More than 100 babies are trapped in various bomb shelters across Ukraine and many more embryos lay hidden by many laboratories. These babies or the embryos belong to foreign couples that have sought services from infertility clinics in Ukraine, considered the capital of surrogacy – a procedure in which a woman carries another couple’s child for a fee, until birth. Ukraine dislodged India, a top destination for surrogacy, until commercial surrogacy was banned in the country .

According to a report in the New York Times, a basement in Kyiv has 19 babies born to Ukrainian surrogate mothers and are waiting for their biological parents to arrive. BioTexCom, the fertility company that organised the surrogacy and birth has deployed nannies to look after these newborns. The numbered cribs are regularly visited by doctors for check-ups.

The war has complicated the nationality of these babies in absence of their real parents. While these babies, already delivered, remain protected in bomb shelters, there are others being carried by surrogate mothers around Ukraine, struggling to survive amid Russian bombing.

Thousands of such surrogate children are conceived through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and the surrogate moms carry the embryo till it turns into a baby. There are several agencies in Ukraine that offer surrogacy services with arrangements with clinics in countries like Ireland, UK, Canada, China and Australia. Poor Ukrainian women who carry and bear the child get paid up to $20,000 and agencies can charge wealthy parents up to $40,000.

Commercial surrogacy is not legal in many countries and there are several legal hurdles in getting another woman’s womb on hire. Ukrainian surrogate agencies offer this service, with minimum legal moorings, at affordable rates.

But the war has put the Ukrainian surrogacy industry in a big jeopardy as they can’t even think of shifting surrogate mothers or the newborns to another country – say neighbouring Poland or Hungary—where surrogacy is banned. If this happens, the Ukrainian surrogate mother will be recognised as the legal parent of the baby, instead of her biological parents.

READ MORE:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/12/world/europe/ukraine-surrogate-mothers-babies.html

https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/03/11/surrogacy-in-crisis-as-ukraine-war-leaves-newborns-stranded-in-bomb-shelters-and-families-

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/15/the-stranded-babies-of-kyiv-and-the-women-who-give-birth-for-money