An Indian surrogate is a wretched creature. She is at the mercy of her poverty. As a woman, she is at the mercy of her husband and in-laws. As a surrogate, she is at the mercy of the doctors treating her and, according to a new study, what some of them do to her goes against medical ethics but they do it anyway because she is poor and illiterate.
Researchers from two Indian universities, Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Aarhus University in Denmark say in a new study that some doctors in fertility clinics implant several embryos in the womb – sometimes as many as five or six – to ensure a higher success rate for the commissioning couple. One woman in the study was found to be carrying seven embryos, even though medical guidelines advise that no more than three should be transferred so as not to pose a risk to a mother’s health.
In their year-long study, the researchers found that doctors often consulted the commissioning couple about decisions, but few involved the surrogate mother. In any case, the notion of informed consent is a joke if women cannot read contracts and cannot understand oral explanations because the concepts and vocabulary are beyond them.
Given the vulnerability of the mothers, it is shocking that India has left the surrogacy industry, worth an estimated $2.3-billion (U.S.), almost totally unregulated. Five years ago, as reports of exploitation by middlemen began to surface along with stories of surrogates being paid a pittance compared with the money flowing to clinics and middlemen, the Indian government drafted legislation to regulate the industry. But the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill has been hanging fire ever since. Indian MPs are too busy haranguing one another about corruption to pass a law to protect surrogates from abuse.
Parliament convened on July 21 for the monsoon session and it is high time legislators applied their minds to the bill and passed it into law. Under the bill, the banks that would handle the money being exchanged for surrogacy will have to be registered, and commissioning parents will have to go to the registered banks to identify surrogates. And the process of recruiting surrogates – currently a totally random event, with agents who work for private IVF clinics trawling poor neighbourhoods for possible surrogates – will be streamlined.
The bill also contains provisions for situations where the commissioning couple reject the baby. That happened in 2012 when an Australian couple’s Indian surrogate gave birth to twins; because the couple already had a son, they decided to take home the baby girl but left the perfectly healthy twin boy in India. The bill would require commissioning couples to pay a bond so that if a baby is not accepted, there is least enough money to raise and educate the child.
It is insulting to surrogates, who are already victimized, to call them, as some do, “biological coolies.” But that is the sad truth. They rent out their wombs to raise money to care for their own families, or to escape their squalid slums.
That for five years MPs have not bothered to act on legislation that would help these women is a brutal demonstration of the fact that poor Indians – and particularly poor Indian women – have no voice or clout in the corridors of power.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government came to power more than a year ago, it promised voters achhe din (good days). MPs need to live up to that pledge.
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