Burma's Thai Babies

The families in Loi Kaw Wan know there are advantages in their children having Thai citizenship. Citizenship isn't something countries just hand out, and in Thailand even the newborns have to work for it.

When we arrived in Loi Kaw Wan early Sunday morning, Homm Noon was waiting to greet us. She was at the end of her pregnancy, her face had become fat and freckled. The greeting was brief, because she was holding out just long enough to see us and then with her mom climbed into the tinny pick-up truck that dropped us off at the border post, and was driven away to the nearest Thai hospital to give birth.

Since she and her mother are the only trained midwives in the village, it made sense that she wouldn't want to deliver her first child alone in Loi Kaw Wan. The other benefits were realized later on. If Homm Noon's children are born in Thailand, they're Thais. In an area where you're either a Thai or an illegal refugee, the choice seems obvious.

It isn't a simple matter of being born in Thailand though – the babies need a Thai parent. There are men in Thailand, usually old men, who each take money to claim he is the father of a woman's baby. Homm Noon and her husband found such a man to do this for them, as did every other family in Loi Kaw Wan who's children are Thai citizens.

It must be a terrible choice for these families, for the father to give up any official connection he has to his own children, replacing his name with some grasping stranger's. Surely it isn't a secret either. The doctors who register the births can't believe for very long that the old men who come in with young Burmese women are really the fathers of all those children. The Thai government must be aware of the trick as well, still it continues. After the birth the women return home with a newborn, probably hoping never to meet the official father of their child again.

At the end of our time in Loi Kaw Wan we returned to Thailand and paid a visit to Homm Noon. She had delivered a baby boy and was resting in a safe house in Thailand until the baby could get some vaccinations. The safe house is used for Burmese patients sent to the Thai hospital. It's a small warehouse among a line of other warehouses and loading docks.

Homm Noon, her husbadn and the baby had blankets laid out on the floor of the empty storage unit, with some clothes hung up in the corner. She introduced her healthy little baby. We asked his name, and she gave one but said it's only his Thai name, for the birth certificate. He doesn't have a real name yet.