The lawyer Ana Miramontes has handled hundreds of surrogacy processes but she had never come across a court ruling that established that a surrogate woman who is in Mexico has to pay alimony for the baby she had for a Spanish single father and also contribute with half of the extraordinary expenses generated by the minor, that is, pay her share of the dentist or the purchase of glasses. This was ordered on April 29 by an Alicante court, which imposed on a Mexican surrogate mother "the obligation to contribute to the maintenance of the ordinary expenses of support, housing, education and clothing for that [the minor] generated with a child support of 150 euros per month," according to the ruling to which this newspaper has had access and which explains that the amount has been set taking into account that it has not been proven that the surrogate mother has income that exceed the interprofessional minimum wage.
The woman, the ruling also establishes, has "the obligation to contribute half to the support of the extraordinary expenses generated by the minor (understood as those derived from long illnesses, surgical interventions, orthopedic treatments, optics, orthodontics, psychology, speech therapy, rehabilitation and other similar in the amount not covered by Social Security)."
"The judge decides that he has to pay me 150 euros a month; it is a ridiculous measure," says the father of the case, Carlos, 41 years old and originally from Alicante, who works in a computer company in Switzerland so he lives on the road between the Swiss country and Spain. "I have always had the idea of having children but I decided definitively during Covid. I spoke with my parents and they told me to go ahead. I spoke with my company as well, because as a single father I needed the company's support, not financially but logistically. Since surrogacy is illegal in Europe, I had to go to Mexico and, due to the paperwork, spend several months there," Carlos says before the process.
The pregnancy was carried out with Carlos's genetic material and the egg of a donor, so that the surrogate, the woman from whom child support is requested, has no biological link with the child. Finally, L. was born on April 24, 2024. Carlos attended the birth and remained in Mexico with his son while he processed the paperwork, that is, waiting for the court ruling to be issued establishing that he is the sole parent of the child, as is done in cases of surrogacy undertaken by a single person in Mexico. Once she had the resolution, she could obtain a Mexican passport for the newborn - it would appear with both paternal surnames - and leave the country with the baby. "They gave me the sentence in July, three months after the birth, and then I had to wait 10 business days for the final sentence [for the sentence to be final]. But eight days later, when there were two left for the final sentence, the judges went on strike and were on strike for about three months," he recounts the stroke of bad luck he suffered. "I had to stay there teleworking. Because of the time difference, I had to get to work at one in the morning. With the child without papers, without being able to leave the country, without health insurance, without a passport, in a limbo, far from the family... A stress. It was very hard, honestly," he remembers.
Faced with this situation, he says, he went to the Spanish consulate. "But they don't help you there. In fact, the person I was in contact with directly told me: 'We have orders to reverse the processes,'" she says how the diplomatic office aligned themselves with the Government's position, which considers the practice - illegal in Spain - "a commodification of the body of women and their children."
On January 10, 2025, more than eight months after L.'s birth, Carlos managed to obtain a provisional passport for the child for one year, a document with which he was finally able to leave Mexico.
Carlos's lawyer, Ana Miramontes, explains that when it comes to registering children born through surrogacy to a single father in Spain, most Spanish civil registries consider that the mother must appear, meaning the mother is the woman who has given birth regardless of whether she is the biological mother or not, as established by Spanish law. This is what happened with Carlos's son. L. was registered with the first surname of his father and the second of the Mexican surrogate.
The next step that Carlos took was to file a lawsuit to request that the surrogate mother be deprived of parental authority over the minor. This is how single parents usually proceed to remove the surrogate mother from the child's life. "In order to avoid situations derived from this double affiliation in the future, so that the father alone can decide which school the child is going to go to, whether he is going to take communion or whether he is going to undergo certain medical treatment, for example," explains Miramontes. "We must adapt the situation to our legal system and one of the effective formulas to avoid the limitations of having shared parental authority is to deprive the surrogate of it," he adds.
After the hearing was held, the sentence was issued in April 2026. The judge, arguing that to withdraw parental authority requires that the parent fail to comply with his duties "in a serious and repeated manner" and that "it is beneficial for the child" determined not to deprive the surrogate of parental authority but to suspend its exercise and attribute it exclusively, as a precautionary measure, to Carlos - who is also given guardianship and custody - so that he could alone make decisions about the minor. She was also denied the change of surnames and, although she considered that a visitation regime should not be established for the surrogate, she should contribute to the child's expenses and pay him alimony.
"Ridiculous," insists Carlos, who has no intention of claiming the pension from the surrogate and will continue fighting because his son has both of his surnames on the Spanish documentation. The nuance of "in the Spanish documentation" is important because the only passport that L. now has is the Swiss one - it has already been said that the father works there - and it does appear there in accordance with Carlos's wishes. "Switzerland, although in some aspects it is not very open, has given him a passport with both of my surnames. And why not Spain? It makes no sense for me to have two passports with different surnames," he says.
