Beware of Greeks Bearing Babies

23 Responses to Beware of Greeks Bearing Babies

1. C.L. says:

   27 August, 2023 at 11:16 pm

   ‘Women locked in Greece baby factory jail’.

   At least one surrogate mother from Georgia involved in the birth of a newborn baby to an Australian couple this month spent the bulk of her pregnancy in a dark flat, under prison-like conditions and ordered by her handler not to leave or talk to anybody.

   “They have empty faces,’’ said one neighbour who lives next door, describing the young women, all of whom are pregnant or recovering from giving birth and believed to be from rural areas of Georgia.

   The neighbour detailed the apparently lonely and miserable existence of the women in the Chania building, which she said was only punctuated during the evening when it was dark and several men arrived.

   “I used to think they were their boyfriends, but now I am not so sure,’’ said the neighbour. “This trafficking case is very unsettling.’’

   The grim lives of these young women, some still teenagers, have been exposed with the eight-month investigation and extensive police raid of the Mediterranean Fertility Clinic in Chania, Crete this month.

   While two Australian families have been able to take their newborns from the hospital and are finalising documents to allow them to obtain an Australian passport to fly home, the future of the surrogates – the victims in this extraordinary story – is unclear.

   Certainly the reality for the surrogates is very different to the assurances given by the clinic’s leaders: director and gynaecologist, 73-year-old Ionnis Giakoumakis; embryologist and scientific director Danny Daphnis, 44; clinic secretary Katerina Dimotaki, 41, and; a 38-year-old woman known as the “fixer” who would liaise with the surrogates. All four are in a Greek prison on remand, and a complex trial is not expected to be listed for hearing until 2025 at the earliest. Another five have been released on bail.

   Police allege the women were brought to Crete under false pretences, and made to undergo hormonal treatments, egg extraction and insemination for surrogacy. This was made possible because foreign parents, especially those in far-flung Australia, would have the barest interactions with the surrogate mothers.

   One surrogate is known to have undergone embryo transfer process 10 times before she became pregnant. Others had the highly uncomfortable egg retrieval procedures on at least four occasions, police have found.

   This distancing of parents from the surrogates was a deliberate policy by the clinic, which meant in at least one known case involving an Australian couple, there were no contact details for their surrogate. They had to send messages to her through clinic “gatekeeper” Ms Dimotaki.

   For some couples this third-person approach was ideal. One couple had not even told their closest family members they were using a surrogate and the woman who carried their child was to have no relationship or further part in their lives. Others had pressed for more information and expressed concern about their surrogate, but were fobbed off by the clinic’s staff.

   One Georgian surrogate, given the pseudonym Anna by the Hellas Postsen, said she only knew the first names of the intended parents and that they were from a foreign country. “When I gave birth, they sent gifts and thanked me. However, too many girls have no idea of the fate of the children they conceived, as they did not know who they would end up with.”

   The Georgian surrogates feared they would get in trouble with Greek police for overstaying their three-month visas and a man known as “the Georgian” would be angered if the discovered the women went outside after dark for more than a few minutes. No one was allowed to visit them.

   Even when the intending parents arrived in Chania when the birth was imminent, their accommodation was arranged by the clinic some kilometres away from where the surrogates were housed and any meetings would be at the clinic or the hospital, under the supervision of clinic staff.

   The women were housed in 14 different apartment blocks around Chania, and paid €200-€600 ($300-$1000) a month for expenses. A baby bonus – usually another €2000-€6000 – was paid upon delivery of a healthy baby. The total payments of around $10,000-$20,000 were promoted as a chance for surrogates to financially “get ahead” in their own country, but after having one baby they would be under pressure to become a surrogate again.

   The intended parents, meanwhile, would face costs for the “altruistic surrogacy program” of more than $150,000 and in some cases more than $200,000.

   The Australian has been told the two Australian couples who were DNA-matched and allowed to remove their babies from the Chania hospital over the weekend have ensured their surrogates have a place to live and are being cared for. The couples have not responded to a request for comment.

   Chania locals only knew that pregnant women had been regularly housed in this building, a few blocks from the four-storey fertility clinic, because occasionally one woman would sneak out and go to the shop across the street and order four takeaway coffees.

   “They were there,’’ a neighbour said, “but they don’t open the door to anybody, especially the authorities. They keep those shutters down all year, all day. The only time we might see them is in the evening when one might duck out for a quick cigarette, but they go back inside very quickly … they seem very frightened.”

