An improvised nursery has been set up in the basement of a cream-colored building in the Ukrainian capital, kyiv. Strollers and prams are lined up in this windowless two-room apartment behind an iron door. According to Biotexcom, the main surrogacy agency in Ukraine, 50 children have been born to a surrogate mother since the start of the war, more than a month ago now, and 450 surrogate mothers have yet to give birth.
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Six nurses, including Svetlana, watch over the 21 babies born in this bunker. gestational surrogacy (GPA). “As soon as we understood that the war was real, we prepared this shelter and put the children inside. We had taken the maximum of things that we needed. Then, when the explosions subsided, we brought prams, beds, pushchairs. We made the place more comfortable. We work 24 hours a day. We won’t give up on these babies.”she promises.
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The youngest of the babies is four days old, the oldest six months. The surrogate mothers have signed the surrender document but not all the intended parents have been able to come yet. The recovery of children has been upended first by the Covid-19 pandemic and now by the war in Ukraine.
igor Petrovichchief doctor of Biotexcom, the main surrogacy agency in Ukraine, almost organizes an exfiltration operation when the parents come to the country or to the border.
“I take a weapon. I take the baby in my arms. We leave in a convoy in a car. We meet the parents, we give the baby, the documents, we shake hands. And we leave.”
Igor Petrovich, Chief Medical Officer of Biotexcomat franceinfo
“In this situation, the parents are shocked. They are wide-eyed. Between these sounding sirens and their baby”, says the doctor. The intended parents are French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Canadian… Most of the French were able to pick up their child despite the war. Mathilde’s intended daughter (alias) was born on March 13 about a hundred kilometers from kyiv. She met him the next day. “We were very anxious. I was risking my life, my husband too. But we couldn’t leave our baby in this context of war. We arrived at the hospital, they put him in our arms. And we are distributed”she explains to franceinfo.
On the other hand, Mathilde’s baby only had a pass to enter France: Ukraine could not issue a birth certificate. Her daughter therefore has no official identity, no social security. Several families are in this case in France. Maître Catherine Clavin, a lawyer specializing in parentage law, has launched a dozen procedures since the start of the war to establish the identity of these babies born from surrogacy. “All we have to do is go to the court of the parents’ domicile to ask for a judgment which will make up for the non-existence of the birth certificate, and therefore declare the civil status of this child”.
In the meantime, the babies in this nursery have a fictitious, temporary identity. Post-it notes, purple for the girls and blue for the boys, are stuck on their cradles. The nurses wrote the surname of the surrogate mother on it. “because the child does not yet have any documents. We give them a first name ourselves. We choose Ukrainian first names like Igor Petrovich, who is a child who has just been picked up by his parents, or Nicolai Igorevich” , explains Svetlana.
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Besides these children far from their parents, there is also the situation of surrogate mothers. According to Biotexcom, 450 are still to give birth. Sonia and Samuel Vacher are anxiously awaiting the birth of a little girl in early June. From France, the couple takes news of the surrogate mother. She lives in the occupied zone, in the area of Kharkiv, in the east of the country. “She felt safe at home. Then, one day she said to us: ‘the Russians are in my city’. Then after that it was: ‘it bombards’. We told her that we really had to ‘she leaves but she told us’now it’s too dangerous because there’s a car that tried to get out of town, they shot it, they all died“.
“What can happen to our surrogate, to her family, to our child?”
Samuel Vacherat franceinfo
The couple has several fears: “Will she be able to be evacuated to a safer area? If not, how is she going to give birth if in her town there are no more hospitals, no more doctors? How are we going to be able to get our child back?”, asks Samuel Vacher.
The kyiv nursery is not an isolated case. There are about ten surrogacy agencies in Ukraine. It was an important activity before the war because it is one of the few countries to offer surrogacy to foreigners. The procedure costs around 50,000 euros.