26 5.8.22
after the move, speaking in the living room of
her new home in Krakow. ‘‘They called us and
said, ‘Pack up — we’re leaving.’ ’’ A photo an
agency employee took on the bus to Krakow
shows Nataliia and Liubov, both of them bun-
dled up in winter coats, their bellies slightly
wedged into the space. Nataliia smiles dimly
for the camera; Liubov is looking away. Neither
looks comfortable.
The apartment Liubov was moved into, along
with Nataliia, was light and airy, suitable in every
way for two very pregnant women except for its
location up four fl ights of stairs. She and Nataliia
were washing and rewashing in the bathroom
sink the few pairs of underwear and socks they
brought with them from Kyiv, back when they
thought they’d only be away for a short time.
Liubov was unusual among the women work-
ing as surrogates — she was an educated person
from west of Kyiv. She favors a glam-rock look,
with jet black hair and red lipstick; in photos
taken before the war, she wore a black leather
jacket, choosing a slightly shellacked aesthetic
that projected an air of invulnerability. For some
women in Ukraine, being a surrogate provides a
fast track to fi nancial stability; but Liubov, who
lived with her 13-year-old son and his father,
previously worked in a government job and
already had a house. They even had a car, albe-
it one that her partner was always using. What
she wanted was her own business, a storefront
where she hoped to sell shashlik, a version of
shish kebab. What she wanted was a second car.
What she wanted was not to have to supplement
her government job, which paid the equivalent
of $300 to $400 a month, with side hustles; she
wanted to get ahead, instead of scraping by.
Nine months of pregnancy seemed like a small
price to pay in return for a nest egg that would
support the next phase of her career. Surrogacy,
for Liubov, was not an act of desperation, but
an affi rmative act of self-improvement, even
independence. But now she felt she was being
moved essentially against her will.
It had already been months since she had
seen her son, although they spoke often on the
phone. She told him she was going away on busi-
ness, but left the details vague. Surrogacy was
considered a step down for someone like her,
and a shameful choice among many Ukrainians,
even for women in more desperate straits. She
couldn’t bear to tell her son why she was away
and what she was doing. Liubov’s son, a soccer
fi end who was always posting TikTok videos of
his fl exed muscles and dance routines, attended
a sports class with the children of doctors and
lawyers, and she also didn’t want them to know
how she was earning the money for the family’s
advancement. Her partner’s work sometimes
took him to Kyiv, so her son was staying with
Liubov’s sister, who doted on him, in a village
that was calm and quiet.
The intended parents with whom she corre-
sponded every day had been among those advo-
cating for her to be taken to Poland, which Liubov
knew (she’d seen the text, courtesy of a colleague)
even though they couched the idea to her as the
judgment of Kersch-Kibler and Hrytsiv.
Liubov understood why the parents wanted
her to move — and to some degree, she felt they
had the right to decide. She’d signed up for a
job, which was to carry a baby to term, and if
her employers thought the safest place to do
that was Krakow, ultimately, she felt she had to
defer to their wishes. ‘‘This child is my constantconcern,’’ she said, occasionally rubbing her belly
slowly, as if trying to discern the shape of the
living being inside. She cared about the safety of
the child she was carrying — but she wanted des-
perately to be back home, fi ghting for Ukraine.
‘‘I have a hunting gun, and I know how to use
it,’’ she said.
Generally, the text exchanges between her
and her intended parents were aff ectionate,
with fl oods of heart and prayer-hands emojis
and questions about everyone’s health and the
weather. As a rule, the exchanges between the
surrogates and the intended parents were fairly
superfi cial. The surrogate and the intended par-
ents were not allowed, by contract, to communi-
cate without a member of the agency also present
on the text exchange or Zoom call, a measure,
the agency said, meant to avoid miscommuni-
cations or demands outside the contract from
either party. Once Russia attacked, Kersch-Kibler
strongly urged intended parents to keep thingslight, for the well-being of their surrogate, and
therefore their own future child — not to ask any
upsetting questions about the war or the safety
of the surrogate’s own children. Liubov gladly
shared monthly updates in the form of photos
of her belly.
But when the decision came down that she
would be leaving for Krakow, Liubov wrote to the
intended parents with a red-faced crying emoji
and said exactly what she thought. ‘‘It’s a terrible
thing when a grown person does not belong to
herself,’’ she wrote to them. ‘‘And has no opinion.’’
She acknowledged that there was no one good
decision to be made by anyone — but because the
decision was being made for her she felt, as she
put it, ‘‘like a hostage of the situation.’’Among the many intended parents who were
writing to Kersch-Kibler almost every day were
Marilyn and Antonio Hanchard, a couple in
Florida. When the war started, their surrogate
was still in Ukraine, a situation that was caus-
ing them great stress. Sometimes Marilyn, a
nurse, drafted emails to Kersch-Kibler that were
overtly angry, but Antonio, a sales manager who
often played the role of peacemaker in his large
extended family, usually stepped in to tone themdown with an edit. Kersch-Kibler was grateful
that the emails she received from the couple
were respectful, if insistent.
Antonio and Marilyn were not demanding
people; they were, however, people who had
been through a series of losses, miscarriage
after miscarriage. ‘‘I kind of stopped counting,’’
said Marilyn, a 33-year-old nurse from Coco-
nut Creek, Fla., a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. ‘‘I
drown it out.’’ But she estimated that she had
had about nine miscarriages over the course of
six years. The never-ending mourning and the
hormones she took to try to sustain the various
pregnancies laid her low emotionally and phys-
ically. The expenses were stressful, too, and she
started working as a traveling nurse to supple-
ment the costs that insurance didn’t cover. She
had gained 30 pounds, from the hormones and
short-lived pregnancies, and she no longer rec-
ognized herself — she was starting to forget what
hope even felt like.Intended parents were encouraged to keep their text conversations light, for the well-being of their surrogate, and