Spain’s Minister of Equality, Ana Redondo (main image), has said that her department and the Ministry of Justice are working on a reform aimed at strengthening the ban on surrogacy in Spain, which they expect to be ready ‘this month’.
This assisted reproduction technique, where a woman is hired to give birth to a child whom she will then relinquish in favour of the person or couple who made the agreement, is ‘radically prohibited’ in Spain, as Redondo reiterated. However, there are legal loopholes that allow for the registration of children conceived in other countries.
The minister had already announced a reform measure a week ago, which was set to be included in a future human trafficking law. However, on Tuesday, before presiding over a Conference on Equality, Redondo told the media that it is most likely that the reform will be pushed forward separately in order to speed up the process.
‘I am convinced that in a very short time, I estimate this month, we will have a solution that may even precede the human trafficking law,’ she said.
At the moment, the details have not been specified, although Redondo has insisted that the government is working ‘to ensure that this prohibition is fully implemented in our country’.
When the minister announced last week the intention to address these loopholes, she explained that preventing the registration of these children is ‘the missing piece’, but that this task presents ‘some difficulties’.
In Spain, surrogacy is regulated by Law 14/2006 on assisted human reproduction techniques: ‘The contract for surrogacy, with or without payment, whereby a woman renounces maternal affiliation in favour of the contracting party or a third party, shall be void,’ according to Article 10. Therefore, the illegality of this practice is stressed, and the same text acknowledges that the biological parents will be recognised as legal guardians.
Despite this, a 2010 Instruction from Spain’s ‘Directorate General of Registries and Notaries’ allows for the registration of children born through surrogacy in countries where it is legal, as long as there is a judicial ruling that supports it.
According to data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 2010 and July 2023, a total of 3,546 applications were received in Spain to register babies born through surrogacy abroad.
The reform recently announced by Redondo is part of other work that the Ministry of Equality is carrying out against surrogate pregnancies.
In January, she said that Spain’s Institute for Women had submitted a legal report regarding the ‘commercial promotion of surrogacy’ on websites and social media. This form of advertising was banned in the reform of the abortion law approved in 2023, but the Ministry of Equality identified as many as eight agencies that were still engaged in the practice.
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El Gobierno quiere aprobar este mes de abril una norma para reforzar la prohibición de la gestación subrogada y que se lleve en España “a sus últimas consecuencias” https://t.co/4nHIlL12fs
— Europa Press (@europapress) April 22, 2025
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