The Spanish Supreme Court will not recognise foreign court rulings that affirm surrogacy contracts, as they treat the surrogate mother and the child as “things susceptible to commerce.”

Commercial surrogacy is already banned in Spain.

The case involved a commercial surrogacy contract, validated by a court in Bexar County, Texas, USA, which the commissioning adults asked the Spanish Court to recognise.

Spain’s ‘Tribunal Supremo’ ruled that the best interest of the child is not decided by the interests of the intending parents, the surrogacy contract, or the assigning of parenthood by foreign law, but rather on “the severance of all ties between the minors and the woman who gestated and gave birth to them, the existence of a biological paternal filiation and a family unit in which the minors are integrated”.

The ruling follows a similar case in September, where the Court allowed parents of a child born abroad through surrogacy, by analogy with international adoption, to register the child in Spain as its place of birth and to omit the place of origin.

That ruling came despite a 2022 judgement that surrogacy contracts entail harm to the child’s best interests and exploitation of women that are “unacceptable,” and “dehumanising”.