Nothing better than a war can highlight the paradox of surrogacy, summarized by the motto “her body, my child”. During a conflict, should a surrogate mother hide in a safe place to protect the child she is raising on behalf of others? Or should she stay with her family, in her city of hers, even on the street to defend her country?
This is a very topical issue in Ukraine. The country is an international hub for surrogacy, one of the few to allow foreigners to enter into contracts with local women. This means that couples from the United States, China, Germany or Italy can go there and arrange with a Ukrainian woman to raise their baby in her womb. Conditions must be respected – parents must be heterosexual and married, and medical reasons are needed to justify resorting to the practice – but there are still many would-be mothers, their pay is legal, and establishing legal parenthood for parents is simple. It is unclear how many children are born to surrogate mothers in Ukraine, perhaps 2,500 per year. For example, BioTexCom, a large fertility clinic in Kiev, told me that in the next three months they have expected about 200 babies to be born.
Surrogacy in Ukraine
In any case, tensions can arise during this type of pregnancy. It happens all over the world, even in peacetime. In fact, those who carry the child have the right to full autonomy over their own body, but at the same time the parents have the right to the safety of the child. So sometimes parents, for example, ask the mother to abstain from certain foods such as coffee, or from sports such as kickboxing. I’ve read contracts with North American surrogate mothers banning hair dye, perfume, dentist, sex. On other occasions, however, the movements of the mothers are limited: they cannot leave the state in which they live, or perhaps not even go away from home for more than 150 kilometers.
These are rules to which Ukrainian surrogate mothers are also often subjected. Indeed, even before the war, they were often contractually obliged to move close to the clinic or hospital where the child would be born several months before delivery. The ones I met three weeks ago on Zoom were working with the gestation agency for other Delivering dreams, based in New Jersey, and seemed to welcome these kinds of requests.
They all had an apartment available, some had brought family members with them. And no one was worried about a war that, at the time, seemed unlikely. One of them had called it “completely nonsense”. Conversely, the intended parents, from the United States and Canada, were nervous and feared that the country might be invaded, so they demanded that surrogate mothers be safe.
In war
At the end of January Susan Kersch-Kibler, the founder of Delivering dreams, met them on Zoom to talk about possible alternative plans. I listened with interest. Kersch-Kibler claimed that he expected nothing more than cyber attacks from Russia, but that she would still be preparing for the worst. For this, she asked customers who would come to Ukraine in the following weeks to pick up the children to bring cash (in case of bank closures) and warm clothes, to cope with any power outages. She also advised her to buy very flexible airline tickets. But it wasn’t clear where their babies would be born. In the event of significant military action, in fact, eastern Ukraine would have transferred the surrogate mothers west to Lviv. What if there was a large-scale invasion, straight out of the country. Besides, she said, their passports were in order.
In mid-February, government alarms became more urgent. They exhorted foreign citizens “not to go to Ukraine” and “leave as long as commercial means were available”. When even the embassies began to leave Kiev, Kersch-Kibler moved the pregnant women to Lviv. “We cannot allow them to be in any danger,” he had told me in those days. “And it doesn’t matter if they see it as a risk, if it is for the parents too, if they’re going to freak out with anxiety. I just don’t want all of this to go to surrogate mothers ”.
I felt the tension between the parents’ need to feel safe and the surrogate’s need to make decisions independently. The mothers I had heard, in fact, were not happy to leave, they did not consider it necessary. They did not want to uproot their families again and so many were about to leave alone. Even if, a few days after the transfer, already two had told me on WhatsApp that they were already homesick for their children. “I hope to be able to return to Kiev as soon as possible”, one wrote to me. We know how it turned out.
In the days following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kiev’s fertility clinics, now under attack, have closed. The mothers went to shelters or fled. I was told by BioTexCom that they secured an air shelter nearby to protect parents, surrogates and babies. And a video shared on YouTube showed this shelter with beds, cribs, sleeping bags and gas masks. There were also food supplies, medical supplies, running water, toilets, a kitchen. I emailed to ask if any of them actually used it on their first or second night of fighting in Kiev, but got no response.
Meanwhile, Kersch-Kibler scrambled to rescue the surrogate mothers. Those later in pregnancy were already in Lviv, now it was the turn of those who were recently pregnant, even some people who had just started taking hormones to prepare the uterine walls for embryo transfer. But not all of them wanted to leave or, in some cases, to separate from the family to stay in a safer place. They wanted to decide for themselves where and how to survive.
Moreover, it is not new that many professions force them to live separated from their families. This is the case of those who work in the army or in the diplomatic corps, foreign correspondents, international nannies, domestic workers. And in Ukraine, being a surrogate mother is not just a job, but a well-paid job. The difference, however, is that, usually, you can always quit your job, or at least put it on pause. But in this case you can’t. In such a situation, being a surrogate mother can force you to stay away from your family, not to respond to a sense of duty towards your country. It can physically prevent you from securing yourself. And make sure you need medical help even when doctors are overwhelmed by injured or dying people.
In wartime, in short, people can usually choose and turn all their attention to the family and the war effort. But surrogate mothers can’t: even if they defy requests to go to a safe place, they carry their work with them, in their bodies.
Should a surrogate mother in Ukraine be safe for the baby? Or should she do what’s right for her family? Should he take refuge in a third country, such as Poland, Moldova or Hungary, where parenting regulations also entail legal complications for would-be parents, or he should go to great lengths to go to a country like the Czech Republic, with laws more favorable for parents?
The reality is that the interests of surrogate mothers and those of the parents do not always coincide. The war only makes this contrast even more evident.
(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)