Vanesa Petrillo 
Argentina’s judiciary is investigating the establishment of an illicit transnational business dedicated to exploiting women’s bodies through surrogacy and then selling the babies.
The National Public Prosecutor’s Office for Criminal and Correctional Matters, led by María Alejandra Mángano, has requested a series of searches and orders in clinics, notary offices, and law firms in Buenos Aires City, Buenos Aires Province, and the province of Santa Fe. The requests are part of a case that began in January, which Mángano is working on with state anti-trafficking agency PROTEX.
The judiciary is targeting four fertility centers in the capital and two in the city of Rosario, where pregnant women underwent fertility treatments and in vitro procedures. Generally, these centers worked with intermediaries for the clients and the pregnant women. The authorities conducted searches to obtain medical records and accounts.
They are also investigating seven notary offices where the pregnant women signed their written consent before the procedure and at the time of delivery. The seizure of notarial records and protocols, as well as signature certifications regarding the cases, was ordered.
Procedures were also carried out in three law firms representing the pregnant women or the clients, and orders were sent to five Buenos Aires City maternity hospitals where the women gave birth.
Individuals and companies established abroad but operating in Argentina are believed to have participated, making considerable profits, judicial sources told the Herald’s sister title, Ámbito.
The Human Trafficking and Cybercrime Divisions of the Federal Police carried out the operations simultaneously.
The individuals and legal entities targeted by the investigation advertised their services abroad. Couples who wanted children contacted them, and were offered a “service” called the “Argentina Program,” which cost around US$50,000. This included selecting the surrogate, acquiring the embryos to be implanted, the treatment itself, regular pregnancy check-ups, and the birth of the baby.
Recruitment of surrogates
The other side of this “business” is the recruitment of surrogates. Companies contacted poor women through social media. They offered them US$10,000 to carry a pregnancy to term, with a “bonus” of US$1,000-2,000 if they gave birth by cesarean section.
If the pregnancy was interrupted for any reason, the companies refused to make the payments, except for the minimal monthly expenses already paid.
Sources with knowledge of the case argue that these organizations took advantage of the women by offering them US$10,000 in exchange for doing whatever was necessary to induce a pregnancy, carry the pregnancy to term with all the corresponding check-ups, and hand over the baby when it was born.
The physical and emotional consequences for the women, as the case makes clear, were disregarded.
According to sources, the ultimate purpose was to register the children, then hand them over to the couples. To this end, the companies involved took advantage of “the deficient oversight provided in the local regulations of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, thereby ensuring that births would be registered, even when the surrogates resided and underwent treatment in other provinces.”
“This whole sophisticated business scheme was set up for the sole purpose of a boy or girl being born so that they could be delivered to a couple who, in many cases, were foreign and not resident in the country, and with whom they have no genetic, cultural, or social ties.”
A place of reproductive tourism
The agencies that select surrogates, the agencies that contact foreign nationals seeking to become parents, fertility clinics, and notaries all appear to have been motivated exclusively by profit.
“They take advantage of the socioeconomic needs that countless women in our country may be facing, as well as the weak national regulation in this area and the registration system in Buenos Aires City, to turn Argentina into a place of ‘reproductive tourism’ where couples from mostly developed nations arrive, with no legal or sociocultural ties to our country, solely for the purpose of registering, then returning to their country of origin with, a child.”
The Public Prosecutor’s Office is treating the case as a trafficking investigation (in line with article 145 bis of Argentina’s criminal code), since it believes the individuals under investigation routinely engaged in a criminal enterprise dedicated to recruiting women, many of them poor and vulnerable, in order to subject them to exploitation comparable to servitude through the practice of surrogacy.
This was in exchange for payment, and in some cases risking their health.
The prosecution also argued that this crime applies to the sale of children, since this treatment implies their reduction to a situation equivalent to slavery.
The buying and selling of human beings constitutes a crime established in Article 15 of Argentina’s constitution, which states that “any contract for the purchase and sale of persons is a crime for which those who engage in it, as well as the notary or official who authorizes it, will be held responsible.”
The case also involves crimes against public faith, a category of offenses that includes forgery, since it involved making false statements in public documents. This was allegedly the case with the agreements between the surrogates and the clients presented to Buenos Aires City’s Civil Registry by public notaries.
Case 1 and the German woman
The case began on January 25, after the head of the Argentine Foreign Ministry’s litigation department reported the situation to the Federal Court.
German child protection services notified the Argentine Consulate in the city of Bonn that a 58-year-old German woman had gone to her local hospital to request medical attention for a three-month-old girl born in Argentina. She provided proof of her relationship to the baby by showing a birth certificate issued by the Buenos Aires City Civil Registry and an Argentine passport.
The German official warned that the girl was in extremely poor health, and that the woman who brought her to the emergency room was unable to provide the care she needed. Consequently, she informed the local police, temporarily revoked custody of the baby, and placed her in the care of a foster family.
The investigation revealed that the girl’s birth was registered in the Buenos Aires Civil Registry. The fertilization process had taken place at a private medical institution in the capital, where the surrogacy treatment was carried out and the surrogate was identified.
The investigation found that the girl was not an isolated case. Instead, they discovered an illicit national and international business mechanism dedicated to “surrogacy” treatments in Argentina.
The next step was to establish how many babies had been born in similar circumstances. A series of local dispositions had made it possible to register births this way in Buenos Aires City, according to sources from the investigation.
Investigators found records of 147 cases of surrogacy carried out between 2018 and April of this year. In at least 49 cases, the clients had similar characteristics to the German woman.
No emotional bond
These individuals are foreign nationals from a variety of countries. Most are not resident in Argentina. In some cases, investigators confirmed that the clients had not provided genetic material. The majority did not establish an emotional bond with the surrogate mothers. There is no evidence that the assisted reproduction procedures were carried out directly, with the prior informed consent of the individuals subjected to the practice. The circumstances mean it is hard to see how this could have happened without the involvement of third parties who had commercial motivations.
None of the cases were taken to judges for them to authorize the procedure or establish parentage. Instead, they went via notaries who oversaw the signing of what were allegedly contracts of consent, but were based around claims that were demonstrably false.
Investigators are now trying to establish whether, like with Case 1, a series of intermediaries were involved in these cases, making a significant profit from the exploitation of vulnerable women and the sale of babies born in Argentina.
