Surrogacy: challenges for the law in a globalized world

Abstract

There is information that the first studies and the first births of children conceived through in vitro fertilization took place in the last quarter of the 20th century, but the first case of litigation related to surrogacy (Johnson v. Calvert) is registered at the beginning of the 1990s in the USA, before the Supreme Court of California, which means that the practice of surrogacy is relatively recent. The first known legal developments are in jurisprudence, the regulation on the subject has been later. The research problem revolves around the question: what are the scope and limits of the Law in relation to surrogacy? To answer it, the scope and limits of intervention of the Law in relation to surrogacy in a globalized world are determined. The research is theoretical with a qualitative approach. The method adopted is the systemic-structural-functional. Although it begins by making a description and comparison between legal systems of three countries: Colombia, USA and Spain, it identifies the essential elements of surrogacy and ends by explaining how these elements interact in the law and how the law interacts with the ethics and politics in the context of surrogacy today.