~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

[Year 1997]
[Year 1998]
[Year 1999]
[Year 2000]
[Year 2001]

Vietnam surrogate pregnancy brings legal questions

HANOI - Vietnam's first surrogate pregnancy through in vitro fertilisation has brought about an interesting legal quandary, state media reported Saturday: Who is the child's mother?

A Vietnamese woman is just three weeks into a surrogate pregnancy in Ho Chi Minh City, but doctors and legal experts are already scratching their heads over whose name will appear as the mother on the child's birth certificate. "We haven't decided how to write the birth certificate," Dr. Vuong Thi Ngoc Lan, who performed the operation at Tu Du Obstetrics Hospital, was quoted as saying in Sai Gon Giai Phong (Liberated Saigon) newspaper. Vietnam's first-ever test-tube baby was born from a donated egg last February, but a surrogate birth has never been performed here. According to existing regulations, only the woman who delivers the baby would be provided with registration papers, the newspaper said. "We don't know if the responsible authorities will be able to deal with the legal aspects of this case satisfactorily," Lan said.

Birth registration is a crucial issue in communist-ruled Vietnam. Location of a child's registration helps determine several conditions, particularly residence and schooling. A child's registration location is highly dependant on the mother's residence, said a Western lawyer in Ho Chi Minh City who has researched registration problems of Vietnamese streetchildren. "The consequences of not having a proper birth certificate are real, and they can follow you throughout your life," the lawyer said. New legislation on how unregistered children can get birth certificateswhere they were born has been issued, said the lawyer. "But none of this addresses surrogate motherhood," he said. Costs for the surrogate pregnancy are expected to run as much as 25 million dong (1,718 dollars), Lan told the newspaper.

The blood mother is a 37-year-old woman with uterine tumours, but as her ovaries remained healthy, the Ministry of Health allowed her to seek assisted reproduction, the paper said. The three-week-old embryo was transferred to the surrogate mother's uterus on December 18. Delivery is expected in September.

Bernama (Malaysian News Agency) - January 6, 2001.