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World
Worlds first baby factory: Inside Indias home
for surrogate mothers
Nadia Gilani Tuesday 1 Oct 2013 8:59 pm
Use keys to
Willing workers: Dr Nayna Patel (front, centre) with surrogate mothers at her clinic (Picture:
SWNS)
House of Surrogates: Inside India's 'baby factory' for surrogate mothers |... http://metro.co.uk/2013/10/01/worlds-first-baby-factory-inside-indias-h...
2 of 8 12/7/2013 7:51 PM
The worlds first baby factory will house hundreds of surrogate mothers as they carry infants to term for
couples in the West.
The multi-million-pound complex which will have a gift shop and hotel rooms for people coming to collect
newborns is being built in India by controversial doctor Nayna Patel.
One floor will be home to the surrogates, who make babies for a fee as a way of escaping extreme poverty.
They will be impregnated using sperm and embryos sent by courier, with childless couples often visiting
India only to pick up their new son or daughter.
Dr Patel who has a back street clinic that puts up 100 surrogates in a single house has faced death threats
from people who accuse her of exploiting the poor for profit. But she views her work as a feminist mission
to bring needy women together with would-be mothers who are unable to conceive.
Expecting: Surrogate Papiya will get a bigger fee after scans showed she was pregnant with
twins (Picture: SWNS)
These woman are doing a job, she said. Its a physical job. They are paid for that job.
These women know there is no gain without pain. I definitely see myself as a feminist. Surrogacy is one
woman helping another.
The doctor whose expansion plans were revealed in a BBC4 documentary pays surrogates 4,950 and
takes 28,000 from childless couples.
She has delivered nearly 600 babies for her wealthy clients in the decade the programme has been running in
3 of 8 12/7/2013 7:51 PM
rural Gujarat. A British doctor named as Michael, 62, spoke to the BBC after going to the clinic with Russian
wife Veronica, 33, who is infertile.
Procedures are sterile and its no different to what Im used to in the Western world, he said.
Surrogate Papiya is expecting twins for a US couple and plans to buy a house. Having twins means we get a
bigger fee, she said. Last time I was a surrogate I bought white goods, a car and lent some to my sister-
in-law.
BBC, India
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More like this
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5 days ago
4 of 8 12/7/2013 7:51 PM
To
Business Insider More: India
Foreigners Are Flocking To India To Rent Wombs
And Grow Surrogate Babies
Nita Bhalla and Mansi Thapliyal, Reuters Sep. 30, 2013, 6:05 AM 4,3123
REUTERS/Mansi Thapliyal
Paid surrogate moms: (L-R) Daksha, 37, Renuka, 23, and Rajia, 39, pose for a photograph inside a temporary
home for surrogates provided by Akanksha IVF centre in Anand town, about 70 km (44 miles) south of the
western Indian city of Ahmedabad August 27, 2013.
India's booming Surrogate Mother Industry - Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/india-surrogate-mother-industry-2013-9...
2 of 5 12/7/2013 7:53 PM
ANAND, India, Sept 30 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Dressed in a green surgical gown and cap, British
restaurateur Rekha Patel cradled her newborn daughter at the Akanksha clinic in northwestern India as her
husband Daniel smiled warmly, peering in through a glass door.
"I can't believe we have our own child at last," said Patel, 42, gazing in wonderment at five-day-old
Gabrielle.
"We are really grateful to our surrogate mother who managed to get pregnant and kept our little daughter
healthy. She gave nine months of her life to give us a child."
It is the perfect promotion for India's booming surrogacy industry that sees thousands of infertile couples,
many from overseas, hiring the wombs of local women to carry their embryos through to birth.
But a debate over whether the unregulated industry exploits poor women prompted authorities to draft a law
that could make it tougher for foreigners seeking babies made in India.
"There is a need to regulate the sector," said Dr. Sudhir Ajja of Surrogacy India, a Mumbai-based fertility
bank that has produced 295 surrogate babies - 90 percent for overseas clients and 40 percent for same-sex
couples - since it opened in 2007.
"But if the new law tightens rules as suggested by the ministry of home affairs, which disallows surrogacy for
same-sex couples and single parents, then it will clearly impact the industry and put off clients coming from
overseas."
