Keep the baby or go to jail, surrogates told

Pregnant women held and forced to keep children they were paid to bear after Cambodian crackdown

A CAMBODIAN woman had just given birth when she saw a Chinese man peering desperately through the window to her Phnom Penh hospital room.

Security would not let him enter. But nine months earlier the man had agreed to pay the 24-year-old $10,000 (£7,800) to be a surrogate, and the boy in her arms was biologically his.

In June, authorities arrested her and 31 other pregnant surrogates, detaining them in a police hospital.

She spent five months there. During labour, she was twice chained to her bed. Nor did her release come easily. In order to avoid up to 15 years in prison, the illiterate villager agreed to raise the child as her own.

On Wednesday, like the 31 other surrogates, she stamped her thumbprint on an agreement acknowledging she would be arrested if she ever sent the child to its adoptive family.

The Chinese father is unlikely to see his child again.

The case highlights the impact of Cambodia’s announcement earlier this year that surrogates who sold their babies overseas could be charged under human trafficking laws, a response to a surge in cases brought on by a 2015 ban on the trade in neighbouring Thailand.

An official working with the National Committee for Counter Trafficking said the women were released on “humanitarian grounds”, as although they had committed a crime, the children themselves were innocent.

“I love [the boy] and it’s my right to keep him,” the woman, known only as Lee, told The Daily Telegraph over the phone from her home in the province of Kampong Speu.

“My husband loves him as well,” she said. “He looked after him last night.”

Even Lee’s four-year-old daughter has taken to playing with the boy, named Korng.

In total, however, Lee received only $3,000 of the sum she was promised.

Making ends meet will not be easy. Lee plans to return to the garment factory where she once worked.

“I hope to make at least $200 per month,” she told The Telegraph, disobeying a government directive that none of the women involved speak to the media.

“Together with the income of my husband, who works in construction, I think it’s possible to look after the boy.”

Demand for surrogacy services in Asia has risen following the end of China’s one-child policy.

But since Jan 8, Cambodia has taken an increasingly hard line on the trade as the children involved are sold, it claims, as “goods”.