The Supreme Court has allowed the parents of a child born by surrogate mother in Ukraine to officially change his place of birth so that he is listed as having been born in Spain. The judges have upheld the appeal of a couple and understand that the privacy of the child takes precedence and that preventing his adoption and birth circumstances from being made public. Allowing the official place of birth to remain a foreign country, argues the Civil Chamber, “would denote the adoptive nature of the filiation and the circumstances of the child’s origin.”
The various rulings in the case reveal that the child was born by surrogacy in Ukraine, the biological son of his father and later adopted by his partner. Once in Spain, they began to litigate so that his documentation would not reflect that he had been born in Ukraine, but in the Spanish city where the family lived. The Civil Registry rejected this change, considering that the child was Spanish and that it had been a national adoption, in which these modifications to the place of birth are not approved.
Both the court and the Provincial Court that studied the case also rejected the change. “There cannot be considered to be any similarity between international adoption and the surrogacy technique,” said a first ruling that recalled that this practice is also “expressly prohibited.” The Court added that the parents’ argument was “unsustainable” since this technique is directly prohibited.
The Supreme Court understands that the parents, both biological and adoptive, have the right to have the child listed as having been born in Spain and not in Ukraine. The Court puts on the table the right to personal and family privacy of the minor, concluding that the determining factor in allowing this change is not that it is an international adoption but that “publicity of this information may be indicative of the adoptive nature of the filiation.”
The judges have ruled out the formula used in other cases of registering the minor as having been born in a “remote country”. The aim is “to prevent the adoptive nature of the parentage and the circumstances relating to the minor’s origin from being made public”. According to the Supreme Court, the requirements of the Civil Code for changing the place of birth can therefore be applied to this case, even though it is not an international adoption.
Allowing documentation to reflect the child’s place of birth “would violate the child’s right to privacy, as it would reveal the existence of the adoption and the particularly sensitive circumstances relating to his or her origin, having been conceived by surrogacy.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
