Surrogate Motherhood in Colombia: Towards a Comprehensive and Inclusive Legal Framework

Abstract

This article proposes legislation surrogate motherhood in Colombia taking into account: 1. The scientific background of assisted human reproduction techniques; 2. The different legal responses from comparative law and international tribunals; 3. The relationship between surrogate motherhood and the filiation concept and its different variables, and 4. The Criminal Law and the jurisprudence of the Colombian high courts answer to it with thematic relevance. In Colombia, the only legal referents on this practice are the progress towards a bill under the possibility of the regime of regulated permission and Sentence T-968 of 2009 of the Constitutional Court, which defined surrogacy as 'The reproductive act that generates the birth of a child gestated by a woman subject to a pact or commitment by which she must assign all the rights over the newborn in favor of another woman who will appear as her mother'.