A working group with researchers from Spanish universities studies how those born by surrogacy or surrogacy feel and are affected
When the baby that Ana Obregón has just brought from Miami turns eighteen, her social mother —the term used to define women who hire surrogates; in this case, Obregón herself—will have, if she is still alive, 86. What will she think of how she came into the world? Will she want to meet the woman who gave birth to her? Did you have contact with her during your childhood? Will she have a trauma, will she assume it normally, will she reject the decision that the actress made or will she defend her at all costs?
Although there are not many, in Spain there are beginning to be adults born using this method and research projects that ask the same questions. Maribel Jociles is Professor of Anthropology and PhD in Sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid. She is part of a specific working group, with researchers from various Spanish universities, on this topic. “We are working on it. It is a project that we started in September and it is not easy to reach conclusive conclusions,” she tells THE SPANISH NEWSPAPER of the Iberian Press group. “There are no numbers, because there is no record of how many children have been born by this procedure in Spain. But we’re locating a lot of them. Most of those we interviewed are young, six or eight years old, but there are already some older ones, 19, 20 or 21″.
The way in which the researchers approach their study is as follows. “First, we want to know How have they assimilated the gestation story that their parents have told them?, who are usually heterosexual couples or homosexual parents. There are few single women. Then, find out what kind of relationship they have with the person who has gestated them. Most of the time they keep in touch. When contact is not maintained, it is difficult to anticipate how it will be explained to them,” says Jociles. “We work with how they feel and how it affects them in their environment, at school, with their friends and in other settings when they get older . As children they do not notice it, but as teenagers they make strange comments and suffer: from ‘your mother is not your mother’ to ‘they went to buy you’. Her parents try to arm them with a speech of resistance and end up becoming defenders, in militants, of surrogacy“.
Those who are still children, on the contrary, “live it in the most normal way in the world because It’s what they’ve been told all their lives.” In any case, the professor insists, all these deductions are still preliminary. “It is what we have seen so far, I do not know if when we finish the work we will have to qualify.” Aware that it is a controversial issue, Jociles (adoptive mother), stresses that It is difficult for him to position himself. “In the end I will have to do it, but for now I prefer to pay attention to what the different social actors involved tell me.”
Is it gestating a job that can be paid?
Surrogacy —or surrogacy, depending on how you want to name this practice— has become popular in recent years as an alternative for couples who want and cannot have children naturally, either by fertility problems or because both are men. It consists of hiring a pregnant woman who delivers the baby at the end of the pregnancy. On many occasions this woman does not even lay the egg. In Spain, the Assisted Reproduction law considers surrogate pregnancy contracts (the legal term used here) null and void, but an instruction from the General Directorate of Registries allows those born by this method to be registered in another country, to prevent them from being left in a situation of legal uncertainty. The United States and Ukraine are two of the most popular destinations for surrogacy in Spain.
The rise of this method to bring babies into the world coincides, the experts consulted point out, with the decline of adoptions in our country. “The families we have interviewed do not fit the stereotype of the hyper-rich. There is everything: from the working class that is in debt to the upper middle class,” continues Jociles. “Why do they get in there? Well, there are women who don’t have a uterus. And to say that adoption is available is not to know the panorama. In 2004 there was a ‘boom’ of adoptions and then it began to decline. Virtually all countries have stopped giving their children up for adoption, starting with China. And in Spain there are not so many cases”. In 2021, according to data from the Children’s Observatory675 minors were adopted in our country and there were 1,659 offers of adoption.
That for one thing. On the other, according to Beatriz San Román, doctor in Psychology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and expert in reproductive strategies, in Spain —and in the world in general— we have skipped “prior debates” necessary before scientific advances in the area of human reproduction.
