the suspect and the night ferry michael robotham

According to the ABC current affairs program Lateline, Australian consular officials in New Delhi alleged ‘the baby was passed to another family and that a sum of money changed hands’ they also alleged that a senior Australian federal politician intervened on the couple’s behalf to allow them to return with only one twin. Just when I was wondering about the plausibility of the plotline, news broke that an Australian couple, who used a surrogate in India to bear them healthy twins in 2012, had refused to take both babies home on the basis of gender preference. But she’s pretending to have one baby and Samira, the Afghan surrogate, is pregnant with twins. When Cate and her husband are killed in a hit and run, Cate’s friend, Detective Constable Alisha Barba, sets out on a mission to understand why Cate died and to find her child(ren).

Meanwhile, the genetic mother of the embryos, Cate, is faking a pregnancy in preparation for the handover of the newborn. The surrogacy is brokered by a charitable organisation, run by Julian Shawcroft, who believes he is ‘saving’ babies by facilitating their adoption, even if it involves cutting corners, breaking the law, and money changing hands. The young girl, Samira, a virgin and devout Muslim, chooses surrogacy and in what is referred to as a ‘ritualised form of medical rape’, she is implanted with two embryos belonging to a couple in the UK. In The Night Ferry, an orphaned Afghan asylum seeker is given a choice between prostitution and surrogacy as a means of repaying her debt to the human traffickers who have brought her to Amsterdam.

Last week, as I read Michael Robotham’s dark and gripping thriller The Night Ferry, another scandal came to light that made me wonder whether crime writers can ever hope keep pace with reality when it comes to the murky world of overseas commercial surrogacy.

The suspect and the night ferry michael robotham