A noble couple from the Philippines demanded the fulfillment of a Russian “order” for children

The high-profile case surrounding surrogate twins found in Odintsovo in winter took an unexpected turn

The surrogate twins that MK wrote about were transferred to a foster Russian family. A married couple from the Philippines, Fredenila and Jane Castro, who once ordered these children from a surrogate mother, again demanded that the Russian authorities return to them Augusto and Anita (names have been changed), conceived in a test tube and born to a third woman. Another donor provided her reproductive cells for the IVF procedure.

Legal battles surrounding this case have been ongoing for several years. With a final but inconclusive decision, the RF Supreme Court returned it to the appellate court. This means that the process is not completed and the end is not set, but the twins are now completely safe.

These children were found under very strange circumstances, in the winter of 2020 in Odintsovo, in the company of two more surrogate babies, one of whom was dead. They were born in the fall of 2019, but customers did not arrive for them on time, citing their busyness. Until the police came to the rented apartment, where strangers were looking after the abandoned babies.

The twins are now victims in a high-profile human trafficking case, the trial of which is still ongoing. Some of the sentences for ordinary performers were handed down last year, and the main defendant, Konstantin Svitnev, who ran a company for the creation and sale of surrogate babies, is still on the run and arrested in absentia.

Everything would be fine, but all the time that the investigation was ongoing, the genetic father of the boy and girl, a member of the local parliament, Filipino Fredenil Castro, continued to insist on the return of the twins to him and even addressed this request to Putin.

By the way, within a fairly short period of time, the Castro couple became the parents of as many as seven children from Russia. The same Konstantin Svitnev wrote openly about this.

The fate of the five previous babies is unknown, although Castro is convinced that they live with them, the sixth and seventh – Anita and Augusto – are still on Russian territory. So that the children, who are almost four years old, do not await their fate in the orphanage, it was decided that they would be taken into preliminary care by a resource family. So at the moment they “are in safe and comfortable conditions of living, education and development.”

The Castro spouses insist that the children were placed in guardianship “without their knowledge and against their will.” They demand that the twins be handed over to them immediately and that communication not be interfered with.

However, as noted by the Ministry of Social Development of the Moscow Region, the twins will be returned to the Filipinos only after a judicial act – a decision of the Supreme Court (SC) of the Russian Federation – enters into legal force.

The Filipino couple sent a response statement to the department, where they said that “there is no dispute, there is an unwillingness of the guardianship authorities to return the children to their parents.” The Castro spouses believe that both children belong to them and should not live in a foreign country and a foreign family, even if there are living parents and brothers/sisters. So there is still a long way to go in this story. Despite the fact that this high-profile case ultimately became a precedent for legislators, because it was from this that the ban on the use of surrogacy technologies in Russia for foreigners, as well as for couples in which only one of the parents is genetically related, began to be discussed and was finally adopted , and single men.