Surrogacy has many names: Dr Carmen Maria Lazaro began by stressing that “surrogate pregnancy, ethical gestation, wombs for rent, are all euphemisms that try to disguise the reality.” And she continued to explain that “as a 2018 report of the United Nations Assembly says, the commercial surrogate gestation that is currently in practice equates to the sale of children.” The civil law expert went on to say, “this is hiding the truth of the situation by describing it with more trivial language.” And, quoting Socrates, she assured that “at the base of this there is a very serious problem: if you corrupt the language, you corrupt the soul.”

According to Lázaro, “there are very few countries that allow it, but they are very prominent.” Among those are Texas, Florida and California in the United States; Canada, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. “A quarter of all global surrogacy comes from Ukraine. It is very profitable economically: €1.5 billion annually”. And that is even when theoretically, there should “be no reason for profit, but only compensation. But, of course, when there is so much money involved, this ‘compensation’ is a fallacy.”

She provided various sources of data: according to The Global Surrogacy Market Report, the figure for baby business is expected to reach $27.5 billion by 2025. Of this, 64% will go to fertility clinics; 35.1% will be shared out among the brokers, legal services and satellite companies, and pregnant women will receive only 0.9% of the income generated. “This means that less than 2% of surrogate agreements in the world are altruistic.”

As well as this, the underlying problem of surrogacy is the damage to the dignity and rights of both the surrogate mother and the child: this corruption of the soul to which Socrates refers. As the speaker explained: “Pregnant women are monitored twenty-four hours a day for nine months, during which they have to justify everything: how they are, how they feel and what they are doing. Then, after giving birth and delivering the child, they are forgotten. There is no follow-up or postpartum care, and they are prohibited from contacting the buyers, looking for information about them on social networks, making public the terms of the contract. And this comes with economic sanctions that can reach 200%. These are ‘adhesion’ contracts that can hardly be negotiated like gas, water or electricity contracts.”

But Lázaro observed that whether there is price or not, the essence remains the same: “even though the bill indicates that there will be no price for the child per se, but ‘compensation’, this does not naturally transform it into a good act. Likewise, if there is a falsification of a public document, even if it is free, it does not mean it is not a deception.

Added to this we could ask, what about the child? There is no article in the draft of the Spanish law that refers to the minor. Simply because, when the contract is signed, there is no minor: the contract is concluded to create an embryo outside the law. That child will not have the right to know about their origins, their siblings–by law the surrogate mother has to have at least one child already–or their mother. "Whether you want it or not, a bond is created between the mother and the child that is necessary for the baby. Pregnancy by surrogacy breaks this bond.”

And this leads us to concepts like ‘genetic mother or father,’ ‘biological mother,’ ‘mother or father of intent.’ This generates complex relationships that surrogate agencies try to explain to children with stories. But when they reach adolescence, fiction has to be replaced by reality.” In fact, she noted, “studies conducted in the US revealed that everyone who participated in the process claimed to have some bond with the child, but no one considers it entirely their own.”

In her session, which was just over half an hour, Carmen María Lázaro spoke of one of the most famous cases, that of Gamy, whose Thai mother gave birth to twins: the healthy girl, in perfect condition, was taken away by the Australian gay couple who had commissioned her. The other child, who had heart problems and Down syndrome, was abandoned in an orphanage. Later, it was precisely the mother who made arrangements to keep him.

Which is to say that in surrogate gestation, nothing is what it seems.