The World Center of Baby, a surrogacy agency founded by Ukrainians, advertised its services, representing itself as a “turnkey service” which would give its clients a long-hoped-for child, coordinating all the medical and legal processes.
In mere seven years, the agency expanded its activity – it had its own clinic in Kyiv, a donor egg bank, programmes in Mexico, Georgia, Albania, and Cyprus. Its clients were families and lonely people from almost the entire world.
Yet, this February, the World Center of Baby sent its clients letters to inform them about its bankruptcy. This was about the World Center Croup Corp., registered in Florida (the USA) in 2021. After that, the agency stopped providing any services whatsoever. As a result, the surrogate mothers were left without payments, promised to them, and genetic parents were left without any information about their future children.
It is unclear what exactly was behind such an abrupt termination of the agency’s activity. Some parents united into groups, others are going to the court. Meanwhile, in Albania, the local prosecutor’s office investigates the circumstances of the death of a young Ukrainian woman, who agreed to become a surrogate mother for the World Center of Baby. It is surrogate mothers, including the ones from Ukraine, who, in the experts’ opinion, suffer the most and are the least protected in such stories.
This investigation was conducted by NGL.media in cooperation with the international investigative journalist network OCCRP, two Italian freelance journalists and the Albanian editorial office of Shteg.
The story of surrogate mothers
The body of 27-year-old Yana, a Ukrainian woman the name and some details have been changed at the request of the relatives of the deceased was found in the apartment in the Albanian capital, Tirana, in late April, but only a few weeks prior to the time when the woman was supposed to complete the surrogacy programme. Yana died together with her unborn baby girl whom she was carrying for the World Center of Baby.
Yana is from a small Ukrainian town. Several years ago, she divorced her husband and since then, as per her relatives, she focused on providing for her son, who is at school. Yana gave her consent to the surrogacy program to buy a house and invest some money in her own business. Her sister told NGL.media that the World Center of Baby was recommended to Yana by some “acquaintances who had already taken part in the programme”.
This young woman was to earn about USD 25 thousand for giving birth to a baby on request. The agreement with the American company, World Center Group Corp., envisaged her getting a payment of USD 600-700 per month during pregnancy, and the main payment of USD 15.4 thousand after the delivery. She was to be paid additionally for each attempt of embryo transfer The fertilized embryo may not implant in the surrogate mother’s body on the first try.
The agreement also envisaged NGL.media received the unsigned copy of the agreement which, in Yana’s boyfriend’s words, was signed by her and the genetic father of the baby a number of fines for Yana – USD 200 for missing a doctor’s appointment, USD 250 for use of alcohol and tobacco, USD 1,000 – for an unauthorized trip abroad. If a woman dared to have an abortion, that would cost her a fine of USD 20 thousand; if she refused to give an already born baby away – that would be a fine of USD 50 thousand and reimbursement of all the client’s expenses.
Force majeure for Yana was also taken into consideration in the agreement, however, it cost less: USD 500 to 1,500 for a miscarriage (depending on the pregnancy duration) or USD 500-1,200 for an abortion due to medical reasons. The woman was to be paid USD 1,500 more for a Cesarean section, and USD 2,000 more – for the birth of two children. In case of the surrogate mother’s death, a person to receive all the agreed-upon payments is stated in the agreement.
The curator, appointed by the agency, was to control Yana’s compliance with the agreement terms, and the medical coordinator was to monitor the state of her health, this is specified in the document, studied by NGL.media journalists.
Yana’s sister said that the woman was following the programme in the Kyiv clinic called Alice, which belonged to the World Center of Baby. Except for a few closest people, nobody else knew that Yana took part in the surrogacy programme – her relatives said that she was worried about possible judgement and rumours in a little town. In the last trimester of pregnancy, the woman was supposed to move to Albania and give birth to a baby there.
