Baby Farms of India

“Indian ‘baby farms’ are thriving as demand from couples from developed countries, including the UK, soars.

Infertile couples are turning to women in India to carry and give birth to their children, as commercial surrogacy is not legal in certain countries, or if it is legal, can be prohibitively expensive.

The money these women are earn – as much as £4,700 per pregnancy – is transforming communities.

The Akanksha Infertility Clinic in Anand, a small town in the Indian state of Gujarat, is at the forefront of the commercial surrogacy in India.

The treatment at the clinic costs from £17,000 with the surrogate receiving about £4,700 as a fee.

The surrogates generally come from poor backgrounds. In India, about one third of the population lives on less than 75p a day.

The clinic started offering surrogacy services about ten years ago, and since then more than 700 babies have been delivered there.

The money paid to women for carrying other people’s babies has had a huge economic impact on families in the surrounding villages

Sarla Patelia, 40, lives in a village called Manjipura about 25km from Anand. She was a surrogate in 2009 and 2012. With the money she earned, she built a new two-storey house and moved her family out of the hut with a tin-roof they were living in previously.

She has two sons, aged nine and 10. ‘It completely changed our lives,’ she says, explaining that her husband, Shashikant, 44, had a tumour and she was able to pay for a life-saving operation which cost 150,000 rupees (£1,470), which they otherwise would not have been able to afford.

“We don’t actually have a source of income at the moment,’ she says. ‘We’re still living off the money from the surrogacy.’

Neeta Makwara, 30, who lives not far away in the village of Nadiad, gave birth to a baby boy for a foreign couple in 2008 and to twins for another couple in 2011.

The first time, her husband, a rickshaw driver, squandered all the money she received. But the second time, she used the money to build a three-storey house and now makes a bit of cash each month from renting out the ground floor.

Commercial surrogacy became legal in India in 2002 but it is illegal in countries including the UK and Australia. A surrogate cannot legally be paid to carry a child in the UK; only their expenses can be covered.

Commercial surrogacy is available in parts of the United States but costs about five times as much as it does in India.

Dr Nayna Patel, the medical director of the Akanksha centre, says that affordability is a factor for foreign couples opting for surrogacy in India, but that it is also popular because Indian doctors and medical technology are well-regarded and the poor rural women generally lead clean-living lifestyles.

‘The surrogates are considered trustworthy, committed, and the vices like drugs, smoking, and drinking are not seen amongst women,’ says Dr Patel.

A British couple, who wish to remain anonymous, used the clinic last year after the wife was left unable to have children following a botched operation at a clinic in London.

The couple had a baby girl who was genetically their own through a surrogate in India. The wife, 37, a management consultant, explains that she was apprehensive of using the treatment at first.

‘When you’re from the West, you don’t do this lightly,’ she says. ‘When we did the research and visited we were reassured that the women were volunteering and it wasn’t exploitative. We’re obviously very conscious of human rights.’

She contacted other clinics in India, which seemed much ‘more commercial and pushy’, before deciding on the Akanksha Infertility Clinic.

She says burst into tears after the surrogate mother and her husband visited the baby a couple of weeks after she was born.

‘They were thanking me, which is what made me emotional because they’ve given me this baby. The surrogate’s husband was able to start his own diamond business with the money.

‘They’re moving into a bigger house. For them, this money means so much. This place actually helps people. Yes, it helps people like myself and my husband, who have been married 11 years and have tried lots of different avenues to have a child.

‘We’ve got the happiness of a lifetime now having this child but it’s not just a one-way thing. It helps the surrogates and their families as well.’

Dr Jatin Shah has a clinic in Mumbai called the Mumbai Infertility Clinic and IVF Centre, which last year handled the surrogate birth of a baby boy for the Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan.

The clinic oversees about ten surrogate cases a month, but only offers the service to Indian residents or Indian expats.

Dr Shah explains that he wants to see a proper surrogacy law in place in India before he starts catering to foreigners. There is an Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill but the actual law has yet to be passed.

Dr Shah explains that there is no issue with finding women who are willing to act as surrogates and that there is a ‘long queue’ of potential candidates who approach the clinics.

They are screened and selected based on having a healthy uterus. The clinic pays surrogates almost 400,000 rupees (£3,860) for carrying a child. In some case the surrogates will also get a bonus from the couple.

Dr Shah dismisses concerns often raised that the surrogate mother might become bonded to the child and not want to give the baby up. ‘Why should it happen?’ he says. ‘She needs the money. I haven’t heard of a single case yet in India. When you go to the grassroots and talk to the mother, she has two of her own children, she is doing this for the money.

‘She has no interest in getting linked up to the child. She can’t look after her own, so there is no question of looking after somebody else’s child.’

They could also face legal challenges in such a situation, Dr Shah explains. ‘There’s a legal contract between the surrogate mother and the patient, so how will she turn around? And she delivers under the care of the doctor in the nursing home.

‘The minute she delivers the baby is handed over to the genetic parents. Unless she absconds in the fifth month and disappears. Why would she do that because she needs that money?

‘We’ve done about a hundred surrogates and they’ve all just been very happy that they’ve been paid the promised amount and from that money they could buy their husband a taxi or buy themselves a house or pay for their kids’ education.

‘That is their motive which we fulfill for them.'”

Wombs for rent: The Indian baby farms transforming the lives of the poverty-stricken women who are paid to carry babies for wealthy foreigners[Daily Mail 3/6/14 by Bianca London]

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