One of the images of the pandemic that will remain etched in my memory forever was that of a hotel room in Kiev with dozens of babies lined up like products in a supermarket. It was a veritable stockpile of babies that couldn't be delivered due to the lockdown resulting from the so-called "unintelligible" situation. surrogacy, a euphemism so aseptic, so technical, that it doesn't trouble our consciences. Spanish law prohibits this practice because it is ethically contrary to human dignity, due to the commodification of life and the instrumentalization of women, almost always poor, to satisfy the desires of rich men and women.
For all these reasons, it was an unpleasant surprise, outrageous from a feminist and human rights perspective, when the Bioethics Committee of Catalonia published a couple of weeks ago a document in which it recommends the legalization of surrogacyIn the text, the committee members propose considering it "ethically acceptable that a woman, freely and without being subjected to pressure, coercion, or psychological or social conditioning, decides to gestate for others." However, they do so after having erased "The contextual elements that often contaminate the analysis." They urge us to look at the issue from a conceptual perspective and to consider the motivations of the "intended parents," which range from medical difficulties that prevent pregnancy to personal and "lifestyle" reasons such as prioritizing a career or having a phobia of childbirth. These assumptions are put forward to justify this outsourcing of a process, that of pregnancy, which is not exactly a walk in the park and should be carried out under conditions of altruism, albeit with fair, but not excessive, compensation, lest it appear you're doing it for the money. That is, the hired human incubator should be paid, but not too much, just for the inconvenience caused. The report is full of shocking statements, coming as it does from a group of people dedicated to ethical reflection. After comparing "surrogacy" with parents who give their children up for adoption, he tells us that opposing the transformation of human procreation into reproductive labor would amount to an idealization of motherhood. Breaking women down and believing that children can be manufactured and excreted like any other bodily matter without consequences is not idealistic. Although he emphasizes that "if surrogacy involves the instrumentalization of pregnant women, then it represents a violation of their dignity," he also adds that each culture has its own idea of dignity. He tells us that the free consent of surrogates must be free of "heteronomy," but that in practice this may be impossible to determine. When he addresses the harm that can be caused to minors by being conceived this way, he goes on to say that it is not scientifically proven that knowing that your parents bought you and your mother gestated you to sell you has negative emotional effects. We hope, therefore, that some university will conduct a study to determine whether it is more or less harmful to know that you were born from an economic transaction. Or that Obragón's granddaughter grows up and explains to us what it's like to be conceived to replace a dead man who is both your father and your brother.
At the end of the report, Dr. Joan Viñas Salas, professor of surgery and professor of bioethics, expresses his dissenting opinion by reminding us that pregnancy and childbirth create an important emotional and physical bond, that what is being rented is a woman and not a womb, and that "the medicine of desire cannot be subsidized by the .
