SYDNEY: The surrogate mother of a baby reportedly abandoned by his Australian parents in Thailand because he has Down Syndrome was a “saint” and “absolute hero,” Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said Monday.
Seven-month-old Gammy is being raised by 21-year-old Thai woman Pattaramon Chanbua, who agreed to carry a child for an Australian couple for Aus$16,000 ($14,900).
Reports said when the pregnancy developed into twins the couple, who have not been identified, took Gammy’s healthy sister but not the baby boy, who also has a life-threatening heart condition.
“It is terrible, just absolutely horrible and heartbreaking,” Morrison said of the case.
“But I have got to tell you who is an absolute hero in all of this and that is the Thai mother. She is a saint.”
Pattaramon, who reportedly agreed to be the surrogate so she could afford education for her older children and pay back family debts, has spoken of her love for the boy.
But she has also admitted she cannot afford to pay for his medical expenses, prompting an outpouring of global goodwill which has raised more than Aus$200,000 online for an Australian charity to pay for the infant’s care.
“The outpouring of support from Australians I think demonstrates in the best possible way about how I think Australians feel about this,” Morrison said, speaking on radio station 2GB.
“We are taking a close look at what can be done here but I wouldn’t want to raise any false hopes or expectations.
“Sure there are lots of Australians who are desperate to be parents, but that can never I think sanction what we have just seen here.”
Surrogacy Australia president Sam Everingham said the case highlighted the need for better counselling of parents who were intending to engage in overseas surrogacy arrangements.
“You should never be putting in more than one embryo if you are not prepared to take twins,” he told AFP.
He also urged couples to use credible surrogacy services overseas, saying it was not uncommon for foreign agencies to embezzle money, go bankrupt or make off with couples’ life savings.
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Thai woman cited for taking care of abandoned Aussie baby
Thai woman cited for taking care of abandoned Aussie baby
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
