‘I’m trying to keep my @*#% together’: Being a surrogate mum in Ukraine

This story is part of the June 4 edition of Good Weekend.See all 12 stories.

On February 24, in the early hours of a cold, dark morning in Lviv, two phones in one apartment rang nearly simultaneously. The phones belonged to two women, Maryna and Nataliia, professional colleagues of a sort and temporary roommates; they were also newfound friends, both of them pregnant and near the beginning of their third trimesters.

Just over a week earlier, they had come from Kyiv, where they’d both been living, on a kind of business trip. Lviv was about an eight-hour train ride away, a hassle of a journey even for someone who wasn’t pregnant, and especially unappealing in the heart of a freezing Ukrainian winter. But the American businesswoman who was working with them insisted – the clients demanded it. They would be away two weeks at the most, she’d told them. Their manager tried to sell it: see it as a paid holiday to Lviv! The town is well known to Ukrainians for its historic cobblestone streets and charming pastel townhouses.

Under different circumstances, the trip might have held more appeal. But the two women had already uprooted themselves once, moving from their respective homes in the country’s south-east, as was required by their contract. Their employers initially wanted them in Kyiv, the nation’s capital, so they could be near some of the country’s best obstetric care. That luxury was probably not one the women could have afforded if they were carrying their own children – but neither of them was. They were both surrogate mothers in Kyiv, two of 13 pregnant women working with an American company, Delivering Dreams International Surrogacy Agency. That agency, as of mid-February, decided to move everyone to Lviv, a city that was far from any likely conflict and where it already had relationships with medical providers.

Starting in mid-January, many of the agency’s clients had been listening to the news and worrying. Russian troops were gathering along the border of Ukraine, and the United States announced that it had intelligence that Russia would most likely invade soon after the Olympics ended in mid-February. Most Ukrainians did not put much stock in the American intelligence – what were the Russians going to do, roll tanks into Kyiv? It sounded absurd. Even if there was an uptick in hostilities, many Ukrainians believed, the fighting would remain confined to the same embattled regions in the east, along the border, where battles had been ongoing since 2014.

The surrogacy agency’s owner and founder, Susan Kersch-Kibler, who lives in New Jersey in the US, explained to various intended parents, in an informational Zoom call in late January, that she did not think war was necessarily imminent. As an entrepreneur who had worked in Ukraine and Russia for years, Kersch-Kibler was well aware of local scepticism about the likelihood of an invasion; but given the volume of concerned messages she was receiving from the intended parents, and how potentially disastrous the consequences of war would be for surrogates and clients alike, she felt she had to plan for contingencies. She reserved apartments in Lviv for a month for the pregnant women working with the agency.

Many of the other surrogate mothers considered this trip an unnecessary disruption. But the agency told them that they needed to pack a few things, including all their legal documents, and come to the train station on the evening of February 15. Kersch-Kibler had her doubts about whether all of them would show up. In the end, they all did, including Maryna and Nataliia.

Maryna is a tall, stylish woman who had been a manicurist. After a friend of hers worked as a surrogate, Maryna started considering the possibility.

Ukrainian law required that women who would be hired as surrogates had already successfully given birth, and she had two healthy daughters. By helping another family, she hoped to buy a home, a goal that would otherwise have been a significant stretch for her and her husband, who worked on cars. On August 21, she was impregnated with two embryos for a couple in North America. Surrogates for Delivering Dreams typically earn about $US18,000 ($25,000) a year, but because she was pregnant with twins, she would be paid a bonus of several thousand more. In Ukraine, a typical school teacher would make less than a quarter of that over the course of a year.

On the train, Maryna met Nataliia, a calm, warm woman with whom she shared a compartment. They were pleased to find they had a lot in common: they were both from the same region, and they both had two children, with some overlap in ages. Maryna’s husband and children had joined her in Kyiv; Nataliia’s were still back in the south-east with her husband. The two women talked easily on the train, with understanding and sympathy about their respective choices, and ended up sharing housing in Lviv.

