It is not the first time that a cover of the ¡Hola! marks the news agenda, but few cases like this are remembered. It is clear that surrogacy – a term used by the law – irritates, and the circumstances surrounding the case of Ana Obregón, even more so.
What is it about this photo of Obregón leaving Memorial Regional Hospital in Miami in a wheelchair with his baby, who is also named Ana, in his arms, to generate such virulent reactions and comparisons with The Handmaid’s Tale? “It’s a hard image, which shows the reality of what this market means and this idea so widespread that you can reproduce it whenever you want in any way”, believes Itziar de Lezcuona, director of the Observatory of Bioethics and Law at the UB . The team of experts in ethics and legislation that it coordinates issued in 2019 an unequivocal report against the legalization of this practice, which they consider instrumentalizes and reifies the pregnant woman “because it reduces her to the function of a mere container or incubator”. The report also concludes that there is no real autonomy for the pregnant woman, who resorts to that work with her body pushed by situations of vulnerability.
For Ana Miramontes, lawyer and member of the Son Nuestros Hijos association, which groups families formed through surrogacy, Obregón’s photo is proof that this reality exists and that it should be regulated. “This woman has appeared on the cover and there is no talk of anything else. It is a situation that exists”, he claims. Miramontes also speaks out on the issue that is raising more suspicions, that a 68-year-old woman like Obregón was able to fulfill this wish without problems. “It is a global process in which all elements are examined. It’s not ‘you’re 68 years old, I’m removing you from the list’, or ‘my income statement is 30,000 euros a year, you’re no longer useful’. Everything comes together. The judge who intervened will have considered it possible. Obregón, like everyone else, will have had to establish a legal guardian or two to ensure that this baby will not be left defenseless.”
The Associació de Gestación Assistida Reproductiva (AGAR), which advises families interested in the process, usually indicate that it is best not to reach the age of 50 at the start of treatments.
“Do we need a photo to think about it?” asks Sara author of the book Mercados reproductivos: crisis, deseo y desigualdad (Txalaparta). “What we see in this image is a performance, and that is why it attracts so much attention. It is like an imitation of the birthing process. I don’t think she is choosing it, but it is something we see in many cases, a simulation of the biological process. It’s an image that puts the question very face to face, among other things the issue of age”. The important thing is not to censure a person who has a child at the age of 68 – he believes – but to ask what is happening with the age of reproduction.
According to Lafuente, what cases like this do is emphasize the obviousness that access to babies can be done through a market. But it is important – he points out – that we do not focus on the extremes, but on the most common practices. “Not all wishes must be fulfilled. We need to enable ways to better address the reproductive issue and to address them socially. If I have a health problem and the only solution to cure me is to buy an organ, I prefer not to make that decision. We are very clear about that. Well, with this we also need to make a collective decision that includes the donation of gametes”.
Supporters of legalizing the practice speak of “intended or intentional mothers and fathers”, of “surrogate gestation” (which they consider to be within the techniques of human assisted reproduction) and refer to the woman who bears the pregnancy as a “surrogate”.
Opponents of the system often prefer the crudeness of a term like surrogacy and refer to the whole process as “baby shopping”. Lafuente uses “gestation per substitution”, which is the term used by Spanish legislation, and does not usually say “mother” for pregnant women because they do not identify as such. The term womb for hire seems disrespectful to the women who do this work for money: “The problem I see when talking about surrogacy is that it focuses only on the pregnancy, but the process is wider . It involves treatment with hormones and assisted reproduction that often fails, a pregnancy that may not come to term, the birth and the postpartum period, beyond the management of the separation”.