Why was Albania chosen for the delivery of the baby? It is not quite clear but, while advertising its services in Albania, the World Center of Baby highlighted that the absence of specific legislation in this country opens the way for surrogacy for “married and unmarried couples, homosexual couples, and lonely men” In Ukraine, the legislation allows surrogacy only on condition that clients – genetic parents – are a married heterosexual couple. The journalists didn’t find any company, registered in Albania under the agency’s name.
On February 25, just before Yana went to Tirana, the agency sent its clients a letter with the notification about its bankruptcy. The online forums exploded with messages from the clients of the World Center of Baby who were looking for assistance and writing that the agency abandoned them, sometimes just in the middle of the process.
Yana didn’t receive that letter. But the family says it was clear that something was wrong. Her sister told NGL.media that at first Yana had her prophylactic examinations in the Kyiv’s Alice clinic which belonged to the World Center of Baby, but then the clinic stopped working. Yana’s boyfriend says that she also stopped receiving payments, and the communication with her medical coordinator came to nothing. When the journalists came to the Kyiv clinic, it was closed.
Only a general banner on the building and small signs remind of the fact that some time ago, there was a seemingly innovative reproductive clinic on the first floor of the residential building. Now the door is closed with a metal lock and the sign has been removed.
The Alice clinic is located on the first floor of the multi-story residential building; now the premises of the clinic are closed (a photo by NGL.media)
That’s when Yana started communicating with the baby’s father directly. He started paying the woman on his own, he also paid for medical visits to the hospital in Albania where she was supposed to give birth to the baby and he rented an apartment in Tirana for her last months of pregnancy. Yana was found dead in this very apartment on April 22.
The messages, seen by the journalists, prove that prior to her death, she complained to her boyfriend about a severe headache. The young woman was found in the apartment by the police after her relatives couldn’t get her on the phone.
It is still unknown what exactly happened to Yana: the Albanian doctors stated “a sudden death” in her death certificate. The official autopsy report is still being prepared in Albania, according to the local prosecutor’s office, which added that a criminal case was opened into the death and the case is currently at the stage of pretrial investigation.
Yana’s sister says that in the morgue, to which the body had been brought, she was told that it had been death due to a high level of sugar in her blood. She doesn’t understand why it had been overlooked during regular visits to the hospital. The American Hospital clinic in Tirana, attended by Yana for all the examinations, didn’t respond to the journalists’ inquiry.
Yana didn’t want to go to Albania but she had to because of the agreement that she had signed, her sister told us.
“She just wanted to come back to her country, where there were people who loved her,” her sister said in a conversation with NGL.media.
Yana’s relatives didn’t receive any money from the World Center of Baby after her death.
The journalists found out that besides Ukraine, the World Center of Baby worked with surrogate mothers in Mexico and tried to recruit them in other countries, including Armenia and Georgia, sometimes using its own brand “MamaTak”. On their website, they highlighted their attitude of care for surrogate mothers.
“Here in the World Center of Baby, we understand the importance of surrogate mothers in the surrogacy journey. That’s why, as an international agency, we ensure that a surrogate mother is not only vetted, medically screened, and taken care of in the best way possible for a successful gestation period,” says the website.
27-year-old Maria the woman’s name was changed as per her request, a Ukrainian woman, was forced to join the surrogacy programme by her adversity. But in a conversation with the journalists, she told that since last December, the World Center of Baby had been giving her monthly payments with delay, and the last one prior to the delivery hadn’t been paid at all. In February, she gave birth to twins for a married couple from Brazil and was supposed to receive over USD 20 thousand but the agency still didn’t pay her.
“I wanted to buy a house. Not a large one, just for my children to have something of their own. This is my main loss,” Maria says, who has five children of her own.
Now the Brazilian couple pays Maria her fee on their own even though previously they had already paid the World Center of Baby in full. At present, they are still due to pay several thousand dollars to the surrogate mother.
