Wassana’s Bangkok is not the city of skyscrapers and spas that most visitors see. The petite, soft-spoken 32-year-old with a ninth grade education has spent her life in a trash-strewn slum, scraping by selling traditional Thai sweets from a food cart and sharing a mildew-stained tenement with seven relatives. At $ 6 a day, it was affordable until her late father’s medical bills drained the family’s savings. They couldn’t pay rent for a year and faced eviction.
So when her sister stumbled upon an ad seeking surrogates in 2012, Wassana didn’t hesitate.
“I thought that any parents who would spend so much money to get a baby must want him desperately,” she says. “The agent told me it was for a foreign couple.”
She assumed it was customary to keep the biological parents’ identities confidential. In a country where deference to authority is expected — especially for poor, uneducated women — she didn’t probe.
She wondered, though, who the baby’s mother was.
“I don’t know if the doctor used my eggs or another woman’s,” she says. “Nobody told me.”
During the pregnancy, she developed pre-eclampsia, a condition that causes dangerously high blood pressure. She was rushed into the delivery room two months early and on June 20, 2013, she underwent a cesarean section, giving birth to a boy. Wassana’s family came to visit, but, she says, Shigeta did not.
The infant was placed in an incubator and after six days, Wassana returned home. She’s not sure when the baby was released from the hospital to Shigeta’s custody.
Two months later, she finally met Shigeta for the first time at the New Life fertility clinic, which had posted the Internet ad.
He was tall, with shaggy, shoulder-length hair, and was dressed casually in jeans and a wrinkled, button-down shirt he left un-tucked. His lawyer had accompanied him to the meeting, where he and Wassana signed a document granting him sole custody.
He wasn’t personable. There was no “thank you” for carrying his child, she says. There was, in fact, no communication at all.
“He didn’t say anything to me,” she says. “He never introduced himself. He only smiled and nodded. His lawyer did the talking.”
Wassana’s Bangkok is not the city of skyscrapers and spas that most visitors see. The petite, soft-spoken 32-year-old with a ninth grade education has spent her life in a trash-strewn slum, scraping by selling traditional Thai sweets from a food cart and sharing a mildew-stained tenement with seven relatives. At $ 6 a day, it was affordable until her late father’s medical bills drained the family’s savings. They couldn’t pay rent for a year and faced eviction.
So when her sister stumbled upon an ad seeking surrogates in 2012, Wassana didn’t hesitate.
“I thought that any parents who would spend so much money to get a baby must want him desperately,” she says. “The agent told me it was for a foreign couple.”
She assumed it was customary to keep the biological parents’ identities confidential. In a country where deference to authority is expected — especially for poor, uneducated women — she didn’t probe.
She wondered, though, who the baby’s mother was.
“I don’t know if the doctor used my eggs or another woman’s,” she says. “Nobody told me.”
During the pregnancy, she developed pre-eclampsia, a condition that causes dangerously high blood pressure. She was rushed into the delivery room two months early and on June 20, 2013, she underwent a cesarean section, giving birth to a boy. Wassana’s family came to visit, but, she says, Shigeta did not.
The infant was placed in an incubator and after six days, Wassana returned home. She’s not sure when the baby was released from the hospital to Shigeta’s custody.
Two months later, she finally met Shigeta for the first time at the New Life fertility clinic, which had posted the Internet ad.
He was tall, with shaggy, shoulder-length hair, and was dressed casually in jeans and a wrinkled, button-down shirt he left un-tucked. His lawyer had accompanied him to the meeting, where he and Wassana signed a document granting him sole custody.
He wasn’t personable. There was no “thank you” for carrying his child, she says. There was, in fact, no communication at all.
“He didn’t say anything to me,” she says. “He never introduced himself. He only smiled and nodded. His lawyer did the talking.”
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