Police in Crete close surrogate mother clinic due to human trafficking
In 2019, ZEIT ONLINE reported on a Greek clinic where couples from Germany had children born. Now the police have arrested the doctors.
Greek police have closed a surrogacy clinic on the island of Crete and arrested eight employees, including the facility's two senior doctors. The police in Athens said it was a "criminal organization whose members are said to be guilty of human trafficking and illegal child adoptions," the police in Athens said in response to the case , which is currently causing a stir across the country . ZEIT ONLINE had already reported on the same clinic in the city of Chania in an investigative research in 2019 and uncovered a number of inconsistencies back then. Some media in Greece also accuse the investigators of thisthat they should have intervened sooner. Surrogacy is permitted in Greece under strict legal requirements, but even back then research showed that these were not being adhered to in the now closed clinic.
As the police further announced, in the far-reaching investigations since last December alone, at least "182 cases of exploitation of women in the area of egg retrieval and surrogacy have been registered", and there have been a further 400 cases of fraud in the area of artificial insemination. According to the police, the 73-year-old director and founder of the clinic, whom the ZEIT ONLINE reporters spoke to during their undercover research, together with other employees, set up an international network of "brokers" to bring "vulnerable foreign women" to Greece and "exploit them there as egg donors or surrogate mothers".
The Greek police continue to say that the aim was to meet the “wishes of the organization’s customers from all over the world”. These were childless couples, as well as single or same-sex men who wanted to have children. In 2019, the two reporters from ZEIT ONLINE posed as a childless couple from Germany at the clinic under a false identity and met one of the surrogate mothers. The head of the clinic confirmed at the time that he had already worked “with many couples from Germany”. In Greece, however, surrogacy is only permitted on condition that there is no commercial purpose associated with it. For example, a friend or relative may carry a baby for a childless couple. A prerequisite is also judicial permission for such surrogacy. According to the police, the clinic often forged these.
Women housed in 14 controlled apartments
The surrogate mother told ZEIT ONLINE reporters at the clinic that she came from Bulgaria and was carrying a baby for a German couple at the time. It was not possible to find out more about the woman at the time because the surrogate mothers were shielded from interested customers. As the police have now determined, the clinic housed the women in "controlled rooms" in 14 specially prepared apartments with the aim of becoming pregnant there. Greek media also report that the surrogate mothers were primarily Roma women from Bulgaria and Romania from very difficult economic backgrounds.
According to the police, the clinic generally earned between 70,000 and 100,000 euros per surrogacy, "of which 70 percent made up the net profit," according to the investigators. The eight suspects in the case have now been handed over to the Greek public prosecutor's office.