While average Ukrainians suffer amid NATO’s proxy war against Russia, business is booming for the surrogate baby industry, which requires a steady supply of healthy and financially desperate women willing to lease their wombs to affluent foreigners. Surrogates “have to be from poorer places than our clients,” explained the medical director of Kiev’s largest “baby factory.”
From a 2022 BioTexCom promotional video showing surrogate Ukrainian mothers inside the company’s bomb shelter. Ihor Pechonoha of the Swiss-based BioTexCom says the business model that enabled him to build one of the most profitable surrogacy companies in the world is simple exploitation: “We are looking for women in the former Soviet republics because, logically, [the women] have to be from poorer places than our clients.”
It is no surprise then that BioTexCom’s quest for rentable wombs has led it to the seemingly endless pool of desperate young women in war-torn Ukraine. Eight years of civil conflict combined with the subsequent proxy war between NATO and Russia has plunged Ukraine into economic disaster. As Ukrainians sank into poverty, their country swiftly emerged as the international capital of the surrogacy industry. Today, Ukraine controls at least a quarter of the global market—despite being home to fewer than one percent of the world’s population. Alongside the industry’s rise, a seedy medical underworld filled with patient abuse and corruption took hold of the country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team have actively encouraged the West to plunder their war-torn country, inking an investment partnership with the global asset management firm Blackrock, stripping workers of labor protections, and handing state owned companies over to private firms.
Yet Ukraine’s surrogacy industry has fallen under the radar, despite pumping over $1.5 billion into the country’s economy in 2018 alone. Since then, the global market for surrogate babies has more than doubled. The industry was valued at over $14 billion in 2022, and is projected to grow by around 25% annually in coming years, according to an analysis by Global Market Insights.
As nations like India and Nepal slam the door on surrogacy companies citing concerns the industry drives human trafficking, Western officials appear to be turning a blind eye to the abuse-ridden business flourishing in a deregulated, politically unstable Ukraine.
Emma Lamberton is a Master of International Development candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Recently, she published a paper in Princeton’s Journal of Public and International Affairs detailing the risks Ukrainian women face when participating in the country’s surrogacy industry.
“The main concern of advocates on the ground in Ukraine is that legislators and even news organizations aren’t looking at this as a human rights violation,” Lamberton told The Grayzone.
“A government would never see human rights violations like child abuse as something to simply be regulated,” she explained. “They’d never say ‘you should only be able to beat your children on Wednesdays’ — that would be incredibly ridiculous. And so from the perspective of advocates on the ground in Ukraine, this is an abuse issue and therefore, it should not be regulated and instead it should be outlawed.”
Long before the February 2022 escalation of hostilities in Ukraine, the country was known as a fertile hunting ground for shady characters and agencies seeking to prey on desperate Ukrainian women.
Asian nations with weak regulatory systems and masses of impoverished citizens like India, Thailand, and Nepal also provided popular surrogacy markets. But their governments could not ignore the mounting record of human rights abuses by top industry players and ultimately closed their doors to wealthy foreigners seeking surrogates.
The restriction of these national surrogacy markets has channeled global demand to Ukraine, and kicked off a race to the bottom among child- vending firms. Now, childbirth profiteers have effectively exported the industry from impoverished nations to one in the midst of a grinding military confrontation with its neighbor.
“The war has brought to the forefront the need for unified international regulation on the topic of surrogacy, as surrogates are currently forced to choose between staying in a war zone or fleeing to neighboring countries that don’t recognize the legality of surrogacy,” Lamberton noted to The Grayzone.
“As with any humanitarian crisis, human trafficking becomes an even greater risk,” she said, “and international agreement on surrogacy and human rights violations are needed to protect the vulnerable women and children in Ukraine.”
“They don’t treat you as a human being”: impoverished mothers held hostage in baby farms
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