Global action plan needed to combat ‘outsourcing’ of babies

TWENTY Filipino women have been rescued in Cambodia after being trafficked as surrogate mothers.

They said they were recruited online and ended up in Cambodia, where surrogacy is illegal.

Thirteen of the pregnant women were taken to a Cambodian hospital while the Philippine Embassy in Phnom Penh works to repatriate them.

Authorities suspect the women were victims of a syndicate that preyed on Southeast Asian women from poor communities willing to become surrogate mothers.

Surrogacy offers women with pregnancy issues, single men, and male couples a way to achieve biological parenthood and ultimately start a family. But surrogacy has sparked ethical and legal debates.

Pope Francis wants a universal ban on surrogacy, deploring it as “a serious violation of the dignity of women and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”

Some countries such as Cambodia, China and Italy have banned it altogether. Others, such as Belgium, Canada, Denmark and the United Kingdom, allow “altruistic surrogacy,” in which the surrogate mother receives compensation only for her expenses.

In the United States, surrogacy is allowed in some states and prohibited in others.

Critics of surrogacy are anchoring their opposition to human rights issues, saying children from surrogacy pregnancies are vulnerable to having their rights to identity and health violated and not sold off.

In a number of countries, including the Philippines and India, the surrogacy industry is legal but highly regulated.

Commercial surrogacy is a widely accepted practice that requires a legal agreement detailing the intentions of both the intended parents, or IPs, and the surrogate mother, reimbursements and payments, and other specifics.

In the Philippines, legitimate clinics offer surrogacy-based “guaranteed baby programs,” procedures that cost as much as P3 million.

The requirements – and associated fees – could prove prohibitive for some IPs, who could be desperate enough to look for more suitable options.

The restrictions have created an international black market for baby “outsourcing” – matching IPs with surrogates. Syndicates lure women into having their wombs ‘rented’.

A 2014 article in Yale Global Online noted that “the lack of international regulation leaves surrogacy largely to the brokers and vulnerable parties.”

Surrogates may not be paid and the intended parents may end up being overcharged.

‘Outsourced’ children, meanwhile, are left to deal with legal issues regarding their medical history.

In 2022, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, Mama Fatima Singhateh, red flagged the Philippines for being a source and destination for child trafficking and sale, saying the country lacks legal had provisions to punish child exploitation.

Globally, surrogacy has many gray areas that need to be clarified. Basic principles need to be agreed upon: Commercial surrogacy is not inherently unethical, but the commodification of women it promotes is.

Commodification has “instrumentalized” women, treating them as “disposable resources” that only benefit the fertility industry.

One way forward is to strictly regulate commercial surrogacy to prevent the exploitation of surrogate mothers.

This approach should be consistent with the concept of reproductive justice, which gives women the right to freely decide to become surrogates.

The right of the surrogate child must be protected at all costs. Every child born through a surrogacy arrangement must be given a nationality from birth, as part of their right to identity.

Conventions and protocols relating to children, adoptees or refugees could provide the model for establishing international guidelines and protection measures relating to surrogacy.

Hand in hand with establishing a global strategy on surrogacy should go hand in hand with an intensive crackdown on the black market for outsourcing babies. The illegal surrogacy operations exposed in Cambodia reveal the regional reach of the syndicate behind it.

As a regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations must become more involved in tackling baby traffickers.

In fact, it has an “Action Plan against Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children,” which, among other things, calls for improved “cross-border cooperation and intelligence sharing and information exchange to disrupt the activities of traffickers.”

Now is the time to put that plan into action.