TO HAVE A Child

Parents go to great lengths to realize the dream of childbirth. Many hire surrogates in Ukraine. When the war came, two of those pregnant women set out on an all-night, cross-country escape, desperate to make someone else's dream come true-and their own.

- ERIN O'BRIEN

In the early hours of the 21st day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Taisiia Zyma gripped the edges of her hospital bed in Lviv, her pink gel nails digging into her palms. She is blond and blue-eyed, and her dark, tattooed eyebrows were knit together in concentration and pain. With a black T-shirt and colorful blankets bunched around her, black plastic covering the windows behind her to hide the hospital's lights, she heaved her way through her final moments of labor. Five nurses and a doctor encouraged her, told her to breathe, to keep pushing another person's child into the world.

More than 300 miles away, in Kyiv, the capital of her country, Russian troops were attacking harder and more ruthlessly each day. They hit a civilian apartment block while Taisiia was in labor, killing five residents. In the southern port city of Mariupol, hundreds of thousands of civilians were trapped, under siege by Russian forces, with limited food and water. Corpses including those of children and babies-lay in the street and on the cold floor of a makeshift morgue in a hospital basement there. The city of Kharkiv was heavily damaged by the Russian army, and the city of Kherson occupied. As Taisiia pushed mightily, willing new life into the world, the lives of hundreds of children had already been lost.

Two Mothers Ulyana Zvyahintseva (left) and Taisiia Zyma, both pregnant, in their apartment in Lviv. The women completed their surrogate pregnancies together, away from their families in central Ukraine.