Prosecutor's Office cracks down on surrogacy ads: manages to shut down the first websites

BarcelonaA message occupying the entire homepage of the website explains that the law prohibits publishing "content related to this assisted reproduction technique," but adds that the company will continue offering its services. Below this are an email address and two phone numbers for booking a surrogacy arrangement. Paloma Pelegrín, the prosecutor who leads the Barcelona consumer rights service, laments that, despite the law prohibiting surrogacy companies from advertising, the internet remains rife with such content. However, for the first time, the Public Prosecutor's Office has succeeded in shutting down some of these websites. In Barcelona, between the end of 2024 and the first quarter of this year, two cases were resolved after a lawsuit for illegal advertising and mediation with the companies involved, which ultimately agreed to close their websites. In Madrid, a conviction has already been handed down against the company SurroBaby for unfair and illegal advertising on its website and social media. There is also a second lawsuit pending in the Madrid courts. While the proceedings are underway, the court has issued a precautionary order blocking the website, but the prosecutor admits that the order "has not been very effective."

The obstacle facing the courts is that the companies continue to advertise surrogacy services on international websites and, when a court order is issued, they close the Spanish domain but not the international one, which disseminates the same content. "The websites .They had copied from the .com sites. "We managed to get the .es domains shut down, but not the .com ones," Pelegrín explained.

Appeal to the administration

Another option the public prosecutor's office has proposed is urging the administration to block these websites. For the moment, according to Pelegrín, the Madrid Prosecutor's Office has the support of the Women's Institute. Meanwhile, both the Madrid and Barcelona prosecutors have contacted the Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructure, who responded that it lacks the authority to block access to the websites. The Secretary believes the measure could infringe upon freedom of expression and has urged them to pursue legal action.

Securing the initial closures of state-owned domains has also proven difficult. A complaint filed by an association in Vigo, Galicia, revealed a long list of companies, institutions, and lawyers advertising or offering services related to surrogacy. The initial attempts to pursue criminal charges were unsuccessful because the crime of false childbirth (pretending to have given birth) requires that the child be alive, and in these cases there wasn't even an embryo. Therefore, once the list of companies was distributed among different prosecutor's offices according to their respective territories, the Barcelona Prosecutor's Office opted for civil proceedings with two lawsuits for illegal advertising, which were resolved through mediation.