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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, cel-
ebrates, in its name, the meaningful benefi t 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, how-
ever, a business contract, which entails, for the
expectant women, a job — one with managers,
rules, oversight and risks to their physical health.
Even as reproductive technology has
advanced, the number of countries that explic-
itly permit international paid surrogacy has
dropped. Opponents of the practice argue that
the transactional arrangement commodifi es 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
the practice a means of fi nancial 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 traffi cking and exploitation
led India to pass a law in 2019 that offi cially shut
down what was once, according to a 2012 esti-
mate, a $2.3 billion surrogacy industry. Cam-
bodia, Thailand and Nepal also once served as
frequent destinations for foreigners seeking
paid surrogates until those countries, too, legal-
ly 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 England and the Nether-
lands; in heavily Catholic countries like France,
Belgium and Spain, the intended parents of chil-
dren born to surrogates often face challenges
claiming their legal rights as parents, despite a
European Court of Human Rights decision, fi nal-
ized in 2019, that recognized children’s inher-
ent 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 vul-
nerable in the event of a dispute. In the United
States, legal protections vary state by state: Somestates, like Illinois and California, allow surroga-
cy contracts; others do not recognize 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 the 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,
around $75,000, is substantially higher than it is
in Ukraine, where the cost usually runs between
$40,000 and $50,000. In the United States, espe-
cially recently, the cost is between $100,000 and
$200,000. Given the diff erential, many parents
desperate to have a biological child travel toOlya, a Delivering Dreams surrogate,
and her daughter in Lviv in March.Photograph by Oksana Parafeniuk for The New York Times