“Your path to parenthood – easy, transparent, and full of sense”
Roberta and Felipe Martins are the very Brazilian couple for whom Maria gave birth to twins. They started looking for a surrogacy agency when Roberta lost the possibility to have children due to her health problems.
They described people from the World Center of Baby as friendly, kind, and attentive, although a few times, they were surprised by some additional bills – one procedure unexpectedly cost USD 10 thousand, they said. The couple told the journalists that just before the twins were born, the agency said that they had to pay an additional USD 4 thousand for medical insurance for the second baby.
The Brazilians, Roberta and Felipe Martins with their twins, born by Maria, the Ukrainian (a photo was kindly provided by the couple)
But they really felt that something was wrong in early February, when they were already in Ukraine, getting ready to take their children home. The agency representative said that they had to pay Maria for the baby’s delivery in cash, allegedly because of banking problems.
“They started insisting that we should pay in cash, and it would increase our expenses. We didn’t understand why we had to do it,” Martins said.
Finally, they agreed to pay EUR 14.5 thousand to the bank account. Yet, when Maria was being discharged from the hospital, it turned out that she didn’t receive her fee. The Brazilians contacted their coordinator who said that the agency had financial problems and that she hadn’t been paid either.
It isn’t clear what happened to the money they transferred – the employees of the World Center of Baby, who communicated with the couple, said that they didn’t know where the money went.
Finally, the Martins borrowed USD 5 thousand more from their relatives to pay Maria directly and decided to send her monthly payments of USD 1,000 to cover USD 16 thousand owed to her. Maria signed a document, giving her consent to the registration of newborn babies as children of the parents-clients.
During a conversation with the journalists, the Brazilian couple showed a nursery of the twins, full of colours and brightly decorated with frescoes of rural landscapes. Yet the Martins still feel that Maria wasn’t treated fairly.
“We would like to get back the money we had spent, and which she hadn’t received. We want Maria to get her money, we want everything to be made right, we want the company to pay a debt to her,” Roberta said.
The journalists found out that another couple from Great Britain sued the World Center Group Corp. in Florida, demanding that the agency pay back the money they had paid. The couple paid over USD 87 thousand for the surrogacy programme but, as the claim says, they got nothing.
The couple told that their contact person at the agency informed them that the programme could not be prolonged any longer. So they asked the company to pay the money back and in response heard that there was only EUR 450 on the company’s account.
“We were crushed because we could have put all that money down the toilet with the same result. But we were lucky that we didn’t find out about it in the middle of the process when the surrogate mother would be carrying our child without being paid,” the couple told the OCCRP journalists.
This is not the only lawsuit received by the World Center of Baby from its former clients. Two years ago, a couple from California (USA), Jennifer Rastegar and her husband, Hector Barocio, paid the agency over USD 100 thousand for a premium package which envisaged several attempts of embryo transfer and the birth of a baby of a surrogate mother.
The Americans, Jennifer Rastegar and Hector Barocio, lost over USD 100 thousand and were left without their desired baby (a photo, kindly provided by the couple)
The couple said that they decided to look for a company in Mexico because it was not far from their home in California and because Hector has dual citizenship of the USA and Mexico. The couple told the journalists that they decided to take the path of surrogacy after Jennifer had her hysterectomy a surgical complete or partial removal of the uterus during the surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.
They saw positive feedback about the World Center of Baby online, so in spring of 2024, they contacted the Mexican representation of the agency. Yet the agency delayed for months and made up excuses until the couple asked for a refund. The letters and documents, provided to the OCCRP, confirm their payments.
In October 2024, the couple received a letter in which Malvina Jonas, the Director of the World Center of Baby, suggested that the agency would pay them only USD 22 thousand back. Yet the couple had paid USD 102 thousand, so they resented this suggestion. Later they received another letter – the World Center of Baby offered to pay them USD 90 thousand back. But Jennifer and Hector were to remove all the negative feedback about the agency from the network. The couple didn’t accept these conditions and are now dealing with the lawsuit in Mexico via the local attorney.
