There are no statistics on surrogacy legal cases in Russia. We can mention only three cases.
In 2004 a couple from Chita (a Russian city) hired a traditional surrogate mother who was artificially inseminated by the genetic father’s sperm. The surrogate mother did not give up the child for the intended parents, but they did not want to bring the case to court. The surrogate mother sought alimony, and the court awarded her with it. That’s a classical case revealing all the mistakes committed by a couple who hired a surrogate mother on their own – they should have done IVF, not an insemination, and they should have used a donor’s eggs to avoid the genetic relation between the surrogate mother and the baby she carried. There is no need to say that they should have drawn up a sort of contract to fix all the formal and legal details.
An interesting legal case was heard in court on-line in a popular TV-show Chas suda (‘The Court Time’) on November 29, 2004. The surrogate mother bore a child with a heart disease for a couple. It was not said whether the surrogate mother was ‘traditional’ or gestational. The parents gave up their baby saying that they did not want a sick child. They also did not pay the money compensation they had promised to the surrogate mother before. She filed a suit in court for them to pay her the promised sum of money, but the court declined it saying that ‘the European Counsel suggests hiring as surrogates sisters, close relatives and friends of the infertile woman only’, reimbursing only the pregnancy expenses. Well, no comments are needed.
Probably, the most interesting case was heard in one of Moscow courts at the end of 2005. A Russian couple implemented a successful IVF programme in one of Moscow clinics. However, the surrogate mother, who had previously given her consent for bearing the embryos and putting the intended parents’ names on the child’s Birth Certificate upon delivery, tried to question the Birth Certificate after the document had been issued. She explained to the court that she had thought ‘she’d live with the baby’s father’, and there is no need to say that such a ‘marriage’ never came to the father’s mind. No matter how strange it can be (according to Paragraph 3, Article 52 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation, the surrogate mother is not entitled to question the Birth Certificate after this document had been issued), that suit was accepted and the court even arranged a few hearings of it. Eventually, this case was dismissed.