BIRTH OF A MARKET
India opened up to commercial surrogacy in 2002. It is among just a handful of countries - including Georgia,
Russia, Thailand and Ukraine - and a few U.S. states where women can be paid to carry another's genetic
child through a process of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and embryo transfer.
The low-cost technology, skilled doctors, scant bureaucracy and a plentiful supply of surrogates have made
India a preferred destination for fertility tourism, attracting nationals from Britain, the United States,
Australia and J apan, to name a few.
There are no official figures on how large the fertility industry is in India. A U.N.-backed study in J uly 2012
estimated the surrogacy business at more than $400 million a year, with over 3,000 fertility clinics across
India.
The Akanksha clinic in Anand is the best-known at home and abroad, giving the small town in Gujarat state
the reputation as India's "surrogacy capital".
"The surrogates in Anand have become empowered through giving this beautiful gift to others," says
Akanksha's owner, IVF specialist Nayana Patel, who shot to fame in 2004 after she helped a patient have a
baby by using the woman's mother - the child's grandmother - as a surrogate.
"With the money, they are able to buy a house, educate their children and even start a small business. These
are things they could only dream of before. It's a win-win situation."
Patel, who appeared on U.S. celebrity Oprah Winfrey's talk show in 2007, has produced more than 500
surrogate babies - two-thirds of them for foreigners and people of Indian origin living in over 30 countries.
3 of 5 12/7/2013 7:53 PM
Charging couples like Rekha and Daniel an average of $25,000 to $30,000, a fraction of the cost in the
United States, Patel pays her surrogates around 400,000 rupees ($6,500).
For 33-year-old Naina Patel, who gave birth to Gabrielle, the compensation outweighs the downside. The
wife of an auto-rickshaw driver with three daughters of her own, she had to live in a hostel for nine months
with 60 other surrogates so the clinic could monitor her health.
Like most surrogates, she kept her pregnancy a secret due to the social stigma in India's conservative society.
"I was happy to do it but it was not really out of choice because we needed the money," she said in a hospital
bed as she recovered from the Caesarean operation for Gabrielle's birth.
"BABY FACTORIES"
India's surrogacy industry is vilified by women's rights groups who say fertility clinics are nothing more than
"baby factories" for the rich. In the absence of regulation, they say many poor and uneducated women are
lured by agents, hired by clinics, into signing contracts they do not fully understand.
In May last year, surrogate mother Premila Vaghela, 30, died days after delivering a child for an American
couple at a clinic in Gujarat. It was recorded as an "accidental death" by police.
A recent government-funded study of 100 surrogate mothers in Delhi and Mumbai found there was "no fixed
rule" related to compensation and no insurance for post-delivery healthcare. It cited cases where surrogates
were implanted with embryos multiple times to raise the chances of success.
"In most of these cases, the surrogate mothers are being exploited," said Ranjana Kumari, director of the
Centre for Social Research that conducted the study.
Moves to introduce a law - the Assisted Reproductive Technologies Bill (ART) - to protect surrogates, the
children and the commissioning parents is long overdue, Kumari said.
Revised visa requirements introduced in J uly have already resulted in foreign same-sex couples and
individuals being prohibited from surrogacy in India. The ART bill, expected to come before parliament next
year, will tighten things further.
Under the current draft, all fertility clinics must be registered and monitored by a regulatory authority.
Surrogates must be between 21 and 35 years old, they will be provided with insurance and notarized contracts
must be signed between the women and the commissioning parents.
"Legislation should be there so that this wonderful procedure can be supervised and it is being done by the
right people for the right people," said Akanksha's Patel.
"But more bureaucracy will make it difficult for everyone. It will not only mean less commissioning parents
from overseas but it will also impact surrogates, who will lose out on the only chance they have to change
their lives for the better."
(Editing by John O'Callaghan and Ron Popeski)
This post originally appeared at Reuters. Copyright 2013.
4 of 5 12/7/2013 7:53 PM
Infertility & Reproduction Health Center
WebMD Feature from "Marie Claire" Magazine
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 NEXT PAGE >
Womb for Rent: Surrogate Mothers in India
By Abigail Haworth
Customer service, tech support...these days we outsource everything to India. So why not
pregnancy? Here i s a report on the growing number of Indi an women willing to carry an
Ameri can chi ld.
