WAR in Ukraine has created a tragic predicament for hundreds of surrogate babies, and the mothers who are carrying them, caught in the conflict and leaving IVF parents from around the world watching in horror.
For years Ukraine, where paid surrogacy is legal, has been a favoured destination for foreigners to get Ukrainian women to carry their pregnancies.
Amidst the ongoing bombardment of Russian missiles on Ukrainian cities, families that have turned to surrogacy, including some 40 couples in Australia, have scrambled to help their surrogates flee to safety.
Professor of Bioethics at University of Notre Dame Australia, Margaret Somerville, says she doesn’t agree with surrogacy, but in the case of Ukraine it was “important to deal with the problem in front of you”.
“It is a tragic situation. I believe babies have a right to a mother and a father, if at all possible their own biological parents,” she said.
“What you have to ask in all of these circumstances is what is the right thing to do and what is the best thing to do?”
For one Australian couple, Canberra couple Emma and Alex Micallef, Svetlana, their surrogate mother, is now safely in neighbouring Moldova.
With the help of their surrogacy agency, Ms Micallef got in touch with two other parents who had surrogates in Ukraine and together they found a bus that would take all three women and their 10 children on an 18-hour trip to the Moldovan border.
From there Svetlana and the other women and children are reported to be staying in a small apartment.
However, there’s another dilemma facing Svetlana and Emma Micallef.
If the baby is born in Moldova, Svetlana will be its legal guardian. She could place it for adoption but then it could be years before Emma and husband Alex are allowed to take their child home.
So together they have come up with a plan for Svetlana to deliver the baby (due in May) back in Ukraine – in a city close to the border.
The Micallef’s case is unique. Their decision to chose surrogacy came only after a long and difficult health journey.
Ms Micallef was diagnosed with cervical cancer 32 weeks into her pregnancy with her only son Felix.
Doctors told the couple she would never carry another baby and would require an intensive bout of chemotherapy to live.
Following her recovery, the couple tried to fall pregnant over the next five years, exhausting many options including more than a dozen cycles of IVF treatment.
The Canberra couple admit commercial surrogacy in Ukraine was an “extreme move”, involving a raft of complex legal arrangements, yet they could not have anticipated the scenario of a Russian invasion.
A precarious situation exists for hundreds of other surrogate families.
Ukraine’s biggest surrogacy agency currently has 500 surrogates at different stages of development.
News agencies have carried images of dozens of the agency’s surrogate babies stranded in a bomb shelter in Kiev as shelling continues.
Professor Somerville said “it’s such a difficult situation” when the “commissioning parents can’t get to the baby and the parents can’t get to them”.
“I guess once you’ve got a baby you have to do what’s best for the baby no matter what you think about the way in which it came into existence,”she said.
“When you were arranging a surrogacy you wouldn’t have anticipated that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, but what I think you can anticipate is difficulties.”
