The situation is desperate, both for the babies, who are not yet aware of the situation but surely perceive the horrific reality from their few hours of life, and for their respective families. In a bomb shelter improvised in kyiv, at least 20 children born to surrogate mothers are waiting so that their foreign parents can travel to Ukraine, to take them home.
The little ones are well catered for, but even underground you can clearly hear the detonations occasional. Many of the nurses at the surrogacy center are also stranded at the shelter because it is too dangerous to get to and from their homes.
Ukrainian troops have resisted Russian forces in the suburbs of kyiv, halting efforts to encircle the capital. “Now we stay here to save our lives and those of the babies,” said Lyudmilia Yashchenko, a 51-year-old nurse. “We hide here from the bombs and from this appalling misery”he added.
“We hide here from the bombs and from this appalling misery,” one of the workers graphed. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd
Yashchenko said they go out every day to get some fresh air, but they don’t dare stay outside for long. She also fears for her children: the two, aged 22 and 30, are fighting to defend their country. Exhaustion is constant. “We barely sleep,” said the health worker. “We work all day,” she added.
Yashchenko declined to say how many parents had traveled to pick up their children, how many babies were still waiting, or how many surrogate mothers expected to give birth soon.
Even though there was plenty of baby food and supplies to attend to the little ones, the nurses could only wait for the newborns to be picked up, just as they could only wait for the war to end.
How surrogacy works in Ukraine
Surrogacy of womb is a common practice in Ukraine and there are many people who come from Argentina to access this method. The Biotex clinic is the most visited by Latin Americans, with the majority of Argentines who come to that country to have a child. in the middle of the war after the Russian invasion, conditions for those families changed markedly.
At the beginning of the conflict, five Argentine families had to settle in the basement of the Embassy of our country in Ukraine with their babies until they could leave after the intervention of the diplomatic headquarters.
The clinic where surrogacy is performed in Ukraine is still in operation. Photo courtesy Biotex.
A few days ago, from Biotex they mentioned to Clarín that the Spanish department is one of the largest in the clinic and that there the largest percentage is of “Argentine couples”. Although in that assisted reproduction center a total of more than 15,000 children have already been borncould not report how many of them were children of Argentines, since due to the war they cannot attend the physical place that keeps that record.
As reported, currently the clinic did not stop working instead, after birth in hospitals, he moves the children to his own bomb shelters. This procedure, they affirmed, is carried out with the accompaniment of volunteer soldiers as escorts.
Ukraine moved 71 babies from an orphanage in Sumy
Ukrainian authorities confirmed that managed to evacuate 71 babies from an orphanage in Sumy to a safer area. The minors were sheltered in a bunker in that region, located in the northeast of Ukraine and bombed by Russian troops for a few weeks.
“With the first opportunity to evacuate through the humanitarian corridor, we took the children out of the specialized orphanage in the combat zone,” said Dmytro Zhyvytskyi, governor of the region, on his Facebook account.
He further stated: “For almost two weeks we have been hiding these babies. These are children who do not have parents (for various reasons) and most of them need constant help from doctors.”
With AP information.