   It is believed as many as four women slept in one room.

   No one answered the door on several occasions The Australian knocked.

   However, a local Greek newspaper interviewed one of the surrogates from an unknown eastern country. “If we did not comply we risked being sent back to our country, we were under constant surveillance,” the woman told Ta Nea. “Many girls I lived with were not mentally ready for pregnancy, some were clearly depressed.’’

   The Australian approached a Romanian surrogate who did not want to talk, only waving her hand dismissively and saying “tired’’.

   Other surrogates were lured from Moldova, Bulgaria, Albania and Bulgaria. In the eight months of their investigation, police uncovered 182 women who had been used by the clinic. Seventy-one women had eggs removed and 98 women had became surrogate mothers. Some were used for both.

   Complicating the case is the clinic’s poor record-keeping, and alleged fraudulent documents given to the courts, which police fear could have resulted in embryos being used illegally by other childless couples.

   Police told the court a week ago there were 13 cases of illegality involving the surrogacy program, but this has already expanded to 25, police prosecutor Nikolaos Zdragkas said.

   ——————–

   – Jacquelin Magnay, Europe Correspondent, The Australian
2. C.L. says:

   27 August, 2023 at 11:48 pm

   Catechism of the Catholic Church:

   2376 Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilisation) infringe the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses’ “right to become a father and a mother only through each other.”¹
   ————————-
   1. CDF, Donum vitae II, 1.
3. NFA says:

   28 August, 2023 at 1:01 am

   A ‘bitch’ in a breeding kennel gets better treatment than those unfortunate humans.
4. rosie says:

   28 August, 2023 at 7:03 am

   It was a breeding kennel.
5. Cassie of Sydney says:

   28 August, 2023 at 7:23 am

   STOP surrogacy NOW…and by that I mean ALL surrogacy.

   I repeat, it isn’t a right to have a child.
6. Buccaneer says:

   28 August, 2023 at 7:56 am

   A refusal from our society to admit that the trend to delay conception of children has had serious consequences. Also a refusal to admit that women prioritising work ahead of their own children has had serious consequences.
7. Christine says:

   28 August, 2023 at 8:17 am

   Women can become obsessed in the quest to have a child.
   Nature says no; but today, acceptance is rare.
   Once it was claimed that Mother Nature knew best. That’s been turfed.

   The existence of breeding kennels shouldn’t surprise. Of course the celebrity women who’ve used surrogates, and helped make the practice acceptable, wouldn’t need to go near such a kennel.
8. C.L. says:

   28 August, 2023 at 11:28 am

   It was a breeding kennel.

   Indeed, Rosie.

   Great reporting by Magnay.
9. Rosie says:

   28 August, 2023 at 11:49 am

   The problem, in the main, is waiting til you are pushing forty and being impelled by hormones to long for a child.
   Stop being stupid and have babies when you are young and fertile, no you won’t be able to afford the fancy pram, get over it.
10. Franx says:

    28 August, 2023 at 12:01 pm

    Amazing. Australian parents by occupying a plane seat to Greece can come to find they have their very own newborn baby. The facts of life according to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
11. dover_beach says:

    28 August, 2023 at 12:52 pm

    One of the great things anout Church teaching here is that it’s position on surrogacy, IVF, and the like is related to it’s position on marriage as well as to what is due to the child. This is simply absent from liberalism. The liberal wonders what impediments if any should there be to an individual contracting with third parties to obtain a child. Whereas the Church’s position is that justice demands the parents be known to the child, as well as justice demanding that the spouses only become parents through each other. The liberal scoffs at the idea that chastity also involves refraining from such mechanical measures because they betray the unity of the spouses. The enormity of which always comes to mind when I hear Heart’s All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You.
12. Buccaneer says:

    28 August, 2023 at 1:03 pm

    Artificially high real estate prices, in a country where we have no shortage of land, but large shortages of actual accommodation because of big government restricting artificially access to land and development, along with the shortages in materials, licencing of trades and the demonisation of trades from the Keating government on.

    This artifically high cost of real estate makes it hard for young folk to see a secure environment for raising a family. This is a real problem and one no one seems to want to address. One should not need a 7 figure donation from their parents to afford a stable roof over their head.
13. Tintarella di Luna says:

    28 August, 2023 at 4:33 pm

    Dear oh dear – human trafficking of both the birthing person and the birthed person. What a travesty.
14. twostix says:

    28 August, 2023 at 5:45 pm

    So i’m guessing 99% of these “parents” are fags.