Surrogates in Ukraine can earn about $25,000 a year, a potentially life-changing income.Credit: Nanna Heitmann/Magnum Photos/Snapper Images

And so they were together, nine days later, when their phones rang, waking them from their slumber. A family member was calling Nataliia to pass along news from a cousin, a border patrol agent: the Russians were invading. Nataliia called the cousin immediately to ask what he knew. “I can’t talk, I have a call on another line, but I’ll call you right back,” he told her. But he did not; in the following weeks, the family had no word of him whatsoever.

The moment Nataliia hung up the phone, Maryna emerged from her bedroom crying. Her husband had also called to say war had started – that Russian soldiers were in the area. He and the children were no longer in Kyiv, but were near the city of Kherson in the south-east of Ukraine, where he’d gone to take a driver’s test and where the children’s grandmother lived. They were supposed to return to Kyiv after a short visit, but now it would be difficult to get out: the fighting was fierce around Kherson, which would become the first city in Ukraine to come under Russian occupation. Maryna was distraught, her fears commingling with an anguished longing: if only her children were with her in Lviv.

Many of the other surrogates also came from the eastern part of the country, where the fighting was most intense. As they followed the news on Telegram and received harrowing messages from loved ones, the turmoil and sorrow among them was so powerful that Oksana Hrytsiv, the agency’s most senior employee and a long-time resident of Lviv, worried that some of the women might flee, leaving Lviv to be reunited with their children and families. She checked in on them frequently during those first few weeks of the war, trying to discern their intentions.

Maryna did not show signs of bolting, but her misery was apparent. When she spoke to her children, she sometimes heard the bone-chilling sound of explosions in the background, so loud that Nataliia, seated beside her, could hear it, too. “Mummy,” one of Maryna’s daughters once cried into the phone, “get us out of here!” Days later, Maryna broke into sobs when recalling the sound of her daughter’s desperation. “Just a little longer,” she told her daughter. “We’re going to see each other soon.”

Delivering Dreams, Kersch-Kibler’s agency, celebrates, in its name, the meaningful benefit of surrogacy to both parties in the arrangement – for the parents, the gift of a biological child; for the surrogate mother, a potentially life-altering sum of money. That arrangement is also, however, a business contract, which entails, for the expectant women, a job – one with managers, rules, oversight and risks to their physical health.

Could a woman really be said to have choice in deciding to become a surrogate, if doing so was the only way to lift her family out of poverty?

Even as reproductive technology has advanced, the number of countries that explicitly permit international paid surrogacy has dropped. Opponents of the practice argue that the transactional arrangement commodifies one of the most profound human experiences, the birth of a child. Feminists tend to divide on the ethical issue of surrogacy, with some seeing in it a means of financial autonomy, and others perceiving it, especially in less-developed countries, as a kind of reproductive coercion: could a woman really be said to have choice in deciding to become a surrogate, if doing so was the only way to lift her family out of poverty?

Concerns about trafficking and exploitation led India to pass a law in 2019 that officially shut down what was once, according to a 2012 estimate, a $US2.3 billion surrogacy industry. Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal also once served as frequent destinations for foreigners seeking paid surrogates until those countries, too, legally restricted the practice.

In those countries, as in many others, the only form of surrogacy allowed is among nationals, provided that no compensation is received. Altruistic surrogacy – in which only pregnancy-related expenses are covered – is legal in countries like Australia, England and the Netherlands; in heavily Catholic countries like France, Belgium and Spain, the intended parents of children born to surrogates often face challenges claiming their legal rights as parents, despite a European Court of Human Rights decision, finalised in 2019, that recognised children’s inherent right to belong to their biological families.

In other countries, like Argentina and Albania, the law does not address the issue one way or another, diminishing the market for commercial surrogacy, as the ambiguity leaves all parties vulnerable in the event of a dispute. In the US, legal protections vary state by state: some states, like Illinois and California, allow surrogacy contracts; others do not recognise surrogacy contracts but do provide for judicial recognition of intended parents’ claims to children born with the help of a surrogate. In Michigan, paying a woman to be a surrogate is a felony.

