According to The Independent, for the first time, an anti-slavery helpline in the United Kingdom has reported suspected forced surrogacy.
The anti-slavery charity Unseen released UK-wide data ahead of its annual report, which is expected to be released within a week. Calls to the helpline have increased “significantly” for the fourth year in a row, and the number of potential slavery victims has risen 30%. Unseen also noted that three women who contacted the helpline in the last year are potentially victims of forced surrogacy. It defined forced surrogacy as forcing or coercing a woman into carrying a child for another person. The Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, called the news “alarming.”
“[C]riminals are finding new and shockingly rutless ways to exploit victims,” she said. “Alarmingly, for the first time we have seen cases of forced surrogacy being reported. This is alongside a rise in the reporting of organ harvesting and forced scamming of victims.”
Unseen has not provided further details regarding the potential cases of forced surrogacy.
READ: Italian Prime Minister slams surrogacy: ‘Uterus renting’ is an ‘inhuman practice’
In 2017, The Washington Post reported on the story of a young woman from Mexico who was given a bus ticket and 100 pesos for food and sent to the U.S. for a job with a 47-year-old Florida woman named Esthela Clark. The young woman was going to be a surrogate for Clark, who hired “coyotes” to smuggle the woman through the border of Texas. After the baby was born, the plan was to return to Mexico after earning a few thousand dollars. But when the woman arrived at Clark’s home, things were not as she expected.
For two years, Clark allegedly held the young woman, known as “Y.L.” in court documents, captive in a small apartment where Clark used her for free labor. She was fed only beans and was forced to sleep on the dining room floor. After Clark would have sex with her boyfriend, she would take semen from the condom and attempt to inseminate the woman with a syringe.
“Clark would instruct Y.L. to lie on pillows with her legs pointed in the air, naked from the waist down, and stay in that position for 20 minutes for the procedure to ‘take,’ ” according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court. Y.L. never became pregnant and Clark was sentenced to seven years in prison.
In surrogacy, the surrogate is often required to sign an agreement giving the intended parents full control over her body, including the ability to force her to have an abortion. Journalist Julie Bindel explained that because there is always some amount of money exchanged, even in countries where commercial surrogacy is prohibited, “there is always a coercive element to surrogacy, even in places where the practice is not officially commercialised and only women who volunteer for the job are allowed to become surrogate mothers.”
She said, “In places where for-profit surrogacy is legal, from California and New York to Ukraine and Mexico, disadvantaged women are being turned into wombs for hire with no consideration for their human rights.”
