'42 British babies were being carried by Ukrainian surrogates'

[BingBunnyBlues]

What a weird world we live in where a fetus inside a Ukrainian woman in Ukraine is claimed as British property by two people who had never met the Ukrainian woman.

Article about the complications (to put it mildly) of the woman you're using as an incubating oven becoming a victim of war.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/dec/09/an-english-couple-a-ukrainian-surrogate-and-a-baby-the-extraordinary-story-of-how-war-united-two-unlikely-families

The Ukrainian woman had a history of health problems, was a victim of domestic abuse and went into the surrogacy process to try to keep custody of her firstborn son. She was paid 15k to have twins for a French couple and left crying for weeks after handing them off, and yet the English purchaser blithely says the Ukrainian woman is being given a 'life-changing amount of money' to carry a baby for her.

Honestly it disgusts me. Pure exploitation and the surrogate was so young too! Poor woman doing what she needs to do to survive.

“Financial instability, triggered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, meant there were plenty of Ukrainian women willing to be surrogates. By 2018, the country was believed to account for a quarter of the global surrogacy market. One Kyiv-based lawyer estimates that, before the war, 2,000-2,500 surrogacy contracts were being signed every year. The scale of the industry was revealed during the pandemic when Ukraine closed its borders and couples were not able to collect their babies. In April 2020, BioTexCom, the country’s largest reproductive agency, released a video showing 50 stranded newborns lined up in trolleys in a giant makeshift nursery.”

Honestly imagine using poverty and war to your advantage so you can get a baby you want, in a place where you won’t have any legal “complications” around getting legal parentage of the baby.

what strike me most about this article…..like with almost all articles about surrogacy….is how little attention is given to the actual infant. No comment on how the situation might affect them, their needs etc.

How anyone can think this is ethical is beyond me.

It says too at the end of the article that the war has led to a surrogate 'baby boom' in Ukraine - well of course it has. Their economy embraces trading in babies and there are lots of women in financial desperation there.

It's icky on a huge scale.

Fucking disgusting

Imagine looking at the suffering in Ukraine and seeing an opportunity. I think that's at the heart of my reservations about surrogacy - there don't appear to be any limits to what the procuring parents are willing to see women and babies suffer to get what they want.