Vietnam baby ring mothers allege sex abuse: report

Thu, Jun 02, 2011
AFP

HANOI, VIETNAM - Vietnamese women who bore babies for foreign couples in an illegal surrogacy ring in Thailand said they suffered sexual abuse at the hands of the gang, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The 15 women were discovered in two houses in a suburb of Bangkok during a police raid in February. Thai authorities said seven were pregnant at the time, while two had newborn babies.

Some of the women, who have now returned to their home country, had never had sexual relations before poverty drove them to leave and enter the surrogacy ring, the Vietnamese police-linked An Ninh Thu Do daily reported.

On the way to Thailand they stayed at a house in Cambodia where a member of the ring said he would have to initiate one girl into sex because "if you are a virgin, you cannot get pregnant", the newspaper said.

If she refused his advances she was told she could return home after paying 20 million dong (S$1172), it said, adding she submitted to him out of fear.

Another woman, aged 22, endured "sexual abuse" from that same man for three nights, the newspaper said.

It quoted a third women, Thuong, 21, as saying it was the second time she had joined the surrogacy ring. Her drug-addict father had already spent the money she earned previously.

By returning to Thailand, Thuong hoped to find the baby she gave birth to three years earlier by caesarean section, the report said, adding she was told the women were only allowed to carry a foetus for eight months.

"The baby was in fact the child of a Taiwanese couple. But when I gave birth to him, he looked very much like me, from his eyes, his nose and his smile. Since then, I dreamt of him several times," she was quoted as saying.

"He is my child, not the child of the Taiwanese, right?"

The women, all from the Mekong Delta, are now living at a safe house, the newspaper said.

Nine admitted they volunteered to be surrogates for a payment of about 5,000 dollars for each baby while several others said they were tricked, according to Thai police, who arrested four Taiwanese, one Chinese and three Myanmar nationals in connection with the operation.