More women in Ukraine want to be surrogate mothers
The Internet has countless surrogacy ads, with the lion’s share generated by women willing to be surrogate mothers. Some women answer such calls themselves, while others are assisted by male intermediaries. Experts at reproductive/fertility clinics note, however, that because of the crisis there is less demand for surrogate mothers, while the number of prospective surrogate mothers has increased.
Valerii Zukin, vice president of the Association of Reproductive Medicine of Ukraine, says that in 2007 about 90 couples used surrogate mothers, compared to 60 this year, but there are no official surrogacy statistics.
Olena Morozova, manager of the Intersono Reproductive Clinic in Lviv, also points to a lower demand for surrogacy: “At present we employ surrogate mothers twice a month. Previously it was three to four times. The crisis has increased the supply of surrogacy services. This stands to logic because these women want to earn a living.”
Her colleague in Chernivtsi, Tamara Yuzko, notes that there are many infertile married couples in Ukraine, so this problem can be solved by surrogacy: “Every sixth couple proves infertile and only one in four women can get pregnant.” Zukin says there are 10 million reproductive-age couples in Ukraine, of which 15 percent are infertile. However, this does not mean that every such couple needs a surrogate mother, considering that surrogacy makes up only 1.5 percent of the reproductive services rendered.
Despite surrogacy being a legal reproductive method, potential surrogate mothers are afraid: they can’t legally seal their relations with the customers, because these procedures are absent in the current Ukrainian legislation. The Family Code does not even use the notion of a surrogate mother, just the implantation of human embryos produced by married couples using auxiliary reproductive technologies.
Maryna Lehenka, a lawyer with the La Strada Ukraine Center, explains that the law protects the family and the child, but not the surrogate mother. The latter can protect herself by making a civil law contract specifying the rights and obligations of the contracting parties: “In fact, this is a services agreement. This document must be drawn up [and duly signed] before conception, because afterward it will be actually an assignment contract providing for the transfer to the customer of the baby who has been conceived or born. This agreement may entail criminal prosecution on charges of human trafficking or as an illegal agreement on transfer of a human being.”
Upgrading legislation may also increase the demand for surrogacy. Not so long ago, MP Volodymyr Kapliienko prepared a surrogacy bill, but it found no support in the Verkhovna Rada and the Ministry of Health. Kapliienko explained that the bill was, above all, about the surrogate mother’s legal and social protection and ways to solve the problem of infertility: “Eleven percent of young married couples can’t have children, including three percent that are totally infertile.” In addition, the bill, if passed, would prohibit “usage of surrogate mothers as material by foreigners and Ukrainian nationals.”
In his bill Kapliyenko proposes paying tax-free honorariums to surrogate mothers, along giving the status “heroic mother,” paid maternity leave, training courses for government employees and law enforcement agencies, provision of government monetary aid, and so on. The required budget appropriations would total 200 million hryvnias a year.
Expert opinions on this know-how vary. “The positive aspect about this bill is the emphasis on protection of surrogate mothers, and the negative one is that there is nothing about protection for the genetic parents and children. In fact, Ukraine ranks with the world’s leading surrogacy countries. If surrogacy starts being financed by the central budget — as the bill proposes — Ukraine will become the world’s first country to support surrogacy from the central budget. In Europe, surrogate mothers are legally allowed in the UK and Greece, also in Russia, Canada and the US. In other countries surrogacy is prohibited for ethical reasons,” says Zukin.
Ukrainian legislation in regard to surrogacy is considered to be among the most liberal ones the world over. There are shortcomings. Kyiv-based lawyer Vadym Nastoiashchy, CEO, Euroconsulting, points out that only an infertile legally married couple has the surrogacy right, which is discriminatory with regard to the reproductive rights of unmarried women and common-law couples. Accordingly, this also reduces the number of potential surrogate mothers and the surrogacy market demand. Canadian legislation is even more liberal. It allows even homosexual couples (there are quite a few of them there) to hire surrogate mothers.
Foreigners visit Ukraine in search of surrogate mothers. “Married couples from abroad make up about 50 percent (of the sum total of surrogacy cycles),” says Zukin. Nastoiashchy points out that people are coming from all over Europe because it’s a short trip to Ukraine, but that his own statistics read that the Ukrainian-nationals to foreigners ratio is 80 percent by 20 percent.
Ukrainian couples that are determined to have children are not scared by the formidable prices. Morozova says that some couples refuse to buy a car and spend about the same money to hire a surrogate mother. All surrogacy procedures are quite expensive, including over 60,000 hryvnias worth of medical services and the sum due the surrogate mother that ranges from USD 6,000–15,000. Zukin adds that “some surrogate mothers charge about 25,000 dollars, but I don’t believe that such proposals are realistic.”
Surrogacy also faces a moral and ethical problem, considering that the surrogate mother parts with her child, whom she carried in her womb for nine months. On the one hand, she does the good thing, giving birth to a child, but on the other hand she is paid for this.
The psychotherapist Larysa Didkovska, Ph.D. (Psychology), from Lviv has dealt with three women involved in surrogacy and says that this ethical problem can be solved: “What we have here is a moral component, namely the gratitude of people who will enjoy their parenthood. This explanation will serve as a moral compensation for the surrogate mother.” And she doesn’t idealize surrogacy: “This is what I’d rather describe as a life adjustment, both for the married couple and the surrogate mother.”
