Inside a Ukrainian baby factory
War has destroyed much of the Ukrainian economy. But one key industry --- delivering babies via surrogates — continues amid the epic strife. By Ilya Gridneff, Emily Schultheis and Dmytro Drabyk 07/23/2023 07:00 AM EDT
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KYIV, Ukraine --- When Tanya, a 45-year-old woman living in Los Angeles, paid $10,000 and sent two embryos to a surrogacy firm in Ukraine hoping to build a family six years ago, she says she never expected the uncertainty and heartbreak the process would bring.
Tanya desperately wanted a child but found out she would be unable to conceive herself. After discovering how expensive surrogacy in the U.S. can be, she and her husband began pursuing options abroad --- and came across the Kyiv-based company BioTexCom. Tanya’s parents were originally from Odesa, so she felt there was something fitting about her future child being born in Ukraine.
Once the process began with BioTexCom in fall 2017, however, Tanya had an uneasy feeling. After sending her embryos, she says, she was told they would be implanted in a surrogate almost immediately --- a timeline that didn’t fit with all the research Tanya had done into the surrogacy process. When, a few days later, the firm told her the embryo transfer had been unsuccessful and provided minimal information about why, she says, she suspected something was off. Tana paid $10,000 and sent two embryos to a surrogacy firm in Ukraine hoping to build a family. | WELT
Her husband was in Kyiv for work a few weeks later and decided to stop by the clinic to see if he could get some answers.He introduced himself to a clinic staffer, who immediately thanked him for donating their embryos to another couple. He was floored: Was this what had happened when the firm told them the process was unsuccessful?“Obviously, that’s when, you know, crap hit the fan,” she said. At that point, she added, BioTexCom stopped answering her messages and they never received her embryos back.
The account of Tanya and her husband was one of multiple complaints that reporters for POLITICO and the German news outlet WELT uncovered in an investigation into BioTexCom, arguably the world’s most popular surrogacy agency. Complainants were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. One German couple said BioTexCom mixed up their surrogate twins with another couple’s pair, forcing them to exchange the babies at a secret rendezvous in Germany.
Another German woman said her uncertainty and stress after BioTexCom never returned all her embryos after she canceled plans for a surrogacy in Ukraine. WELT also spoke to former prosecutors, surrogates and advocates in Ukraine who raised allegations of BioTexCom’s lack of proper care for the medical needs and complications of women who bore the babies. They say cases were not pursued in the country’s sometimes chaotic legal system even though the company’s founder confirmed that he was placed under house arrest as part of a pretrial investigation.
Tanya, too, has been thwarted in her efforts to initiate an investigation into her embryos. Tanya and her husband remain anxious that their embryos may have been implanted and a child born and given to another couple. Although she has filed a complaint with the international crime agency Interpol, more than five years later she still doesn’t know what really happened. (Interpol did not reply to a request for comment from POLITICO.)
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/23/ukraine-surrogates-fertility-00104913
I’m going to express an opinion not meant to hurt anyone here. I’m adopted so that helps form this thought.
I do not like the idea of freezing embryos that you can then “wake up” when it’s more convenient to have a baby. Babies are inconvenient, they stretch out our young bodies leaving scars, the whole process of gestation is fraught with sickness, aches and pains. Birth is hard and dangerous not much glamour in it but the rewards are immeasurably worth it all.
I believe a lot of women were tricked out of having babies when they were young and now are faced with problems that force them to do these crazy things to get pregnant.
I was the most inconvenient of babies in 1964 but my 16 year old mother not only had me but then gave me away to be raised by another family! I am glad there are treatments and ways to help families grow especially since there aren’t many moms giving babies for adoption anymore bc of Roe V Wade.
I am adopted as well. My mother was 14. We're both fortunate to be conceived pre roe. Otherwise neither of us would be having this conversation. God has looked out for me since day 1!
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“The unfortunate part is there’s so little that we could do about it, you know?” she said. “That was a very traumatic situation. … We’re five years down the road from the situation and I think I only came to terms with it about a year ago.”
Former prosecutors, surrogates and advocates in Ukraine have raised allegations of BioTexCom’s lack of proper care for the medical needs and complications of women who bore the babies. | WELT
Albert Tochilovsky, the founder of BioTexCom, in a written statement to WELT and POLITICO, said Tanya’s concerns about her embryos being implanted for another couple are “completely false”: “The quality of the material was absolutely poor --- it makes no sense for us to use the embryos for another couple.”
In the case of the German twins, Tochilovsky blamed it on Kyiv’s public maternity hospital. “Two couples had their twins born at the same time, and, unfortunately, the staff mixed the children. It was the only case, and we carefully control all the processes,” he said.Similarly, Tochilovsky dismissed concerns about a German woman’s embryos being misplaced or used for another family.
“We always release the material of our patients upon their request, and we even assist with transportation,” he said. “We do not need donor eggs/embryos --- we have a large bank of donor oocytes (more than 10,000) that were retrieved from young, healthy donors.”
