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Cambodia Moves to Classify Commercial Surrogacy as “Human Trafficking” while U.S. Does Nothing to Protect Women and Children

San Francisco–Nov. 13 . . . Cambodia is joining the growing international movement to protect low-income women and children from the commercial surrogacy industry by planning to formally classify the practice as “human trafficking.”

In doing so, Cambodia is joining India, which last month announced plans to ban paid surrogacy tourism, Thailand, Nepal, Canada, and many European nations. The European Parliament in 2011 passed a resolution calling surrogacy “an exploitation of the female body and her reproductive organs.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. government is doing . . . nothing.

“States around the U.S., and the federal government, have fallen far behind other nations in protecting women and children from the exploitative commercial surrogacy industry, and there is simply no excuse for it,” said Jennifer Lahl, a former pediatric nurse and President of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. “Here in the U.S. the practice grows unabated with virtually no government oversight, even after an Idaho surrogate mother died last month carrying twins, reportedly for a Spanish couple. Women are being preyed upon in the U.S., and children are being manufactured and sold daily. Do our elected leaders really need to be reminded that women aren’t breeding animals and children aren’t commodities?”

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