Anonymous ID: 8c9750 Feb. 15, 2024, 2:08 p.m. No.20420086   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0112 >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

Inside a Ukrainian baby factory

War has destroyed much of the Ukrainian economy. But one key industry — delivering babies via surrogates — continues amid the epic strife. By Ilya Gridneff, Emily Schultheis and Dmytro Drabyk 07/23/2023 07:00 AM EDT

1/3(too long to post for the full article)

 

KYIV, Ukraine — When Tanya, a 45-year-old woman living in Los Angeles, paid $10,000 and sent two embryos to a surrogacy firm in Ukraine hoping to build a family six years ago, she says she never expected the uncertainty and heartbreak the process would bring.

 

Tanya desperately wanted a child but found out she would be unable to conceive herself. After discovering how expensive surrogacy in the U.S. can be, she and her husband began pursuing options abroad — and came across the Kyiv-based company BioTexCom. Tanya’s parents were originally from Odesa, so she felt there was something fitting about her future child being born in Ukraine.

 

Once the process began with BioTexCom in fall 2017, however, Tanya had an uneasy feeling. After sending her embryos, she says, she was told they would be implanted in a surrogate almost immediately — a timeline that didn’t fit with all the research Tanya had done into the surrogacy process. When, a few days later, the firm told her the embryo transfer had been unsuccessful and provided minimal information about why, she says, she suspected something was off. Tana paid $10,000 and sent two embryos to a surrogacy firm in Ukraine hoping to build a family. | WELT

 

Her husband was in Kyiv for work a few weeks later and decided to stop by the clinic to see if he could get some answers.He introduced himself to a clinic staffer, who immediately thanked him for donating their embryos to another couple. He was floored: Was this what had happened when the firm told them the process was unsuccessful?“Obviously, that’s when, you know, crap hit the fan,” she said. At that point, she added, BioTexCom stopped answering her messages and they never received her embryos back.

 

The account of Tanya and her husband was one of multiple complaints that reporters for POLITICO and the German news outlet WELT uncovered in an investigation into BioTexCom, arguably the world’s most popular surrogacy agency. Complainants were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. One German couple said BioTexCom mixed up their surrogate twins with another couple’s pair, forcing them to exchange the babies at a secret rendezvous in Germany.

 

Another German woman said her uncertainty and stress after BioTexCom never returned all her embryos after she canceled plans for a surrogacy in Ukraine. WELT also spoke to former prosecutors, surrogates and advocates in Ukraine who raised allegations of BioTexCom’s lack of proper care for the medical needs and complications of women who bore the babies. They say cases were not pursued in the country’s sometimes chaotic legal system even though the company’s founder confirmed that he was placed under house arrest as part of a pretrial investigation.

 

Tanya, too, has been thwarted in her efforts to initiate an investigation into her embryos. Tanya and her husband remain anxious that their embryos may have been implanted and a child born and given to another couple. Although she has filed a complaint with the international crime agency Interpol, more than five years later she still doesn’t know what really happened. (Interpol did not reply to a request for comment from POLITICO.)

 

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/23/ukraine-surrogates-fertility-00104913

Anonymous ID: 8c9750 Feb. 15, 2024, 2:11 p.m. No.20420112   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0133 >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

>>20420086

2/3

“The unfortunate part is there’s so little that we could do about it, you know?” she said. “That was a very traumatic situation. … We’re five years down the road from the situation and I think I only came to terms with it about a year ago.”

 

Former prosecutors, surrogates and advocates in Ukraine have raised allegations of BioTexCom’s lack of proper care for the medical needs and complications of women who bore the babies. | WELT

 

Albert Tochilovsky, the founder of BioTexCom, in a written statement to WELT and POLITICO, said Tanya’s concerns about her embryos being implanted for another couple are “completely false”: “The quality of the material was absolutely poor — it makes no sense for us to use the embryos for another couple.”

 

In the case of the German twins, Tochilovsky blamed it on Kyiv’s public maternity hospital. “Two couples had their twins born at the same time, and, unfortunately, the staff mixed the children. It was the only case, and we carefully control all the processes,” he said.Similarly, Tochilovsky dismissed concerns about a German woman’s embryos being misplaced or used for another family.

