Category: Articles

Article: Gay Couple Win Custody Battle Over Thai Surrogate Mother

Gay Couple Win Custody Battle Over Thai Surrogate Mother
By Oliver Holmes | The Guardian | April 26, 2016

the guardianThis article follows up on a case in Thailand involving a same-sex couple that won a legal battle against the gestational mother who gave birth to their daughter, but refused to sign the paperwork to allow the baby to leave the country when she found out they were gay. It also provides links to articles covering the case of Baby Gammy and a 24-year old Japanese businessman who fathered 16 children with Thai gestational mothers – both of which led to the country’s current ban on the practice.

Read the full article >

For additional background on the case, read more by Oliver Holmes at The Guardian.

Article: Thailand Bans Commercial Surrogacy

Thailand Bans Commercial Surrogacy
By The Guardian | Feb. 20, 2015

the guardianThe Baby Gammy case made headlines in August 2014, when a Thai gestational mother claimed that Australian intended parents abandoned Gammy because of a diagnosis of Downs Syndrome.

This article provides an overview of the case and key elements of the law that came into effect soon after.

According to Thailand’s new law:

  • Foreign and same-sex couples are banned from seeking surrogacy services in the country.
  • Only married heterosexuals, with at least one Thai partner are allowed surrogacy.
  • No fees are allowed for the service.
  • Gestational mothers must be Thai, over 25 years old, and related to the intended parents.

Read the full article >

For more background on the Baby Gammy case and international commercial surrogacy in Thailand, read:

Article: Baby Markets and the New Motherhood

Baby Markets and the New Motherhood: Reproducing Hierarchy in Commercial Intimacy
By Michele Goodwin | Huffington Post | May 13, 2015

Excerpt:

huffington post logoIn recent weeks, the private reproductive decisions of Elton John and Sofia Vergara have spilled over into prime time news cycles — albeit by the celebrities themselves. Elton John called for a boycott of all Dolce and Gabbana merchandise after the designers regrettably referred to babies born through in vitro fertilization as “synthetic” children. The swift backlash caused the designers to issue statements of clarification and apology. Elton John’s twitter followers accused D&G of being woefully out of touch — not only with contemporary fashion, but also baby-making. In part, they are right.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), tens of thousands of children are born each year in the United States through assisted reproductive technologies (ART). These technologies provide a stunning candy store of options: a spectrum so vast in array, scope, and breadth as to make heads spin: in vitro fertilization, ova selling, cryopreservation of ova, womb renting, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryo transfer, assisted hatching, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of ova, embryo grading, and more. However, these technologies are not just for celebrities.

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Michele Goodwin is a law professor at the UC Irvine School of Law. She is also the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and author of “Baby Markets: Money and The New Politics of Creating Families.”

Article: The Cost of Life

The Cost of Life
By Justine Griffin | The Sarasota Herald Tribune | 2014


In this article, organized into chapters, the author describes her own experience as an egg provider and details the stories of others – including one woman who has so little trouble that she donates five times, and another who develops severe endometriosis symptoms.

Excerpt:

One night last summer at my parent’s dinner table, I told my mom and dad that I wanted to help somebody have a baby. The usual lively suppertime conversation and laughter died down, and my parents lost their appetites. They didn’t want to joke about that time I drove my brother’s four-wheeler into a tree anymore.

I told them I am like the thousands of other women — the daughters, sisters, girlfriends or wives at someone else’s dinner table — who donate their eggs to couples who cannot conceive a child on their own.

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Article: Baby Traffickers Thriving in Nigeria as Recession Hits

Baby Traffickers Thriving in Nigeria as Recession Hits
By Anamesere Igboeroteonwu and Tom Esslemont | Thomson Reuters Foundation | Oct. 12, 2016

screen-shot-2016-10-25-at-11-26-11-amThis investigative piece builds on an earlier Al Jazeera article on Nigeria’s baby farmers.

In conversation with more than ten Nigerian women, the Reuters team documents their experiences being duped into giving up their newborns to strangers – in houses known as “baby factories” – or being offered children whose origins were unknown. It also describes the use of “studs” (men paid to get women pregnant), and the cultural and political context that is making it hard for the Nigerian government to respond.

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Article: Offshore Babies: The Murky World of Transnational Surrogacy

Offshore Babies: The Murky World of Transnational Surrogacy
By Amel Ahmad | Al Jazeera | Aug. 11, 2014

Excerpt:

al jazeera logoThe case of an Australian couple accused of abandoning their child with his Thai surrogate mother after discovering he had Down syndrome — and taking home his healthy twin — has turned global attention to the murky underworld of international surrogacy.

Such cases have raised ethical and legal dilemmas, which experts say are the inevitable consequences of an unregulated multibillion-dollar industry dependent on impoverished women in developing countries providing a “product” — a child — so desperately wanted by would-be parents in wealthier nations.

In Baby Gammy’s case, which made international headlines this month, the boy’s Australian parents are claiming that the Thai surrogate mother, Pattaramon Chanbua, refused to release the child into their custody and that they lacked the legal right to force her to do so.

This article provides a global overview of laws related to international commercial surrogacy, with a focus on Thailand. It delves into issues specific to the rights of children – such as citizenship and legal parentage – and links to the work being done by the Hague Conference on Private International Law, an intergovernmental organization, on the legal challenges posed by the practice.

