Womb for Hire
By Raissa Robles,
Newsbreak
| 06. 15. 2009
The story almost reads like a fairy tale: no sooner had the child been born than it was taken from its mother and whisked to a land far, far away.
Except that in this case, the infant was flown as hand-carried baggage from Manila to Bangkok, swaddled in the arms of a Danish man who had bought and prepaid for the baby boy.
Far from being a tale of enchantment, what took place seven months ago in October was the first ever commercially transacted case of surrogacy in the Philippines. It was arranged by a foreign company between a Filipino married woman and a male gay couple from Malaysia and Denmark.
"The egg is actually her own," Michael Ho, owner of Singapore-based Asian Surrogates, told Newsbreak. He said the woman, whom he declined to name, became pregnant in a "pretty straight forward" manner - through intrauterine insemination or IUI.
"The sperm is inserted into the womb of the surrogate and she gets pregnant, (with) no physical contact" with the male client, he assured.
Because the client "donated" his own sperm...
Related Articles
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Eleanor Hayward and Joanna Crawford, The Times | 03.29.2024
Gazing out at the Mediterranean from an idyllic rocky mountaintop, Sophie Hermann announced to her half a million Instagram followers that she had decided to freeze her eggs. Since that post in August, the 37-year-old former Made in Chelsea star...