“We are still trying to become parents. When I am 50, I will give up,” Jennifer said, who was 49 in June.
Branches and owners of the World Center Group
The federal court records in the USA contain no proof that the World Center Group Corp. has ever filed for bankruptcy. The company is listed as active in the register of Florida. As of the moment of the publication, the website is also working, there just appeared a banner with the notification that the company didn’t take on new clients because it is “completely focused on the implementation and completion of current programmes”.
However, the contact telephone numbers and email addresses on the website of the World Center of Baby aren’t responding anymore. But in May, the website of the World Center of Baby was seized by unknown hackers for several days who promised to expose the agency’s practices, but they didn’t provide any details. The Kyiv clinic of the agency, Alice, doesn’t work either – its doors are closed with metal bars now.
According to Iryna Myronova, the former director of Alice clinic and fertility specialist, they began withholding staff salaries in early 2026. At the same time, prospective surrogate mothers still came for examinations and transfer of the embryos. And in February, they started laying off the staff.
“A girl from the sales department called me and said, ‘Can you imagine – they fired the entire sales department in one day.’ And that’s when I understood that that was it, the end. There may be some financial problems, they could fail to calculate some things. But if they fire the people who can earn the money, sell agreements and replenish the budget – that truly is the end,” Iryna Myronova said.
In the doctor’s words, in early March she gave the keys of the clinic to the owner of the premises – they had to leave it because the rent hadn’t been paid. Myronova told NGL.media that, to preserve the clients’ embryos, she rents a small warehouse using her own finances, to which she moved the equipment for the preservation of biomaterials of the Alice clinic former clients.
“Many clients who were in contact at the time, in active programmes, they got organized very quickly, and mainly they all moved their biomaterial. And [the biomaterial] of those who left it earlier, we keep it. Frankly speaking, there is no real desire to deal with all of it. But you mainly worry about the material – some people had their last cells frozen for fertilization. It would be a shame to lose them – you don’t have any responsibility anymore, but just from the human perspective,” Myronova said.
So who is the owner of the World Center of Baby? In the previous website versions, Vladyslav Natochii, a Ukrainian businessman, is listed as the founder and director. He is 38 years old, born in Kyiv, his father is a professional diplomat, working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.
According to the legend from the agency’s website, Vladyslav Natochii called the Kyiv clinic Alice in honour of his daughter. By this May, it was he who owned this clinic, which is legally active since October 2018. In addition, the employees and surrogate mothers called him the owner of the World Center of Baby in conversations with journalists.
Vladyslav Natochii (a photo from the website of the World Center of Baby)
According to the archived biography from the agency’s website, Vladyslav Natochii started working with his mother when they organized the adoption of Ukrainian children by foreigners, and then, in 2018, he registered the World Center of Baby. At the same time, he is not listed in the documents of the American World Center Group Corp. Yet, the trademark “World Center of Baby”, registered in Ukraine in 2021, belongs to his mother who didn’t respond to the journalists’ messages. The trademarks with the same name in the USA and the EU are registered in the name of the same Vladyslav Natochii, along with the trademark of the clinic in Ukraine.
It is not known where Vladyslav Natochii lives now. Former agency employees said that after the full-scale Russian invasion he left Ukraine and lived in Cyprus for some time.
The OCCRP journalists contacted Natochii online, via email. He stated that the World Center of Baby “suffered an acute financial and operational crisis”.
“Debts and unfulfilled responsibilities as such don’t prove any facts of fraud or criminal intent. I realize that clients, surrogate mothers, employees, and partners suffered severe difficulties during this period, and I am deeply sorry about that. I absolutely reject any charges of fraud, theft, or embezzlement of the finances, or of intentionally harming clients or surrogate mothers,” he told the journalists.
In Natochii’s words, there is no “cause and effect connection” between his actions and the death of the surrogate mother in Albania.
