India
Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood
Stephanie Sinclair/VII Network
By AMELIA GENTLEMAN
March 10, 2008
MUMBAI —
Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their
child about being made in India,
in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from
an Internet lineup.
“The child will know early on that he or she
is unique, that it came into the world in a very special way,” said Mr. Gher,
29, a communications officer for the environmental group Greenpeace.
An enterprise known as reproductive
outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that
provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated
with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix
of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.
Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some
states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost
comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United
States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother,
which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and
hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to
collect the baby).
“People are increasingly exposed to the idea
of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,” said Dr.
Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai. Just an hour earlier she had
created an embryo for Mr. Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them
(they would not say which) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before
in another part of the clinic.
The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda —
The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor,
surrogate mother or future parents. The donor and surrogate are always
different women; doctors say surrogates are less likely to bond with the babies
if there is no genetic connection.
There are no firm statistics on how many
surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence
suggests a sharp increase.
Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of
PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said
he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up
from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.
“Every time there is a success story,
hundreds of inquiries follow,” he said.
In Anand, a city in the eastern state of
Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate
mothers are pregnant with the children of couples from the United States,
Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them live together in a hostel attached to
the clinic there.
Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic,
said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were
coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.” She said
she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad.
Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council
of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children.
A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.
This eases the process of taking the baby out
of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from
San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda
clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers,
accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses,
the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.”
Surrogacy is an area fraught with ethical and
legal uncertainties. Critics argue that the ease with which relatively rich
foreigners are able to “rent” the wombs of poor Indians creates the potential
for exploitation. Although the government is actively promoting India as a
medical tourism destination, what some see as an exchange of money for babies
has made many here uncomfortable.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development
said in February that it was weighing recommending legislation to govern
surrogacy, but it is not imminent.
An article published in The Times of India in
February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by
abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women
will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”
Even some of those involved in the business
of organizing surrogates want greater regulation.