A womb is on rent in India. For a fee of Rs250,000 ($6000), Indian women, particularly from Gujarat, are the new outsourcing representatives for this increasing popular enterprise.
They lease their womb; give birth to babies of childless couples for a price.
Unproductive couples from abroad are making a beeline in large numbers for this new Indian outsourcing boom. The couples sign affirmation form; undergo necessary medical checkups, and in-vitro fertilisation formalities, then pay Indian women the rental to give birth to their baby. They go back home; chill out for the next nine months, and come back to take the delivery of the baby once the child is ‘made’ or ‘manufactured’. No wonder, Indian surrogacy market has grown to a whopping $500 million a year business.
Though this practice is rarely recognised in India, and is seen as ‘immoral’ and ‘unacceptable’ because of country’s ‘ethical’ social order, a new trend is being set by Indian women, who wouldn’t mind bearing a child for a ‘right money’.
Moral, immoral?
Many who practice surrogacy will not talk. They avoid any possible indignity that the practice may bring on them and their families. Many, who don’t want to be named, though say they would not want to be identified as people would then think they are involved in something unfair and shameful.
Social scientists term it a Western exploitation of Indian women. The ‘abuse’, they say, is most in the case of those, who come from poor economic background. However, some suggest that in India, infertility is seen as a curse, so if women are helping childless couple in having child then it isn’t immoral.
Whatever, the price to rent a womb for nine months is growing manifold, and the business of ‘manufacturing children’ is growing like never before. The process of this outsourcing is simple: an embryo produced through IVF cycle harvested from a woman’s eggs is combined with her partner’s sperm to be implanted into the womb.
She becomes pregnant even without having sex with a foreign body; carry their baby in her womb with all necessary nutrition that may be required to bear a child taken care of by the agents or doctors in the hardcore business of surrogacy.
Tug-of-love battles Once the birth of the child is due, the parents are known. They arrive, and take the delivery of the baby along with the DNA test reports. But there are problems. In some cases, driven by hormones and emotions, the surrogate mothers have refused to hand over the baby resulting in tug-of-love custody battles.
There are cases where womb rental money has been refunded to couples. Despite parent’s DNA rushing in the child’s blood born in a third party womb, the surrogate mother deny handing over the baby.
Fertility expert Dr Nayna Patel, who is breaking new ground in the outsourcing of pregnancy in India says: “The government should pay attention to the emotional welfare of the surrogate mothers.” Ministry of child and women development says the Indian laws does not regard surrogacy as unethical.
Patel’s clinic named Akanksha clinic in Anand, Gujarat, is just a dilapidated two-storey building where beggars cry for attention of visiting couples, mostly from US and Europe. She says: “I have more than 50 surrogate cases. Some 3-4 babies are born every month to be taken away by their parents abroad.” Legal rights “Every day, I get middle-class Western couples arriving at the clinic,” Patel says. But how does Indian law favour them? In India, the surrogate signs away her rights to the baby as soon as it is born, whereas laws of most of the European countries, including United Kingdom, does not consider surrogacy agreements as binding.
However, in case of Indian guidelines, the procedure is far simpler. Thanks to government’s ignorance that has resulted in such a practice to undergo without much legal implications. The Western couples primarily prefer India because they are reluctant or incapable of paying high fees for surrogacy, while in India the same cost far less.
