Wombs for Rent
On June 25, 2008, the Ministry of Women and Child Development held round table conferences on surrogacy and on building partnerships with men to promote women’s welfare and development.
The issue of renting wombs has been widely discussed abroad whether it’s CNN saying that giving birth has become the latest job to be outsourced to India or the NYT pointing out that while couples from foreign countries pay about $30,000 to clinics, the surrogate gets only about $7,500 out of that amount. (Like everything else which is outsourced to India, it’s quite a bit cheaper to use an Indian surrogate than an American one.)
And it seems quite a bit easier to exploit Indian women: one woman from the US using a surrogate said that Indian surrogate stays at a clinic or supervised home where she can be effectively policed unlike an American surrogate over whom no such control can be exercised. All that would exist if the surrogate were American would be a third party mediator to try to iron out problems.
Also, in the US, the surrogate would have legal rights to the child till she signed parental rights over to the biological parents. Presumably, that isn’t a problem which arises in India since the women who seem to act as surrogates are extremely poor and agree to the arrangement simply to take care of their own families.
There exist ‘National Guidelines for Accreditation, Supervision and Regulation of ART Clinics in India’ but they are not legally binding. An Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill, 2008 has also been drafted although it is unlikely to be enacted at any point in the near future. The bill says the child’s birth certificate shall bear the names of his or her genetic parents, that a woman cannot be a surrogate more than three times and that she must be both between the age of 21 and 45 years and disease-free.
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