We pay tribute to the courage of women’s organizations, individuals and human rights activists in Taiwan who are speaking out against attempts to open up surrogacy in Taiwan, as outlined in the Taipei Times article “Public hearings to be held on surrogacy” published on Jan. 23.
In doing so, they add their voices to those of other women’s organizations fighting against surrogacy in Belgium, Germany, Ukraine, Canada, Japan, South Korea, South American countries and elsewhere.
Surrogacy is wrongly portrayed as progress with a bright side, with intended parents elated to receive the children they have ordered, yet the dark side of surrogacy remains invisible: Nobody really cares about the women hired as surrogate mothers or the children born through surrogacy. However, everyone should be aware that surrogate pregnancies are riskier than natural pregnancies because of the technology used: genetic material foreign to the surrogate mother and multiple embryo transfers. Women who agree to this practice do so mostly out of economic necessity. All surrogacy contracts require surrogate mothers to give up their fundamental rights for the duration of the pregnancy, and international conventions show that surrogacy is akin to the sale of children and human trafficking.
We are grateful to Shan Hsin-ai (單信愛) and Hsieh Hui-chen (解慧珍), quoted in the Jan. 23 article, for raising these neglected issues in their speech.
Listen to the testimony of Alivia Maurel, a young woman born through surrogacy. At 32 years old, she still deals with a strong sense of abandonment and cannot get over the idea of having been exchanged for money. She was invited to speak in the Czech parliament and a video of her speech can be watched online.
The best interests of a child should not be bought or sold.
Marie-Josephe Devillers is co-president of the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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