“They tell me that I am some kind of incubator,” Yeni says in front of the camera with a belly that indicates that she is about to give birth. The recording is for the expecting baby. “I’m not supposed to create any bond with you but love is not thought of,” she dedicates to him. Played by Shani Lozano, Yeni is the protagonist of Netflix’s Rent Mother, which takes advantage of a hot topic as a trigger: the conditions of women who lend themselves to surrogacy to gestate the children of third parties.
Scriptwriter Aída Aracely Guajardo, of course, seasons the story with traditional soap opera ingredients: shameless script twists, a powerful family linked to the pharmaceutical sector that dishonestly pressures the pregnant woman, a viperine matriarch and an impossible love story between the pregnant woman and the biological father of the baby.
Since it premiered on June 14, it has accumulated 218.3 million hours viewed among platform users. In its second week it led among non-English speaking series with 5.3 million viewers. The production stands out for its way of questioning the method of reproduction in an audiovisual industry that, at least commercially, often treats surrogacy as a sitcom, emotional drama, or superficially.
“We know that she is renting her womb because she is under pressure from a very ugly situation,” it is said of Yeni, who is the victim of a very twisted plot to use her womb, with a racial and class component that does not go unnoticed. “Any woman who agrees to do something like that is because she has a need to do it.”
It is worth remembering, for example, the altruistic case of Phoebe in Friends, where she gestated for her brother; the screenwriter Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story) writing a sitcom like The New Normal about the friendship between a pregnant woman and her biological parents, or Bosé, with the singer making the decision to start a family.
Not even Elisabeth Moss, star and producer of The Handmaid’s Tale, dares to say that her series is a critique of surrogacy. After all, it is a practice that is hired by colleagues such as Nicole Kidman, Ellen Pompeo, Neil Patrick Harris, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker or Jimmy Fallon, who had their babies in the United States, where the ultra-capitalist mentality with the religious feeling that Ana Obregón also took advantage of.
And, taking into account that the surrogate mother has been among the most watched worldwide, including the US or Spain, can it affect the narrative around surrogacy in the countries where it is in force or in Spain, where the almost extinct Ciudadanos party leads the fight for its legalization?