The midday sun is ferociously hot outside the Akanksha Infertility Clinic, a scuffed concrete
building in the small Indian city of Anand. Crammed into a single patch of shade by the gate, a stray cow and a family of
beggars caked so uniformly in dung-colored dust they resemble clay models wait out the noontime heat.
Inside, the lobby is jammed with barefoot female patients in circus-bright saris. Nurses in white
Indian tunics scuttle among them, hollering out names and brandishing medical files. The air smells
faintly of sweat and damp cement. On the walls, blurry photos of babies and newspaper clippings
celebrate the clinic's raison d'tre: "The Cradle of the World" declares one headline.
In this case, the metaphor is also literal. The Akanksha clinic is at the forefront of India's booming
trade in so-called reproductive tourism foreigners coming to the country for infertility treatments
such as in vitro fertilization. The clinic's main draw, however, is its success using local women to
have foreigners' babies. Surrogacy costs about $12,000 in India, including all medical expenses
and the surrogate's fee. In the U.S., the same procedure can cost up to $70,000.
How surrogacy came to be so popular in the choking backwater of Anand, a dairy community with a population of 150,000 in
India's western state of Gujarat, is a long story. The short answer is Dr. Nayna Patel, 47, the clinic's director. A charismatic
woman with flowing hair and a toothpaste-commercial smile, Patel single-handedly put Anand on the map when, in 2003, she
orchestrated the surrogacy of a local woman who wanted to "lend" her womb to her U.K.-based daughter.
The woman gave birth to test-tube twins her own genetic grandchildren and the event made headlines worldwide.
Afterward, Patel was inundated with requests for surrogacy. She now has 45 surrogate mothers on her books, mostly
impoverished women from nearby villages. Twenty-seven of them are currently pregnant, and each will be paid between
$5,000 and $7,000 the equivalent to upwards of 10 years' salary for rural Indians. More than 50 babies have been born at
the clinic in the past three years, half to Westerners or Indians living overseas.
Another example of third-world exploitation? Globalization gone mad? The system certainly lends itself to the criticism that
foreign women unwilling or unable to pay high Western fees happily exploit poor women at a tenth of the price it would cost
back home. The system also avoids the legal red tape and ill-defined surrogacy laws women face in the U.S. (Not to mention
that India, unlike some developing countries, has a fairly advanced medical system and doctors who speak English.) Or is it a
mutually beneficial relationship?
Symptoms | Doctors | Health Care Reform
Womb for Rent: Surrogate Mothers in India http://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-reproduction/features/womb-rent-...
1 of 1 12/7/2013 7:55 PM
< PREVIOUS PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 NEXT PAGE >
continued...
By some estimates, Indian surrogacy is already a $445-million-a-year business.
J essica Ordenes is a petite yoga-school proprietor from New J ersey. Hot, disoriented, jet-lagged, and alone her husband,
David, will join her in a week's time she is sitting in an empty doctor's office at the Akanksha clinic, sipping fresh coconut
juice and waiting for her daily hormone injection. A girlishly pretty woman with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, Ordenes
wears a crisp green shirt and a liberal slick of lip gloss ("to stop my lips from shriveling up in this heat," she explains after
numerous reapplications). She has come to Anand because she felt, at age 40, that she was nearly out of time.
Unable to get pregnant but still ovulating, she spent years unsuccessfully trying to arrange for a surrogate in the States to
carry her biological child. "I was running out of eggs, running out of hope, and running out of patience with being treated like a
number in the U.S. system," she says. "I read about this clinic online I felt India was my last chance."
Ordenes arrived a few days ago, checked in to the only hotel in town with air conditioning, and
arrived within hours at the clinic, where she began having hormone treatments to stimulate her
ovaries. In about 10 days, the eggs she produces will be extracted and fertilized with her husband's
sperm. Two days after that, if all goes according to plan, some of the resulting embryos will be
implanted into local surrogate Najima Vohra, a 30-year-old mother of two. Ordenes knows very little
about the woman she hopes will carry her baby. She has met her only once, during a short session
with Patel on the first day.