In addition to Ukraine, Russia and Georgia are among the few countries that allow for legal, international surrogacy – a legacy, perhaps, of their shared history as former Soviet states, where religion and politics are less entwined, and where reproductive rights are expansive (in Ukraine, for example, abortion is legal under various circumstances up until the 28th week of pregnancy). In Israel, where the government regulates international surrogacy, the price, about $105,000, is substantially higher than it is in Ukraine, where the cost usually runs between $56,000 and $70,000. In the US, especially recently, the cost is between $US100,000 and $US200,000 (about $140,000 to $280,000).

Given the differential, many parents desperate to have a biological child travel to Ukraine, which has the additional benefit of clear guidelines that explicitly recognise the intended parents as holding all legal rights to the child, with their names immediately listed as the parents on the birth certificate, provided that they can show they have exhausted other means of carrying a baby to term on their own or a pregnancy would put the intended mother at risk.

Since various countries have restricted international surrogacy, agencies have rushed in to take advantage of Ukraine’s relatively well-regulated market. One Ukrainian embryologist has estimated that before the war, roughly 3200 implantations were performed in the country each year – creating, through the fees and also the associated tourism, a new, thriving economic sector.

Typically, parents who opt for surrogacy fly into the country and work with a local clinic, conceiving embryos that are subsequently implanted in the wombs of Ukrainian women whom they have interviewed (usually by video call) or chosen from descriptions the agency provides. In some, but not all, cases, the parents choose to build a relationship with the woman carrying their child, texting regularly, even flying in to visit her; almost always, the parents fly back into the country nine months later, either to be there for the birth, if all parties agree, or to receive their newborn and take the child back home.

The starkness of war has laid bare the many ethical tensions that exist in surrogacy arrangements.

Even under the best of circumstances, the arrangement can be fraught. Now, Ukraine’s surrogates are working under the worst of circumstances, forcing everyone involved – agencies, intended parents and surrogates – to make decisions based on imperfect information regarding matters of life and death. The starkness of war has laid bare the many ethical tensions that exist in surrogacy arrangements, casting into bold relief the power dynamics that underlie a contract in which a woman signs over the whole of her physical self.

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For Susan Kersch-Kibler, Delivering Dreams is the latest in a series of businesses she started in the region in her 20s. In 1991, right out of college, she travelled to St Petersburg, where she fell into the booming real-estate market and soon became a developer. She returned to the US in 2002, and eventually adopted a baby from an orphanage in Kharkiv, an experience that inspired her to start her own business facilitating adoptions from Ukraine. That business shifted to surrogacy when new rules in that country and the US restricted those adoptions.

In February, as Russia bombarded Ukraine, many of the intended parents were insistent that Kersch-Kibler exert her will to make sure that their surrogates leave Ukraine altogether – to leave Lviv and go to Poland, for the surrogates’ safety and the safety of the children they carried. The emails came in every day; but it had been hard enough to persuade the women to go to Lviv. Now that the war was on, many were reluctant to abandon their country and travel even farther from their families.

“You cannot put her in a trunk and force her to go over the border,” Kersch-Kibler says she told an intended parent. “That is human trafficking.” Some of the intended parents were pressing for the families of their surrogate to be moved to safety, and were frustrated by why it hadn’t happened sooner; according to Kersch-Kibler, some surrogates felt that their children were in less danger if they stayed where they were than if they took to the road.

Kersch-Kibler faced another logistical concern: surrogacy is not legal or straightforward in many countries near Ukraine, like Poland and the Czech Republic. If she moved the women to Poland and any of them went into labour and delivered there, the surrogate would be considered the child’s mother. The intended parents would have to undergo lengthy legal proceedings to adopt their child. If they moved the women outside the country, they could always try to move them back into Lviv or elsewhere in Ukraine for the delivery; but sending a woman nearing her due date across the border was not easy or desirable.

Delivering Dreams employee Oksana Hrytsiv in Poland, organising documents and payments to take to surrogate mothers in Ukraine.Credit: Nanna Heitmann/Magnum Photos/Snapper Images

Kersch-Kibler and Oksana Hrytsiv, her senior employee, talked frequently, weighing the various considerations. Hrytsiv helped navigate the considerable bureaucracy involved with international surrogacy. A mother of two herself, Hrytsiv has green eyes that can convey helpless innocence or steely resolve, depending on which approach she thinks will be more effective under the circumstances. But now the women had to work through the sorts of logistics that they never before imagined they would need to think about, the most pressing question being: at what point would they have no choice but to move the surrogates across the border?

