The Sorry State of Indian Surrogates
Posted by Gina Maranto, <i>Biopolitical Times</i> guest contributor August 6, 2013
Biopolitical Times
The surrogacy industry in India is both booming and changing. A new 168-page report from the Centre for Social Research, a women’s advocacy group based in New Delhi, finds that the industry appears to be shifting from towns like Anand and Amritsar to the megacities Mumbai and New Delhi, which are more easily accessible to international travelers and have higher quality health care facilities. Surrogate Motherhood: Ethical or Commercial documents a range of disturbing conditions: Although the government has guidelines for assisted reproduction clinics, regulation continues to be spotty and current law affords scant protection to the poor, largely uneducated women who are being drafted to serve as incubators, or to the resulting children handed over to primarily foreign clients.
Foreign scholars and journalists have probed the Indian surrogacy business for some years. Within the country, groups like the Sama Resource Group for Women and Health have drawn attention to the broader practices of ART clinics, as in their 2008 publication Cheap and Best, which puts the industry in the context of global medical tourism and examines the rhetoric deployed by Indian IVF websites and brochures competing for their share of the international pie. Sama also produced a report in 2012 based on interviews with a dozen surrogates in Delhi and Punjab, five physicians, two agents, and one set of commissioning parents. In addition, Sama has recently released a documentary, Can We See the Baby Bump.
To study the current situation, CSR expanded the sample size significantly and employed systematic methodologies, akin to the pioneering fieldwork of researchers such as sociologist Amrita Pandé. CSR researchers carried out structured and open-ended interviews with 100 women serving as surrogates, half in Mumbai, half in Delhi, and with 50 couples who had commissioned pregnancies. In addition, the Centre’s researchers convened focus groups that gathered information from,
Foreign scholars and journalists have probed the Indian surrogacy business for some years. Within the country, groups like the Sama Resource Group for Women and Health have drawn attention to the broader practices of ART clinics, as in their 2008 publication Cheap and Best, which puts the industry in the context of global medical tourism and examines the rhetoric deployed by Indian IVF websites and brochures competing for their share of the international pie. Sama also produced a report in 2012 based on interviews with a dozen surrogates in Delhi and Punjab, five physicians, two agents, and one set of commissioning parents. In addition, Sama has recently released a documentary, Can We See the Baby Bump.
To study the current situation, CSR expanded the sample size significantly and employed systematic methodologies, akin to the pioneering fieldwork of researchers such as sociologist Amrita Pandé. CSR researchers carried out structured and open-ended interviews with 100 women serving as surrogates, half in Mumbai, half in Delhi, and with 50 couples who had commissioned pregnancies. In addition, the Centre’s researchers convened focus groups that gathered information from,
the ART clinics, the doctors and the nurses who carry out the entire procedure, the immediate society and community members, family members, agents including travel agents who arrange for commissioning parent‘s arrival, stay, passport and departure with the child and guest house/hotel owners where foreign couples stay during the whole procedure and the maternity homes/shelter homes where at times surrogate mothers stay for nine months to maintain secrecy. (p.14)
The report begins with an overview of the legal and regulatory status of surrogacy in India and a literature review, both of which cover familiar ground and are notable chiefly for the authors’ eschewal of euphemisms: they define a surrogate as “one who is hired to bear a child that she turns over at birth to her employer,” refer to the child as a “saleable commodity,” and use similar market-based terminology throughout. CSR estimates that surrogacy accounts for $500 million of India’s total reproductive tourism market annually.