But the concerns resonate because of the extent of the surrogacy business in Ukraine --- which produces hundreds of babies per year — and the anxiety and desperation of the people involved. There’s also the not insignificant factor that the entire process is being carried out amid an epic military clash in which the fate of the country hangs in the balance.
Indeed, the Ukrainian economy may have suffered a desperate series of blows through Russia’s invasion, but the country’s surrogacy industry, fueled by a permissive legal environment, remains open for business.
A booming industry
Over the past decade, surrogacy, or the “rent-a-womb” industry, as critics sometimes call it, has become a booming global industry. In 2016, the Swiss NGO International Social Service estimated that 20,000 babies annually were born via surrogacy. Promoted by celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Elton John and Paris Hilton, this reproductive process was worth an estimated $14 billion in 2022 and may reach $129 billion by 2032, according to the research and consulting company Global Market Insights.
Although surrogacy is legal in most U.S. states, and an increasingly mainstream option, it is banned across much of Europe and in many other parts of the world, meaning those interested in pursuing it must look outside their home countries to find surrogates. Even in places such as California, where surrogacy is common, it is often prohibitively expensive --- leading women like Tanya to seek more affordable options abroad.
But the patchwork of conflicting national regulations and the proliferation of women traveling across national borders to seek surrogates also creates the space in which companies like BioTexCom, Ukraine’s most successful surrogacy agency, operate.
Despite the war with Russia, Ukraine’s surrogacy industry continues to advertise for customers and serve its international clientele.
BioTexCom’s sophisticated online presence promotes hundreds of stories of happy families elated to meet their newborn. But scant details can be found about BioTexCom’s past complaints and brushes with Ukrainian law enforcement.
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For example, in 2018 and 2019, Ukrainian prosecutors obtained a court order to put Tochilovsky under house arrest for what one former prosecutor, Yuriy Kovalchuk,deemed as possible child trafficking cases, because some of the children might not have had a DNA link to the parents, along with allegations of tax evasion and money laundering.
But the cases were redirected to other law enforcement agencies and lesser courts before eventually being dropped.Kovalchuk said he was sidelined by senior officials under the guise of institutional reforms to tackle rampant corruption in Ukraine’s law enforcement ranks. Asked to respond to these and other allegations, Tochilovsky said the criminal investigations were “hysteria” fueled by corrupt Ukrainian prosecutors and attempts to extort him and the company for an ownership stake in the firm or a $1 million payment.
“All the allegations made by him and his team were completely false,” he said of Kovalchuk in his statement.
Since Russia’s brutal invasion, surrogacy in Ukraine has received increased international attention. Indeed, Ukraine’s surrogacy trade, worth tens of millions of dollars, soldiers on. Amid bombing, water cuts and power shortages, BioTexCom, one of the world’s most popular agencies, simply adapted.
According to the company’s own social media posts, babies have been protected in bunkers and armed soldiers escorted newborns to and from hospital, while foreigners made frantic journeys to Kyiv to be united with their newborns.
During the war, hundreds of Ukrainian women have provided babies for childless couples, which was, even during peacetime, a logistical --- and for some an ethically dubious — challenge. Yet BioTexCom’s social media is filled with their happy stories: Foreign couples, who risked everything by traveling to a war zone, become parents for the first time via BioTexCom.
So while Ukraine fought back against Russia, BioTexCom tried to incorporate the struggle into its marketing. It launched a PR campaign to “ Make babies, not war,” and said they “will do their best for your dream of becoming parents. Nothing can stop us,” as posted regularly on their Facebook, Telegram, Tik Tok and Instagram accounts.
BiotexCom does not shy away from its business-as-usual approach during wartime. In his written response, Tochilovsky said the company is actively recruiting women from newly liberated areas of Ukraine.
“We have a great shortage of surrogate mothers, the number of potential clients is three times more than the number of the surrogate mothers,” he said.
‘There is no absolute infertility’
Surrogacy is a controversial and deeply contentious issue around the world. Commercial surrogacy was banned in Thailand and Nepal in 2015, then in India in 2019 after a series of high-profile scandals of exploitation and charges of dubious ethics in the industry. But demand for surrogacy did not go away --- it simply shifted to countries like Ukraine, where the process is less expensive and, compared with some countries, less heavily regulated.
The requirements to use a surrogate in Ukraine are simple: A heterosexual couple must to be married, show they are medically unable to have children and provide at least half of the child’s genetic link, via sperm or embryo. BioTexCom advertises on its website packages from as little as $40,000. On average, surrogacy with BioTexCom costs $40,000 to $50,000, with an “all inclusive VIP” package going for $71,000, according to the website. These prices are substantially less than what surrogacy costs in the United States, where surrogacy experts and firms estimate that the average price tag is upward of $100,000.
Those familiar with the pre-war surrogacy industry in Ukraine estimate that nearly half of the country’s approximately 2,000 to 2,500 surrogate pregnancies every year were carried out through BioTexCom. Since then, the company reported in February 2023 that 600 families used their services during the first 11 months after Russia’s invasion. If each family paid on average $50,000, that would have meant BioTexCom took in $30 million….
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/23/ukraine-surrogates-fertility-00104913