Watch Cambodia’s Surrogacy Crackdown on Tuesday 30 July at 9.30pm on SBS or
Australians Anthony Fisk and Joseph Hoang always pictured having a family, but didn’t think it was possible.
“I didn’t think I could have kids. I thought as a gay man, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for me to have children,” Anthony told SBS Dateline.
In Western Australia, where they are from, altruistic surrogacy is legal but not for gay men.
The couple turned their attention overseas, but it soon “felt like a movie” for all the wrong reasons.
In 2014, they chose Thailand. While their first daughter, Celeste, was in the womb of a surrogate mother, the Thai parliament from seeking surrogacy.
Joseph and Anthony got Celeste out of the country under an amnesty for surrogate babies already in the womb.
The experience didn’t discourage the Perth couple when two years later they decided they wanted Celeste to have siblings.
With Thailand not an option, they went across the border, to Cambodia, where the surrogacy industry was legal and booming — but not for long.
Joseph Hoang (left) and Anthony Fisk’s first daughter Celeste was born to a surrogate mother in Thailand around the time the country banned surrogacy for foreigners. Source: Supplied
Smuggling your own children
Soon after matching with their Cambodian surrogate through a local agency, the Australian couple learned they were expecting twins.
But the road to delivering their children was more challenging than they anticipated.
In late 2016, while their twins were still in the womb, Cambodia’s health ministry announced a ban on all forms of surrogacy. It was the latest in a string of crackdowns across Southeast Asia, including Thailand, India and Nepal.
While the government drafted legislation to outlaw surrogacy, the industry continued to operate in the grey while police targeted agencies and surrogates under human trafficking laws.
Anthony and Joseph started hearing reports of surrogate homes being raided and police cracking down on agencies and in vitro fertilisation clinics.
“There were reports of officials boarding the plane and basically arresting some of the surrogates,” Joseph says.
They were left with a confronting decision on how to get their unborn children out of Cambodia.
They say they were advised by their agent to smuggle their surrogate out of the country overland.
“There were a lot of sleepless nights thinking about it and ensuring that this was the right thing.”
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m smuggling people across borders. This is just insane. I don’t want to be doing this.'”
The couple decided to smuggle their surrogate into Thailand, but they were wracked with questions about her safety, and the health of their twins she was carrying.
Anthony (right) and Joseph (left) had to take their Cambodian surrogate, who was carrying their twins, to neighbouring Thailand when the Cambodian government started to crack down on agencies and surrogates under human trafficking laws. Source: Supplied
“We had to do this in the middle of the night, at a place that doesn’t have a border crossing,” Anthony says.
“I felt … Is this woman going to be okay? Is she going to be fed? What about her family? Who’s she going to be leaving and how’s she going to communicate with them? All these questions didn’t have answers,” Anthony says.
After a lengthy journey, their surrogate arrived in Bangkok, due to deliver.
While Thailand had outlawed surrogacy in 2015, she was able to give birth as a foreigner and the couple were able to arrange Australian citizenship for the children and return home.
Anthony and Joseph are now raising their three children in Perth’s inner-city suburbs.
“It was a journey and you wonder if you made missteps, but at the end of the day you did the best that you could. And I think every parent does that.”
But not everyone got their children out of Cambodia.
Forced to raise a foreigner’s child
In 2020, Chinese national Xu Wenjun was sentenced to 15 years in Cambodian prison for human trafficking after he attempted to collect his biological son born to a local surrogate. Xu has maintained his innocence and claims he had consent from the child’s mother to take his son to China.
The Cambodian government has still not introduced any specific laws against commercial surrogacy and continues to use human trafficking laws to enforce the 2016 ban.
Surrogate mother Hun Daneth had to choose to either raise a child she carried for a Chinese client or go to prison. Source: SBS / Dateline
Cambodia’s National Committee for Counter Trafficking, the agency responsible for promoting the crackdown, did not respond to Dateline’s requests for an interview.
Xu’s son is being raised by the woman who gave birth to him, Hun Daneth.
Daneth was 25 and working at a garment factory when she was approached to be a surrogate for a Chinese man who used a Russian egg donor in 2017. She was promised US$9,000 ($11,700 by the 2017 exchange rate) in compensation. She found the pay acceptable, and since she already had a child of her own, she agreed.
Once she was pregnant, she was taken to live in a villa in Phnom Penh run by the surrogacy agency. Many of the women housed alongside her came from lower-income areas.
“If the fetus did not grow up well, they would ask us to do an abortion,” she told SBS Dateline.
“So, the main thing was the baby must grow up; must make good progress; otherwise, they would end the pregnancy. If the pregnancy ended, we were finished with them too.”
In 2018, Daneth was eight months pregnant when police stormed the complex in a raid on what they called “an illegal commercial surrogacy operation.”
While there’s still no legislation criminalising surrogacy, Cambodian authorities have been cracking down on the surrogacy sector and its clients under human trafficking laws. Source: Supplied / Cambodian National Police
She and 32 other surrogates who were carrying babies for Chinese clients were arrested and charged with human trafficking. Most gave birth in a military hospital on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.
“While I was delivering the baby, they shackled my legs to the corner of a patient bed,” Daneth said.
As her criminal sentencing approached, she was released on an extraordinary condition: either raise a stranger’s child or face 20 years in prison.
Since then, she has grown fond of the boy, affectionately named China — inspired by the boy’s biological father.
“Before he was born, I did not like him. I got angry with him and questioned why I am here today,” Daneth says.
“After I delivered him, I felt that those thoughts disappeared. Anger and hatred are all gone, and only love remains.”
Daneth was 25 and had a child of her own when she agreed to become a surrogate for a Chinese man Source: SBS / Dateline
Daneth says she’s seen Chinese people around her neighbourhood, and she thinks they could be extended family who’ve come to see what the boy looks like.
For the Australian dads, Daneth’s story is a sliding door moment.
“To me, it’s cruel, extremely cruel. Both to the surrogate mother and to the parents overseas, but also of course to the kid,” Anthony said.
“I just imagine Iris and Julian (his children) now in Cambodia.”
