Anastasia was living in Zaporizhzhia and was pregnant with Dorothy and Charlie’s baby. Then Russia invaded and she knew she had to escape to save the child.
One cold day in December 2021, a former primary schoolteacher in Suffolk opened her laptop, clicked on a Zoom link and was introduced to a beautician in Ukraine who would carry her baby. Dorothy, then 43, and her husband Charlie, 44, who worked for a printing company, had been trying to conceive for eight years. When the last attempt ended in miscarriage, a consultant had suggested surrogacy.
The agency had sent a number of women’s profiles to choose from. Among them was Anastasia. She had a young son called Alexander, a pet hamster, and didn’t like fish or aubergines. She had a soft round face, dark hair down to her shoulders and a way of looking at her child that Dorothy thought was tender.
Dorothy asked if she could meet Anastasia on Zoom. She had no illusions about the surrogate’s motivation: of course, it came down to money. “But I wanted to check she was happy to work with me.”
When she dialled in, Anastasia was in the agency’s office in Kyiv, with the agency’s “parent-coordinator”, acting as her translator. Both women felt nervous. Dorothy was touched by Anastasia’s empathy. Anastasia thought Dorothy had “good energy”. They agreed to work together: Dorothy and Charlie’s DNA, Anastasia’s body, at a cost of £43,000. They thanked each other and said goodbye, fully expecting never to see or talk to each other again (the agency recommended this “for their own protection”).
But even as they spoke, the world they inhabited was spinning out of control. Approximately 100,000 Russian troops were gathered on the border of Ukraine. When Russia invaded, on 24 February 2022, 42 British babies were being carried by Ukrainian surrogates. Anastasia was one of them. This is the story of what happened to the surrogacy industry amid that chaos – and the extraordinary steps Dorothy and Charlie took to keep Anastasia and the baby safe.