Thai authorities arrested a man trying to smuggle six vials of sperm into Laos, a customs officer said on Thursday, the latest sign that a commercial surrogacy industry is growing in the opaque communist nation following curbs around the region.
The 25-year-old was arrested in the border town of Nong Khai with the tubes packed inside a nitrogen tank, the customs officer said.
“It was his 13th time smuggling [semen] through Nong Khai,” the official said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Officials believe the vials were bound for a surrogacy clinic in Laos, an impoverished nation that is quickly soaking up demand for the “rent a womb” business.
The boom in Laos, an authoritarian nation with no restrictions on surrogacy, comes after neighboring Thailand and Cambodia clamped down on the industry following a flurry of scandals and concerns about exploitation.
A number of Laos-linked surrogacy agencies and in vitro fertilization clinics have cropped up, consultancy group Families Through Surrogacy said.
Some offer services to carry out the embryo transfer in Laos and then provide pregnancy care for the surrogate in Thailand, a wealthier nation with vastly superior medical facilities.
The Thai customs officer said the man was carrying sperm donated from Chinese and Vietnamese men in Bangkok. He was fined for violating a law that bans the export of reproductive tissues.
Thailand for years hosted a thriving, yet largely unregulated international surrogacy industry popular with same-sex couples, but a string of scandals in 2014 — including tussles over custody — spurred the military government to bar foreigners from using Thai surrogates.
In one high-profile controversy, authorities discovered nine babies in a Bangkok apartment that had been fathered by a Japanese man using Thai surrogate mothers.
Thailand’s crackdown pushed the industry to neighboring Cambodia, where it took off until the government banned surrogacy last year.
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