Womb for Hire

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...