International surrogacy has been a big topic during the Covid pandemic. Commissioning parents were stranded on one side of a border and their surrogate and the baby on the other. Journalists featured anguished couples desperate to pick their baby. The war in Ukraine made the situation even more dramatic.

But Covid seems to have been a double-edged sword. Kidspot, a News Ltd website for lifestyle parenting, features an American couple left holding the baby. Amanda carried twins for a foreign couple and gave birth in February 2021. But the commissioning parents never showed up. “They weren’t willing to quarantine for two weeks before entering the US,” Amanda told Kidspot. “Not only did they not pick up the twins – they never established their parental rights.”

Now Amanda and her husband are the legal parents. They don’t know what to do. The biological parents “on the other side of the world” have been in touch occasionally and even sent some money to cover costs. But the twins celebrated their first birthday recently and the commissioning couple didn’t bother to contact them.

What comes next? Amanda and her husband don’t know.