Ordenes is not childless. She had a daughter at age 20 with her first husband, but her uterus
became infected after a C-section, and she had to have it removed. Her marriage ended soon after.
Three years later, she met David, a pharmaceutical executive and the love of her life. Not being able to have a baby with him
tormented her. "I come from a huge family, and I always wanted a house full of kids," she says. Ordenes hoped for at least
one child with David "to make our union complete."
The couple, who live in a sprawling house in the suburbs, started to think seriously about surrogacy seven years ago. Ordenes
tried local agencies but learned that willing candidates were scarce because New J ersey state law decrees that surrogates
cannot receive payment. She found herself languishing on waiting lists and frustrated by potential surrogates who backed out.
"It was the most demoralizing experience of my life," she says.
As she sits in the empty doctor's office, a young Indian man wearing a red T-shirt and stonewashed jeans enters the room.
Without a word, he proceeds to stick a needle in Ordenes's arm and fill a syringe with her blood. She looks up at him
quizzically she has no idea who he is. After he leaves, she examines the livid red dot left behind on her skin for a second,
then shrugs. "So anyway, the years disappeared, and now, as you can see, here I am in India."
1 of 1 12/7/2013 7:55 PM
continued...
The temperature at 9 a.m. the following morning is pushing a brain-melting 107 degrees. Najima Vohra, immaculately dressed
in an electric-blue tunic-and-pants set, arrives at the clinic an hour early for her meeting with Ordenes so they can bond a bit
more before the procedure begins. It's not the most intimate venue, but Vohra is uncomfortable being seen anywhere else
like most women here, she plans to keep her surrogacy a secret. Vohra is slim, and her long hair is tied back with a plain
rubber band. "I couldn't wait to get here," she says through a translator, sitting in a plastic chair in the lobby. "I've been so
excited since Dr. Patel chose me to be a surrogate that I haven't been able to sleep."
Vohra says she's not ashamed of being a surrogate, but most locals are very traditional and don't understand. "They think it's
dirty that immoral acts take place to get pregnant," she whispers, explaining their disbelief that she could conceive a child
without having sex. "They'd shun my family if they knew." Vohra comes from a village 20 miles outside Anand, but she has
temporarily moved to the town with her husband and two children, a 12-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son, to hide what
she is doing. "We told our neighbors we were coming here for work, which is not strictly a lie."
Vohra has no job but helps her husband in his scrap-metal business, for which they earn 50 to 60 rupees ($1.20 to $1.45) a
day. If her pregnancy is successful, the $5,500 she receives will, as she puts it, "give my children a future."
Growing up, Vohra worked in the wheat fields; she had little education. After her parents married her off at 16, she moved with
her husband into a one-room mud house that erodes every year during the monsoon season. She plans to divide her
surrogacy windfall three ways: buying a brick house, investing in her husband's business, and paying for her children's
education. "My daughter wants to be a teacher," she says. "I'll do anything to give her that opportunity.
"I'm fit and strong, and I've already given birth twice," she continues, scoffing at the idea of being nervous. And yes, she's
mentally prepared to hand over the baby. "It won't even have the same skin color as me, so it won't be hard to think of it as
J essica's." The clinic stipulates that all surrogates must already be mothers so they understand what's involved physically and
will be less likely to become emotionally attached to the babies they bear.
Of course, it's impossible for Vohra to know how she will feel after she gives birth this is the wild card, the reason custody
battles sometimes ensue in the U.S. All surrogates at the clinic sign a contract agreeing to hand over the baby which
reassures prospective parents, but also supports arguments that the women, many of whom are illiterate, are being taken
advantage of. (In the U.S., only a handful of states regard presigned contracts as legally binding. In others, a surrogate has a
small window of time after birth to stake her claim to parental rights.)
1 of 1 12/7/2013 7:57 PM
continued...
Vohra sits in silence for a while and examines her cracked fingernails. "If I do feel sad after the birth, I won't show it," she says
eventually. "I can understand how much J essica wants this baby." In India, she explains, infertility is considered a curse.
Ordenes arrives at exactly 10 a.m., having hired her own car and driver to help navigate the belligerent scrum of auto
rickshaws, rusting buses, and camel carts in downtown Anand. She walks over and hugs Vohra, ignoring the custom that
discourages lower-caste Indian women from interacting with those outside their group. Vohra smiles.