On March 11, after Russia bombed two airfields to the north and south of Lviv, Kersch-Kibler suddenly had clarity: it was too dangerous for the surrogates to stay where they were. What they had assumed about Lviv – that it would remain untouched – was no longer a given. It was impossible to predict where the Russian military would strike next and how aggressively.

Scrambling to rent apartments in Krakow, Poland, they resolved to move four surrogates that evening. By then, Maryna had been checked into a maternity
hospital in Lviv and placed on bed rest after the doctors had deemed her at high risk for premature labour. This meant that Hrytsiv, who was from that city, would remain there with her, rather than go as she’d hoped to her family home in the relative safety of the mountains.

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Among the many intended parents who were writing to Kersch-Kibler almost every day were Marilyn and Antonio Hanchard, a couple in Florida. When the war started, their surrogate was still in Ukraine, a situation that was causing them great stress. Sometimes Marilyn, a nurse, drafted emails to Kersch-Kibler that were overtly angry, but Antonio, a sales manager who often plays the role of peacemaker in his large extended family, usually stepped in to tone them down with an edit. Kersch-Kibler was grateful that the emails she received from the couple were respectful, if insistent.

Antonio and Marilyn are not demanding people; they are, however, people who had been through a series of losses, miscarriage after miscarriage. “I kind of stopped counting,” says Marilyn, a 33-year-old nurse from Coconut Creek, Florida, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. “I drown it out.”

But she estimates that she had about nine miscarriages over the course of six years. The never-ending mourning and the hormones she took to try to sustain the various pregnancies laid her low emotionally and physically. The expenses were stressful, too, and she started working as a travelling nurse to supplement the costs that insurance didn’t cover. She had gained 14 kilograms, from the hormones and short-lived pregnancies, and she no longer recognised herself – she was starting to forget what hope even felt like.

She and Antonio began working with Delivering Dreams in 2021, travelling to Ukraine for six weeks to conceive embryos for implantation in a surrogate. They were thrilled to get to know via Zoom a surrogate they chose. But that young woman’s hormone levels at the expected time of implantation indicated that the odds were not favourable for the pregnancy. Almost numb at that point to failure, they resolved to try again with surrogacy – but they realised that if they did move forward, they needed to detach as much as possible from the process. They chose a surrogate named Lilia but declined to build a relationship, trying to limit any emotional involvement or investment or even hope in the outcome, for the protection of their own mental health.

“Your surrogate mother Lilia is PREGNANT!” they learnt in an email from Hrytsiv on November 22. “Congratulations!” Marilyn wrote back immediately: “We will keep her health and wellbeing, and baby’s also, in our prayers.” Antonio wrote as well, to thank the team: “This is the best news we’ve had in years.”

Even worse than the loss of the pregnancy was the fear that a woman’s life was now in danger on their behalf.

On December 14, Marilyn was walking down a hospital hall on a day shift in Berlin, Wisconsin, when an email popped up on her iPhone. It was from Hrytsiv with a dire subject-heading: “ICU – critical change in condition of Lilia’s health.” For reasons that were never clear to Marilyn, Lilia had started bleeding, and her life was at risk, which required the termination of the pregnancy. Marilyn ducked into the bathroom to try to maintain her composure, then raced to her car, in the parking lot, where she burst into tears and called Antonio. “I can’t go back to work,” she told him. Even worse than the loss of the pregnancy was the fear that a woman’s life was now in danger on their behalf.

After the surrogate recovered, Marilyn and Antonio decided to try one more time with another woman, and on February 22, they were told by the agency that a young mother named Olya had just received a positive result on a pregnancy test. They chose not to build a relationship with Olya, but Kersch-Kibler sent them a photo of her, smiling sweetly, her daughter, then six, solemn-faced in the crook of her arm. They had already been advocating for her to be moved to Lviv; but when Russia attacked two days later, Olya was still living in her hometown, in the region of Sumy, in the north-east of the country. The town was safe, far enough from the front; but in order to get to Kyiv, and then to Lviv, she’d have to travel through more dangerous areas that had been subjected to heavy shelling.

