India's baby farm

Subject: India's baby farm Sat Jan 05, 2008 7:12 pm

Dressed in pink and blue gowns, a group of expectant mothers meets in a clinic. None of the women will become mum to the child she carries.

Every night in the quiet Indian city of Anand, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.

A team of maids, cooks and doctors cares for the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.

The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery and counsels them afterwards. Anand's surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to about 40 babies.

More than 50 women in the city are pregnant with the children of couples from the US, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalisation, as well as that most natural of desires: to have a family.

The woman behind Anand's baby boom defends her work as meaningful for everyone involved.

"There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her [own] family," Dr Nayna Patel said.

"If this female wants to help the other one why not allow that? It's not for any bad cause.

"They're helping one another to have a new life in this world."

Experts say commercial surrogacy - it has been called "wombs for rent" - is growing in India. While no reliable numbers track such pregnancies nationwide, doctors work with surrogates in virtually every major city. The women are impregnated in-vitro with the egg and sperm of couples unable to conceive on their own.

Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002, as it is in many other countries, including the US. But India is the leader in making it a viable industry rather than a rare fertility treatment. Experts say it could take off for the same reasons outsourcing in other industries has been successful: a wide labour pool working for relatively low rates.

Critics say the couples are exploiting poor women in India - a country with an alarmingly high maternal death rate - by hiring them at a low cost to undergo the hardship, pain and risks of labour.

Link.

Subject: Re: India's baby farm Sat Jan 05, 2008 8:25 pm

Worked for me!

JK.

The market will provide.

India's baby farm

India's baby farm

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