $43,000 , for an adoption in Florida between 60,000 and 65,000 dollars (i.e. up to 60,000 euros).
Florida Surrogacy Law
Pregnancy for others is based on the same principle: the Florida statutory surrogacy contract is made between the intended parents and the carrying surrogate (and her spouse if she is married to acknowledge that she has no parental rights) and is a type of Pre-adoption contract that provides for a fee for the surrogate. Unlike in private adoption, the child is conceived with the egg cell or sperm of the future parents. The woman who continues the pregnancy is guaranteed the right to choose medical interventions and the treatment of the pregnancy, provided that they follow “reasonable” medical indications. You agree to waive all legal rights of the child upon birth and to continue to do so in the event of the child’s disability or health condition. A surrogacy in Florida costs between $110,000 and $200,000.
Age limits for expectant parents
In the case of the Spanish actress Ana Obregón, her old age is also a source of criticism: 68 years. In Spain (as in Italy), the techniques of medically assisted fertilization impose age limits on expectant parents: usually between 50 and 55, depending on the clinic and the region. Don’t become foster parents. While Italy also sets maximum ages for adoption (at least one of the prospective parents must be no older than 45 years of the adopting child), Spain does not have a maximum age for adoption that is also open to single people.