Thai officials discover a condo filled with babies born by different surrogates


In Bangkok, authorities are attempting to determine if nine babies born to surrogate mothers were all fathered by the same Japanese man.
Police received a tip about the condominium filled with nine babies, seven nannies, and a pregnant 20-year-old. Investigators say the nannies earn 10,000 baht ($310) a month to care for the infants, and the surrogate was hired for 300,000 bhat ($9,300). They briefly spoke with a man who claimed to be the lawyer of the babies' biological father. "If the Japanese man admits that all these children are his babies, we would ask him why he wanted to have so many babies," deputy national police chief Aek Angsananont told Reuters.
Surrogacy in Thailand has been in the news lately, with one 21-year-old saying she was hired by an Australian couple to carry their twins, but was left with the baby boy who was born with Down syndrome. The number of cases is causing officials to worry that Thailand is becoming the center of unregulated surrogacies, and in need of an overhaul of its laws.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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