Something never seen in a State of law: that a national university convenes courses to train students in activities that are not accepted by the legislation of their country. Continue to the National University of Distance Education. Its Procedural Law department offers another course of 20 teaching hours on renting wombs. “We bet on family diversity”, they allege. And they talk about the “discriminatory treatment of individuals with problems of infertility and/or structural sterility” in Spain if assisted reproduction laws that favor their wishes are not approved.
It doesn’t matter that these desires come before the consolidated rights of women, who are reified and reduced to mere receptacles for selling babies, as if their existence, their body and mind were not compromised. It doesn’t matter that the Violence law has denounced it as a violent practice against women. Nor that the Civil Code indicates that people cannot be the subject of a contract, nor minors, merchandise.
The UNED does not exactly organize an expert debate that sheds light on all of this, something that the Assisted Reproduction Techniques law of 2006 already invalidates by categorically affirming that surrogacy contracts are null and void. It will not talk about the manufacture, purchase and sale of human beings or fundamental rights. What the UNED offers – paid for by the Spanish – is a summer course that openly addresses topics such as the “surrogacy contract between the pregnant woman and the intended parents and the judicial procedure of filiation”.
And it will continue to be so as long as law firms and surrogacy agencies that profit from the reproduction business are allowed in this country. And as long as the 2010 instruction of the General Directorate of Registers and Notaries is not repealed which – even though Spain is one of the countries in which parentage is determined by the birth (the mother is the one who gives birth) – allows the fraud of the law in to recognize the filiation of those children born by this practice abroad “for the sake of the baby”.
From vulnerable children and reduced sentences for pedophiles in Germany, we’ll talk about it another day.
