GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: More surrogate mothers jailed in Cambodia

domingo, 28 de julio de 2019

BioEdge: More surrogate mothers jailed in Cambodia

BioEdge: More surrogate mothers jailed in Cambodia

Bioedge

More surrogate mothers jailed in Cambodia

by Michael Cook | 28 Jul 2019 |

^{Children in Phnom Penh / by Ronny Sison on Unsplash}

Cambodia is continuing to jail surrogate mothers. Three women were charged with human trafficking last week. After being detained in Vietnam they had been handed over to Cambodian authorities, allegedly carrying babies for foreign nationals. If convicted, they could be jailed for as long as 20 years.

One of the women has already delivered her baby.

Cambodia hastily outlawed surrogacy in 2016 after Thailand also banned it. Since then, dozens of women and some surrogacy agents have been arrested.

But the rewards are high for women who are willing to take the risk, or who are desperate. Surrogates told Reuters that agents offered them US$10,000. This is more than six times the average annual salary in Cambodia. .

“The effect of the law should be to focus on the perpetrators and agents of surrogacy, who are often men, not the women who carry the children,” Chak Sopheap, head of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, told Reuters. “The possibility that these women were coerced or driven by poverty to become surrogates is high.”

In December 32 women were released on bail and in April another 11 – on the condition that they raise the child as their own.

Cambodian authorities take a dim view of surrogacy.

Chou Bun Eng, of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking, told ABC Newsthat commercial surrogacy was buying or selling children and was therefore human trafficking. "They hide the baby in the womb and deliver them or bring them across borders," she said.

“As the woman who gives birth to the baby, she’s the mother. And if she gives up [her child], she’s violating the law of a mother’s responsibility, and if she’s involved in selling her own infant to others, she will be punished,” she told the Phnom Penh Post.

Sam Everingham of Australian-based Families Through Surrogacy says that Cambodia’s current policy is nonsense: "To compare child-trafficking to surrogacy is an ignorant and far-fetched comparison.”

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

What's in a name? Does it make a difference if (by way of example) the widespread abortion of unborn children with Down syndrome is called "eugenics"? A number of bioethicists deny that it is, even though the rates of termination reach 90% if a diagnosis is made before birth. From their point of view, "eugenics" is a word reserved for Nazi atrocities. The destruction of children with Down syndrome is not being carried out by Nazis, ergo, it is not eugenics.

A number of bioethicists writing from a disability perspective disagree. We have presented some of their arguments in a special issue of the Journal of Policy and Practice in Intellectual Disabilities. They have a refreshingly different opinion on this contentious topic.