India seeks to shut down surrogacy services for foreign would-be parents
PUBLISHED : Monday, 01 February, 2016, 6:23pm
UPDATED : Monday, 01 February, 2016, 6:23pm
Tribune News Service in Thane, India
By banning foreigners — who account for the vast majority of the industry’s clients and usually are charged higher fees — the government is trying to end India’s reputation for what critics call “rent-a-womb” services. Photo: Reuters
Long before she married at 14, Sushila Sunar had stopped going to school. She never learned to read. After her two children were born, she broke rocks at a construction site for a few dollars a day, the only work she could find.
Then a woman approached Sunar with a job that paid nearly US$6,000, a sum so large she and her husband felt she could not refuse. She became a surrogate mother, delivering a light-skinned baby for a foreign couple she never met.
Three years later, with her own children’s school bills piling up, she has decided again to become a surrogate.
“I didn’t study; I can’t do any other work,” said Sunar, now 28 and six months pregnant. “This is my only option to make a living.”
Chasing dreams of financial independence, thousands of poor Indian women have found work as surrogate mothers, helping to turn this country into a favoured destination for foreign couples who can’t become pregnant on their own.
Now India’s government is taking the first significant steps to rein in commercial surrogacy, citing fears that the women are being exploited by a mushrooming industry that pays them a small fraction of what surrogates earn in the West.
In October, authorities barred foreign couples from hiring Indian surrogates, following an earlier ban prohibiting single people and gays from contracting with Indian surrogates. The government has proposed a law allowing surrogacy only for married Indian couples, or those recognised by the government as being of Indian origin.
The new legislation, which has yet to be taken up in Parliament, also would prevent women from becoming surrogates multiple times, or after they turn 35.
India’s low medical costs, lack of regulation and large numbers of women willing to carry someone else’s child have long fueled concerns about corruption and malpractice by doctors eager to satisfy foreign clients. A surrogate birth in India can cost $15,000 to $20,000, about a tenth of what some clinics in California charge.
Medical groups say the industry generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in India, but there are few reliable statistics. In the two decades since the country’s first surrogate birth heralded a lucrative new frontier for medical technology, clinics have popped up so fast that authorities have lost track of how many are operating or how many babies have been delivered.
