Maria, 49, is to become Portugal’s first official surrogate – and to add special poignance to the country’s début in exceptional pregnancies, she will be carrying her own grandchild.
The national council for medically assisted procreation approved Maria’s daughter’s request for her mother to be sanctioned as a surrogate last Friday.
The reasons, explain reports, are that 30-year-old Isabel and her husband Miguel cannot have children together as Isabel lost her uterus to the disease known as endometriosis.
Bizarrely, Isabel and her husband’s last name is Avó (which in Portuguese means grandmother).
But national media has glossed over this part of the story as the ‘news’ really is that the new surrogacy law, published in State newspaper Diário da República, in July is coming into its own.
Under the terms of the law, surrogacies will be allowed – for no financial return – in situations where normal births are impossible.
Law 25/ 2016 was designed for “absolutely exceptional circumstances” and has nothing to do with paving the way towards surrogacy agencies, of the sort that exist elsewhere in the world.
As reports here add, Maria’s “privileged” connection to the child’s genetic mother will ensure that the otherwise “potential psychological risks” of surrogacy are likely to be minimal.