That was when the insistent emails started coming in full force from Marilyn and Antonio to Kersch-Kibler: wouldn’t it become only more dangerous the longer she stayed? They were watching millions of Ukrainians make the flight to safety on the news every day – why couldn’t Kersch-Kibler arrange that for Olya?

In mid-March, as Russian bombing continued around Sumy, Olya understood, through the agency, that the intended parents were eager for her to go to Lviv. She did not know them, which pained her – she would have liked, during those first few weeks, to have their support, the sweet emails back and forth she enjoyed during a previous surrogacy, a chance to tell them what she had done that day with her own daughter.

She appreciated their concern for her safety, but at home, she was comfortable – the air-raid sirens rang in her city only the first day of the war, and she heard no shelling. She read only light local news and kept her television viewing to the cartoons she watched with her daughter. The shops were open. Her friends were all staying put. Whenever she thought about leaving, she wasn’t sure she could summon the nerve – especially as the mayor advised against it.

On March 17, she received a call from a woman from the agency, Liubov – a surrogate who was seven months pregnant herself – who explained that she’d been researching drivers from the various Facebook pages, with names like “Escape From Sumy” or “Evacuate Sumy”. Liubov personally spoke to a driver who said he had a microbus that he had used to make several safe trips to Kyiv; from Kyiv, Olya and her daughter could get on a train to Lviv. After speaking to him herself, Olya resolved to make the trip.

Before she left, Kersch-Kibler wrote to Antonio and Marilyn, letting them know the plan: “Do we have your permission to do this?” she wrote them. The responsibility she was laying at their feet was overwhelming, but they gave their consent.

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At 6am, Olya and her daughter boarded the microbus with six other people, all of whom were immediately charmed by her daughter – for the young girl, this trip started out as an exciting excursion. But it wasn’t long before the girl fell silent, along with the rest of the passengers. As the driver took circuitous routes, on unpaved roads and even through fields, Olya took in with her own eyes, for the first time, the full force of the war: the road was littered with burned cars, vehicles sometimes sheared fully in half, their twisted steel guts exposed, the roads, at times, choked with debris. Liubov texted her often.

“I’m trying to keep my [expletive] together,” she admitted, sitting at the table in her apartment in Krakow, staring at her phone. She was checking it every five minutes. “I’m really worried,” she confessed to Olya by text.

“Yeah, so am I,” Olya wrote back. “What’s on the roads here is scary.” Liubov sent back an emoji with its eyes downcast in distress, then three prayer hands. “Everything’s going to be fine,” she wrote.

The group drove through towns where the Russian flag flew. “Maybe we should stop to take it down,” the driver said. “It’s still our territory.” He was trying to lighten the mood, but no one spoke; Olya felt a chill. And then deep in her belly, she felt an ache – she worried she was bleeding. The pain got worse with the bumpiness of the road all along the way. They drove around a crater in the road so vast, so deep, at one point, they could only imagine the kind of artillery that caused it.

Olya, a Delivering Dreams surrogate, and her daughter in Lviv. “What’s on the roads here is scary,” she said of her 12-hour drive to safety.Credit: Oksana Parafeniuk for The New York Times Magazine.

The train to Kyiv from her home usually took about four hours, but that day, the drive stretched on – they had been on the road for nine hours and they were still not close to Kyiv. For an interminable two-hour period, neither Hrytsiv nor Liubov heard from her, when she was driving through locations with no mobile phone reception. Olya had not brought enough food or water to sustain herself and her daughter for that duration of time. Her daughter accepted the driver’s generosity, but Olya could not eat – the pain in her belly was severe. Hrytsiv and Liubov were texting her, advising her to take various medications, but they did not help.