Ordenes has brought her own interpreter, a female student from the local college recommended by the clinic, since Vohra
doesn't speak English. However, when they find an empty ward upstairs and sit on the beds to talk, the women struggle for
words. It's as though they both realize the gap between their lives is so vast, there's simply no sensible place to begin.
Ordenes feels her way with some questions about Vohra's kids, then fills her in on her latest ovum count topic that
consumes foreign patients while they're here, since their sole contribution to the pregnancy is healthy eggs. (Surrogates' own
eggs are never used.) Ordenes has produced six eggs so far, but two need extra time to mature. She takes Vohra's hand and
squeezes it and promises to look after her during the pregnancy. "You're my angel, you're my angel," she coos and hugs her
again. Then Ordenes gets out her camera to take photos to send to her husband.
Patel's office is a gloomy, narrow room with a computer at one end and an ultrasound machine behind a fraying living-room
curtain at the other. Her enormous desk sits in the center, piled high with papers. The room is constantly packed with nurses,
patients, and anyone else who cares to wander in nobody ever knocks before entering.
Making her rounds of the upstairs ward, where pregnant surrogates have been admitted for monitoring, Patel says the
business has taken off beyond anything she imagined. She has about 150 foreign couples on her waiting list, and every week
three new women apply to be surrogates. She works 14-hour days and insists she's only involved in surrogacy because
there's a genuine need. "I accept patients who have an established infertility problem," she says. "I've had some women ask to
do surrogacy because they don't want to give up work for a pregnancy, but I turned them down flat." All the same, Patel admits
there are dangers if the surrogacy business continues to grow in India. "There is little regulation by the Indian Medical Council,
the body that oversees such practices," she says. "Rules need to be tighter to ensure women are not exploited."
1 of 1 12/7/2013 7:57 PM
continued...
As a guest speaker at many international infertility conferences, Patel isn't fazed by the foreigners who beat a path to her door
including clients from Taiwan, J apan, the U.S., Europe, and Australia. But she refuses to treat gay couples, revealing her
deeply conservative cultural roots. "I get e-mails from gays and lesbians," she says, "some of them very well written but I
don't feel right about helping them."
The people she does feel good about helping are the local women-the surrogates so long as they're not being coerced by
their husbands or in-laws eager for a paycheck. "I must be certain it's a woman's own decision," she explains. "If there's any
sign of tension or unwillingness, I spot it straightaway." Patel also helps to ensure each woman keeps control over her fee.
"For example, if she wants to buy a house, we'll hold her money for her until she's ready. Or if she wants to put it in an account
for her children, we'll go with her to the bank to set up the account in her name." The money gives many women their first
taste of empowerment.
Achieving that financial freedom is hard work. In one of the wards, Sofia Vohra (no relation to Najima), 35, is lying in a room
with three beds, an ancient ceiling fan, and wall paint that has bubbled in the heat like a nasty rash. She is about to give birth
for the sixth time, to a baby she's carrying for a couple living in the U.S. She has five children of her own, a husband who's a
lazy drunk, and a job crushing glass that's used in making (of all things) fortified kite string, for which she earns $25 a month.
She became a surrogate for no other reason than to pay for her two daughters' dowries, an illegal but still widely practiced
Indian marriage ritual.
"I'll be glad when this is over," she says, as Patel places a stethoscope on her ballooning brown stomach. "It's exhausting
being pregnant again." Then, in case her complaints are misunderstood, she quickly adds, "This is not exploitation. Crushing
glass for 15 hours a day is exploitation. The baby's parents have given me a chance to make good marriages for my
daughters. That's a big weight off my mind."
It's lunchtime on Thursday, and the clinic's surrogate mothers crowd into a small room where the
staff is throwing a party. Among them is 30-year-old Rubina Mondal, a former bank clerk with long,
straight black hair, dressed in a red sari fringed with gold. In February, she gave birth to a healthy
boy for a couple from California.
