David Farnell
What happens when a convicted pedophile is allowed by courts to keep a surrogate daughter?
Australian couple David Farnell and Wenyu Li sparked an international furor in 2014 when they were accused of leaving behind their surrogate son in Thailand, who had Down Syndrome, and returning home with his healthy twin surrogate sister, Pipah. When ultrasound results seven months into the surrogate pregnancy indicated that Ms Pattaramon, the surrogate, was carrying twins and that one of the twins, a boy, had Down syndrome, Farnell and Li requested that she abort him, and said that they would keep only his twin sister. Ms Pattharamon refused, and instead opted to raise the boy on her own.
Ms.Pattaramon tried to get Pipah back the following year after learning that Farnell was a convicted child sex offender. “I am very worried about my baby girl, “ she said. “I need help from anyone who can bring my girl back to me as soon as possible. This news makes me sick. I will take care of my twin babies. I will not give her or him to any family that wants a baby.”
Farnell was imprisoned in the late 1990s for sexually molesting two girls under the age of ten, and was sentenced to three years behind bars. While serving time for that crime, in 1998 he was charged with six counts of indecently dealing with a child under the age of thirteen and was convicted and sentenced again. At the sentencing, the judge was scathing in his remarks, stating that Farnell had 'robbed’ these young girls of their childhoods. Farnell was released from prison in 1999, after being charged with over 20 counts of child molestation.
Nevertheless, the Family Court of Western Australia ruled that Pipah could continue to live with the Farnells in the western city of Bunbury. The conditions that attached to Pipah remaining in their included Farnell not being left alone with Pipah, and the couple always keeping Western Australia’s Department for Child Protection informed of their address. The Court also ruled that Pipah must be read a photobook with age-appropriate language every three months that explained her father's offenses.
While family court proceedings are not usually published, the judge said he had made his judgment available as it was in the public interest. He also said the case “serves to highlight the dilemmas that arise when the reproductive capacities of women are turned into saleable commodities, with all the usual fallout when contracts go wrong”.
In response to the controversy, Thailand authorities banned surrogate babies from leaving the country with their parents. A law was also drafted making paid surrogacy a criminal offense in Thailand.
Sources for this story
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Thai_surrogacy_controversy
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“I think commercial surrogacy should be banned completely. They're putting women at risk without even telling them the risks. There is no such thing as informed consent in this situation. There is no way to tell any young woman, so that she could actually understand the risks. The research isn't even being done to determine the risks. There's funding for fertility, but no funding to do research on the risks. It's a multi-billion dollar industry to make designer babies. There is all that funding. But no research on women like me who were surrogates. " |
Brooke's doctors and the fertility industry surely knew that as a surrogate who had already carried her own three children to term followed by five surrogate babies, Brooke was at high risk of grave injury. But in the end, none of them deemed Brooke's life, and those of the infants she carried, to be worthy of any news coverage or more than the $7,000 raised by GoFundMe to cover the cost of her funeral. --From Brooke Brown’s Story: What happens when surrogacy kills you.
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Right now, young women agreeing to egg donation cannot give informed consent because information about long-term health risks doesn’t exist. It didn’t exist for my daughter who passed away, and it doesn’t exist for anyone now. Until the health consequences are known and understood, it would be unconscionable to legalize commercial surrogacy’ given that it will greatly increase the demand for donated eggs, and risk the lives and health of many more young women.
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I don’t think surrogacy should be legal, when even the most common of serious and debilitating health risks isn’t required to be disclosed. I don’t think surrogacy should be legal, when much-needed health care for longer-term pregnancy-related harms is not required or made available. The lives of too many perfectly healthy and fit young mothers and wives are forever compromised or irreparably harmed, not only to their own detriment, but to the detriment of their families who need them. I suffer deeply, every single day, as do my children and my husband. No amount of money was worth this cost to us all. |