Finally, they drew closer to Kyiv, and Olya heard, also for the first time, the sound of shelling close by. “Get out of here fast,” a Ukrainian soldier told the driver with urgency. He had no time to suggest an alternative route to Kyiv with any real specificity – he just needed the vehicle somewhere else, immediately. Olya started to despair that they would ever arrive, except that the driver seemed to know what he was doing – or at least gave the impression that he would figure something else out.

Hrytsiv and Kersch-Kibler were in a hotel room in Krakow, where Hrytsiv had travelled for the day, when her phone rang. She looked up at Kersch-Kibler, her face breaking into a smile: “She’s in Kyiv!” she whispered, with evident joy. The drive had taken close to 12 hours.

In Kyiv, now Olya was on her own, exhausted, in pain, with an equally tired seven-year-old, needing to call something like an Uber to take them to the train station, but her phone was at 1 per cent. It was as if the phone had run out of energy at the moment she did – but it lasted just long enough for her to get the ride they needed. In the bathroom of the train station, she learned that what she feared had come to pass: she was bleeding, or at least there was discharge. She and her daughter got on the train to Lviv, at long last, and tried to sleep. “Can you schedule me an ultrasound?” she wrote to Hrytsiv. “I’m really scared.”

She and her daughter arrived in Lviv at 4am, but no one was there to meet them. Hrytsiv, who planned to pick them up, was on her way back from meeting with Kersch-Kibler in Krakow and ran into the problem of curfew. No one could be on the roads until 6am, so that Hrytsiv and her driver ended up sleeping in the car for three hours, pulled over near the border. Finally, Hrytsiv made it to the train station, where Olya had been resting with her daughter in a separate room set aside for mothers and children. The two women, who had never met, embraced.

Just after 1am, Marilyn, at work on a night shift, realised it was morning in Ukraine – she should have heard from Hrytsiv by then. She ducked into a tiny private room and reached out to ask if the agency had any news. Moments later she received a text from Kersch-Kibler: “She has arrived and is at the apartment.” The next day, an ultrasound revealed that the pregnancy was still stable. For the first time in a long while, Marilyn and Antonio felt something like tentative relief – maybe even hope.

Across town, at the hospital in Lviv, Maryna, on bed rest, talked every day to Nataliia, who was deep into her third trimester. After a missile attack in Lviv took at least seven lives, Marilyn and Antonio requested that Olya be moved once more; Olya and her daughter prepared to pick up and relocate to Krakow for the remaining six months or so of her pregnancy. Maryna spent much of her time worrying about her family in Kherson. They went without power or water for 13 days. At times, food was hard to come by. On top of everything, her husband kept telling her he wanted to join the army. “Who’s going to take care of our kids?” she’d ask him. She spoke and texted with her family many times a day, which made the pain all the more excruciating when two days went by without any word from them.

The stress of the war heightened the anxiety of her pregnancy and forced new decisions on the agency, which created tensions with Maryna’s intended parents. That couple desperately wanted Maryna moved out of Lviv to Poland, but Kersch-Kibler explained to them that the doctors’ advice was not to move her because of the risk of premature labour. Both parties were concerned for the wellbeing of Maryna’s children, and Kersch-Kibler proposed one possibility for their evacuation; the intended parents, who judged that option unsound, rejected her proposal out of hand, insisting they’d handle it themselves.

Over the course of March, the urgency and anguish fed resentments between the two parties until the relationship between the intended parents and the agency, and between Maryna and the agency, broke down over questions of her care. (Maryna and Nataliia declined to continue communicating with me.)

Maryna remained in close touch with her intended parents and hoped that they would be in Lviv for the delivery. They were in Warsaw; was it too risky for them to come? She knew they were anxious about the war, and about everyone’s safety; and she was not sure she wanted to subject them to what she was experiencing every day. “The air-raid sirens destroy you, emotionally and psychologically,” she’d said via Zoom from her hospital room.

In the end, when Maryna delivered the twins, both intended parents were by her side. Hrytsiv had been part of many bruising phone calls with them; but she had to admit, when she arrived at the hospital not long after Maryna delivered, that she admired the parents’ dedication. They had made it for the birth.

This is an edited version of a story originally published in The New York Times.

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