EDITORIAL — Surrogate mothers

In yet another tragic manifestation of the inadequacy of economic opportunities in this country, 20 Filipino women have been rescued from a human trafficking operation in Cambodia.

The horror stories about Filipinos, particularly women recruited for work overseas, keep getting worse. Many years ago, Filipino teachers seeking better pay opted to work as housemaids abroad. For a long time now, Filipino women including teenage girls hoping for regular jobs abroad have ended up being trafficked for sex in many parts of the world. In recent years, overseas Filipino workers promised jobs in business process outsourcing in Southeast Asia ended up being forced to work in cyberscam hubs in no-man’s lands in Myanmar and Thailand. Those who tried to escape were beaten up. The victims have been mostly educated and tech-savvy youths who, like earlier generations of OFWs, were lured by salaries that they cannot hope to have in the Philippines.

This time in Cambodia, the 20 Filipino women were recruited to serve as surrogate mothers. Of the 20, authorities said 13 are pregnant. The departure of the 20 from the Philippines was reportedly facilitated by a local agency that recruited online, promising to send the victims to another country in Southeast Asia. The 20 were in the care of a Cambodian nanny when they were rescued together with four other women from a neighboring country.

It was reported in Cambodia that the Philippine recruitment agency worked with in vitro fertilization experts in Thailand for the surrogacy scheme in Cambodia for the trafficking of babies. While Cambodia has banned surrogacy, it has not yet made it a criminal offense. Particularly depressing is the report that most of the 20 appeared to know what they were getting into.

Pursuing the traffickers is a challenge because the transactions with the victims were conducted mostly through social media, with the online recruiter using a fake identity. Social media has facilitated human and sexual trafficking along with a wide range of other criminal activities.

Horror stories of OFWs who became victims of human trafficking have been widely reported. The government and civic groups fighting human trafficking have also been issuing warnings to prospective OFWs. The biggest challenge is removing the root cause of the problem, which drives Filipinos to accept questionable work, including surrogacy. Poverty has driven parents to traffic their own children for sex. And poverty and the lack of opportunities drove most of those 20 Filipinas to become surrogate mothers for a fee.