 

“We always release the material of our patients upon their request, and we even assist with transportation,” he said. “We do not need donor eggs/embryos — we have a large bank of donor oocytes (more than 10,000) that were retrieved from young, healthy donors.”

 

But the concerns resonate because of the extent of the surrogacy business in Ukraine — which produces hundreds of babies per year — and the anxiety and desperation of the people involved. There’s also the not insignificant factor that the entire process is being carried out amid an epic military clash in which the fate of the country hangs in the balance.

 

Indeed, the Ukrainian economy may have suffered a desperate series of blows through Russia’s invasion, but the country’s surrogacy industry, fueled by a permissive legal environment, remains open for business.

A booming industry

 

Over the past decade, surrogacy, or the “rent-a-womb” industry, as critics sometimes call it, has become a booming global industry. In 2016, the Swiss NGO International Social Service estimated that 20,000 babies annually were born via surrogacy. Promoted by celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Elton John and Paris Hilton, this reproductive process was worth an estimated $14 billion in 2022 and may reach $129 billion by 2032, according to the research and consulting company Global Market Insights.

 

Although surrogacy is legal in most U.S. states, and an increasingly mainstream option, it is banned across much of Europe and in many other parts of the world, meaning those interested in pursuing it must look outside their home countries to find surrogates. Even in places such as California, where surrogacy is common, it is often prohibitively expensive — leading women like Tanya to seek more affordable options abroad.

 

But the patchwork of conflicting national regulations and the proliferation of women traveling across national borders to seek surrogates also creates the space in which companies like BioTexCom, Ukraine’s most successful surrogacy agency, operate.

 

Despite the war with Russia, Ukraine’s surrogacy industry continues to advertise for customers and serve its international clientele.

 

BioTexCom’s sophisticated online presence promotes hundreds of stories of happy families elated to meet their newborn. But scant details can be found about BioTexCom’s past complaints and brushes with Ukrainian law enforcement.

 

>https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/23/ukraine-surrogates-fertility-00104913

Anonymous ID: 8c9750 Feb. 15, 2024, 2:14 p.m. No.20420133   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

>>20420112

3/3

For example, in 2018 and 2019, Ukrainian prosecutors obtained a court order to put Tochilovsky under house arrest for what one former prosecutor, Yuriy Kovalchuk,deemed as possible child trafficking cases, because some of the children might not have had a DNA link to the parents, along with allegations of tax evasion and money laundering.

 

But the cases were redirected to other law enforcement agencies and lesser courts before eventually being dropped.Kovalchuk said he was sidelined by senior officials under the guise of institutional reforms to tackle rampant corruption in Ukraine’s law enforcement ranks. Asked to respond to these and other allegations, Tochilovsky said the criminal investigations were “hysteria” fueled by corrupt Ukrainian prosecutors and attempts to extort him and the company for an ownership stake in the firm or a $1 million payment.

 

“All the allegations made by him and his team were completely false,” he said of Kovalchuk in his statement.

 

Since Russia’s brutal invasion, surrogacy in Ukraine has received increased international attention. Indeed, Ukraine’s surrogacy trade, worth tens of millions of dollars, soldiers on. Amid bombing, water cuts and power shortages, BioTexCom, one of the world’s most popular agencies, simply adapted.

 

According to the company’s own social media posts, babies have been protected in bunkers and armed soldiers escorted newborns to and from hospital, while foreigners made frantic journeys to Kyiv to be united with their newborns.

 

During the war, hundreds of Ukrainian women have provided babies for childless couples, which was, even during peacetime, a logistical — and for some an ethically dubious — challenge. Yet BioTexCom’s social media is filled with their happy stories: Foreign couples, who risked everything by traveling to a war zone, become parents for the first time via BioTexCom.

 

So while Ukraine fought back against Russia, BioTexCom tried to incorporate the struggle into its marketing. It launched a PR campaign to “ Make babies, not war,” and said they “will do their best for your dream of becoming parents. Nothing can stop us,” as posted regularly on their Facebook, Telegram, Tik Tok and Instagram accounts.

