Indian surrogate mothers

At the Akanksha Infertility and IVF Clinic in Anand, India, couples from as far away as Germany, Canada and the United States can hire surrogates for a fraction of the cost as in the United States. Clinic director Dr. Nayna Patel says their success rate in 2006 was a very high 44 percent—which gives new hope for couples struggling to start a family.

Dr. Patel says couples in her program—the waiting list is 250 to 300 couples long— fly to India to get the process underway. First, the medical team extracts eggs from the mother. Then, using sperm from the father, Dr. Patel and her staff create embryos which they implant into the surrogate.

After implantation, the surrogate mother remains at the clinic for 15 days so the staff can monitor her progress and determine if she becomes pregnant.
More here.

When you hear that people from the US are going to India for hip replacement surgery and various other medical reasons, the word 'exploitation' doesn't come to mind. You only think in terms of the revenue that these hospitals make by providing much needed medical care to people from the western world.

But when you hear about surrogate mothers in India carrying babies for American couples, you immediately think of the whole kidney selling scams. A lot of uninformed people were conned into selling/giving up their kidney for nothing. This whole surrogate motherhood is not that appalling, but couples from America go to India because surrogate mothers in India are cheap. In other words you can pay just $5000 (which is 10 years salary for these women, so claims the Oprah website) instead of the $80,000 that they would have to shell out in the US. This does sound like exploitation to me.

It is the same thing. You employ immigrant farm workers, so that you can pay them less and get away with it. Someone is in desperate need, you make use of it, more to your advantage and less to theirs, it is exploitation. There are always people that can be exploited and in a country like India, where there is very little accountability, I would say that these women are being exploited.

If something goes wrong during the pregnancy, is the woman covered by law. Can she sue for personal injury? I don't think so. She would just have to take it as bad luck and move on with her life. A lot of things can go wrong during a pregnancy. Do these women make an educated decision to be surrogates? They do so for the money and think of it as a noble cause. There is so much stigma attached to surrogacy in India, most people do it secretively, which only adds to the problem when things go wrong.

How much money is the fertility clinic making in the whole process? How much money is Dr Patel making? What percent is being given to the surrogate mother? What kind of law exists to protect these women? This yahoo news story talks about a law to monitor fertility clinics but not much to protect the surrogate mother. When the state of things is such, I am not sure if $5000 is enough compensation for the risk that these women take.

(Thanks to Sowmya)