Gero and Oksana Berndt with their daughter Amy in Kyiv.
Image: private
In Ukraine, many babies delivered by surrogate mothers are waiting for their parents. A German couple reports on fleeing from Kyiv with their child.
AWhen Gero Berndt received the email at 9:33 p.m. on January 12 that his daughter Amy had been born two days prematurely, he and his wife Oksana immediately booked a flight to the Ukraine. A surrogate mother had carried her child there for the two. They flew to Kyiv and received the newborn. But in order to take it back to Porta Westfalica, they still had to get Amy a passport from the German embassy, and that took time. Finally, they had everything together and booked their return flight – for Friday, February 25th. “But then my wife woke me up at five o’clock on Thursday morning and said: ‘The Russians have marched in,'” says Berndt now on the phone. The airspace over Ukraine was closed to civil aviation and their flight was canceled. They were stuck.
A number of couples are currently in the same situation as the Berndts. Except that they are not stuck in Kyiv, but at home – far away from their children, whom they have not even met because they were born in Ukraine to surrogate mothers. Every year, Ukrainian women carry around 3,000 babies to parents from all over the world. Paid surrogacy is legal there, and the country is considered one of the cheapest places in the world to do so because the cost per child, at 40,000 to 60,000 euros, is significantly lower than, for example, in the United States, where surrogacy is also legal. Since there are around 20 companies that employ surrogate mothers in Kyiv alone, it can be assumed that several dozen newborns are currently waiting to be picked up.
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