Mondal heard about Patel's clinic on a TV show, and traveled to Anand from her home in the
eastern city of Kolkata. Her reason was purely economic: Her 8-year-old son, Raj, has a hole in his
heart, and working as a surrogate was the only likely solution to covering his expensive medical
care. Patel matched Mondal with Karen, a 33-year-old who works for a mortgage lending company
in Los Angeles.
1 of 1 12/7/2013 7:58 PM
continued...
Karen and her husband, Thomas, wanted children, but she had been diagnosed with a uterine tumor at age 16 and knew
someone else would eventually have to carry the baby. Mondal conceived on the first try. Over the next eight months, Karen
called every week from the States to hear news of her growing child. On top of the surrogacy fee, Karen paid for a spacious
two-bedroom apartment in Anand for Mondal's family, hired a cleaner, and sent care packages containing cotton pajamas and
panties for Mondal and toys for her two sons.
Five weeks before the baby was due, Karen flew to India and moved in with Mondal so they could go through the final weeks
together. "Karen became like my sister," says Mondal. Patel delivered the baby boy, Brady, at the clinic.
Like Ordenes, Karen had tried to find a surrogate in the States. "Some of the women were nice, but we just didn't click," she
explains. As a Buddhist, Karen thought she'd have an affinity with India's shared beliefs in fate and karma. She also
connected with the warmth of Mondal and the clinic. "The people were honest and real," Karen says.
She bristles at those who suggest that she chose India because it was hassle-free. "Some people made it out like we went
grocery shopping and came back with a baby," she says. "But being in India was tough the heat, the mosquitoes, worrying
about Rubina and the baby's health. You have to want a baby real bad to deal with this kind of arrangement."
Karen e-mails Mondal photos of Brady every week, and she plans to bring her to the U.S. for her
son's first birthday next year. "I want Brady to have a relationship with the woman who carried him
for me," she says. Meanwhile, she has embarked on a second surrogacy. Najima Vohra's sister,
Razia, is 10 weeks pregnant with a sibling for Brady.
Karen's story gives hope to Ordenes. Ten days after her arrival, she learns that the latest ultrasound
has revealed eight healthy eggs good news, seeing as more eggs mean a greater chance of
producing viable embryos to implant in Vohra. Still, the odds are iffy: For a younger couple, the
chances of a surrogate conceiving are 30 to 40 percent, but that drops to 15 to 20 percent for
someone Ordenes's age.
As excited as she is about the prospect of Vohra's pregnancy, Ordenes isn't sure she can stick around for the embryo transfer
Patel has scheduled it for the following week. "I really want to stay to be with Najima," she says, "but I need to get home
because I've arranged to have my basement renovated." She quickly realizes how that sounds and adds a qualifier. "Well, you
know, good workmen are very hard to find. And the renovations are for the baby."
1 of 1 12/7/2013 7:58 PM
INDIA TODAY GROUP : India Today Aaj Tak Headlines Today Business Today Men's Heal th Wonder Woman Cosmopolitan
Updated 20:00 IST | December 7, 2013
In Association With
TAGS: Surrogacy | Gujarat | Shah Rukh Khan | Aamir Khan
India Today / Archive / Cover Story / September 2, 2013 / Story
In a cramped bylane off Station Road in Anand, men camp beneath the banyan tree, or perch on a bench
waiting for their women to complete their business at an adjacent clinic. Foreigners and Indians, all
couples, are dropped off by taxis at the entrance, husbands holding wives by the hand. India's cooperative
milk capital has also turned into its surrogacy hub: The Sat Kaival Hospital and Akanksha Infertility Clinic
run by Dr Nayana Patel, 55, and her husband Hitesh, 57, churns out 30 babies on average every month.
Surrogate No. 500, a 28-year-old single mother of two, delivered a baby girl here on August 5, an
inadvertent milestone in the now routine comings and goings of cooperative commerce. Four days later,
she sees the baby for the first time at the behest of the sponsoring parents, who are from Lucknow. She
does not recognise the newborn from a series of photographs. "If it's a girl, it must be mine," she says,
blankly.
The Baby Factory
The Baby Factory: Surrogacy, the blooming business in Gujarat
GAYATRI J AYARAMAN AUGUST 23, 2013 | UPDATED 13:47 IST
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The Baby Factory: Surrogacy, the blooming business in Gujarat : Cover ... http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/surrogacy-blooming-business-in-gujarat...
