Welcoming a baby into the world is a beautiful, difficult-to-properly-explain thing, but there can be no doubting that it can also be extremely stressful.
Though science and medicine have come on leaps and bounds, delivering a baby can be fraught with risk, even today, and as a parent you’ll continue to fret over your child’s health from the second they arrive.
Now just imagine that your baby – or babies, as the case may be – was born in a war zone, and potentially lacked what was needed to keep them alive.
Well, that terrifying scenario was all too real for Chicago residents Alex Spektor and Irma Nuñez, whose joy at having twin baby boys was soured by the fact that their surrogate, a woman named Katya, was in Ukraine when she gave birth.
Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few weeks, you’ll know full well that Ukraine is one of the last places on earth suitable for a baby to enter the world right now.
Though Alex – who originally hails from Kyiv, Ukraine – and his partner Irma live in the US, they were left helpless when their boys arrived.
Making matters worse, the twins, named Moishe and Lenny, needed special formula and expert care because they were born prematurely. Yet moving them to another location posed life-threatening complications.