Behind the pastel walls of an ordinary apartment block on the edges of Hà Nội, a darker story was unfolding—one where the perpetrators blended the glossy surface of nightlife and high-end rentals with encrypted whispers of a cross-border trade. It was a business that turned wombs into warehouses, and poverty into a contract. Beneath the neon calm, a transnational surrogacy ring—slick, organised, and ruthlessly efficient—was using Vietnamese women as reproductive vessels, producing babies bound for lives beyond the country’s borders. Now, after a dramatic police raid and the rescue of 11 infants, the hidden machinery of this cruel economy has been laid bare.
Earlier this year, investigators from the Criminal Police Department of Vietnam under the Ministry of Public Security smashed a ring led by a Chinese national named only “Wang”. They rescued eleven infants—aged between nine days and three months—from a scheme that recruited Vietnamese women, often in dire straits, promised them substantial payments for acting as surrogate mothers, and then facilitated embryo implantations abroad (in China or Cambodia) before the women returned to Vietnam for the rest of the pregnancy.
The probe revealed a chilling business model: women under 35, in “good health”, were found via social-media platforms (notably the Vietnamese app Zalo), offered around 300–400 million VND (about US$12–15k) per pregnancy. One key recruiter was identified as Quach Thi Thuong, who using the alias “Coca” (later “Pepsi”) lured the women under Wang’s instructions and then handled caregivers, hospital logistics, registration of birth certificates, DNA testing, “paternity” documentation and travel papers.
Vietnamese law allows surrogacy only under very strict humanitarian usage. Commercial surrogacy, where the surrogate is paid and the baby is sold or transferred, remains illegal. In this case, the women were being exploited—essentially trafficked—for their reproductive capacity. The Vietnamese term “mẹ bụng thuê” (surrogate mother) typically has a limited legal scope; in this criminal scheme it was twisted into something very different.
These women were not free agents making educated choices in safe environments. Many came from rural areas or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Once onboard, they were transported abroad for embryo implantation, brought back home to carry the pregnancy to term, and then often rehired as nannies in the same operation, earning outrageously low wages (750,000 VND/day in some places). Meanwhile, the orchestrators lived in luxury apartments with high-end security and frequently changed addresses to avoid detection.
In this cultural context, post-war Vietnam carries a strong societal expectation of reproductive duty, filial piety and the family unit. But for these women, the promise of tens of millions of dong was a lure into a system that treated their bodies as instruments of profit. The ring’s coverage across province lines and national borders (into China and Cambodia) highlights how the grey zone surrounding reproductive technologies links with transnational organised crime.
After the bust, attention turned to the 11 rescued babies now held by the Vietnam Women’s Union’s Centre for Women and Development via the Peace Home Shelter. Their legal status remains uncertain. Vietnamese lawyers point out that under Vietnam’s 2014 Marriage and Family Law the “legal mother” is the woman who gives birth, but when embryos involve donor eggs or sperm and a “surrogate mother” is not biologically linked, the status becomes murky. The infants’ futures hinge on complex legal processes: DNA testing, custody review, potential foreign claims—and at the core, the child’s best interest (“quyền lợi tốt nhất của trẻ em”) must prevail.
In July 2025 the Vietnamese government issued new regulations on assisted reproductive technology (ART) and surrogacy, effective from October, that aim to clamp down on commercial surrogacy and ensure any surrogacy is strictly humanitarian, carried out only in licensed facilities, with full medical-psychological-legal counselling. Yet the recent bust shows how quickly the criminal networks can adapt: recruiting via social media, organising cross-border embryo transfers, and ignoring national borders and regulations.
What this case makes painfully clear is that even as Vietnam modernises and medical science advances, the vulnerabilities of women in poverty, of migrants, of ethnic minorities, remain acute. The ring preyed on those who saw few alternatives, who might have thought that helping an infertile couple or earning a lump sum would change their lives. Instead they found themselves entangled in a system that edged them into captivity, stripped their motherhood of agency, and placed newborns into circuits of commerce.
For advocates of women’s rights and child protection in Vietnam, this case is another reminder that the phrase “thương lượng thân thể” (body negotiation) cannot be allowed to become commerce. If any part of the reproductive journey becomes a transaction, the danger of exploitation—and the collapse of social trust—is real. As the investigation deepens, the voices of the women recruited, often still silent, and the futures of the infants rescued must be heard and protected.
So here we are again, staring at the ugly underbelly of “reproductive opportunity”—while the ones paying the price are women like our Vietnamese sisters. The story of the broken ring in Hà Nội that turned wombs into factories is more than shocking—it’s a wake-up call. These women weren’t “helping” an infertile couple in some respectable arrangement; they were trapped in a transnational machine that treated bodies as commodities.
I want you to imagine: young women from rural or poor backgrounds in Vietnam, lured by the promise of tens of millions of dong to serve as surrogate mothers—only to discover that once pregnant, they’re shuffled abroad (where multilingual brokers and encrypted apps dictate their fate), then brought back to finish the job, and afterwards sometimes re-deployed as… nannies. Their agency? Squeezed. Their motherhood? Instrumentalised. Their dignity? Sold.
This isn’t just one ring. Research shows that commercial surrogacy in South and Southeast Asia is often pushed underground through “grey zone” networks. A 2021 mapping of transnational commercial surrogacy arrangements found that once countries like Thailand or India tried to clamp down, the business didn’t vanish—it simply moved to other territories lacking regulation.
In a recent case in the Kingdom of Cambodia, 20 Filipino and 4 Vietnamese women were found in a surrogacy villa; 13 of the pregnant women were prosecuted under human-trafficking law. In the Philippines the legal vacuum on surrogacy means women are vulnerable to exploitation disguised as altruism or economic uplift.
So: how many of these rings operate in Southeast Asia? The honest answer: we don’t know the exact number—or we’d be even more angry—because the whole business hides in shadows. What is clear: there are multiple such operations, moving across borders, exploiting legal loopholes and vulnerable women. The recent bust in Vietnam may be one node of a larger network that stretches across Cambodia, the Philippines, possibly Indonesia and beyond. Many of these are unreported, under-detect, and under-prosecuted.
What this means: the sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines are not isolated victims—they are front-line victims of a regional (and global) pattern of reproductive exploitation. And we must side with them—not only in outrage, but in action: legal reform, support services, rescue and restoration of dignity. Because until the system that treats motherhood as a transaction collapses, the next ring will just pop up somewhere else, maybe with a different country name but the same human cost.
No more silence. The womb is not a factory. The body of a woman is not a commodity. And motherhood is not a contract.