The Mom Who Had 15 Babies as Surrogate
Mothers, Babies Stranded in Ukraine Surrogacy Industry
Virus travel bans are wreaking havoc on surrogacy agencies that help same-sex couples build families.
KYIV, Ukraine — Tears streamed down Yevhenia Troyan's face every bit her flying took off from Northern Cyprus, one of the odd corners of Europe where Ukrainian surrogacy agencies have set up shop.
The flight in February was her last run a risk to return home to Ukraine before its borders slammed shut with coronavirus travel bans. But she had to leave — carelessness, she felt — the infant daughter she had just given birth to on behalf of a lesbian couple in London.
"I had the feeling I was leaving my own baby behind," she said.
In one of the more bizarre consequences of coronavirus travel restrictions, biological parents, babies and surrogate mothers have become scattered and sometimes stranded in multiple countries for months this year.
Ukraine, with its relatively permissive reproductive health laws and an abundance of willing mothers amid a poor population, is a hub of the international business, executives in the industry and women's rights advocates say.
But Ukrainian police bans surrogacy for aforementioned-sex couples or for clients who wish to select the sex activity of the kid. In response, a co-operative of the Ukrainian industry began moving women to other jurisdictions for impregnation and birth, often to legal gray zones like the largely unrecognized, Turkish-backed, splinter country of Northern Cyprus.
An "ideal destination for all family models," 1 visitor offering the service, Surrogacy 365, says on its website.
The women travel to have an embryo implanted, render to Ukraine for seven months of pregnancy, and then travel once more to give nascence.
Virus travel restrictions drew attention earlier this yr for blocking heterosexual parents from retrieving their babies inside Ukraine. At ane point, 79 babies were stacked up in Kyiv, cared for past nurses, in cribs at a hotel.
In neighboring Russia, where surrogacy is besides legal, a member of the Kremlin'south advisory council on human rights said that as many as 1,000 babies built-in in surrogacy are stranded, the Guardian reported. Virus travel bans as well stranded babies built-in by Ukrainian surrogate mothers in third countries.
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It is a very common illegal business in such countries as Northern Cyprus, Transnistria, Abkhazia and other unrecognized statelets, said Sergii Antonov, a lawyer and authority on reproductive law in Ukraine.
In Northern Cyprus, the Ukrainian mothers give birth without a legal surrogacy contract. Instead, they renounce custody later nativity, which allows the genetic parents to adopt the children. It is a legal process that can stretch for several weeks.
In February and March, fourteen Ukrainian mothers, fearful of being stranded by virus travel bans, left Northern Cyprus after giving birth only before completing the transfer to the genetic parents, leaving behind a crop of babies in legal limbo.
An ensuing dispute betwixt agents and the mothers has spilled into the news media in Ukraine and shed light on what is normally a secretive business. The women say they endured shoddy medical care and mandatory C-sections, assertions supported past medical records of postpartum treatment. 1 infant died.
"These illegal programs became visible" only because the virus travel bans disrupted their business model, said Svitlana Burkovska, director of Mothers' Force, a nongovernmental group.
Ms. Burkovska estimated that last year, before the virus travel bans, about 3,000 Ukrainian women traveled abroad for surrogacy births and another 30,000 traveled to donate eggs, by and large out of public view. "It is very risky" for the women giving nascence, she said.
Her grouping is now investigating an underground motherhood ward in an apartment in the town of Famagusta in Northern Cyprus. The mothers described it as a cloak-and-dagger hospital. They said the nurses spoke only Turkish, and the doctors didn't know their medical histories.
"When I came to the infirmary a doctor was surprised to hear I had a C-section before," said one of the women, who offered only her first name, Ira, because she does not want family and friends to know of her piece of work as a surrogate mother.
It was too late to follow safe do and deliver her next child by Cesarean, equally her cervix was opening, she said. "An anesthesiologist arrived wearing a downwards jacket," rather than scrubs, inside the makeshift hospital, and she gave birth.
Several hours later, she watched the baby die on a table nearby while medical workers were trying to save her own life, she said. She was haemorrhage internally and vomiting.
"They manifestly did not have enough staff," Ira said. "They put the baby aside, information technology was a nice good for you-looking girl. She did not exhale only I saw her moving," Ira said, crying while recalling the ordeal, which took place in Feb.
After the death, the Turkish doctors demanded the women give nascence past C-department, though one was allowed a vaginal birth.
"I begged to give birth naturally," Ms. Troyan said. "They promised me I could, but the doc suddenly came and said I am having a C-section, right now."
An agent sent a text bulletin to her telephone: "We don't need more deaths."
Another surrogate female parent in the group, who offered only her first name, Yana, who is 22, carried a infant girl for a gay couple from England. The infant was born in the 36th week by C-department. "I could have hands carried the baby full term," she said.
As the virus spread in Feb, the surrogacy agency asked the mothers to remain in Famagusta and feign parenthood of the children until paperwork was completed, but they left instead.
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"I was told to pretend, if the constabulary came to cheque, that the biological father is my common-constabulary husband," said one of the mothers, Yulia, twoscore, who carried twin girls for a gay couple from England.
Yulia is in touch with the couple, who paid more 100,000 euros, or $118,000. Simply the couple has been unable to choice up the twins, she said. The babies are temporarily in foster care, Yulia said.
When she left, Ms. Troyan feared for the uncertain legal hereafter of the daughter she had given nativity to, and she cried. In her example, nonetheless, the gay parents from United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland managed to retrieve the infant from Northern Cyprus.
Non all Ukrainian women who travel away to provide surrogacy services endured such ordeals.
Lyudmyla Medvedchuk, 40, had an embryo transfer in Ukraine and gave birth in Poland in mid-February, without incident. Ms. Medvedchuk, in an interview, said she enjoyed the feel of existence a surrogate mother and planned to do so again.
Merely back in Ukraine, the group who gave birth in Northern Republic of cyprus struggled even to receive reimbursements for postpartum treatments.
Two agents who arranged the births blamed the mothers for abandoning the babies and lashed out publicly. The agents published the mothers' names online to intimidate them, and posted on social media disparaging comments calling them "cattle." Reached by phone, i of the agents declined to comment.
Carlos Alberto Leiva Signes, a case director with Surrogacy 365, declined to discuss the company's operations, writing "you lot are requesting confidential information." Two gay couples in Britain, contacted through the mothers, declined to comment.
Dorsum in Ukraine, the women'southward lack of documents showing renunciation of custody leaves them fearful that child welfare officials will investigate them afterward they request postpartum care without infants to show for the births.
"I am afraid I tin can be arrested," said Yana.
Doctors, she said, have started request her a question she cannot answer: "Where is your baby?"
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/world/europe/ukraine-baby-surrogate.html
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