Russia’s liberal surrogacy rules are under threat

RUSSIA IS ONE of the few places where commercial surrogacy is entirely legal (along with Ukraine, Georgia and some American states). Foreigners can pay a Russian woman for the use of her womb. Each year Russian surrogate mothers give birth to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies (estimates vary wildly). And in contrast to America, the service is cheap. Nine months of gestation plus labour can be bought for around $20,000. But in the next few months or so, Russia’s parliament looks set to ban the practice, at least if the customers are foreign. “Russia is not an incubator,” says Irina Yarovaya, a deputy speaker of the Duma, Russia’s parliament.The apparent trigger for this proposed change was the death of a baby boy who was born to a surrogate mother on behalf of a Filipino family last year. The baby was nursed in a rented flat outside Moscow and died while recovering from an operation on his brain. When the police entered the flat, they found three other babies being nursed for different Filipino families. These included three-month-old twins belonging to Fredenil Hernaez Castro, a member of the Philippines’ parliament.