 

BiotexCom does not shy away from its business-as-usual approach during wartime. In his written response, Tochilovsky said the company is actively recruiting women from newly liberated areas of Ukraine.

 

“We have a great shortage of surrogate mothers, the number of potential clients is three times more than the number of the surrogate mothers,” he said.

 

‘There is no absolute infertility’

Surrogacy is a controversial and deeply contentious issue around the world. Commercial surrogacy was banned in Thailand and Nepal in 2015, then in India in 2019 after a series of high-profile scandals of exploitation and charges of dubious ethics in the industry. But demand for surrogacy did not go away — it simply shifted to countries like Ukraine, where the process is less expensive and, compared with some countries, less heavily regulated.

 

The requirements to use a surrogate in Ukraine are simple: A heterosexual couple must to be married, show they are medically unable to have children and provide at least half of the child’s genetic link, via sperm or embryo. BioTexCom advertises on its website packages from as little as $40,000. On average, surrogacy with BioTexCom costs $40,000 to $50,000, with an “all inclusive VIP” package going for $71,000, according to the website. These prices are substantially less than what surrogacy costs in the United States, where surrogacy experts and firms estimate that the average price tag is upward of $100,000.

 

Those familiar with the pre-war surrogacy industry in Ukraine estimate that nearly half of the country’s approximately 2,000 to 2,500 surrogate pregnancies every year were carried out through BioTexCom. Since then, the company reported in February 2023 that 600 families used their services during the first 11 months after Russia’s invasion. If each family paid on average $50,000, that would have meant BioTexCom took in $30 million….

 

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/23/ukraine-surrogates-fertility-00104913

Anonymous ID: 8c9750 Feb. 15, 2024, 2:35 p.m. No.20420217   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0238 >>0246 >>0359 >>0361 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

Polisi is pretty animated in this interview (what is wrong with her eyes?)

 

MAGA War Room

@MAGAIncWarRoom

Legal analyst @CarolinePolisi

: "This has been a BOMBSHELL… huge, huge issues here… it's about lying to the court, it's about potential financial gain on the part of Fani Willis… the issue is that her credibility is shot…it's a horrible, horrible look for her."

 

https://x.com/MAGAIncWarRoom/status/1758181530680074641?s=20

Anonymous ID: 8c9750 Feb. 15, 2024, 2:46 p.m. No.20420256   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

Alexander Dugin, he is retweeting this rap song with Trump & Tucker.@Agdchan

 

This is the BEST!

 

3:40 AM · Feb 13, 2024

·131.7K Views

 

https://x.com/Agdchan/status/1757323882329956688

 

Aleksandr Dugin

Aleksandr[a] Gelyevich Dugin (Russian: Александр Гельевич Дугин; born 7 January 1962) is a Russian far-right political philosopher.[3] (at least he has a sense of humor)

 

Born into a military intelligence family, Dugin was an anti-communist dissident during the 1980s.[4] Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dugin co-founded the National Bolshevik Party with Eduard Limonov, a party which espoused National Bolshevism, which he later left.[5] In 1997, he published Foundations of Geopolitics, in which he outlined his worldview, calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through alliances and conquest, and to challenge the rival Atlanticist empire led by the United States.[6][7][8][9] Dugin continued to further develop his ideology of neo-Eurasianism, founding the Eurasia Party in 2002 and writing further books including The Fourth Political Theory (2009).[6][4] His political views have been characterized as fascist or neo-fascist.[10][11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin

 

This is the Russian Intellectual, his daughter was killed by Ukraine in 2022, thinking they would kill him. She was a journalist

Anonymous ID: 8c9750 Feb. 15, 2024, 3 p.m. No.20420303   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

Putin: Biden Better for Russia Than Trump, ‘More Predictable’

(Reverse psychology) Paul Bois 14 Feb 2024

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin said President Joe Biden would be better for Russia than Donald Trump, calling him “old school” and “predictable.” Putin expressed his feelings about Biden during an interview with broadcaster Rossiya 1 TV.

 

“[Biden] is a more experienced, predictable person. He is a politician of the old school. But we will work with any leader of the United States, who is trusted by the American people,” Putin said.

