Surrogacy Practice Survives in Ukraine, Clients Start Returning

After spending months hiding underground to escape the bombings, Viktoria, a Ukrainian surrogate mother, managed to escape with her family, as well as the fetus she was carrying for foreign clients, away from the fighting.

She said she was able to escape because the surrogacy agency she worked for offered her financial help and an apartment in the capital, Kiev, to ensure her and her baby’s physical safety.

At first she was reluctant to leave her city, Kharkiv, even when it was under artillery attacks, but now she is glad to be in relative safety.

“I wouldn’t have left Kharkiv if the clinic hadn’t convinced me.”

Viktoria is one of hundreds of women who have completed pregnancies over the past seven months, hiding every time the sirens sound to warn of an impending air strike, surviving in bomb shelters and fleeing destroyed cities to give birth to their children and hand them over to parents living abroad.

Before the Russian invasion in February, Ukraine was a major supplier of surrogacy, being one of the few countries that allows this practice for customers from other countries. After a spring break, surrogacy agencies are resuming operations, reviving an activity that many childless people depend on but which some critics consider exploitative and which already faced ethical and logistical complications even in peacetime.

The hailstorms of Russian missiles that hit Ukrainian cities last week further highlighted the dangerous environment in which the surrogacy industry operates.

A dozen women interviewed said the extra financial support they received helped ensure their families’ survival, allowing them to leave areas that were fenced off or that were frequent targets of artillery shelling.

In some cases, however, the surrogacy industry has exposed pregnant women to new dangers that they would not have faced had they stayed at home — for example, passing through Russian checkpoints to exit occupied territories.

Like other surrogate women who agreed to be interviewed and photographed at a clinic in Kiev, Viktoria conditioned her participation to using her first name only. Some of the women were concerned about the privacy, security of family members who remained in occupied territories or because of their own ties to these areas.

Agencies are also adapting to war. In addition to helping pregnant women and their families move to cities more safely, some are having to find ways to care for babies whose biological parents are struggling to overcome obstacles from war and the pandemic to reach Ukraine. Svitlana Burkovska, the owner of a small agency, Ferta, took in babies to care for in her own home for months.

Fears that surrogacy would be derailed — especially when Russia tried but failed to take Kiev in the opening weeks of the war — proved exaggerated. Life in western and central Ukraine has largely stabilized despite fighting in the southern and eastern regions and the continued risk of long-range missile attacks.

“We haven’t lost a single baby,” commented Igor Petchenoga, medical director of BioTexCom, the country’s largest surrogacy agency and clinic. “We managed to get all our surrogate mothers out of areas under occupation and bombing.”

But for months, women who thought they would make money by creating lives were forced to protect their own lives first. Outside the capital, they slept in cars parked on the side of the road as they escaped from occupied territories, faced interrogation by Russian soldiers and lived in underground shelters.

In the first month of the war, 19 babies from an agency were stranded in an underground nursery in Kiev. For months it was difficult or impossible for biological parents to reach their children in Ukraine, but by August all the babies had been taken home.

According to Albert Tochilovski, director of BioTexCom, the war has not diminished the demand for surrogacy from couples desperate to have children. “Couples are in a hurry. Explaining that we’re at war doesn’t work.”

Before Russia launched its invasion, BioTexCom had approximately 50 surrogates per month. Since the beginning of June, the company has started at least 15 new pregnancies.

With the money made from surrogacy, Tochilovski said, women are being taken from frontline cities and Russian-occupied regions to safer places like Kiev.

Many who practice this activity speak of surrogacy as their work. According to doctors, this term prevents them from forming emotional bonds with the babies they are carrying.

On a recent morning in Kiev, 20 women were lining up at the company’s front desk to get a medical check-up or prepare for a pregnancy. All had stories to tell about the war, about dangers narrowly avoided or painful losses suffered. All of them, including Viktoria — who was carrying a baby for Chinese clients, as is the case with many surrogates in Ukraine — said they are motivated by money, a love for their own children and a desire to ensure their safety.

Surrogacy is banned in many countries for a number of reasons, including the criticism that it leaves poor women vulnerable to being exploited by clients and agencies. Proponents of surrogate pregnancy, in which women undergo IVF to bear the babies of clients who are unable to have children on their own, said the practice is invaluable to these couples and offers women cash values ​​they can change. your life.

“I do it for the money, but why not?” asked Olga, 28, who started a new surrogate pregnancy this summer. “I have good health and I can help people who have money and want children.”

Before the war, the activity thrived in Ukraine, where women are usually paid around $20,000 for each baby they carry. The conflict increased the importance of having financial security.

A 30-year-old surrogate mother, who requested anonymity to speak because she left Melitopol, in southern Ukraine, and feared reprisals, said she was able to get her family out of the danger zone thanks to this work. “I saved my family with the help of surrogacy.”

Due to the nine-month waiting time, agencies cannot make immediate decisions on whether to continue or cease operations after new developments such as last week’s missile shower. And expectant mothers cannot be transferred to jurisdictions outside Ukraine that do not recognize the right of custody of biological parents of babies born via surrogacy.

The war created many new dilemmas for women, clients and doctors. Viktoria and her family face one of them: the payment she will receive will help them survive, but it’s not clear where they should go after she recovers from her c-section. The family remains for the time being in the apartment rented by the clinic in Kiev.

For many, the question that concerns them is where to give birth. The dangers include not just the fighting, but how the authorities installed by the Russian occupation government will treat surrogate babies.

A surrogate mother named Nadia lived in a village in Russian-occupied territory that was not at risk of artillery bombardment. But she decided to leave the region and seek territory under Ukrainian control to give birth, to avoid the danger that the biological parents could not have custody of the baby and that she would lose her fees.

Nadia spent two days with her husband and 11-year-old daughter sleeping in a car on the side of a road that is sometimes bombed, waiting to be able to cross the front lines.

When the war broke out, Svitlana Burkovska was caring for two surrogate babies who could not be picked up by their parents. Unlike most specialist agencies, she takes care of newborns in her own home before they are picked up by their biological parents. She was forced to take shelter for some time underground with the newborns, her husband and her own children.

As more babies were born in the first few months of the war, she ended up with seven newborns in her care, babies whose biological parents could not come to pick them up right away, both because access to Ukraine was made difficult by the war and because some lingering restrictions due to to Covid, like the measures adopted in China, caused delays.

Burkovska’s children helped care for the babies until their parents could come and get them. By August, most parents had picked up their children.

A Chinese customer of BioTexCom, Zhang Zong, was one of the people who had difficulties getting to Kiev. He said the wait was very difficult. The first meeting with her six-month-old son was both emotional and a little awkward. “I was thrilled when they let me hug him.”

“When he grows up, I’ll be able to tell him the story.”