Attention has mounted the past few days over a recent surrogacy case in Thailand in which a surrogate mother refused to allow the American couple who hired her to take their child out of the country when she found out that they were homosexual, Reuters News reports.

Although the woman in the case, Patidta, is not the child’s biological mother, under Thai law the birth mother is recognized as being the mother of the child, and commissioning parents have no automatic legal rights over the newborn.

Apparently Patidta believed she would be giving the baby to a heterosexual couple, but only learned they were homosexual when the couple came to pick the child up. She then refused to let them take the baby.

Women from a poor areas in the world are playing a large role in the multibillion dollar pregnancy surrogacy industry, with many mothers being forced or coerced into carrying a child for someone else.

“Surrogacy depends in many cases on the exploitation of poor women, because it’s the poor who have to sell and the rich that can afford to buy,” Christopher White told CNA July 23.

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