1 of 9 12/7/2013 8:03 PM
One with her own: Suman (Second from left), 32, currently carrying two surrogate babies in her womb, with her daughters Niddhi, 7,
Nisha, 9, and Nirali, 11, husband Mahendra, and mother Sarithaben in Mehrau Village, Gujarat.
A year ago, she had nothing. Her younger son is three and her older one five. Abandoned by her husband
at the younger child's birth, she moved in with her mother, a domestic worker who lives on the road
behind Dr Patel's home. She earned 2,000 a month doing housework. A friend brought her to the doctor.
She has not seen her children even once since. "I can build my own house now," Surrogate No. 500 says.
She would not do this again, she adds. But 3 lakh goes a long way in Anand, Gujarat.
Every turn on a road in Anand bears jagged signifiers of a township straining towards modernity. A chariot
vendor is down the road from a gun store. Past the Subway franchise is the mandatory Amul outlet, selling
shrikhand and the local mithai kaju katri from the 6.5 million kg-a-day cooperative milk union movement
launched here in 1946 by Verghese Kurien.
While the world knows Anand, a town of 1.8 million, for the White Revolution, many other revolutions
have since jostled for space here. There are 66 higher education institutes and two universities. The town is
also an industrial engineering and emerging ship-building hub booming with the opening of the Khambhat
port nearby. But it is hospitals, the Shankara Eye Hospital, the spanking new Zydus multi-speciality facility
on the city outskirts and the multitude of medical agencies pharmacies, private nursing homes and clinics
that drive its medical tourism. You won't find it mentioned in the 'Vibrant Gujarat' roadmap for Anand
district but as far as cooperative movements go, the town offers up the mother of them all: Surrogacy.
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2 of 9 12/7/2013 8:03 PM
By her side: Suresh, 29, an Ahmedabad-based auto rickshaw driver, cooks rice for his wife Seetal, 26, a surrogate mother, every
weekend.
In 2001, Dr Patel, who had been dabbling in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) pregnancies since 1999, took on a
stray case of surrogacy for an NRI family in which the grandmother famously mothered the child to save
her daughter's marriage. Featured on the Oprah Winfrey show in 2006, she has almost become an
institution, instrumental in all landmark cases involving surrogacy up until now. The Indian Council of
Medical Research drew up surrogacy guidelines based on Dr Patel's 2001 NRI grandmother case and
subsequent cases. She hit the headlines in 2008 when the custody of Manji Yamada, a baby born to
Japanese parents at Dr Patel's facility in Anand, was thrown into ambiguity after they separated before his
birth.
The landmark Jan Balaz vs Union of India case, also involving Dr Patel's clinic, saw Indian citizenship
being conferred on the twin babies and the due process of adoption followed. These pioneering cases
conferred the surrogacy capital status on Anand.
The number of babies delivered at Dr Patel's clinic is 680 and counting. But a new draft bill in the making
could remove surrogates from direct employment with the fertility clinic and put them under the influence
of a surrogate agency.
Key features of the bill include:
- Surrogates must be in the age bracket 21-35.
- No surrogate should undergo implantation cycles more than three times for a couple.
- If married, a surrogate should receive consent of her spouse.
Hrithik will reportedly
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Salman will be present
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Woogie'.
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give 12 girls chance to
3 of 9 12/7/2013 8:03 PM
Milestone mom: Surrogate mom no.500, and the 680th child born at the Sat Kaival hospital in Anand.
- Only Indian citizens can be considered for surrogacy.
- Surrogate mother must relinquish all filial rights over child.
- Parents must accept the child born of the surrogacy.
- IVF will be separated from surrogacy requirements, which will be outsourced to specialised agents.
