The Ukraine has one of the world’s largest gestational surrogacy industries. Each year, between 2000 and 2500 babies are born by surrogacy in the Ukraine to low income women.
The surrogacy industry plasters advertisements on buses and the metro, for healthy women of child bearing age. To encourage women to participate, the industry pays the surrogate mother $11,000 and a $250 monthly stipend.
This is an enormous amount of money particularly for the Ukraine, where the average yearly salary is $3,000.
There are at least 33 private surrogacy clinics, which thrive under Ukraine’s lenient regulation and are aided by skilled physicians readily available to carry out the procedure.
Demand for surrogate mothers skyrocketed after Asian countries, such as Nepal, India and Thailand, outlawed commercial surrogacy because of its exploitation of women. Unfortunately, exploitation is occurring in the Ukraine, with surrogate mothers living in terrible conditions, especially during the late stages of pregnancy. The surrogacy business is a highly profitable one that operates in a gray zone of the law, which leads to this abuse of women.
Surrogate mothers and their babies are commodified under this procedure and regarded only as purchased products, never treated as human beings. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 50 newborns were placed in a Kyiv hotel because parents were unable to enter the country to collect their children.
If surrogate mothers and babies are at risk in normal times, this is intensified during wartime, such as is now occurring due to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
It is known that 21 babies born by surrogate mothers have been placed in a makeshift clinic in a residential basement on the outskirts of Kyiv. Babies lie there in a line of small plastic beds, attended by exhausted nurses who are trapped working around the clock to care for them.
What happens to the frozen embryos if the power fails? Will the mothers receive medical care if the doctors employed in the profit driven company are no longer available? How will the parents retrieve their child if they don’t know where the surrogate mother has gone? Did she flee to another country where the baby will be born? What will the law on surrogacy be in that country? Will parents be able to claim their baby there?
The war in the Ukraine has exposed the cruelty, terrible risks, and exploitation that occurs when human reproduction is industrialized for profit.