Thailand's booming business in surrogacy is an ethical swamp

Lorraine

A surrogate has twins. One of them has Down Syndrome. The biological parents only want the perfect child, and leave the Down Syndrome baby with the surrogate. Later it emerges, the father, David John Farnell, was convicted of 22 charges of child sex abuse in the 1990s in Australia. He met his current wife via a matchmaking agency. The child with Down Syndrome remains in Thailand with the surrogate mother, Farnell and his wife have the "healthy" twin. 

A Japanese businessman, multimillionaire Mitsutoki Shigeta, has had at least 15 children with surrogates whose births were weeks or months apart, and were all living in one house. The 24-year-old says his motives are pure; a large family is all he wants. He broke no law;

Reproductive exploitation--one more way to abuse women

The other evening as I watched the PBS special Half the Sky, a documentary spotlighting the outrageous treatment of women in many parts of the world, I thought of another abuse of women which needs to be put front and center, reproduction exploitation.