Thai Police Free Women From Illegal Baby Farm In Bangkok

[on-on]

This business is actually legal in India, and pretty well-known. I do business in the international medical field and this stuff is something I've never personally run across and that I would never touch, legal or not, because of the obvious ethical issues that would bug me personally. First, the women involved are under economic pressure that causes them to choose this work. In only the economic vs. ethics sense, not in the nature of the work, it's not much different than going to work in a go go bar. I wouldn't own one of those either. Second, while I don't have a problem with surrogacy in theory or between individuals who make the decision together, the concept of commodifying it and turning the developing world into a factory for babies is just distasteful in much the same way that the voluntary organ harvesting in The Philippines, India, Pakistan and elsewhere is distasteful. A pregnancy is a pretty serious and traumatic event for a woman's body and the results are far from guaranteed for the mother and the child, so you're not just selling a baby, you're paying someone to take a risk to their health and to the health of a life that you pay them to create. What happens if the baby's got some debilitating birth defect or has autism or something - do people still take it? I doubt it.

I'm not exactly surprised that it happened, but I'm also not surprised that it's largely Taiwanese and Vietnamese involved in this and not Thais. Not just because this is a pretty innovative idea (if ethically reprehensible in many ways) either. There's a ton of inequality in this country and the justice system is screwed up and so on, but by and large you don't see Thai people going to the extreme lengths in screwing over their countrymen that you see in India, The Philippines, China and so on. It's usually more garden variety screwing over. I assume this is because the economic situation here, while not exactly ideal, provides for a considerably better life for many more people than it does in rural China or the slums of Mumbai and what have you and that family networks are less strained because of it. There are some culturally quirky exceptions, though, like prostitution that make sense historically. Not that there aren't plenty of cases where Thai people are perfectly happy to treat Rohingya, Khmer, Burmese and other looked-down-upon peoples like human garbage, of course. Anyway, blah blah blah.

Kind of curious why they didn't do it in Cambodia, with the more lax laws and oversight. Maybe it's because they'd stick out more there? And the NGOs that work to protect human rights would catch them a lot easier and then have a field day? Maybe they just liked living in Bangkok, that's certainly why plenty of other scammers work here. It's a nice town and it's got probably 10MM people, making it pretty easy to hide among the crowds in, I suppose.

[Beetlejuice]

It just amazes me what horrors are going on behind closed doors. They could even be our neighbors and we might never know what is happening.