A Taiwanese woman has been charged with making an illegal surrogacy arrangement that involved paying a Thai woman to bear a child for a Taiwanese man, Hsinchu authorities said yesterday.
Police said the suspect, a Hsinchu resident surnamed Chen (陳), was paid NT$100,000 (US$3,100) to help the man have a child through surrogacy, which is illegal in Taiwan.
They said Chen made arrangements for a Thai woman to undergo in virtro fertilization using the man’s sperm and eggs from another Thai woman at a clinic in Cambodia in July last year.
The egg donor was paid between 160,000 baht and 180,000 baht (US$4,580 and US$5,150), while the surrogate was paid a lump sum of 1.15 million baht in addition to a monthly payment of 35,000 baht during her pregnancy.
Police said the surrogate was in Thailand for most of her pregnancy, but traveled to Taiwan in early March on a tourist visa and stayed at a hotel in Hsinchu until March 31, when she gave birth to a baby boy at a hospital there.
The hospital staff, noticing something unusual in the relationship between the Taiwanese man and the mother, reported the matter to the National Immigration Agency.
Police said the man admitted to the surrogacy arrangement, saying he wanted to carry on his family line.
Neither the man nor the surrogate is liable to prosecution, but the broker could face a prison term of up to two years and a fine of between NT$200,000 and NT$1 million, as stipulated in the Artificial Reproduction Act (人工生殖法).
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