The 68-year-old TV actress Ana Obregón has shocked Spain after having a granddaughter via surrogacy using the sperm of her dead son.
Surrogacy is illegal in Spain, and many in politics and the media refer to it as ‘womb renting’.
Videos by VICE
Obregón, who is famous in Spain, lost her only son, Aless Lequio García, 27, to cancer in 2020. She revealed this week in an interview with Spanish magazine ¡Hola! that she adopted a baby girl born abroad who was biologically her granddaughter. The baby is called Ana Sandra.
She revealed these details after a previous cover story for the magazine last week, where Obregón had only said she had adopted a daughter born via surrogacy. She explained she did so from the pain from losing her son and that she had been struggling to find a reason to live, without giving further information about the pregnancy and her connection to it.
As her story made international headlines – and met international scrutiny – she then revealed this week her son had frozen his sperm before starting cancer treatment in New York. In most US states, the law supports and recognises surrogacy arrangements.
Speaking from Miami, where she has been raising Ana Sandra since she was born on the 20th of March, she explained that doctors had recommended that her son should freeze his sperm before starting chemotherapy, and that it had been his last wish to have a child.
“He communicated this to his father and I a week before he died,” she told the Spanish magazine. “It’s called a holographic testament that’s produced when a person, in front of witnesses, expresses their last wishes.”
She began the surrogacy process the day he died, and only told her sisters about the pregnancy. She kept the surrogacy a secret until her exclusive interview with ¡Hola!.
Much of the scrutiny Obregón has received stems from the highly critical views many in Spanish media and politics hold over gestational surrogacy. Equality Minister Irene Montero, of the left-wing United We Can coalition partner, said “we recognise it as a form of violence against women.”
The Defence Minister, Margarita Robles, instead suggested that the public should hesitate before judging Obregón for her actions, and that it was a separate question to consider whether the law had been broken or not as the full facts were not yet known of the case.
Others have criticised Obregón’s decision to sell her story not long after her granddaughter’s birth.
Consultant and media personality Verónica Fumanal went viral with a clip from a Spanish radio network saying: “You benefit financially from this and you deprive from this creature that’s just days old of the only thing she has – her privacy, her right to privacy.”
