Women head east for wombs to rent

No drinking, no smoking, no taking drugs and eat healthily." As she lists the rules she wants her future surrogate mother to abide by, the voice of Rumyana  Nencheva, 34, a dentist from Varna, Bulgaria, gets thinner and quieter.

Nencheva has come to Ukraine, seeking a surrogate mother. Diagnosed with uterine cancer in June 2008, she cannot bear a child of her own.

The 'Infertility Epidemic'

According to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, ESHRE, in 2013, one in seven couples in the world suffers from infertility.

In up to 35 per cent of cases, ESHRE says, this is down to physiological reasons in the woman. An average of ten out of 100 women aged 20 to 44 cannot have a child.

"Infertility is turning into an epidemic whose peak we have yet to see," says the clinic’s head.

She is a part of a growing phenomenon of women who are unable to get pregnant - and facing a ban on surrogate pregnancy at home - travel thousands of miles to Ukraine to rent another woman's womb.

Victims of society's stigma against childless women, especially in the Balkans, they also confront the hostility of the law in most countries to paid-for surrogacy.

They are drawn to Ukraine by the former Soviet republic's relaxed laws on commercial surrogacy, its relatively developed medical infrastructure - and the price.

Most women heading for Ukraine come from Western Europe and the Americas - only they can usually afford the fees. But a growing number, like Nencheva, are middle-class professionals from the Balkans for whom the cost is still a huge sacrifice.

The staff at the International Surrogate Motherhood Center, in Ukraine, tell Nencheva that she is not the only woman with that name from Bulgaria to have travelled hundreds km.

"We have many patients from the Balkans," the woman at the center confides. While there, Nencheva spots another Balkan traveler, Snezhana, a rotund Macedonian in her forties.

Ethical dilemma

For women who want to escape the taboo on childlessness, and who do not want to adopt, the only solution is to find a surrogate mother who will carry their egg to maturity.

For most governments, however, surrogacy raises serious ethical dilemmas, mainly concerning women being paid to carry children for someone else.

That is why no European Union country allows commercial surrogacy, and why women seeking to rent a womb have to head east to Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, or even further afield to India.

In the EU, Austria, Germany, Sweden, France, Hungary and Italy prohibit all forms of surrogacy, paid-for or not. Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Greece allow surrogacy, as long as no commercial element is involved.

Ukrainian law, by contrast, is the most surrogacy-friendly in Europe. Article 123.2 of Ukraine's Family Code stipulates that women may receive financial compensation to carry someone else's child, and the law places no limits on the amount that can be paid.

The law also guarantees the biological mother's legal rights to the child or children born in the surrogate mother's womb. No adoption process or court order of any kind is required. The entire process is regulated by a contract signed between the agency or clinic, the biological mother and the surrogate mother.

By this, the surrogate mother surrenders all rights to the child carried in her womb. Only the names of the biological parents are entered on the birth certificate.

The vice-president of the Ukrainian Association of Reproductive Medicine says 150 to 200 paid-for surrogate motherhood cycles take place in the country each year.

About half of the women renting these Ukrainian women's wombs are foreigners, usually from the US, Britain, France, Sweden and Italy, but also from Balkan countries.

Cheaper in Kiev

In Balkan societies the taboo against childlessness is especially strong. Here "the inability to conceive a child, and carry it to maturity, is regarded as abnormal," says Bulgarian psychologist Yana Pacholova.

"If people learn about it, the woman experiences shame, reproachful glances, negative attitudes, whispers behind her back, isolation and being pointed out by society," she adds.

Fear of barren women in Bulgaria is handed down the generations. Folklore teaches that childlessness is a curse and a disease.

In some parts of the Balkans, the families of a childless woman give her the child of a relative to bring up as her own, according to Violeta Stan, a child psychiatrist in Timisoara, western Romania.

But, among the Roma, the inability of a woman to conceive can lead to the annulment of the marriage. Among the Kardash community in Bulgaria, meanwhile, a mother-in-law can even chase away an infertile daughter-in-law.

The law is not the only reason why women seeking wombs to rent come to Ukraine.

"The main reason ... is the price," patients' coordinator at one of the Kiev clinics.

Price for the surrogacy program in Kiev is only about one-third of the price charged in those US states, such as Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Virginia and California that permit commercial surrogacy.

Too pricey for the Balkans

While prices in Ukraine are far lower than in the US, they are well above what most people in Balkan countries can afford. It is far too costly for Ani Dimova, a frail-looking young woman from Asenovgrad in Bulgaria.

She still remembers her deep shock on discovering in her teens that she would never conceive. "At first, my parents tried to hide it from me," she says.

"I was 14 and had just had my first check-up in hospital. I went outside and waited for them in the car. When my mum came out, she was crying."

Though naturally smiley, Dimova says few days go by when she is not reminded that she cannot have her own child. "I've thought about going somewhere where surrogacy is possible but the prices are very high," she says.

((http://www.aljazeera.com/))