“The World Center of Baby worked for over seven years, and more than 350 children were born in the programmes, related to the brand. Reducing the entire history of the company only to the period of its crisis means creating an incomplete and distorted picture of its operation,” he said.
However, Vladyslav Natochii didn’t explain what the reason to close the agency was or why the World Center of Baby stopped communicating with clients and surrogate mothers.
“Taking into account legal processes, I will not give public comments on specific cases, financial operations, medical issues, or the inner structure of the relevant legal entities,” Natochii said.
Iryna Myronova, the ex-director of the Alice clinic, told that Vladyslav didn’t give the Kyiv staff any detailed explanations of the reasons for closing the clinic either.
Iryna Myronova, the former director of the Alice clinic in Kyiv (a photo by the WCOB)
“It was February, and Vladyslav got in touch. But he didn’t even turn his camera on during the meeting with us. He was telling us how hard it was for him. Like he hadn’t got in touch because he had felt bad. And we all here felt great! When there was no electricity, we did everything ourselves. The girls would take the generator outside, turn it on. The pregnant women were sitting under shelling – and he felt morally bad in Cyprus. He swore that he was looking for investments, that he would pay us first and foremost, but since then, we haven’t heard from him,” Myronova recalls.
It should be noted that in addition to Kyiv’s Alice clinic, Vladyslav Natochii owns a reproductive medicine clinic with the same name in Tbilisi. Similar to its Kyiv’s “sister”, the clinic in Georgia doesn’t work either, now there is a dentist’s at this address.
As of the moment of this publication, the document on the terms of providing services in Georgia on the website of the World Center of Baby lists the contact person of the agency as a Georgian from Tbilisi, Zurab Shvelidze, but the company name is slightly different: the Global Center of Baby. However, in the conversation with the OCCRP journalists, Shvelidze said that he didn’t know he was a representative of the surrogacy agency.
He said that his acquaintance got in touch with him and said that he could earn USD 100 a month – that’s how he became the “nominal head” of the Global Center of Baby, because he needed money. In his words, the law company in Georgia instructed him to register a company in March 2025, and then he helped open bank accounts for it. The correspondence between Shvelidze and this company demonstrates that by December 2025, the Bank of Georgia blocked access to the account of the Global Center of Baby, and Shvelidze’s personal accounts.
Meanwhile, the agency’s activity attracted the attention of foreign law enforcement bodies. The police of Limassol, in Cyprus, confirmed to the journalists that they are carrying out an investigation into advertising illegal practices, including the sex selection of embryos and the transfer of several embryos to a surrogate mother. The investigation was launched last year, no charges have been brought up so far.
They also informed that there was no company, registered in Cyprus under the name of the World Center of Baby. And no premises of the company were found at two addresses, listed by the agency as its offices on its website.
So who is the owner of the American company, the World Center Group Corp? Yurii Star is officially listed as the company’s president. He told the journalists that he had been hired as a consultant for the company registration and knew nothing about it.
“I have nothing to do with the company. I have never signed any documents, any agreements,” Star claims. In his next email, he added, “I didn’t know who worked there. I didn’t know how many clients it had. Its actual operations – clients, clinics, personnel, programmes – were completely outside the legal entity, the documents and banking transactions of which I administered.”
Also, Yurii Star said that Vladyslav Natochii entrusted him with opening the bank accounts for the World Center Group Corp. in the USA and he transferred the access to the accounts to Natochii, who, as per his words, carried out banking transactions or told other employees to make payments. Yurii Star says that the last time he talked to Natochii was “approximately eight months ago”, when Natochii asked him to open a new bank account.
Yurii Star or Starodubskyi is a US citizen, though his family is from Ukraine. Since 2016, he is listed in the registration documents of six companies in Florida. He also told the journalists that he hadn’t invested in the World Center of Baby and hadn’t been paid for his services either.
