March 25, 2011
12:09 a.m.
In Bangkok, Thailand, Babe 101, operating in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Taiwan, is blunt in its mission. While other agencies shun women seeking surrogacy for the sake of beauty and convenience, Babe 101 welcomes them. For women with eggs incapable of in-vitro fertilization, the outfit presents a gallery of lovely ovum donors with desirable DNA posing in jean shorts by a pool. The Asia-based operation makes pregnancy sound like an illness. Its symptoms include “loss of intimacy,” growing “out of shape” and, of course, “birth pangs.” So what they do to solve this "disease" is fertilize a foreign stranger who will be fed nutritious meals, housed in a Bangkok suburb, monitored around the clock and kept to a precise sleep-wake schedule. This surrogacy is legal in the United States, but not in Asia. Thailand and Taiwan especially are uneasy with the tricky ethics of these wealthy couples paying poorer women to bear their children. In late February, police raided Babe 101’s Bangkok headquarters, a gated two-story house in a quiet suburb. They removed 15 women, all Vietnamese. Two had just given birth and seven were pregnant, among them a woman 20 weeks along with twins, according to Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health.
The problem here is human trafficking which is a huge part of global crime. Almost everywhere in the world has to deal with this problem. Although we do not have a concrete plan to stop human trafficking, due to the fact that people will continue to travel and most human trafficking rings get their people from the tourist population, this raid on one of the dominant businesses in this categories is a step in the right direction.
1 comment:
Human Trafficking is a huge global issue that I feel as if people turn a blind eye towards. It is not widely talked about or discussed and I think many people are just not educated on the issue. They feel like it is not happening here, so why worry about it. But, they are wrong. It is happening here, even in Greensboro, North Carolina. More people should be educated about the issue to help in its awareness.
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