In this first blog, I am very keen on writing one of the global topics related to surrogacy; how it is treated in Cambodia and affected to many Cambodian marginalized women.
The Cambodian government made surrogacy illegal in 2016 which prevented surrogacy operations in Cambodia after neighboring countries like Thailand made it illegal; nevertheless this business has been operated underground .
Surrogacy is the process and practice of using women’s wombs to employers' clients to get pregnant for their babies ; it believes to be be a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry which women do not really sharing a benefit yet exploited due to shadow practices by those operators
In Cambodia where there are a lot of inequalities and social issues; many women lacking economic opportunities choose to do surrogacy. Many women with low wages, like working in garment factories, ended up being surrogate mothers for foreign couples.
Women were promised to be paid about 10 000 USD $ which women would get about 300 $ per month for the first three months after they get pregnant to make incomes while their original jobs offer 150 $ per month to work in garment factories.
In 2016 the government raided the first surrogacy case which arrested agency persons. Following others the government continued raiding on cases and treating women of surrogate through women trafficking that Cambodia has not adopted any surrogate law. Having no surrogate law yet women were being executed with the human trafficking could keep women at disadvantages.
The worst cases were when the first case of female surrogate women, in 2018 about 33 Cambodian women were arrested after the authorities raided the surrogate house, and those 33 women's kept in a prison hospital although there is no surrogate law. Women were promised to be responsible for keeping surrogacy babies in return for their freedoms. This situation makes women’s life and their families worse as women are living in desperate situations that they choose to be surrogate. This not only affected women themselves
but their families as they need to allocate their resources, times and mental health to take care of surrogate newborn.
Post by Meta Kong
This was an interesting blog to read, I had no idea the women that were caught doing this were then forced to keep the babies they were surrogating. This makes me think about Sylvia Chant's piece on "Galvanising girl for development?" The main example of analysis in that piece was Nike's Girl Empowerment program. In comparison to this example, we can make a clear distinction about the spheres in which both activities take place, Nike's Girl Empowerment Program more on the public sphere and illegal surrogating in the private sphere. However, I find there are crucial underpinning notions about women and their close relationship between women's bodies and Neoliberal capitalist economic markets. In this regard we can say that in both cases, women are viewed as a tool or means to gain something within a capitalist market whether this be direct economic and publicity growth through campaigns or savings through means of exploitation. Because surrogating is becoming a popular trend especially due to the influence of Hollywood celebrities there is also an uprising romanticizing narrative around surrogacy which compels to idea of women from the Frist World helping women in the Third World by allowing the opportunity to increase their economic revenues. This is particularly dangerous as it plays into the transnational business of feminism both of the corporations/agencies that carry out these processes as for individuals involved in this process.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing! It is sad to hear about the plight of these women and how their bodies are used and policed by the surrogacy agencies and the government respectively. You mentioned that these women lack economic opportunities so they work low wage jobs (jobs which are usually in the garment industry) and that this is the primary reason they decide to be surrogates. This reminds me of Trauger and Fluri’s book which we read last week: Engendering Development: Capitalism, Inequality in the Global Economy. The authors discuss gender as a form of inequality and how it is used to disadvantage women and suppress their economic opportunities/place in the workforce. One illustration of this can be seen in the type of work mostly accessible to women (in this case work in the garment industry). Women can usually access work in the tertiary sector that is closest to their reproductive roles, work which is usually low paying. However, they are usually shut out of higher paying jobs in the knowledge based sector which is usually reserved for the more advantaged men. Subsequently these forms of inequalities are used to create exclusivity around specific types of employment so that they are only accessible by those who are advantaged which leads to situations like these.
ReplyDeleteAlso, in this case I am reminded of the intersectionality of the inequality as discussed by Trauger and Fluri. These women being women of color, their race also plays a part in the inequality and mistreatment.I assume these surrogacy agencies are foreign agencies, operating in Cambodia with the intention of using indigenous women and giving them low compensation. The fact that the surrogacy industry is a multibillion dollar industry and these women benefit very little from that speaks to my point. Additionally, I think there should be clear, detailed and fair laws about this so that these women are not charged to take care of children they did not plan for, thereby making things more difficult for them than when they started.
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ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this Meta. It was interesting reading this post as it generated quite a number of questions in my head. It is understandable if the government makes surrogacy an illegal activity however the most important question is if this government has in return implemented effective policies which could help better the lives of the women engaged in this activity. I believe there is no way the laws guarding surrogacy will properly be enforced if the main source of the decision of surrogate mothers is not tackled first and this source is obviously poverty or insufficient income. Most women do not just make the decision of becoming surrogate mothers but are forced to, due to the economic hardship faced in the country. I believe the creation of more jobs for women where they are able to earn decent incomes will go a long way in tackling the issue of surrogacy in Cambodia instead of arresting them and imposing more burden on them by making them take of care of children they had no intention of keeping.
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