The name of Yurii Star is also listed in Ukrainian court registers – in a case regarding the power of attorney, allegedly from an American, Alex Marder. In autumn of 2021, he took a loan from a private individual in the amount of about USD 122 thousand under the pledge of Marder’s house with an area of over 500 sq.m. Marder wasn’t a party to the loan agreement, his signature is not on it, and he found out about the pledge of his own property only later. The American notary, whose signature was on the power of attorney, claimed that it had been forged. Finally, the court declared the power of attorney to be void.
In his communication with journalists, Yurii Star said that this case is his personal business and “has nothing to do with the World Center of Baby”.
The Director of the World Center Group Corp. is listed as Malvina Jonas, allegedly registered in Florida. It was Jonas’ signature on the letter on bankruptcy and other letters and documents, sent to genetic parents. However, five agency employees told the journalists that they had never seen or talked to her, and one of them said that her signature was applied automatically. The IP-addresses, from which her digital signature was put on agreements, studied by the journalists, demonstrate that it was used from different places in the world at the same time.
At the same time, the journalists of NGL.media found out that Jonas, who has both Ukrainian and Hungarian passports, actually lives in Mukachevo. A 56-year-old woman has no business in Ukraine and owns no considerable property. Malvina’s possible places of residence, found by NGL.media journalists, don’t reflect the businesswoman’s lifestyle – it seems that Malvina’s family shares a small house with broken plaster and old windows with several other Gypsy families.
According to the data from the court register, in 2020, she didn’t repay a loan of UAH 10 thousand, and in spring 2026, the court ordered her to pay not only the amount of the loan, but also UAH 132 thousand in interest, accrued for this period.
NGL.media tried to contact Malvina Jones but she didn’t get back to us.
A new beginning?
In June, the clients of the World Center of Baby, whose embryos were in the Alice clinic, received a letter from the representative of Blue Oak Fertility, another surrogacy agency, informing them that their biomaterials were “safe and cryopreserved”. The letter stated that Blue Oak Fertility cooperates with an unnamed clinic in Ukraine within a “special programme” for the clients to repeatedly use the preserved biomaterials for EUR 41 thousand, which has to be paid in five parts.
One parent who replied to the proposal of Blue Oak Fertility received a letter, signed by Daniel Epshtein, a former chief operating officer of the World Center of Baby, with the list of countries and prices, offered by the agency. The website of Blue Oak Fertility was created in April 2026, it was registered by the abovementioned Yurii Star.
Daniel Epshtein (a photo from LinkedIn)
Star said that he was hired as a consultant to create the website and that he wasn’t related to the World Center of Baby. “This is an entirely third party which has worked in the market for 10 or 12 years,” he told the journalists, but he didn’t name the company behind the brand.
Epshtein claimed that he started his cooperation with Blue Oak Fertility for the families who suffered “to be informed and to have their materials placed into the proper storage”. He said that “there was no corporate or financial association between Blue Oak Fertility and the World Center of Baby” and that he “had no personal or professional relations with Yurii Star”. Epshtein added that after the dissolution of the World Center of Baby he worked as an independent specialist with other agencies as well.
Blue Oak Fertility said that after the failure of the World Center of Baby, Epshtein started cooperating and “got involved” to ensure the preservation of biological materials which had previously been kept in the Kyiv Alice clinic, and received the list of the agency’s clients and after that, the company started contacting these people.
“We believe that it is a responsible provision of information to the people who were left without any accountable contact person regarding their biological material in combination with the transparent commercial proposal for those who wanted to continue building their family,” the agency said.
Blue Oak Fertility assures that “it has no corporate, financial, or operational relations with the World Center of Baby or the World Center Group Corp.”. They said that the participation of Epshtein and Star in their business is not proof of the association between the two agencies which, in their words, have different owners and different management.
“Blue Oak Fertility is not a company, established in response to the failure of the World Center of Baby. Blue Oak Fertility is a stable brand of the company, which has worked independently for over ten years and whose existence precedes the World Center of Baby,” the agency said.
