USLUGA SUROGAT MAJČINSTVA U PRAVNIM SISTEMIMA EVROPSKIH DRŽAVA

A surrogate mother is a female person who helps couples and individuals become parents by carrying a pregnancy instead of a woman, in situations where a woman who wants to have a child faces certain gynecological problems or there are other medical reasons why she cannot have a child The most common indication for surrogacy is the lack of a uterus, which can be congenital or acquired after surgery, with the presence of one or both ovaries. Other medical indications are various serious illnesses, as a result of which the woman's life would be endangered in the situation of pregnancy. Surrogacy is accompanied by not only legal, but also numerous ethical and moral dilemmas, and in Europe it is allowed in only a few countries. Governments in most countries vote to ban all surrogacy arrangements outright, and in some jurisdictions there are civil and criminal penalties for people who do choose to enter into such arrangements, because in these states surrogacy is prohibited, regardless of whether it is based on altruistic reasons or it is in commercial purposes. In other countries, surrogacy is permitted, but only if based solely on an altruistic purpose, thereby prohibiting commercial surrogacy. In the paper, the author provides an overview of the current state of legal regulation in this area in some European countries, with reference to the proposed novelties that provide for the preliminary draft of the long-announced and still unadopted Civil Code of the Republic of Serbia, which concerns the introduction of surrogacy into our law. After 17 years of work on this Code, one of the most difficult issues to reach consensus on, aside from euthanasia and same-sex marriage, is surrogacy.