Moscow fines woman in surrogate mother scandal
MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti) - A Moscow court has imposed a substantial fine on a woman at the center of an illegal scheme to sell newborn children to childless couples, prosecutors said Monday.
Muscovite Lyudmila Verzhbitskaya was given a fine of 350,000 rubles (about $12,000) for her role in a surrogate mother scam.
Prosecutors established that Verzhbitskaya, who is pensioner with a medical background, convinced pregnant women to participate in the program. In one incident, in spring 2003, the woman found out that an underage girl was pregnant and did not want to keep the baby. She convinced the girl and her mother to do otherwise.
"When a boy was born, his mother abandoned the baby and Verzhbitskaya hid this from the authorities," a statement from the prosecutor's office said. She then forged documents that the child was a "test-tube baby" and found a couple in Germany to register the child under their name.
"The investigation has established several other instances of similar document forgery and embryo transfer to surrogate mothers," the prosecutors said. "In reality, the pensioner convinced young mothers to give up their parental rights and then sold the babies to rich foster parents for $20,000-$25,000."
This is not the first child-related scandal to hit Russian in recent times. A Siberian man was sentenced to five years in prison after he was arrested August 2 in a police sting as he tried to sell his newborn daughter for $9,000 to provide a kidney for a transplant operation.