The images of Ana Obregón arriving this Wednesday at the Adolfo Suárez Madrid Barajas Airport with little Ana Sandra in her arms have generated great expectation and, as expected, have reopened the debate on surrogacy, illegal in our country, and that of begin to take care of a creature with 68 years.
The presenter, like anyone who becomes a surrogate mother or father outside our borders, has to resolve all legal issues about the little girl. All so that she can be one more Spanish citizen and so that she, legally, is registered in Spain as her legal daughter.
Ana already said in the magazine Hola: “Everything is legal. The girl was born in America and will have an American passport and dual nationality. Legally she is my daughter and that is how it appears on her passport. I will register her at the Spanish Consulate and then I can bring her home.”
However, the lawyer Marisa Bautista, with two decades of experience in processes of this type, has explained in Cadena Ser that Obregón would not have it so easy since the case has many edges: “With the Civil Code in hand, without entering into Bioethics, from a legal point of view, has it complicated”.
The motives? “Being a surrogate gestation minor, she will have an American passport stating that the biological mother, according to the US ruling, is this lady, Ana Obregón. Based on this ruling, they will have given her a 90-day visa to come here”.
In this sense, Bautista has explained what are the steps that the presenter has to follow now: “You have to make a claim of filiation, which is presented before the courts of first instance of the address where you live (…) But for For the filiation claim to go ahead, there must be a biological father and DNA from the biological father, that is, the biological father or mother can send the filiation, but for this they must provide a DNA test.
It must be remembered that the girl was conceived in Miami, with the body of another woman in exchange for financial compensation and with the semen of her deceased son, Aless Lequio. The lawyer assures that Ana has a difficult time registering as her mother, since the DNA does not match: “But if there is no filiation claim in which the DNA is that of the mother or that of the father, she will not be affiliated as this lady’s daughter. It’s impossible.”
Now, Ana has the option of being her legal guardian: “If she, instead of being the mother, even though the sentence says that she is the mother, proves that she is the grandmother, logically she can request guardianship of this minor, but not as a mother but as a grandmother. Always with the DNA test because to be a grandmother you also have to have a high DNA match, even if it is not 99.9%”.
In this sense, he considers that this is the simplest for Ana: “The filiation request is not going to go ahead. I would stay here with the girl with the US passport and when she completed the years of residence for being an American, I would request the Spanish residence. And that’s it”.
And he adds: “She would be appointed guardian as a grandmother, the girl would be Spanish and life would not be complicated with the registration, because if she is not the mother, they will not register her.”
Around eight in the morning this Wednesday, May 31, grandmother and granddaughter have landed in Madrid. The girl was born on March 20 at Memorial Regional Hospital in Miami. She came into the world two days after the biologist’s 68th birthday and almost three years after the death of her father, Aless Lequio, who died on May 13, 2020 after suffering from Ewing’s sarcoma.