https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/couple-face-spending-months-in-kyiv-to-claim-their-baby-h2fnqtn62
‘We’ll be trapped in a war zone’: couple face months in Kyiv to claim their baby
Fliss and Memet Demir are travelling to the Ukrainian capital, where a surrogate mother is due to deliver the child
Particularly appalling article on a surrogacy in Ukraine without any comment on the mother or the fact it's commercial surrogacy which is illegal here.
Couple can't have children because woman had cancer five years ago. She's still on hormone medication.
They sent embryos to Ukraine in 2021 but they were implanted only in Autumn last year.
They are whinging because the British government withdrew the emergency passport scheme for surrogate babies born in Ukraine to discourage the continued trade. So they now have to go to Ukraine and apply for a passport in person which might take 16 weeks and this is so awful because they might die. They have been told they won't be fast tracked and they should not travel to Ukraine by the government.
This emergency scheme was withdrawn in August. You'll note this is prior to the surrogate being implanted.
They didn't want to do surrogacy in the UK because
The couple were concerned about surrogacy in the UK, which has been long criticised for its poor legal framework. Demand also far outstrips supply because surrogates can not be paid except for expenses, so they turned to Ukraine, where surrogacy costs about £40,000 and their parental rights would be immediately acknowledged.
Natalie Gamble, a solicitor at NGA Law, a specialist reproduction firm, said Ukraine had been a popular choice for British parents before the Russian invasion because of its clear surrogacy laws and established agencies. In contrast, the “murky and fudged” UK law initially treats the surrogate and her spouse as parents, making everyone nervous, she said.
Two attempts to implant the couple’s embryos failed and, devastated, Demir and her husband explored surrogacy in the UK. They attended charity events to meet potential philanthropic surrogates, but said the process felt like speed dating.
^^
Mr Demir says: “They tell you to try and arrange social events, barbecues, to meet surrogates. The charity organising it, they say, ‘Fliss, you need to work on your social media profile, just put up pictures with nice people’. It just felt like a popularity contest.”
Demir was still going through treatment, and her body had started rejecting one of the breast implants. She was having weekly injections to remove a litre of fluid from the breast, and was rushed to A&E because of infections.
“I was so unwell, we were just broken,” she says. “And there’s all these fresh-faced lovely couples who also want a baby. The surrogate is going to pick them, not the woman who might die of cancer.”
They did not get a surrogate offer, and began to come to terms they would never have a child. War had broken out in Ukraine, and they feared their remaining two embryos were lost.
But in the autumn, after the situation stabilised, the surrogate agency got in touch with the option of trying again. Demir recalls: “We thought, it’s our final chance, what have we got to lose? Desperate people do desperate things.”
So no thought to the surrogate and just how exploitative this is. Or the risk to their unborn child.
Just a tantrum that THEY will now have to travel to Ukraine and won't get special treatment and how it's dreadfully unfair to their British daughter that they have to wait up to 16 weeks for a passport
Plenty of time to reflect on conditions when they've been told
Doctors have asked that they bring everything for their baby, including bed sheets, because supplies are scarce. The couple, who have never been to Ukraine, chose a hotel because it had a generator and a bomb shelter.
Of course 16 weeks in Ukraine is not acceptable for them because the wife can only get 3 months of hormone therapy from the NHS. And this is putting her health as risk.
Nothing about the conditions their daughter will be born in and how risky / awful that might be for the mother. It was perfectly fine for their daughter to be at risk from the war during the pregnancy, but it's somehow dreadful that they have to go there themselves and wait around.
If Ukraine is good enough for them to have a surrogacy pregnancy in, then it's good enough for them to travel to as well. Who deliberately creates a baby in these circumstances and then has the brass neck to complain that they will also have to experience the war zone first hand.
The staggering selfishness is off the scale. The article doesn't reflect on it at all - just that our surrogacy laws aren't lax enough so it's driving couples abroad.
If we tightened our laws here to recognise this as people trafficking then maybe that would give pause for thought because these 'respectable' couples go abroad because our lax laws allow us to do so. We should and could criminalise this. 'Respectable couples' are precisely the ones who should be clamped down on precisely because they are less likely to try and damage their status by acting in a criminal manner.
On the plus side I'm glad the government has said no fuck off to special treatment - they withdrew the emergency scheme to stop twats like this for good reason. These dickheads made a choice to go ahead in the middle of a war after the scheme was withdrawn so I'm all out of fucks to give to them.
At least the article may act as a deterrent for others. That's the only positive.
Monsters.