Pardoned by the king of Cambodia in a matter that has put illegal trafficking in the spotlight. The three children already born will be put up for adoption in the Philippines if the mothers cannot take care of them
Manila () – The already born children of the three Filipino women detained like their companions in October in Cambodia for offering surrogate mothers and repatriated yesterday, could be given up for adoption if the mothers cannot afford to raise them. Ten other Filipinos who returned at the same time are pregnant, while seven others, who were not pregnant, were released shortly after their arrest and have already been repatriated.
For the moment, the women remain in the custody of the Department of Social Security and the National Child Care Authority, which will be responsible for their reintegration into Philippine society and studying the possibility of adopting them.
However, they are also valuable sources of information about the surrogacy contracting system. For this reason, the Undersecretary of Justice, Nicholas Felix L. Ty, indicated that “they will be helped if they have the courage to report their recruiters” with “the assurance that the government will provide them protection.”
The women, accused in Cambodia of violating the law against human trafficking, were allowed to leave the country immediately after being pardoned by Cambodian ruler Norodom Sihamoni. The judges had justified the sentence for “intention to have children to sell them to a third party in exchange for money, which is equivalent to human trafficking.”
In the Cambodian kingdom, the practice of surrogacy – although outlawed – is still widely practiced in compliant clinics, under the control of local and international fraud, benefiting mainly Chinese couples willing to pay between 40,000 and 100,000 dollars to middlemen capable of finding a woman willing to bear a child for them.
The case of the Filipinos who have now returned and risk harsh prison sentences for earning sums that are a small part of what their “principles” paid, has revived attention on the risks of even citizens of the archipelago being “recruited.” » by the «surrogacy mafia», as demonstrated, according to the Department of Justice, by the identification and detention of some of them about to leave the country and the arrest of their recruiters.
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