The Supreme Court has allowed the parents of a child born through surrogacy in Ukraine to officially change their place of birth to appear as if they were born in Spain. The judges upheld a couple’s appeal and understood that the minor’s privacy is paramount and prevented the circumstances of his adoption and birth from being public. Allowing the official place of birth to remain a foreign country, the Civil Chamber said, “would denote the adoptive nature of the filiation and the circumstances of the minor’s origin.”
The different sentences handed down in the case reveal that the minor was born through surrogacy in Ukraine, the biological son of his father and then adopted by his partner. Once in Spain, they began to fight so that his documents did not reflect that he was born in Ukraine, but in the Spanish city where the family lived. The Civil Registry rejected this modification, knowing that the child was Spanish and that it was a national adoption, in which these changes of place of birth are not approved.
The court and the provincial court that studied the case also rejected the amendment. “It cannot be considered that there is any similarity between international adoption and the technique of surrogacy,” states the first sentence, which recalls that this practice is, moreover, “expressly prohibited.” The Court adds that the parents’ argument was “untenable” since this technique is directly prohibited.
The Supreme Court considers that parents, whether biological or adoptive, have the right to have their child appear as born in Spain and not in Ukraine. The Chamber puts on the table the right to private and family life of the minor, concluding that the determining factor in authorizing this change is not that it is an international adoption but that “the publicity of this information may be revealing of the adoptive nature of the filiation.”
The judges reject the formula applied in other cases of registration of the minor as born in “a distant country”. The objective is “to avoid the adoptive nature of the filiation and the circumstances related to the origin of the minor being made public”. In this case, therefore, according to the Supreme Court, the requirements of the Civil Code can be applied to change the place of birth even if it is not as such an international adoption.
Allowing the documents to reflect the child’s place of birth “would violate the minor’s right to privacy, as it would reveal the existence of the adoption and the circumstances related to its origin, which are particularly sensitive, having been conceived through surrogacy.”
