Woman Flew 6,000 Km For A Beach Delivery Now Stranded, Say Unable To Get Newborn's Passport To Fly Home

A British mother-to-be who flew 4,000 miles (6,000 km) across the world to give birth on a beach is now 'stranded' off the coast of Grenada,?Caribbean with her four-month-old baby.

Iuliia Gurzhii, 38, and husband, Clive, 51, said they 'feel like prisoners' as they have been unable to register their newborn's birth or apply for a passport.The couple left Tameside, Manchester, and were travelling to Rodney Bay in St Lucia so that Iuliia could fulfil her dream of having the most 'natural' birth possible on a beach.

SWNS

Legal nightmare

But ever since baby Louisa was born on the beach on April 23, 2023 the couple have been locked in a bureaucratic battle to get her home.

Initially they were told by a hospital they couldn’t register her birth because she was more than 24 hours old.Then an immigration office said they needed proof the baby was theirs, before a passport office said they couldn’t help because the couple had no proof of where Louisa was born.

Following Louisa’s birth, Clive said: "We headed over to the registry office and filled in the forms for a birth certificate. We waited for a couple of weeks and the registry office came back and said they couldn’t do anything as the baby wasn’t born in the hospital and nobody witnessed the birth."? ??

And now they claim the UK High Commission said they needed a DNA test – which they are still waiting to get the results for.?They said then the couple will be allowed to leave with a passport for the baby.

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Stranded, abandoned and out of money

Feeling ‘stranded and abandoned’ and running out of money, the pair say they don’t know how they will get back to the UK.

Clive, a sports coach, from Tameside, Manchester said the experience had left them with credit card debts of ?6,000, or about $7,600. He said: ‘We have been passed around different agencies and nobody will help us.‘We are running out of money. We will soon run out of food, and nobody is helping us.

"I can't stop crying. We are begging for help — we have been abandoned," Yoga teacher Iuliia said, per The Times. "We are essentially stateless — we are more than abandoned. We are prisoners in a country that we are not allowed to leave."

uk-couple

The couple left the UK in March 2023 when Iuliia was 35 weeks pregnant and headed to Martinique.They then headed to St Lucia after they picked up the boat in Martinique, and gave birth at sea off the coast of Rodney Bay.

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