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 Mayan 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.
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.
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.
I speak for women, but also for women in the East, I am Polish myself and I understand that we can do a lot to earn a decent wage.
Although surrogacy is a new and discussed solution, I want to make the voices of those who have done so heard.