Slate takes a look at India’s half-billion-dollar-a-year reproductive-tourism industry. “The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe,” writes Amana Fontanella-Khan. “Surrogacy can cost up to $100,000 in the United States, while many Indian clinics charge $22,000 or less. Very few questions are asked. Same-sex couples, single parents and even busy women who just don’t have time to give birth are welcomed by doctors.” The industry, however, has been plagued by horror stories and accusations of exploitation, and an Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill is being considered. (HT: Market Design) [%comments]
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India should forbid surrogacy. This is a clear case of exploitation of the poor. It is tragic to compare surrogacy to the call-center culture. The call-centers do not hire and exploit an uneducated poor women into a dead end job that takes a toil on the surrogate’s body and mind. Also given the stigma attached to pregnancies outside of marriage in India, no women with an alternative would choose this.
Women’s bodies for hire. Surrogacy is just prostitution of women by women. Can we stop this?
In response to #9, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with surrogacy in and of itself. It’s a legitimate transaction: to suggest that it’s impossible for a woman to decide of her own free will to take an acceptable risk for a particular return is to infantilize women. A call-center isn’t comparable, but there are quite a number of risky, short-term contract jobs which are.
There are certainly a lot of possible problems with this particular situation in India, but you can’t make a sweeping statement that all surrogacy is wrong.
@ Ria.
While US surrogacy agencies will not let “too busy to birth” women use surrogate mothers, that is not the case here in India. There is simply no regulation in India surrounding surrogacy to prevent this from happening.
Furthermore, according to several people I interviewed for the story, women in executive roles can- and have had- surrogates carry their child for them due to time constraints.
I agree that this is toxic, but it is the truth.
Lastly, the article does not claim that these women are fueling the industry. They represent a minority, but these extreme examples serve to highlight the problems that can emerge in an un-regulated surrogacy market.
Best,
Amana Fontanella-Khan
I agree: “Surrogacy is prostitution of women.” How we have fallen, when we think it is OK to strip a woman of her eggs or use her womb to create a child–as long as money changes hands! Even worse are those who use women’s eggs and wombs and then purposefully plan to ensure the child has no mother at all while growing up. It is men who created the first prostitutes, and it is this male mindset that women’s bodies are exploitable that has led to this new and equally awful form of prostitution.
I am in India right now, waiting for my baby to be born, so I am experiencing this world first-hand. The idea that women are doing this to save time or wear on their body is absurd – we’re talking about flying half-way around the world at least twice (once or more for IVF, once for pickup), paying tens of thousands of dollars, having lots of hormones injected in you to extract the eggs, trusting a woman in a third-world country with your baby…you only do something like this if you really need to.
In our case, our first child was born 3 months premature, which is extremely dangerous, and was likely due to my wife’s genetics. Additionally, she is now on meds that would be very dangerous for her to stop, and which can affect the baby. So for the health of our next child, we chose this difficult route. I understand that some people enjoy adopting, which is wonderful. In our case, we only want the huge effort of caring for children if they are genetically ours.
The other people we’ve met using the service have been gay, infertile, or past reproductive age. We’ve met no one doing it because they were busy. Not that my wife is complaining about getting to skip pregnancy – but this route is no easy ride.
As for the comment that this is exploitation of the poor, well, the commenter sounds like a privileged person complaining about other people being given good options that a privileged person finds distasteful. Dead-end job? The surrogates make several years of normal wages, just by carrying a child for 9mo, money they can invest in educating & preparing themselves for better jobs later. It’s better wages than a factory, it’s far better emotionally that prostitution.
And hell, women in America do surrogacy too! They just charge more. If you are going to claim that all surrogacy is exploiting an uneducated woman with no other options, how do you explain surrogacy in the first world? It’s a contract, like any other – somewhat unusual, but chosen because both parties feel they benefit.
To those calling this exploitation and calling for making it illegal, I ask, how do you decide for someone else?
Is the surrogate mother better off with this offer available or worse off? Additional options can hardly make someone worse off.
Also, value is subjective, and therefore such a choice can only be left to the individual involved. Are women not able to weight the benefits and costs, including many intangibles?
Finally, if you think those surrogate mothers don’t know what they are getting into, then spreading information is the right course of action, not legislation.
Prohibition has never succeeded in preventing willing participants or creating a safer environment; the black market it creates is far more dangerous and is not conducive to healthy economic development (which is needed so that those women do get more and better options).
I’m the Co-Director/Producer of a feature documentary called “Made in India” that explores this issue by showing the personal experiences of a US couple and their surrogate throughout the entire process. The film asks the audience to think about different human experiences, choices, fair practice and the clash between reproductive desires and global economics. We’re screening in film festivals across the US and abroad, and we really hope to bring this discussion to a broad audience to get people talking about their thoughts on the issue.
Babies being gestated in machines is a common sci-fi theme. Now we are in the manual-mode of not having to carry babies in our wombs.
It baffles me why people think there is a moral dimension to this.The moral dimension should start at birth, not at fertilization.