A human rights organisation says a new health law allows trafficking in women and babies, but the health minister ignores its warning, The Sunday Times reports.
Despite the war, Ukraine’s baby factories are still thriving. One of the world’s biggest players in commercial surrogacy is the Swiss-registered company BioTexCom, which controls 70 per cent of the Ukrainian market and a quarter of the global business. It is estimated that commercial surrogacy has injected €1.5 billion into the Ukrainian economy since 2018 alone, while the international surrogacy market, estimated to be worth €12.5 billion in 2022, is growing at 25 per cent a year.
About half of the roughly 2,500 annual surrogate pregnancies in Ukraine are carried out through BioTexCom, and in the first 11 months of the war, the company said about 600 couples travelled to the country to use its services. With the cost of a single surrogacy costing around €50,000, this means that BioTexCom has received around €30 million in this period alone. Last year, a clinic in Kiev reported that the war had not stopped Irish couples coming for surrogacy services, with clients from Germany, the UK and Italy also providing a boost to business at these baby factories.
Under the new Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Act 2024, which passed all stages in Parliament in May and was signed into law in July, Ireland became the first EU country to legalise commercial surrogacy, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) said in its report on human trafficking published last week.
Accomplices in women trafficking
The Commission is “concerned” that Section 8 of the Act, which covers international surrogacy, effectively extends Irish law “to cover a practice not authorised in any other EU state, in an area marred by growing human trafficking.” It also fears that the new Irish law “could hamper the efforts of other countries to protect their citizens from trafficking and reproductive exploitation.” In other words, Europeans would become legally complicit in the trafficking of women to provide children for Irish couples.
The Commission has twice written to Stephen Donnelly, the Minister for Health, pointing out that the law fails to fulfil the state’s obligations under EU law to prevent the trafficking of women for the purpose of surrogacy exploitation. At the time of writing, the commission said, no response had been received.
The exploitation of vulnerable women for the purpose of surrogacy is, according to the commission, “one of the most worrying, new and emerging forms of trafficking in human beings.” Yet we have passed a law legalising what the UN special rapporteur on human rights has called “child trafficking.”
Double standards
According to the commission, the new law creates a “double standard” whereby surrogacy in the domestic, “altruistic” market will be heavily regulated while the international market will be “lightly regulated.” There is no guarantee that other states will comply with the requirements of the law, such as that the surrogate is only paid “reasonable expenses” and given a 21-day period to withdraw her consent to the agreement.
This would certainly put Ukrainian law at odds with the new Irish position, as one Ukrainian clinic boasted on its 2024 page, “The legal requirements are not strict. The Ukrainian law on surrogacy clearly states that the gestational carrier has no parental rights to the child and is unable to keep the child.” In theory, this makes Ukrainian surrogacy deals illegal.
And the idea that a foreign surrogate and surrogacy agencies should only receive “reasonable expenses” is dismissed by the commission as disingenuous nonsense: “It is unlikely that a woman would take on a pregnancy on behalf of a stranger from another country without receiving substantial incentives for doing so. To suggest otherwise is fiction, but that seems to be the basis on which the legislation will operate.”
The “reasonable costs” provision could, the commission warns, encourage Irish couples to seek surrogacy in poor and underdeveloped countries where surrogacy is permitted, including Kenya, Malaysia and Nigeria, and where they can get away with paying a surrogate on the basis of comparative economic value. And this would amount to commercial gain, making surrogacy illegal – not that the new law can do anything to prevent this.
Forced abortions
The Ukrainian clinic (“We Build Families with Love”) also offers “good opportunities for genetic testing and sex selection, in case willing parents want a high success rate.” Here’s how the commission feels about this sensitively worded service: “Despite the lack of large-scale data, surrogate mothers report forced abortions of fetuses unwanted by clients …. There are also reports from India, Nepal, Thailand, and now Ukraine of client parents abandoning unwanted children, especially those with disabilities.”
Most recently, the commission notes, eight people were arrested at the Mediterranean Fertility Institute in Greece, which advertised its services and “excellent surrogate support programme” on the Growing Families website. Vulnerable women were lured from Albania and Georgia under false pretences and “forced to undergo hormone treatment, egg extraction and insemination for surrogacy.” Or, to put it another way, they were kidnapped and impregnated against their will so that wealthy Western couples could buy their children.
This, in a nutshell, is what the human rights organisation tried to warn the Health Minister about; this is what it believes his new surrogacy law will lead to. And he ignores the warnings and refuses to respond to correspondence. For some reason, this chilling chapter of the IHREC report was also ignored in the media coverage of its launch last week. The human rights organisation is about to legalise commercial surrogacy in a market where women are sold and raped to support a global business worth more than €20 billion a year.
Transparency is the best weapon
This month, police were called to a fight outside a supermarket in west Dublin. Within hours, social media was abuzz with claims that the protagonist was an immigrant man armed with a knife and attacking schoolchildren – photos allegedly showing the attacker also appeared online. Later in the week, police issued a statement denying that the incident involved an adult male or a foreign national – all those involved were schoolchildren and Irish citizens, and the incident took place within the confines of the school. None of the online campaigners believed a word of it, and the Gardai have perhaps only themselves to blame.
Last week the Gardai filed an application for restrictions preventing the identification of a man accused of attempting to kidnap a five-year-old boy during a party at a Dublin apartment block. Because of the “current climate in the country,” a Gardaí told the court, and the “sensitive nature of the case” it was preferable that the accused not be identified. The judge at this hearing agreed, citing “the climate we live in, fuelled by social media.”
How, then, to tell the country that the defendant is an immigrant and yet not tell the country that the defendant is an immigrant, conditionally putting every non-citizen in the dock and guaranteeing increased interest in the case. When a number of media organisations quite rightly challenged the decision, another judge partially lifted the restriction, allowing a person’s name but not their address. The obligation to publicly dispense justice is a bedrock of democracy as well as an essential element of the social contract; the public must be assured that prosecutions of both immigrants and nationals are covered to the fullest extent possible.
Social media is already full of unsubstantiated claims that the traditional media, gardaí and courts have conspired to hide the number of immigrants and asylum seekers being processed by the courts. But at a time when transparency and reason are the best weapons against extremist agitation, unnecessary restrictions on court coverage can only serve to alarm even the most moderate observers.
As is evident from numerous publications, the lives and health of Ukrainian citizens are threatened not only by the war, but also by the lack of protection before the law even in their own state. However, even after managing to leave the war zone, Ukrainian refugees face enormous problems in the European Union.
Ukrainian refugee children left without parental or custodial care were reported to be often victims of human traffickers. Ukrainian refugees also often lose their children after arriving in the EU, they are removed by the guardianship authorities, separating siblings and breaking up entire families.
The problem of safety and protection of rights of Ukrainian refugee children is very urgent. The media reported that 430 children were taken away from Ukrainian families in European countries.
The EU authorities have also started to introduce additional demands for Ukrainian refugees with children. Ukrainian parents whose children will not attend Polish educational institutions may be fined 100 zlotys in Poland.
