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Peeling a mango inside her rickety wooden shack, Chhum Long explained how her daughter’s decision to nurture a Western couple’s baby in her womb helped her family buy two desperately needed items: a metal roof and a motorbike.
Last year a broker appeared outside the 60-year-old’s house in Cambodia’s southern Takeo province and offered her daughter US$10,000 to be a surrogate mother for a wealthy foreign couple.
“My daughter immediately agreed with the offer because we are very poor,” she said. “They took the baby away as soon as he was born, she did not even see his face.”
An ongoing trial in Phnom Penh of Australian nurse Tammy Davis-Charles on charges of running an illegal surrogacy business has shone a spotlight on Cambodia’s role in the rented womb trade.
It is a little-regulated industry that pairs wealthy foreign couples desperate for a child – paying as much as US$50,000 – with some of the world’s most vulnerable women.
The enterprise has sparked a regulatory game of cat and mouse as poorer nations move to halt the trade only to...
