{"id":2020,"date":"2015-08-28T03:21:48","date_gmt":"2015-08-28T03:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattralston.net\/?p=2020"},"modified":"2015-08-28T16:35:43","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T16:35:43","slug":"gay-couples-surrogate-baby-debacle-is-a-head-scratcher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/politics\/gay-couples-surrogate-baby-debacle-is-a-head-scratcher\/","title":{"rendered":"Gay Couple’s Surrogate Baby Kidnapping Is A Head Scratcher"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Santos\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Manuel Santos and Gordon “Bud” Lake are\u00a0a gay couple from the United States who paid a surrogate service in Thailand $15,000 to have a donor egg and Santos’\u00a0sperm implanted into an impoverished\u00a0Thai woman, and now she won’t give the baby to them.\u00a0Even though she signed a contract<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Santos and Lake have another baby they had some poor woman in India carry for thirty sacks of rice. Apparently in their rabid quest to spread their DNA, they are able to overlook the slummy conditions of their faceless\u00a0baby printers. Which is fine.\u00a0They’re not out to save the world.\u00a0If that happened, what kind of discount rate could they get on human baby incubators? They just need to get their baby and leave these smelly\u00a0countries at once.<\/p>\n

The woman who birthed the baby is currently in\u00a0possession of it. Her name is\u00a0Patidta Kusongsaang, which\u00a0Santos and Lake first read on the contract she signed when she refused to give up the baby.<\/p>\n

Patidta\u00a0is uneducated,\u00a0and coincidentally a homophobe. She explained her decision to keep\u00a0the baby she gave birth to:<\/p>\n

“First of all, they are not natural parents in Thai society.\u00a0They are same sex, not like male and female that can take care of babies.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s unclear if Patidta really believes this or was fed these lines. Human trafficked teenagers an eviction away from kidney donation are often easily manipulated.<\/p>\n

This whole process was supposed to be much easier.<\/p>\n

When Santos and Lake arranged for their Thai surrogate over a year ago, it was seen as a pretty low risk maneuver, like ordering Thai for delivery.<\/p>\n

Then\u00a0an Australian guy named David Pharnell, who is a convicted child sex offender, and his lovely wife arranged for a Thai woman to give birth to their baby. The woman ended up having twins, one of which had Down Syndrome, and they left it in Thailand and returned to Australia with the other one.<\/p>\n

This sent shockwaves throughout Thai society and Thailand’s dictatorship put an end to the surrogacy programs without even allowing a vote on it.\u00a0There was written\u00a0an exemption for couples who had inked their contracts before this, because Thailand is one of those friendly military ruled fascist countries as opposed to the scary kind.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately in a primitive country such as Thailand, and the U.S. a month ago, the laws\u00a0defining a couple are written as “Man and woman.”<\/p>\n

That’s probably why that moronic baby machine said that thing earlier about\u00a0same sex couples not being able to take care of babies.<\/p>\n

This story doesn’t have a clear protagonist, and\u00a0seems to pit LGBT rights against a host of women’s rights issues.<\/p>\n

This is why it hasn’t received much news coverage, it could actually foster an intelligent debate.<\/p>\n

It’s obviously wrong to discriminate against gay people. If Santos and Lake had not been gay, they\u00a0would have had a much easier time keeping their baby.<\/p>\n

Yet it’s also probably wrong to seek out\u00a0a country with lax laws on human rights and pay a disadvantaged person to sign a contract to carry a baby for you.<\/p>\n

This is a cataclysm\u00a0of archaism and\u00a0modernity and raises many questions: Why\u00a0would these people not just adopt a baby. How valid is\u00a0this contract. If this woman broke the contract, legally speaking, could she not refund the money and keep the child. Should signed contracts ever be involved with the creation of life. Could this count as bondage. Isn’t it kind of fucked up on a human level that\u00a0these guys have an extra $15,000 for this elaborate procedure to be carried out in a country where so many people have nothing. Is this a sustainable\u00a0model for humanity going forward. Are westerners going to turn the developing world into baby mills. Is all life equal.<\/p>\n

I see both sides of the argument. Something you won’t hear on TV.<\/p>\n

The couple most likely won’t be able to get the baby back, which is truly awful and unjust, particularly because their orientation plays a factor. On the other hand, this woman won’t have the baby she carried taken away from her, which would seem equally awful and unjust.<\/p>\n

Santos can take solace in the fact he\u00a0did his\u00a0part for humanity and sewed his reproductive oats. The\u00a0child will hopefully grow up to be strong and healthy and pass on Santos’ genes itself, which is, apparently in this couple’s view,\u00a0important.<\/p>\n

It will just live\u00a0in Thailand.<\/p>\n

If that’s not the life they’d want for their baby, then it begs the question, why do this in Thailand?<\/p>\n

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Manuel Santos and Gordon “Bud” Lake are\u00a0a gay couple from the United States who paid a surrogate service in Thailand $15,000 to have a donor egg and Santos’\u00a0sperm implanted into an impoverished\u00a0Thai woman, and now she won’t give the baby to them.\u00a0Even though she signed a contract. Santos and Lake have another baby they had …read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[879,878],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2020"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2024,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions\/2024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}