The National Legislative Assembly (NLA) on Thursday accepted a draft bill to protect the welfare of surrogate babies and prevent human trafficking.
The bill passed its first reading yesterday with a vote of 177 in favour, two against and six abstentions. Eighteen NLA members were appointed to scrutinise the draft.
The bill seeks to identify the parents of surrogate children and regulate the scientific study of surrogacy to prevent abuse or exploitation of the knowledge for commerce.
The bill's primary aim is to protect surrogate babies and bring in measures to hand down criminal punishments against those who are involved in commercial surrogacy. Punishments of violators would be a maximum jail term of up to 10 years and a fine of no more than 200,000 baht.
To be established under the bill is a surrogate children protection body tasked with issuing policies to promote ethical surrogacy and controlling surrogacy services.
Surrogate mothers are required to enter into a legal agreement to hand over the babies born to them to those couples who requested the surrogacy arrangement.
The NLA members debated the legislation at length.
Pirom Kamolrattanakul said surrogacy technology answered the needs of couples who cannot have children and that children form an important part of a family as a social institution.
However, he suggested Section 2 be altered to make the bill cover only surrogacy, not artificial insemination procedures.
Another NLA member Kitti Waseenont threw his support behind the bill, saying unethical and illegal surrogacies have "gone on for too long".