Mercedes Ortuno Lizarán |
Madrid (EFE).- If the words “Surrogacy Spain” are searched on the Internet, the first results that appear are advertisements for intermediation agencies and law firms specializing in seeking surrogacy abroad. With the approval of the abortion law reform, this will no longer be the case.
All advertising that encourages this practice, already illegal in Spain and considered a form of violence against women, is prohibited, and information campaigns will be carried out to avoid it.
This is stated in articles 32 and 33 of the reform of the law on sexual and reproductive health and the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, definitively approved this Thursday in Congress with the fundamental objective of shielding abortion in public health and eliminating the permit paternal for minors under 16 and 17 years of age.
For Miguel González Erichsen, a lawyer from the specialized law firm Universal Surrogacy, “it is one more example of how much is said about surrogacy and how little is known about it.”
In conversation with EFE, he explains that, in his opinion, “a great and general lack of culture” has been promoted among “the most radical sectors, who have confused what surrogacy really is, simplifying it to an insulting extreme.”
However, this new step in the persecution of surrogates is in line with what was dictated by the Spanish Justice: the Supreme Court has ruled twice, in 2013 and 2022, that this practice violates the fundamental rights of women pregnant woman and the pregnant child.
Since 2006, any contract by which a woman offers to gestate a child and then, with or without a price, renounces maternal affiliation and delivers it to the contracting party or to a third party is null and void. On the contrary, the filiation of the children is determined by the birth.
Surrogacy, legal in other countries
Surrogacy is legal, however, in other countries and González considers that the “advice and information work” of Universal Surrogacy and other agencies and law firms “will continue to flow, but it will do so in a more complicated way.”
“Spain is one of the countries that is at the bottom of the birth rate, the drama of infertility is increasingly overwhelming and more evident in our country (…). As much as they want to put limits on this, the need is there, ”she says.
If you want to avoid this type of practice, he believes, it would be convenient to improve and simplify the adoption processes.
Not surprisingly, speed is the main trick played by intermediation agencies.
In just a few minutes, after exchanging just a couple of messages with an online advisor, anyone can receive detailed information in their inbox about the program that best suits their requests, which will take place in one of the countries, developed or not, in which those contracts are legal.
For example, for a single mother who cannot provide her eggs, the package “Full donation with surrogacy services” is recommended in Cyprus with three embryo transfer attempts for 52,950 euros.
It usually takes between eleven and twelve months from the start of the program to the birth of the baby, if the surrogate mother gets pregnant on the first try. As there is no “surrogate mother waiting list”, the process can be started right now, the adviser of one of these companies celebrates by chat.
Age, height, weight, eye and hair color, educational level, marital status and even blood group are the characteristics of the egg donor that can be chosen in just a few clicks.
Intermediation agencies are fully available to potential clients, but most of them hang up on the media.
“They treat us very badly. They misrepresent our words”, alleges one of the people who has refused to speak to EFE.
Faced with this general silence, Pablo Bilbao, spokesman for the Association of Bizkaia families for surrogacy, strives to explain his position and his personal experience.
Together with his partner, he is the father of two children born this way in the United States, and he defends tooth and nail what he considers another form of assisted reproduction.
It naturally describes the process, through which it is sought that both parties are “on the same wavelength” with respect to certain assumptions during the pregnancy. As if it were a dating application, compare Bilbao.
And it downplays the ban on advertising by intermediary agencies, since “most families” have not resorted to them “to access a surrogacy process in countries where it is regulated for foreigners.”
His biggest concern is that it is considered publicity that people like him talk about their cases in the media: “It worries us and reminds us a lot of the ban on homosexual propaganda in Putin’s Russia.”