However, they refused to name the company behind Blue Oak Fertility brand. At first, the agency promised to send the registration documents which would confirm the claimed ten-year-old story but it was not done despite several repeated inquiries.
The journalists didn’t find any registered brands or trademarks with the same name in the database of the World Intellectual Property Organization – the UN agency, aggregating the data on intellectual property from 194 countries.
However, nobody from the World Center of Baby or Blue Oak Fertility contacted the surrogate mothers. Iryna Myronova, the former director of the Kyiv clinic, hasn’t heard about the new agency either.
The lawyers, asked by the journalists, say: the story of the World Center of Baby demonstrates the vulnerability of the entire industry of commercial surrogacy, open to abuse due to the lack of coordinated regulation and the legal complexity of transborder programmes.
Kirsty Horsey, a law professor at Loughborough University in Great Britain, who specializes in surrogacy regulation, says that clients, facing the prohibition on surrogacy in their own country or believing that they would have to wait for a long time due to the local legislation, sometimes contact international agencies, working in the countries with less strict rules.
As explained by Horsey, there are responsible agencies in the market, but less ethical ones often persuade their clients that they will go home with a baby faster, cheaper, and with less bureaucracy. At the same time, they don’t disclose exactly how they work and which legal issues their clients might face, including the procedures they will have to follow to become legal parents of their baby once in their own country.
“These agencies know about the current demand. They play on people’s despair,” Kirsty Horsey says.
“We see ever more transborder cases,” says Bianca Jackson, a British lawyer, specializing in surrogacy cases.
“That’s how it goes: a surrogate mother lives within one jurisdiction, gives birth to a baby within another one, the clinic is within the third one, and genetic parents, clients, are within the fourth jurisdiction. Obviously, it complicates the case, especially if the legislation in all these jurisdictions is different,” Jackson explains.
“In this scenario, surrogate mothers are the most vulnerable people. Their only means of protection is to sue for their payments. And when a company breaks apart, there is nobody to sue,” says Cyra Akila Choudhury, a law professor at Florida International University and an expert in transnational commercial surrogacy.
Choudhury added that although many countries actually have laws regulating the relations between surrogate mothers and clinics or between agencies and parents-clients, the agencies themselves (which she describes as intermediaries) are regulated as ordinary businesses, without any consideration of risks for people in case of their failure.
The expert believes that there should be special laws regarding these third parties which would force them to protect the people who sign such agreements. At present, abuse is common in the business of commercial surrogacy due to the absence of specific legal safeguards and accountability for the agencies if they walk away from the arrangement, she says.
At the same time, while talking to genetic parents who request these services, the journalists found out about other possible violations in the agency’s operations. One of the former clients of the World Center of Baby, who asked us not to mention her name, told the journalists that the letter from Blue Oak struck her deeply.
“Four years after the birth of our only daughter, we had to destroy the remaining embryos. It was an unbearable decision, we had been coming to it for months,” she said.
“We signed the letters of consent and never heard from them again, so we thought that they had been destroyed. And then we received a letter from a new company which offered us a discount for another surrogacy programme – with the same embryos. We are shocked, we are confused and sad because we don’t know whether the embryos have actually been destroyed or sold to some other company to be used elsewhere. This is an awful situation and all the questions we asked the World Center of Baby remained unanswered,” the woman said.
A former client of the World Center of Baby asked Blue Oak Fertility for one thing – to confirm that there were no more embryos. The agency responded neither to her nor to the journalists.
Mariia Horban (NGL.media), Ambra Montanari and Beatrice Petrella (Italy), Xhesika Tollia (Shteg), Kevin Hall and Kelly Bloss (OCCRP), with the involvement of The Governance Monitoring Center (GMC) and Finance Uncovered; the editor of the Ukrainian version Oleh Onysko, translation Nelya Plakhota, a cover by OCCRP
