Mother 'sold her twins for £9,000 to pay for liposuction operation'

By Mail Foreign Service

Sonia Ringoir, who is accused of selling her newborn twin boys for £9,000 pounds to pay for a liposuction operation

A mother accused of selling her newborn twin boys for £9,000 to pay for a liposuction operation was involved in an online rent-a-womb trade with women desperate to have children, it was claimed today.

Restaurant worker Sonia Ringoir, 31, has been accused by police at Ghent, Belgium with treating her twins in a 'degrading' way and with fraud after a Dutch couple alleged that she had conned them.

Tamara Stegeman said that Ringoir had run sperm 'parties' at her large family home in Lovendegem, a village near Ghent, where she charged £300 a time to be impregnated with her husband's sperm.

She told a Belgian reporter: 'It was like a coffee party. First we drank a cup of coffee and then we went upstairs with a syringe.'

Mrs Stegeman and her husband Gideon, a Dutch couple, said they paid three visits spending a total of £900 in the belief that Ringoir would bear them a baby.

They did not know that she had also made the same promise via the internet to another childless Dutch couple whom she charged a total of £1,800 for five insemination trips.

Ringoir is reported to have operated under the name of Sary Levy, but her identity was revealed by Network, a Dutch TV programme, which tracked her down to her home in the course of an investigation into an online surrogate baby racket between Belgium and Holland.

In the end, Ringoir - who is the mother of five other children aged between three and 13 - handed the twins to a friend and the Dutch couples were left empty-handed. She claims that she did not charge her friend any money.

But her estranged husband Marc Poppe, 48, told a Dutch undercover reporter that she had charged money to fund liposuction, the fat removal procedure.

He said the couple had searched the internet to find a quick way to make the cash.

'It was financially attractive to us. Of course we wouldn't do it for nothing,' he said.

After her marriage break-up, Ringoir now has a new boyfriend, Mitch. In an interview with a Belgian newspaper last week he claimed that her husband had put her under pressure 'to have her body rebuilt'.

'Sonia never had debts before she met Marc,' he added.

Ringoir can't be charged with trading in her babies as this is not a crime under Belgian law. She now faces between one month and five years in jail if convicted.
The case had shocked Belgium and there are now calls by politicians to change the law.

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