On December 13, 2024, the webinar ” Surrogacy: Ethical Challenges” was held. The event was organized by the NGO “Democracy Development Center”, The Ministry of Social Policy, the Public Council on Gender Issues (Ukraine) within the framework of the “16 days against gender-based violence” campaign. українською мовою
Opening the webinar, the head of the Public Council, Larysa Kobelyanska, stated that surrogacy is a complex and very urgent ethical, medical, and legal problem. It is very sensitive and painful, as well as harassment of women, sexual exploitation in general. International and national experts were invited to the webinar to discuss the problem of surrogacy.
Webinar moderator, gender expert of NGO ” Democracy Development Center” Maria Dmytrieva also reminded that currently Ukraine is one of the few countries in Europe where this practice is still allowed.
At the invitation of the organizers, the following experts took part in the webinar:
- Marie-Josèphe Devillers, ICASM International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood;
- Taina Bien Aime, Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and a founding member of Equality Now;
- ‘Physical and Social Harms of surrogacy on Women and Children in India’ – Dr. Sheela Suryanarayanan, Associate Professor, Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Hyderabad, India;
- Lindita Pano, activist for children’s rights, Albania;
- Zoryana Skaletska, Kyiv City Council member, Minister of Health of Ukraine in 2019-2020.
“The prohibition of surrogacy should be on the feminist agenda, surrogate motherhood is a component of violence against women. It harms women, eats up medical resources,” said Marie-Josèphe Devillier. According to her, this is a predatory system that profits the baby-buyers, even with domestic surrogacy, it is about the most economically vulnerable women who risk their lives and health. Such a pregnancy carries three times greater risk than a normal one.
On the example of Greece, 60% of surrogate mothers are not citizens of the country, although there this practice is defined as “altruistic”. In South Africa, local women with normal pregnancies do not have access to health care, which instead devotes its resources to accepting surrogate mothers, a similar situation is in Uganda. Instead, Italy has completely banned surrogacy, both commercial and altruistic. Also, the European Parliament has condemned this practice since 2015, and already in 2024, the EU directive was revised, adding surrogacy to the list of human trafficking crimes. There is also a decision of the Spanish court regarding the case of surrogacy, which literally states that this is not parenthood, but reproductive violence.
In her turn, Taina Bien Aime spoke about how the legislative permission for surrogacy was implemented in the state of New York. At the beginning, the women’s movement was united in its attitude to this issue, and in 2019 the bill was rejected. A year later, a hugely-budgeted campaign touting surrogacy as “an option for infertile couples and for gay parents” led to a split within the women’s caucus on the issue to “make it safer,” and the bill eventually passed. Since then, the state of New York became the capital of surrogacy, a stream of surrogacy, violation of women’s rights, and mass exploitation immediately opened. “The names of the women involved in this are unknown, they are not registered, we do not know the state of their health either before, during or after childbirth; New York has become the epicenter of trafficking,” says Taina Bien Aime.
“Surrogacy goes to poorer countries. In India, women receive several times less money for such births than in the United States. But even these incomes ultimately do not improve their economic situation. By bearing a child for others, an Indian woman loses ties with her own family, because she is restricted in contacts. This practice goes hand in hand with trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping of girls,” said Sheela Suryanarayanan.
While researching this topic in India, she learned about the case of the kidnapping of a 13-year-old girl who was raped and forced to give birth to 6 children, who were then sold. The consequences of surrogacy are the deaths of surrogate mothers, the deaths of women – egg donors, the custody and general fate of children born to order, abandoned unwanted “ordered” children, the trafficking of women and girls. That`s why commercial surrogacy was banned in India in 2021.
“We do not want Albania to become a paradise for surrogacy. We do not want women to be taken away in trafficking. Many Albanian women have already been sold into prostitution in richer countries, now they are coming to us with the offer of surrogacy. As soon as the law on allowing surrogacy was adopted in Albania, Ukrainian women also have been brought here for the same exploitation,” added Lindita Pano. According to her, Albania, located near Italy, is a country of dental tourism: quality services are provided here at a low price for the income level of Italians. “And now we will still be a country for surrogacy tourism. At the same time, they are very actively trying to impose the legalization of prostitution on us,” says Lindita Pano.
Ukraine also has this problem, which is practically not regulated by law at a level that would at least somehow protect women involved in surrogacy, as Zoryana Skaletska, a member of the Kyiv City Council, head of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine in 2019-2020, testified.
According to her, the regulation of surrogacy is written within one page of the reproductive health documentation. Therefore, in Ukraine, the basis for regulating the legal relations of women involved in surrogacy with customers became only the contracts. They are offered to women by the other side and, because of this, are not equal. First of all, when signing such a contract, an economically unprotected woman does not know about her rights. There are no restrictions for doctors practicing in this field in the country. They have no consequences for unethical work. Ukraine has not ratified the convention on the rights of the child and biomedicine, so surrogacy does not deal with the main thing: the child has the right to be born in a loving family, and not as a result of “preserving the heritage of biomaterial”. In addition, surrogacy is an obstacle for the European integration movement of Ukraine. Stating the presence of these three key problems, Zoryana Skaletska noted that after the war, they will definitely talk about the revival of the nation, and now it is necessary to sound the alarm, because there will be a surge in the demand for surrogacy, especially taking into account the commercialization of medicine in Ukraine. Surrogacy should be completely banned in all its forms.
Maria Dmytrieva also added that immediately after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russians in Ukraine, the wide advertisement of surrogacy to a foreign audience started: “Biological material is sent to us, women carry children to be sent abroad, they are taken and processed through embassies – biological parents do not even visit here. Also, for surrogacy, women are brought to us from the countries of Central Asia, where their situation is even worse than ours.” Lindita Pano also testified that in Albania, children born “to order” are given away even without registration. “In Ukraine, a woman who is a surrogate mother does not even have the right to this child. At the same time, the law does not even force the customer-parents to pick up the newborns. Even if the birth mother wanted to take this child away, they wouldn’t let her do it. These children do not have any citizenship, our orphanages are filled with surrogate children, who for some reason were not taken away by the customers, because such boys and girls cannot be adopted,” Maria concluded.
