You are well aware of how kind the Ukrainian surrogacy laws are. To ensure that all legal aspects of surrogacy are covered, and you’re safeguarded from any potential legal issues that might arise throughout the process, you should speak with your surrogacy specialist and surrogacy lawyer at HermanFamily.
Surrogacy law: an overview
There is a gap between how surrogacy laws are intended to be enforced and how they are actually implemented in a particular country. Lawyers often should think outside the box to protect their clients in surrogacy contracts, especially in jurisdictions with restrictive gestational surrogacy legislation. In addition, when interpreting certain surrogacy legislation, some courts could be more forgiving than others, and only surrogacy lawyers are aware of these intricacies.
To further understand how the laws in your country and the surrogate’s country are applied and how they will impact your surrogacy procedure, you should consult with an expert local surrogacy attorney.
Legal issues that might arise with surrogacy
Many surrogacy laws govern critical aspects of the surrogacy process.
Commercial surrogacy laws
While many surrogacy experts now support base pay for surrogates, the legal issues involved might be challenging. Some governments completely forbid any kind of payment to surrogates, while others impose a cap on the amount that can be paid to cover the costs of the surrogate’s pregnancy.
Gestational surrogacy laws
Although gestational surrogacy is a more popular form of surrogacy nowadays, traditional surrogacy is illegal in many nations, including Ukraine, so if you’re thinking about it, speak with a lawyer first.
The need for a surrogacy agreement
The legal enforceability of a surrogacy contract is another hot topic. Without clear rules, intending parents might have additional difficulty establishing their parental rights to the child, or surrogates might not collect the negotiated payment.
Finding a lawyer to finish your surrogacy agreement could be difficult if you’re trying to complete the procedure in a country that doesn’t enforce surrogacy contracts.
The availability of pre-birth orders
Paternity identification is one of the trickier components of surrogacy. The intended parents of a child born through surrogacy will need to take further legal measures to secure their parental rights since certain jurisdictions presume that the woman who delivers a baby is the legal parent.
Some of these parental orders can be finalized prior to delivery, while others become effective only after the baby is delivered, and others need the adoption and implementation of other legal post-birth processes. The intended parents’ ability to immediately add their names to the baby’s birth certificate will depend on these surrogacy rules. Once more, the rules of the country will determine when parental rights can be established. In Ukraine, the IPs are written into the birth certificate at the moment of its reception.
Surrogacy laws and regulations
In Ukraine, only gestational surrogacy is allowed. Yet, going through surrogacy in this country has many other benefits from a legal point of view.
But first, the requirements. A couple of IPs have to:
- be in legal heterosexual marriage;
- have medical indications for surrogacy (severe chronic diseases, fertility issues, womb absence, or malformation).
Intended parents are required to provide a marriage certificate. If foreign nationals are participating, this document needs to be properly legalized or apostilled.
A surrogacy agreement is signed if the prospective surrogate mother satisfies all of the intended parents’ medical, psychological, and personal conditions and they choose her. Two copies of this contract, one for the intending parents and the other for the surrogate mother, must be signed in front of a lawyer.
The Vital Statistics Office’s birth registration includes the names of the intended parents from the very beginning.
Also, it’s not possible for a child born in Ukraine via a surrogate mother as a consequence of the transfer of an embryo produced by a foreign married couple to obtain Ukrainian citizenship. If a foreigner gives birth to a baby on Ukrainian soil, the child can’t obtain Ukrainian citizenship unless both parents legally reside in Ukraine and have been there continuously for the whole of the child’s life.