You are correct about contracts @C8H10N4O2 under normal circumstances, however I imagine all that has flown out of the window with the first Russian bomb. Citizens of Ukraine are now fighting for survival. For women newly pregnant or heavily pregnant with a paying customer's baby the landscape has changed. In late pregnancy there isn't much option other than to find a safe place to deliver. Whether a bomb shelter meets the definition of a safe place to have a baby is another matter, given the lack of availability emergency treatment.
Crossing the border to Poland will be tricky as they do not recognise surrogacy so the woman may be left with the baby unless she does a runner from the hospital. She will also have her family and children to worry about. In early pregnancy I would definitely be looking at means of procuring an abortion. Again, Poland is not a good place to be as they have all but banned abortion.
Here is an email update from HeyReprotech, a newsletter I subscribe to.
What about surrogates mid-process?
The day after the war started, I began to wonder what was happening with surrogates who were mid-process.
Surrogacy requires that you take hormones for about two weeks** to thicken the uterine lining, so that an embryo can implant and thrive there. Some women may have just started on hormones. Others have had embryos recently transferred. Still others might be having pregnancy complications or be nearing the birth. Is there care available?
I also started thinking about the many Ukrainian women who act as egg donors. At the very end of donation, a woman takes a shot that causes the eggs to ripen. They have to be retrieved within about 36 hours. Were there women in Kyiv who were scheduled to do retrievals that Thursday morning? If so, were retrievals done? If not, what happens?
I emailed all the clinics I'd been in touch with to ask. I wanted to know if they opened at all, and if they did procedures of any kind.
I did not hear back. The situation continued to worsen in Kyiv yesterday.
This morning, I got an email from Diana Donskaya, head of international marketing at Adonis, a large clinic and surrogacy provider, based in Kyiv:
Alison, my busyness is to protect my family and my country against russian aggression and artillery shelling and rockets from russia
War is our reality today. Try to understand
The missing full stop was how it was in the email, I don't know if that is how it was sent by Diana but I am picturing a woman to frantic to bother with the niceties of punctuation.
It has raised questions for me however. Does anyone here know what happens to a woman whose ovaries have been heavily overstimulated to produce dozens of eggs if the egg collection doesn't proceed?
In the U.K. the NHS picks up the complications from the fertility industry - my hospital had 24 admissions for OHSS, with at least one that I know of ending up in icu in 2019. I've no idea what happens in such cases in Ukraine in normal times and now the hospitals will be prioritising treatment of the wounded and preparing for more wounded. Dealing with the fall out of the fertility industry won't be popular priority.