    Hetero couples generally don’t need to go offshore and buy a foreign womans eggs and womb.
15. rosie says:

    28 August, 2023 at 6:31 pm

    Seems that way though in fact surrogacy for gay couples is illegal in Greece.

    Police have alleged that clinic staff falsely assured clients it was legal to provide surrogacy to homosexual couples and women over 50. Mr Zdragkas alleged that in some cases, courts were provided with falsified documents in order to obtain consent.

    From the Australian.
16. Cassie of Sydney says:

    28 August, 2023 at 6:41 pm

    “So i’m guessing 99% of these “parents” are fags.”

    Probably.
17. Old Lefty says:

    28 August, 2023 at 7:01 pm

    It’s impossible to keep up with political correctness/wokery. You are not supposed to treat women as mere mindless breeding machines- except when you are. Gays certainly belong to the approved category.
18. Cassie of Sydney says:

    28 August, 2023 at 7:03 pm

    Surrogate slaves. I’m reminded of what the Nazis did in Eastern Europe during World War II, they had a special Aryan breeding programme with blond haired and blue eyed Slavic women who looked “Nordic” to procreate with German soldiers and give birth to Aryan looking children.

    When I read Magnay’s excellent piece in the Oz this morning, I felt the blood drain from my body, just like what happened on Saturday when I read Janet A’s superb piece in the Oz on the Harry Garside imbroglio. I confess, I am no longer able to quite fathom this hideously Godless, greedy, and selfish society we’ve become. However there is one thing I am sure of, and that is that such a society cannot last. Because such a society that defies God and defies nature will not linger long.

    “legal to provide surrogacy to homosexual couples and women over 50”

    As I said above, it is not a right to have a child. But we now live in a society saturated with “me, me, me, me”, and a society obsessed with “rights”, which of course is only the rights of the selfish westerners wanting to buy babies to satisfy their egos. The selfish westerners, including those two Australian couples, are completely unconcerned with the rights of the ALWAYS poor women trafficked in surrogate slavery, of the babies created in this unnatural way (and it is unnatural), and of the women who are dying as surrogates (deliberately under-reported by the MSM), you won’t read about any of this because it doesn’t fit the narrative. So well done to the Greek authorities for shutting down this…as Rosie so accurately described….breeding kennel.
19. Old Lefty says:

    28 August, 2023 at 7:04 pm

    At the rate we’re going, the child ‘care’ lobby will have biological parents who want to spend more than 60 minutes a day in their children’s company classified as child abusers.
20. Lee says:

    28 August, 2023 at 7:11 pm

    Gay couples are absolutely not entitled to children who are not the offspring of one of them, IMO.

    You make your lifestyle choice, so you can’t have it both ways.

    Children are entitled to a mother and father.
21. NFA says:

    28 August, 2023 at 9:44 pm

    On a related note of nil concern for individuals in the ‘me’ world.

    Women widowed and children orphaned by the cult of ‘trans’
22. Tel says:

    29 August, 2023 at 6:59 pm

    While no precise figures are available – shoddy record-keeping at the Mediterranean Fertility Institute is one vagary in a shambles being investigated by Greek police – it is also alleged that some surrogate mothers, past and present, are in fact biological parents.

    It’s Greece … shambolic paperwork is normal, and as the German bond-holders discovered, government paperwork is worse, and the Greek Treasury Dept is worse of all.

    Look, I’m a tiny bit alergic to the argument, “Oh the stupid workers are so easily fooled and need beneficent overlords to look after them from unscrupulous capitalists!” because the simple fact of history is that overlords rarely if ever turn out to be benificent … power corrupts and if the small amount of power that comes from turning a profit corrupts some dealers … then the much larger power of being able to shut down whole industries at a stroke will corrupt a heck of a lot more.

    Besides, if ever there was a commodity backed by more blood and misery than anything else in human history, then it would be oil … wars all over the place, even being fought today, refugees, death, destruction … far worse than some miserable poor girls with a dodgy Greek boss. Therefore we are any minute now going to give up using petroleum products, am I right?
23. NFA says:

    30 August, 2023 at 12:14 pm

    Check out Dr Naomi Wolf’s substack,

    The Covenant of Death