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Australian in Cambodia on surrogacy charges says she has never been in trouble with law Australian in Cambodia on surrogacy charges says she has never been in trouble with law
(about 5 hours later)
An Australian woman charged with providing commercial surrogacy services in Cambodia said Tuesday she is a nurse and has never had any trouble with the law before. An Australian nurse denied running an illegal surrogacy service in Cambodia when her trial began on Tuesday, the first case of its kind in the country that recently banned the practice.
Cambodia banned commercial surrogacy last year after becoming a popular destination for would-be parents seeking women to give birth to their children. Tammy Davis-Charles, 49, was arrested in late November with two Cambodians and accused of recruiting foreign couples and Cambodian surrogate mothers to a clinic in the capital Phnom Penh.
Tammy Davis-Charles appeared in court Tuesday in orange prison clothes. The detentions came just two weeks after Cambodia moved to outlaw the surrogacy industry, which critics say exploits poor women, after a similar ban in neighbouring Thailand pushed the business across its borders.
Davis-Charles and two Cambodian associates were charged last year with acting as intermediaries between parents and pregnant women and falsifying documents. They face up to two years in prison. The trio were also charged with faking documents to obtain birth certificates for the newborns.
Developing countries are popular for surrogacy because costs are lower than in nations such as the United States and Australia, where surrogate services are around $150,000. In court on Tuesday Davis-Charles said she played no part in arranging surrogacies.
Davis-Charles, who is from Melbourne, is married with six children. Instead she said her role was limited to providing medical care to a total of 23 surrogate mothers who carried babies for 18 Australian and five American couples.
“They find the clinic” by themselves, she said of the would-be foreign parents, adding that she was also not involved in the recruitment of Cambodian surrogates.
The nurse said she received $8,000 from each couple while surrogates received around $10,000.
All of the infants were born and moved out of Cambodia before her arrest, she added.
Davis-Charles, who is from Melbourne, told the court she left Thailand more than a year ago after Bangkok outlawed commercial surrogacy and moved to Cambodia, which at the time lacked regulations on the industry.
Thailand for years hosted a thriving yet largely unregulated international surrogacy industry that was particularly popular with same-sex couples.
But several scandals in 2014 – including tussles over custody – spurred the government to bar foreigners from using Thai surrogates.
Surrogacy consultants say Laos, a poor and opaque communist country to the north, has since emerged as the next frontier for the “rent a womb” business following the recent bans by Cambodia, Thailand, Nepal and India.
A number of Laos-linked surrogacy agencies and IVF clinics have cropped up in recent months, according to consultancy group Families Through Surrogacy. A Thai man was recently arrested for smuggling frozen sperm between the two countries.
Some offer to carry out the embryo transfer in Laos and then provide pregnancy care for the surrogate in Thailand, a wealthier country with vastly superior medical facilities.