The Spanish government is banning its embassies and consulates from registering children born through surrogates in foreign countries.
Regulations set to go into effect on Thursday cancel all pending registration processes and forbid diplomats from accepting certificates issued by foreign countries in which Spanish citizens are recognized as the parents of a child born through surrogacy.
Several EU countries prohibit surrogacy, but citizens routinely skirt the ban by hiring surrogates in foreign countries and registering the children abroad. Opposition to that loophole has become a unifying issue among politicians — both from the far right and the far left — who are usually diametrically opposed.
In Italy, right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has cracked down on the practice as part of a broader campaign targeting the LGBTQ+ community. Surrogacy had become an increasingly popular option for the country’s same-sex couples, who are banned from adopting children, but in 2023 Meloni ordered city councils to only register biological parents on birth certificates. Last year her government made traveling abroad to have a baby through surrogacy a criminal act.
Surrogacy has been prohibited in Spain since 2006. But for years, Spanish couples have successfully registered children born through surrogacy in other countries by providing foreign court rulings recognizing them as the baby’s parents. Up until now, those documents had been sufficient for diplomats to authorize the child’s inscription in the Spanish Civil Registry, but the situation changed last December when Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that procedure to be illegal.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s left-wing governments have moved to tighten the ban because they object to the practice on feminist grounds. In the 2023 revision of the country’s abortion law, surrogacy was described as a form of violence against women, and last year’s Supreme Court ruling condemned the practice as “an attack on the moral integrity of the pregnant woman” and a measure that treats children as “mere commodities.”
The new regulations, first reported by the Cadena SER, dictate that the child’s parentage can only be determined once the minor has arrived in Spain.
Spanish law only permits the adult who is biologically connected to a child born through surrogacy — usually the father — to be registered as its parent; the other partner must apply for adoption after the surrogate mother has formally relinquished the minor.
Spain’s surrogacy ban is expected to be further reinforced in a human trafficking bill set to be unveiled later this year.
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