Read the full article >

Read a report, Global Surrogacy Practices, published by Marcy Darnovsky and Diane Beeson, summarizing discussions on global surrogacy at the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy, The Hague, August 2014.

Article: Surrogacy Boom in Mexico Brings Tales of Missing Money and Stolen Eggs

Surrogacy Boom in Mexico Brings Tales of Missing Money and Stolen Eggs
By Jo Tuckman | The Guardian | Sept. 25, 2014

Excerpt:

the guardian Five days after her caesarean section, Nancy boarded a night bus in the southern Mexican city of Villahermosa and made the 10-hour journey back to her home in the capital. Instead of a baby, she nursed a wad of bills buried in a blue handbag she never let out of her sight.

The cash was the final instalment of her 150,000-peso (£7,000) fee to be a surrogate mother for a gay couple from San Francisco. After a traumatic year that included being all but abandoned by the agency supposedly looking after her, and being falsely accused of demanding additional cash to hand over the baby, Nancy was not so sure it had been worth it. “I just wanted to get my money, go home, rest and forget about it all,” said the 24-year-old, sitting in her tiny apartment in a poor barrio of Mexico City. “And now the money is all gone.”

Nancy’s story says much about the southern Mexican state of Tabasco’s emergence as the world’s most dynamic new centre of international surrogacy, fuelled by the tightening of restrictions in other countries such as India and Thailand.

This article follows gestational mothers and intended parents in Mexico, providing important insights into their lives, the contexts that frame their decisions, and their experiences within surrogacy arrangements and after. In light of closer scrutiny and tighter regulation, it also reveals the chameleon-like nature of the clinics and agencies in between. Mexico Surrogacy, one featured agency, for example, is reportedly set up like a charity that receives “donations” from intended parents which is then passed on to gestational mothers in the form of “aid.”

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Article: A Brief History of Donor Conception

A Brief History of Donor Conception
by Wendy Kramer | The Huffington Post | May 10, 2016

In a timeline stretching from the year 1322 up through the late 1980s, Wendy Kramer, co-founder and director of the Donor Sibling Registry, highlights the development and use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) around the world.

View the full timeline >

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The Donor Sibling Registry (DSR) was founded in 2000 to assist individuals conceived as a result of sperm, egg or embryo donation that are seeking to make mutually desired contact with others with whom they share genetic ties. DSR advocates for the right to honesty and transparency for donor children, and for social acceptance, legal rights and valuing the diversity of all families. For more information, visit the website.

 

Article: Assembling the Global Baby

Assembling the Global Baby
By Tamara Audi and Arlene Chang | The Wall Street Journal | Dec. 10, 2010

This article provides a global overview on laws related to international commercial surrogacy, highlighting the transnational mobility of the practice as regulation around it changes. It might require a subscription or free sign up to The Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

the wallstreet journal logoIn a hospital room on the Greek island of Crete with views of a sapphire sea lapping at ancient fortress walls, a Bulgarian woman plans to deliver a baby whose biological mother is an anonymous European egg donor, whose father is Italian, and whose birth is being orchestrated from Los Angeles.

She won’t be keeping the child. The parents-to-be—an infertile Italian woman and her husband (who provided the sperm)—will take custody of the baby this summer, on the day of birth. […]

The man bringing together this disparate group is Rudy Rupak, chief executive of PlanetHospital.com LLC, a California company that searches the globe to find the components for its business line. The business, in this case, is creating babies.

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Initiative: Stop Surrogacy Now

Stop Surrogacy Now
Global | 2015

Stop Surrogacy Now is a global effort to oppose the “exploitation of women and the human trafficking of children through surrogacy.” According to the website, the group includes more than 100 individuals and 16 organizations from 18 countries, who believe all forms of surrogacy should be stopped because it is an abuse of women’s and children’s human rights.

In an article published on Public Discourse, co-founder Kathleen Sloan, describes the genesis of Stop Surrogacy Now, from 2011, when she and co-founder Jennfier Lahl first met at a screening of the documentary Eggsploitation, to the initiative’s current reach and status as a network that has, says Sloan, brought together people who might otherwise be “at each other’s throats.”

Here is an excerpt:

What sets this campaign apart is that Stop Surrogacy Now (SSN) unites organizations and individuals with opposing positions on many other issues—including the emotionally explosive issue of abortion. In the United States especially, no other issue ignites such passionate responses and produces such vitriolic debate. It has even led to violence, including eight murders and over forty clinic bombings. As time goes on, the contentiousness of the issue only seems to increase rather than dissipate. It is therefore extraordinary that so many people who stand on opposite sides of this issue have come together to stop the surrogacy juggernaut.

This campaign also brings together the fervently religious and the entirely non-religious, those who advocate LGBTQ rights and those who oppose same-sex marriage, feminists and non-feminists, the radical right and the radical left along with those in between, neoliberal capitalists and socialists, death-with-dignity supporters and those who consider it to be a form of euthanasia.

Visit Stop Surrogacy Now, read the full article, and follow the initiative’s outreach with The Hague on the human rights issues posed by international commercial surrogacy.