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Newborns for sale: Officials slam Ukraine for morphing into global online surrogacy market

The online resource Strana says Ukraine is one of the few countries where surrogacy is officially legal

© Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS

KIEV, May 15. /TASS/. The dozens of babies that surrogate mothers in Ukraine have given birth to for foreign clients (the infants are trapped in Kiev due to the pandemic), has laid bare the serious gaps in Ukrainian legislation and this quagmire requires the urgent intervention of the nation’s authorities, Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Nikolai Kuleba, said in response to the dispute over 46 newborns being kept at a hotel in Kiev’s suburb.

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"This case once again demonstrates the lack of rights that children born to surrogate mothers face. Ukraine has in fact turned into an international online merchant of children. We have no idea of how many kids like these Ukraine ‘supplies to clients’ in other countries in reality," Kuleba said on his Facebook page. He warns that the commercialization of such services in Ukraine would enable the uncontrolled trafficking of Ukrainian children to other countries.

Likewise, Lyudmila Denisova, the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner, shed light on this predicament on Thursday.

"Once again, Ukraine is in the focus of a scandal over children born by surrogate mothers," she said. "This just goes to show that the market for surrogate mother services in Ukraine is vast and chaotic, yet the technologies are advertised as a high-quality trade item."

Denisova urged the police, the Health Ministry and the Social Policies Ministry to act and take urgent measures.

The online resource Strana says Ukraine is one of the few countries where surrogacy is officially legal. In recent years, according to the organization Families Through Surrogacy, the number of those eager to use the services of surrogate mothers in Ukraine has soared ten-fold. Ukraine turned out far more attractive to foreign clients as soon as the previous hotspot for surrogacy, Asia, cracked down on this commercial activity. Thailand outlawed surrogacy in 2014, with India following shortly thereafter. As a result, thousands of surrogacy tourists from Europe, the United States and Asian countries set their sights on Ukraine. Currently, there are dozens of clinics in Ukraine offering in vitro fertilization (IVF) services. These sorts of agencies are popping up throughout the country.

According to the media resources, surrogacy prices in Ukraine are far lower than in the United States and the Netherlands, where the service costs no less than $100,000. In Ukraine, prices range from $30,000 to $70,000. Surrogate mothers receive anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000.

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