 

Putin ordered the invasion of his neighbor country, Ukraine, during Biden’s presidency. During the same interview,Putin also said that he believes reports of Biden’s cognitive decline to be overdone. (this is obviously not true)

 

“When I met with Biden in Switzerland — it was, indeed, a few years ago, three years — even then there were talks about him being incompetent. I saw nothing of the sort. Yes, he glanced at his notes. Honestly, I glanced at mine too,” Putin said. “There’s nothing to it.”

 

Putin said he had less to fear about Biden’s health than with Washington’s position on Russia, which he called, “extremely harmful and erroneous.” The White House responded to Putin’s comments on Wednesday, urging him to stay away. “Mr. Putin should stay out of America’s elections,” said White House spokesperson Andrew Bates.

 

NEW: As the war in Ukraine drags on,Russian President Putin endorses BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT, says he’s ’more predictable’

 

A vote for Biden is a vote for Putin! pic.twitter.com/ycEI6cZnZn — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 15, 2024

 

Critics of former President Donald Trump long accused him of being a “Russian asset” or “Putin’s puppet” due to his willingness to have diplomatic relations with the country while maintaining a tough foreign policy designed to forbid him from aggressive maneuvers.

 

In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin said that he had no plans to invade Poland, a NATO member, and risk starting World War III.

 

“It is absolutely out of the question. You just don’t have to be any kind of analyst.

 

It goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of a global war and a global war will bring all humanity to the brink of destruction. It’s obvious,” he said.

 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/02/14/putin-biden-better-russia-trump-more-predictable/

 

(There's so many ways to look at this, all of them pretty funny. KEK)

Anonymous ID: 8c9750 Feb. 15, 2024, 3:09 p.m. No.20420336   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>0359 >>0476 >>0597 >>0628 >>0744

Rep. Jim Clyburn to step down from House Democratic leadership post

Story by Scott Wong and Dareh Gregorian • 5h

 

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., announced Wednesday that he’s stepping down from his Democratic leadership position in the House, while a protégé signaled a desire to succeed him.

 

“I have informed Leader Hakeem Jeffries of my intention to step down as Assistant Democratic Leader of the House Democratic Caucus," Clyburn, 83, said in a statement.

 

"I am confident that Leader Jeffries, Whip Katherine Clark, Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, and the entire leadership team will continue the important work of putting people over politics," the statement added.

 

His announcement set off a reshuffling in leadership. Rep. Joe Neguse, 39, D-Colo., a rising star in the party, will run for Clyburn’s leadership post, a House Democratic leadership aide told NBC News. Neguse was one of the impeachment managers during former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and one of three Black leaders in the Democratic Caucus.

 

On Thursday, a Democratic source told NBC News that Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, will run to succeed Neguse as chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee (DPCC), the party's messaging arm, should Neguse win a promotion. Escobar, 54, a former El Paso county judge and a member of the Hispanic Caucus, is one of three co-chairs of the DPCC, but she is seeking to oversee the operation as chair, a post lawmakers refer to as "the chair of chairs."Clyburn saidthat although he’s retiring from leadership,he is still running for re-election to his congressional seat.

 

“I will run for re-election for the Sixth Congressional District," he said, referring to a seat he first won in 1992. "Events of the last several years have made it clear that the greatness of America is at peril, and the threats to our continued pursuit of ‘a more perfect Union’ are real."

 

Clyburn, a top Biden ally, raised eyebrows in late 2022 when he didn't follow the lead of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., to step aside and allow younger members to move up in the ranks.

 

Pelosi and Hoyer are running for re-election for their seats, as well. Like Clyburn and President Joe Biden, they are in their 80s.

 

On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., announced Wednesday that he would not seek re-election to Congress. Green, who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, indicated he believes it's important for people to step aside and let new people enter the House.

 

"In the last few months, in reading the writings of our Framers, I was reminded of their intent for representatives to be citizen-legislators, to serve for a season and then return home," he said in a statement. Green's committee advanced articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that were adopted on the House floor Tuesday night.Nearly two dozen House Republicans and roughly as many House Democrats have opted not to seek re-election in November.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rep-jim-clyburn-to-step-down-from-house-democratic-leadership-post/ar-BB1iilKW