Something Else Being Outsourced: Wombs for Rent

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Dardedar
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Something Else Being Outsourced: Wombs for Rent

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Wombs for Rent, Cheap
By Henry Chu
The Los Angeles Times

Wednesday 19 April 2006

Surrogate mothers in India are a bargain for foreigners, and the women reap a bonanza. But some observers say they pay a price.

Anand, India - As temp jobs go, Saroj Mehli has landed what she feels is a pretty sweet deal. It's a nine-month gig, no special skills needed, and the only real labor comes at the end - when she gives birth.

If everything goes according to plan, Mehli, 32, will deliver a healthy baby early next year. But rather than join her other three children, the newborn will be handed over to an American couple who are unable to bear a child on their own and are hiring Mehli to do it for them.

She'll be paid about $5,000 for acting as a surrogate mother, a bonanza that would take her more than six years to earn on her salary as a schoolteacher in a village near here.

"I might renovate or add to the house, or spend it on my kids' education or my daughter's wedding," Mehli said.

Beyond the money, she said, there is the reward of bringing happiness to a childless couple in the United States, where such a service would cost them thousands of dollars more, not to mention the potential legal hassles.

Driven by many of the same factors that have led Western businesses to outsource some of their operations to India in recent years, an increasing number of infertile couples from abroad are coming here in search of women such as Mehli who are willing, in effect, to rent out their wombs.

The trend is evident to doctors such as Indira Hinduja, perhaps India's most prominent fertility specialist, who receives an inquiry from overseas every other week. It can also be detected on the Internet, where a young Indian woman recently posted an ad on a help-wanted website offering to carry a child for an expatriate Indian couple.

Then there is the dramatic example of Mehli's family. Two of her sisters have already served as surrogates - one of them for foreigners - and so has a sister-in-law. Mehli finally decided to join in, with the enthusiastic consent of her husband, a barber, and the guidance of a local doctor who has become a minor celebrity by arranging more than a dozen surrogacies in the last two years, for both Indian and non-Indian couples.

Some see the practice as a logical outgrowth of India's fast-paced economic growth and liberalization of the last 15 years, a perfect meeting of supply and demand in a globalized marketplace.

"It's win-win," said S.K. Nanda, a former health secretary here in Gujarat state. "It's a completely capitalistic enterprise. There is nothing unethical about it. If you launched it somewhere like West Bengal or Assam" - both poverty-stricken states - "you'd have a lot of takers."

Others aren't so sure about the moral implications, and are worried about the exploitation of poor women and the risks in a land where 100,000 women die every year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. Rich couples from the West paying Indian women for the use of their bodies, they say, is distasteful at best, unconscionable at worst.

"You're subjecting the life of that woman who will be a surrogate to some amount of risk," said C.P. Puri, director of the National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). "That is where I personally feel it should not become a trade."

Both sides of the debate agree that the fertility business in India, including "reproductive tourism" by foreigners, is potentially enormous. Current figures are tough to pin down, but the Indian Council of Medical Research estimates that helping residents and visitors beget children could bloom into a nearly $6-billion-a-year industry.

"It's definitely going to increase with education and literacy, especially in a country like India," said Gautam Allahbadia, a fertility specialist in Mumbai who recently helped a Singaporean couple find an Indian surrogate. He has received similar inquiries from the United States, Israel and Spain.

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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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Post by Barbara Fitzpatrick »

It's back to choice - the woman's. If she is healthy and can obtain a good diet while she is pregnant, and doesn't do it too often (every 3rd year, if no complications, max), doesn't start too early (before 21) and doesn't continue too long (after 40, 45 max) - it won't hurt her and should be up to her. Of course, there are a few other ifs - like if she gets the money (as opposed to her husband, pimp, or local "arranger"), if the adoptive parents pay for all the medical, if the society she lives in doesn't stone her, etc.

The problem with this scenario is the potential for abuse. The more money it makes, the more likely women will become breeding cows to enrich their husbands or some male "arranger" - and the benefit that should accrue to her and her children will be frittered away in "status" for some male.
Barbara Fitzpatrick
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