It was just a week ago when a famed 68-year-old Spanish actress left fans shocked after revealing she had a baby by surrogacy. It has now been confirmed that the father to her child was fathered by her dead son.
“This girl isn’t my daughter, she’s my granddaughter,” Ana Obregón told ¡Hola! magazine in an interview in Miami.
Having a baby with your child is illegal in Spain, so he went to the U.S., but adopting a child born abroad is lawful, according to a BBC report.
Obregón’s son, Aless Lequio, died of cancer at 27, so she decided to “bring a child of his own into the world,” she said, adding that it was “his final wish.”
Before Lequio died in 2020, a sample of his sperm was frozen and stored in New York. The surrogate for the child is a woman of Cuban origin who lives in Florida and carried the baby to full term.
When Obregón initially announced that she paid for the surrogacy, ministers in Spain’s left-wing government became outraged, prompting national debate. Equality Minister Irene Montero denounced the practice as “a form of violence against women.”
But the actress finds the condemnation against her to be “absurd,” suggesting that surrogacy is a widely-used practice to assist in reproduction in many countries outside of Spain.
Surrogacy involves a woman who agrees to carry a child on behalf of another woman who cannot or does not want to carry the child on her own. Typically, the practice is done in exchange for money.
Obregón’s child has been named Ana Sandra and will be registered at the Spanish consulate before they fly to Madrid, the star who has appeared in popular movies and sitcoms explained. She added that she has refused to rule out providing her granddaughter with a brother or sister.
Under Spain’s civil code, adoption by a grandmother could pose problems under Article 175, which states that she would not be entitled to adopt “a descendant,” although Obregón has made it clear that she is the baby’s legal mother, even though she is biologically her grandmother.
