Parents Relying on Ukraine Surrogates Desperately Seek Their Newborns

At least a dozen companies offer surrogacy in Ukraine, and BioTexCom, one of the leading agencies in Kyiv, estimates that it arranges at least a thousand births each year. The agency had expected to have 100 babies born by month’s end. Many of these newborns will be born in Kyiv, where fighting has neared hospitals, far from the parents who wait anxiously from outside Ukraine’s borders to take them home.

Sam Everingham, the founder of Growing Families, a nonprofit based in Australia that supports people navigating surrogacy, said that he had heard from about 90 panicked couples with newborns or babies soon expected in Ukraine. Surrogacy agencies, many of them based in Kyiv, once courted parents with images of chubby-cheeked babies and sonograms. Now, the agencies’ social media pages are filled with grim updates of the staff members’ upended lives and their attempts to keep surrogates and newborns safe in bleak shelters.

Some agencies, like New Hope Surrogacy, have relocated pregnant surrogates to safer regions of the country, or outside of it altogether. However, if these women give birth in neighboring countries with different laws about paid surrogacy, the biological parents’ rights could be jeopardized.

The number of stranded babies is growing. Denis Herman, BioTexCom’s legal adviser, said the agency was caring for 30 newborns, most of them in Kyiv.

“We have a lot of babies born during this time,” Mr. Herman said. “We cannot stop this process. We have to find some ways to deal with it.”

BioTexCom believes that the babies are safer in the bomb shelters in Kyiv than being transferred in haste, Mr. Herman said.

Mr. Everingham has heard about “an ongoing flow” of parents traveling into Ukraine despite the risk.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/world/europe/russia-ukraine-surrogate-children.html