For a week in Spain there has been heated discussion, in the media and also in parliament, of the case of Ana Obregón, a 68-year-old actress who is quite famous in the country, who had a daughter using gestation for others (gpa), also known as “surrogacy ” or, in a more derogatory sense, “womb for rent”. Obregón’s baby was born in Florida, where this practice is legal, because in Spain the law does not allow a pregnancy to be carried out by a person on behalf of others, either in exchange for financial compensation or on a voluntary basis (as also in Italy). On the other hand, recognition in the registry office of the parents of girls and boys born abroad in this way tends to be possible.
However, the case of Obregón is considered particularly controversial for several reasons. Initially it had ended up in all the Spanish newspapers due to the advanced age of the woman, who had also received violent attacks on social media, and because she had reopened the political debate on the gpa. But it reached a larger size after that in a magazine interview Hola! the actress said her daughter was conceived from the sperm of her son, Aless Lequio, who died of cancer in 2020, to respect his expressed desire to become a father. Lequio had her gametes frozen before chemotherapy – a common practice among people undergoing such treatments – and a donor egg was used along with them.
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“Legally she is my daughter, and so it is indicated on her passport. I will register her at the Spanish consulate so I can take her home,” said Obregón, who also said he did not want to hide the identity of her biological father from her. “I’ll tell her, ‘Your dad is in heaven and he wanted you to come most of all in the world, and your mom is a giver, that’s all. What’s the problem?”, said the actress, who intends to write a book about it.
History spawned many doubts and discussions in Spain, but it is not unique in its kind. In the United States, which is one of the countries where people who want to resort to gestation for others go most often, parents have already used frozen sperm from their deceased children to have a grandchild with GPA. In 2018, a British couple whose son had died in a motorcycle accident had also done it, because they “desperately wanted an heir”: in that case, they had gone to the United States because in the United Kingdom – where the gpa is legal – it is mandatory to have the written consent of the sperm donor in order to start the process. And in 2019 the US Supreme Court he had declared that it is permissible to have a grandchild through a “surrogate mother” after the parents of a military academy cadet who died at the age of 21 in a skiing accident used their son’s frozen sperm to conceive a child.
In Obregón’s case, the actress says she obtained her son’s oral consent to use his sperm in the days before his death, but also that she has a written and legal document attesting to it. It is very probable that in the Spanish documents the child is in any case the daughter of Obregón, who biologically would be her grandmother: however, it is not possible for the actress to be recognized as both mother and grandmother because the Spanish civil code establishes that it is not possible to adopt a descendant or a second degree relative of the collateral line by consanguinity or affinity. A grandmother might be the legal guardian of her grandchild, but she does not legally become the mother.
In Spain, surrogacy is a practice declared illegal by law 14/2006 and a law of last February reinforced the illegality in article 32 by promoting the elimination of «any type of advertising aimed at the commodification of reproductive health by third parties in violation of the dignity of women”.