¡°§¡re you aged between 18 and 35? Do you have healthy children? Are you physically and psychologically fit? Are you law-abiding?¡±
These are the advertisements that are plastered on buses and throughout the metro in Ukraine.
Ukraine¡¯s most popular surrogacy company, offers women willing to become surrogates nearly $11,000 for one pregnancy and a $250 monthly stipend ¨C a sum more than three times the average yearly salary in Ukraine of approximately $3,000.
Ukraine has become an increasingly popular destination for foreign couples seeking affordable surrogacy services since it became legal in 2002. The average package costs around $30,000, compared with prices between $80,00 and $120,000 in the United States.
Demand has surged since 2015 when Thailand, India, and Nepal outlawed commercial surrogacy following reports of widespread exploitation of women.
However, the surrogacy industry is extremely dubious. Even Ukraine's Ministry of Health was unable to provide data on the number of surrogate mothers in the country.
According to Sergii Antonov, a Kyiv-based lawyer specialising in the medical and reproductive field, between 2,000 and 2,500 children are born through surrogacy in Ukraine every year, with almost half through BioTexCom. About a third of customers are Chinese.
But as demand grows, Antonov says there are increasing reports of alleged exploitation of both surrogate mothers and intended parents.?
Many women who opted to become surrogates say that the conditions for them are terrible.
They are sometimes forced to share a bed with another surrogate mother. Most of the women come from small villages and are in hopeless situations. They spend the first few weeks lying around, crying.
Women are sometimes not paid promised amounts or are housed in terrible conditions during the later stages of their pregnancies. In some cases, parents have discovered they have no genetic link with children born to surrogates.
Authorities suspect some clinics are also using surrogacy as a cover for illegal commercial adoptions.
The highly profitable and murky business, that many worry, is taking advantage of desperate young women and operating in a grey zone open to abuse.
"Ukraine is becoming an international online baby store," the country's commissioner for children's rights Mykola Kuleba warned, condemning the "exploitation" of Ukrainian women and calling for a ban on the industry.
The fact that Ukraine is one of the few countries allowing commercial surrogacy for foreigners was oddly thrown into the spotlight by the coronavirus.
When travel restrictions imposed to fight the pandemic prevented dozens of parents from picking up their children born to surrogates, a local surrogacy company posted a video online showing the infants lying in rows of plastic cots in a hotel on the edge of Kyiv.
One of the poorest countries in Europe, the post-Soviet nation is also known for its attractive prices, with birth through a surrogate costing about $42,000. In the United States, it can cost more than twice as much.
The pandemic has been revealed to be an "international online store for babies" with infants treated as nothing more than "commodities".?
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