“Today I was reading the letter from a thousand experts asking for a moratorium on advances in artificial intelligence. I draw a parallel with surrogacy: science is advancing and raising ethical questions that we must debate,” he explains. “For example: Under what conditions do we find it acceptable for a person to come into the world? Because surrogacy allows an 85-year-old person to be a mother. Can we consider ‘reproduction work’ capable of being remunerated? Because with the care, socially, we have decided that yes: that we can pay someone for the upbringing. Are there exploitative activities per se or exploitative conditions? I have interviewed women who have gestated for third parties who found this more interesting than other types of work. We do not prohibit people from wearing shoes, even though we know that many shoes are made in sweatshop conditions. What I want to say is It is a very complex issue in which there is a tendency to take very strong positions.. I think we should be open to debate.”
What do children born from donated eggs or semen think?
The first impressions of the working group in which Maribel Jociles is — it is called “Children of Assisted Reproduction Techniques and Donations” — indicate that those who have had their children by surrogacy do not hide it. Despite being a practice that generates rejection and in which there is no social consensus (there is no official data about what percentage of the population is for or against), it is not a taboo for families, mainly because it is very difficult to hide. If a family turns up with a newborn baby and the pregnant woman hasn’t been seen before, people will wonder where she came from.
“I have found some cases of people who fake their pregnancy with a fake belly, or who ‘disappear’ in the supposed seventh month of pregnancy to be able to return and not be asked any questions, but it is very residual. And they are old cases” continues San Roman. This situation contrasts with that of the children born from donated eggs or sperm. “That is taboo. Obviously, if it is a couple of mothers or fathers, the question will come out and you do not have to wait for them to ask you to answer. But our research tells us that It is a secret subject that is not told to boys and girls”.
Part of the taboo, the respondents explain, has historical roots: the first donations were sperm, in heterosexual couples and in the 80s. “A sperm donation calls into question the masculinity and virility of the father, Hence, even mothers protect their husbands and don’t tell,” Jociles explains.
La Vanguardia published this week a report about people born by sperm and egg donation who claim to know where they come from and They ask for an end to the anonymity in donations. The researcher Anna Molas, PhD in Social Anthropology from the UAB, carried out her doctoral thesis on the egg donation industry in Spain, an issue that raises fewer debates than surrogacy and that has become something very different from what was initially thought.
Egg donation is done through a process of ovarian hyperstimulation and involves going through the operating room to remove them. The financial rewards range from 800 and 1,000 euros per cycle. “I have interviewed hyperstimulated women who have had a terrible time. There is some altruism, but if there were no compensation they would not lend themselves to something so aggressive,” suggests Jociles. “There are students without a scholarship to whom the thousand euros come in very handy.”
“If you read the law, the donation is set out to, in theory, be voluntary. But as in other types of donations, it can be compensated. What has happened? That the economic compensation has risen and what is not an incentive in other countries here it is, due to the context of precariousness”Molas explains. “It seems very important to me to talk about this when thinking about surrogacy. They are different processes, because gestation is one thing and hormonation is another. But there is talk of the possibility of legislating altruistic surrogacy, without incentive. This is how egg donation was legislated and in practice it has ended up being a different thing. Half of the egg donation treatments carried out in Europe are carried out in Spain, according to The countrywhich makes our country the ova granary of the continent.
Egg donation and surrogacy
Why don’t egg donation and surrogacy go together in the same bag? Why is one so accepted in Spain and the other not? “I think the answer lies in how donations have been normalized since the 1980s,” Molas continues. “First, sperm donations began and shortly after egg donations. Although they are very different processes, that of ovules entered as equivalent to that of sperm, without considering that there were differences. And at first it was something very small, you couldn’t foresee the ‘boom’ that followed.”
The fact that donations are anonymous —a measure that favors the assisted reproduction industry, aware that if anonymity were to end, donations would plummet— and the subject is taboo is what, in the opinion of this expert, favors the trauma of children by donation. “Family concealment is, by definition, traumatic. As a result of the report in La Vanguardia, interesting things have come out on the networks, from people who say that a father is the one who raises you. Requests to end anonymity make us uncomfortable. But the reflection that we have to do is: the main problem is not so much who these people call father or not, but if something cannot be known it is because it is important. It is the system itself that hides it from you. We can understand the context of the late 1970s, when male infertility was stigmatized. whatBut what does keeping this secret help us now? The main stakeholders are the clinics.”