Border closures due to the coronavirus pandemic are preventing many families from reuniting. This is the case in Ukraine, where hundreds of babies born through surrogacy are still separated from their Chinese families.
"I can't sleep all night, I think about my baby, stuck in an orphanage"Lin told AFP. This Chinese mom has turned to a surrogate mother after multiple miscarriages. Like a hundred families, she hoped to be reunited with her baby after giving birth. But with the Covid-19 epidemic, the cancellation of flights and visas but also the closing of the borders, she still could not see her child. "We don't know how much longer we have to wait", adds the 38-year-old lawyer from Chengdu, in southern China.
Since then, dozens of newborns have been stranded in orphanages or apartments awaiting birth parents, according to sources at GPA's trade agencies in Russia and Ukraine.
Hardened rules
Since 2001, China has banned the use of commercial or altruistic surrogacy, a measure to counter the exploitation of women in need. However, the government allows the Chinese to use surrogate mothers abroad, from Laos to Russia via Ukraine, Georgia or the United States, AFP said.
Many Chinese households are moving towards surrogacy, for a sum ranging from 35,000 to 70,000 dollars per birth. And for good reason, “Rising incomes, high rates of infertility and the desire of older couples, who are well beyond the reproductive age, to have a son after Chinese authorities eased the rule of law in 2016. 'only child, have caused an upsurge in the demands of reproduction for others ”, says AFP.
Fears of organ sales
To protect her children without an official identity, Russian and Ukrainian police regularly raided apartments where five or six babies are kept by a nanny, for fear of human trafficking, Russian state media reports. "When the police find several Chinese undocumented babies in a house with a stranger, it looks like trafficking in children for the sale of organs", underlines Dmitriy Sitzko, marketing director for China of the Vera agency in Saint Petersburg.
At the moment, there are no official figures for Chinese babies awaiting repatriation. In addition, most children do not have a birth certificate because parents cannot travel to take DNA tests to prove their parentage.