Surrogate babies stranded in Ukraine

One eyed Jack

Alrigghtythen wrote: »

Its no consequence to you one way other the other.

Surrogacy? Of course it is.

Wouldn’t be one of my immediate conversation starters, but if it comes up, as it has done here due to current circumstances in Ukraine, then sure, it’s an opportunity the same as you have to express my opinion on the topic of surrogacy.

Muahahaha

This story rumbles on and now Ukraines Ombudsman for Children is calling for commercial surrogacy to be made illegal just like Nepal and India have already done before

Lockdown exposed the scale of the commercial baby business in Ukraine, and now women hired for their wombs are speaking out

by Oksana Grytsenko

Some are crying in their cots; others are being cradled or bottle-fed by nannies. These newborns are not in the nursery of a maternity hospital, they are lined up side by side in two large reception rooms of the improbably named Hotel Venice on the outskirts of Kyiv, protected by outer walls and barbed wire.

They are the children of foreign couples born to Ukrainian surrogate mothers at the Kyiv-based BioTexCom Centre for Human Reproduction, the largest surrogacy clinic in the world. They’re stranded in the hotel because their biological parents have not been able to travel in or out of Ukraine since borders closed in March because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Anxious parents check on the children they have not yet met via video calls, and others have sent audio recordings of their voices to soothe the children.

BioTexCom released video footage from the hotel in mid-May to highlight the heartbreaking dilemma for parents and to lobby for an easing of border closures.The babies’ plight made headlines around the world, but a month on, some 50 babies remain in the hotel and the saga is casting a harsh spotlight on the ethics and scale of the booming commercial child-bearing industry in Ukraine.

Mykola Kuleba, Ukraine’s ombudsman for children, has now said reforming a system he described as a violation of children’s rights was not enough and that surrogacy services for foreign couples in Ukraine should be banned.

It gets worse, not only have some babies been mixed up by the main agency BioTexCom but also under the legal contract between the commercial surrogate agency and the perspective parents if the baby is born with health defects the parents then have the right to reject it. The babies then end up as orphans

At Hotel Venice, Albert Tochilovsky, the owner of BioTexCom, does not deny there were mix-ups with embryos during surrogacy procedures in 2011 that led to the human trafficking investigation.

He blames the error on a lack of experience when the clinic was only a year old, and says: “I don’t think it was only us who used to make mistakes here. If someone starts checking DNA, there will be a lot of scandals.”

He claims that in at least three cases parents rejected surrogate babies after they were born with health problems. The best-known of them is the case of Bridget, the daughter of an American couple, who was born in 2016 and now lives in an orphanage in Zaporizhia, in eastern Ukraine. “It was a tragedy for us,” Tochilovsky says.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/15/the-stranded-babies-of-kyiv-and-the-women-who-give-birth-for-money

jam_mac_jam

Hopefully they ban it. It's a pity that it took something like this for it to happen.