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What's clear is while one culprit's been exposed, there will always be another rogue operator, new sets of parents desperate to have children, and a willing supply of surrogates trying to better their own lives. And when this pattern plays out around the world in developing countries with next to no regulation, there are very few winners.1
INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, increased demand for alternative methods of reproduction has resulted in the creation and growth of international, commercial, gestational surrogacy arrangements, where intended parents in one country pay a surrogate mother in another to birth a child who has no genetic ties to the surrogate mother. However, this widespread and somewhat concentrated growth has not been seamless. To date, international surrogacy has been plagued by many of the same ethical and legal injustices that once characterized under-regulated, pre-Hague Convention international adoption. Scandals exposing these injustices led many countries that once allowed unfettered international surrogacy arrangements to create burdensome regulatory schemes or to ban the practice entirely. As certain countries were effectively removed as viable options for the international surrogacy market, other countries have become the new surrogacy epicenters.
Following the implementation of exclusionary regulation in India, Thailand arguably became the most popular epicenter for international surrogacy, described by some as the "womb of Asia."2 Thousands of couples from around the world traveled to Thailand to hire women to carry their children. Eventually, this influx resulted in a series of scandals stemming out of the largely unregulated industry. In July 2014, a baby boy-"Baby Gammy"- with Down syndrome and heart and lung defects was born as the result of a surrogacy arrangement between an Australian couple and a Thai surrogate.3 Gammy's intended Australian parents abandoned him in Thailand because of these developmental defects, leaving his impoverished surrogate mother to provide care for him.4 The couple returned to Australia with Gammy's healthy twin sister.5 Outrage over Baby Gammy's abandonment provoked international criticism of not only his intended parents, but also of Thailand's officials, for allowing such an unregulated industry to survive. Consequently, the military junta in Thailand banned all forms of international, commercial, gestational surrogacy, effective as of July 2015.6
This Note attempts to alert the American legal community to the great threat posed by the...