Despite clear legal provisions, eight mothers from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tuzla, Sarajevo, Mostar and Zenica, offer surrogacy via the Internet.
In our country, surrogacy is strictly prohibited and punishable, so it still remains unclear how they manage to give birth to children.
According to a specialized website, 17 couples from Bosnia and Herzegovina are looking for surrogate mothers.
Eight of them offer surrogacy. One woman updated her profile on this world-famous site for finding surrogate mothers at the beginning of this month.
“Those here cannot achieve that. Not even, let’s say, bringing out biological material, when we are talking about embryos, germ cells that are stored in one of the centers, and if that patient or a couple wants to do infertility treatment, not even exporting that material it is not allowed outside the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” said dr. Igor Hudić from the Commission for Biomedical Assisted Fertilization FBiH.
Hudić explains to us that the fines are very high, that is, the prison sentence is from three to ten years.
We actually have a ban, it is absolutely not allowed, not only surrogacy but also any kind of donor program, talking about male and female infertility. It is absolutely not allowed and is a criminal offense if any of the centers that deal with infertility treatment, if they deal with it.
In our law, donation, hetero-insemination, surrogacy is not allowed.
That is definitely planned in some kind of next phase. It is important that we have this law now, where we have a huge number of couples with the problem of infertility, which they could not have until now
financing, he could not provide himself with the treatment procedure and the IVF procedure itself.
For many years, doctor Suada Tinjić has been considered a prominent expert when it comes to infertility treatment.
He tells that there is a very small number of those who need surrogacy and that couples mostly seek it in countries where it is allowed, although it carries a number of consequences, legal, social and psychological.
He believes that the fact that Bosnia and Herzegovina finally has a law on medically assisted insemination is a big step forward.
“Certainly there is a need to talk about it, because it belongs to one of the real problems of people and couples who want to become parents, but are unable to do so through biomedically supported insemination. I think that the issue of surrogacy should only be discussed in the public discourse to open up, because it’s a very sensitive issue that needs to be elaborated in a broader way, and I don’t think that path will be easy given the sensitivity,” she says.
Surrogate motherhood is still a taboo topic in Bosnia and Herzegovina, because there is not even a word about it in the public space.
Surrogacy is not allowed in most countries of the European Union either.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, this will probably remain under strict legal procedures, i.e. bans, for a long time.
