Should a surrogate safeguard the child she’s carrying for someone else by remaining concealed, by seeking a safe refuge? Or should she remain by the side of her own family, of her own country, risking her life? This is a live question in Ukraine right now.
Many surrogates have been asked to prioritize the intended parents and their babies over their families and their country: they have been offered the opportunity to flee elsewhere in the country or in neighboring nations at the cost of abandoning their loved ones. Nonetheless, some women did not and do not accept to move and be separated from family.
Ukraine is an international hub for foreign couples seeking surrogacy services. Although there are some conditions, such as the fact that the couple must be heterosexual, married and have a medical reason for needing a surrogate, surrogates are plentiful; paying them is legal, costs are reasonable and establishing legal parenthood for the intended parents is uncomplicated. As a matter of fact, under Ukrainian law the intended parents are named on the birth certificate as the legal parents. Hence, it is understandable why worldwide, people are willing to pay Ukrainian women to carry their baby: an estimated 2,000 and 2,500 children are born through surrogacy every year and at least 1,500 international couples have surrogate mothers and embryos stored at clinics in Ukraine.
Thousands of women have consequently found themselves in a state of uncertainty. In the chaos of one of the most important conflicts of the XXI century, no one knows whether a surrogate deserves bodily autonomy or the parents deserve security for their child. Before the war threatened, many surrogate mothers were forced to make some considerable sacrifices: they were contractually obliged to move closer to their birthing hospital a few months in advance of their due date. But at the time taking their family with them was no issue. Now women often are not willing to make any similar choice: they can’t understand how they could uproot their life and their families when their country most needs them. Nonetheless, for some surrogate mothers, who are too far along in their pregnancy, fleeing is not even an option.
No matter what choice they made, other problems will inevitably arise for surrogate mothers. If they choose to remain in Ukraine, some clinics can offer them shelters to ensure their safety but, after the birth, the intended parents may not be able to travel to Ukraine and collect their babies. That’s why numerous children are kept safe but parentless in basement nurseries, waiting for their intended parents to take action. And even if they manage to rescue them, there is also the problem of birth certificates: the registry offices are closed and therefore the children do not have a certificate that allows them to legally leave the country. On the other hand, if surrogate mothers choose to flee Ukraine, at the birth of the baby, they will face the laws of the country where they will have found shelter. In Ukraine, a woman can give birth to a child without being considered the child’s mother, but in many other countries a woman automatically becomes the mother of a child by giving birth. This means they will be considered the mother of the child, a label and role they possibly never wanted and the intended parents never desired them to have.
The issue is clear: the surrogacy contracts made before the war can’t give answers to the life-threatening dilemmas surrogate mothers and their babies are currently facing. The concept of “her body, my baby” has proven to be particularly vulnerable to the chaos caused by the war, putting surrogates and the couples who have paid them in unfathomable situations, which no one has yet been able to solve.
