Yulia is a 31-year-old surrogate mother from southern Ukraine. Mother of a 3.5-year-old child, she is a midwife nurse and her husband is a mechanic. After her first average, she was so happy to allow another woman to become a mother that she wanted to do it again. Next month, she will give birth to French twins for Sylvie and her husband, French citizens, who have decided to resort to this illegal practice in France after 20 years of trying to have children in vitro, among others. Since the Maidan revolution, Ukraine has become the cheapest GPA country in Europe.
Suffering from endometriosis, I may not be able to carry out a pregnancy myself, so I want women like me to know that this controversial method in France is not as black as in the media, despite the moral questions I obviously ask myself.
At Ilaya's, a surrogate mother is paid an average of 20,000 euros for her pregnancy, from the age of 7.5 months, the gestatrices come to live in a comfortable apartment in Kiev and are in permanent contact with the translators and counsellors of the clinic who meet all their needs and talk a lot with them to ensure their morale and prevent any risk of depression.
Finally we met Olessia and her husband, both Ukrainians, in their sumptuous house west of Kiev. Both entrepreneurs, they have founded a successful chocolate brand and breed race horses that they import into England.
For health reasons, Olessia could not carry her own child, so "GS was obvious". There is no way for the expectant mother to be in direct contact with her surrogate mother, "I wanted to know everything and was worried about everything," she admits. So the wealthy couple found an alternative "for the good of everyone": they hired their personal assistant from their company to permanently look after their surrogate mother. A form of control "to bring the most well-being, care" to their gestator, which allowed Olessia to "ensure that she respected the vegan diet" that she and her husband adopted. Without direct contact except through her assistant, the happy mother of a six-month-old girl offered a silver bracelet to her gestator.
At 32 years old, Yaroslavia lives in a poor house on the outskirts of Kharkiv (Eastern Ukraine), last year she was a surrogate mother of an American couple. "It was easy for me to be pregnant," she says, "I have always been very fertile and since I can't afford to raise more children than my three boys, I thought it was right to share this gift of God with people who couldn't do anything but their own families naturally.
Although the clinic has given the green light to ask surrogate mothers and adoptive parents to be interviewed, photographed or even followed, this is a very long process, requiring many trips back and forth to Ukraine. Once an appointment with the parents has been arranged, it is necessary to gain their trust, to make them understand why the media approach is important for the knowledge of other infertile people who have never heard of it, to gain the trust of all doctors, to choose the times when the surrogate mother is able to meet, without tiring her. Each trip is 80% waiting and 20% of result, the proof: Sylvie has still not accepted to be photographed, that's why I only insert her fuzzy silhouette.