Dr Patel wishes the Government engaged more with surrogates and doctors at the local level. "The
Government is saying it will trust an agent, who may or may not be educated or humane towards
surrogates, but not doctors. Why?" she asks. "I wonder sometimes, if there were two children, a girl and a
boy, and they didn't want the boy, could I take him home?" says Suman, 32, six months pregnant and
carrying twins. She was impregnated with quadruplets and two were terminated. She hasn't been home in
five months though her three daughters, Niddhi, 7, Nisha, 9, and Nirali, 11, visit her often. Suman is
carrying plastic dolls she bought for them from the market today. The Eid festive air is accentuated at
Mehrau village, 11 km from Anand, as villagers come out to wave, cheer and ask Suman how her pregnancy
is going. Only one home in the village, that of a lawyer couple, refuses to participate. "Are the people who
talk going to put food on my plate? I have not done anything wrong, so what is there to hide?" Suman asks
as her children clamber all over her. She needs the money. Her husband earns 100 a day as a labourer in
the nearby fields.
Dr Patel has fought varying levels of social opposition since 2005, when she began her surrogacy
programme. A third of the children born here have gone to Indian couples, another third to NRIs and the
others to foreigners from over 34 different countries. All surrogates in the clinic are below 35 and mothers
to at least one child of their own. They are required to meet minimum health requirements or are
otherwise "nutritionally fortified". The husband's consent is mandatory in case of couples.
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ON THE STANDS
4 of 9 12/7/2013 8:03 PM
Doctor life at work: Dr Nayana Patel (Right), 55, assisted by Dr Harsha Vhadarka, 36, places an embryo to mark the start of a
surrogacy cycle.
Dr Patel is now building a 100,000 sq ft hospital on the outskirts of the city that will accommodate
would-be parents, surrogates, IVF facilities and neonatal units next to a vocational institute. While that is
slated for a March 2014 launch, for now she must flit between Surrogate House, the designated home for
surrogate moms, multiple hospitals, standalone neonatal units, and her clinic. Since her first IVF case in
1999 that yielded baby Akanksha, after whom the clinic is named, Dr Patel has been a life-giving, family-
saving benefactor. It is in her genes: Her late mother, a social worker and corporator in Rajkot in the
1950s, was herself a fierce advocate of women's rights.
At the clinic, a jet-lagged Portuguese-speaking couple from Angola, the second to arrive here from that
country, nervously alights from a car. The woman, 34, lean, beautiful, her face strained with emotion, has
just lost her baby and her uterus to complications. "Can we use more than one surrogate?" she asks, in
halting English. At the door is Tajima, a 34-year-old Japanese woman who lost her uterus to nuclear
radiation-linked cancer a few years ago. Her baby had just been born the previous day and is in neonatal
ICU at Zydus hospital. That evening, Dr Jagdish Prasad, the director general of health services, has
circulated a Cabinet note on the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill announcing a firm
intention to disallow surrogacy for foreigners, on the back of the Ministry of Home Affairs already banning
same-sex couples and single parents of foreign origin. At Akanksha clinic, prospective parents, with their
heads bent over reports, medication and bills, ignore the news flashing on five LCD screens.
J ohnson ended his
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in the three-match ODI
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5 of 9 12/7/2013 8:03 PM
Bonding over the baby: Seetal takes a call from the intended parents enquiring about her health.
Surrogate House is a complex of two two-storied bungalows. It's Eid, August 9, and a baby shower is
underway at 11 a.m. The 'parties' of Aarti, 31, Gita, 29, and Rukmini, 27, all seven months pregnant, have
sent them saris, and shared the cost of the ceremony. The women don make-up and braid their hair as they
slip into their new saris, stolen pleasures that bring home the reality of a pregnancy that is not quite theirs.
Durga, 29, smiles. "It's our child, we call it our child." Rukmini has more reasons for joy. Her diamond-
washer husband has just inaugurated his own store that morning. When she returns, she will open her own
beauty parlour.
Housing for surrogates has often been criticised as glorified forced isolation but Dr Patel's stance is that it
guarantees the health of both mother and child. Many surrogates say they prefer it. It allows them
anonymity from prying neighbours or relatives. The controlled environment provides them with
nutritional food and the chance to enrol in vocational classes, from chocolate-making to computers
embroidery and hair and make-up. Surrogate mothers say the base rate that accrues to them from bearing
babies, be it for Indian parents or foreigners, is around one-fourth of the total cost of 8-11 lakh that clinics
6 of 9 12/7/2013 8:03 PM
In the name of god:(From left) Surrogate mothers Madhuri Surbhi Patel, 24, Niranjana Sarla Patel, 28, and Rukmini Reddy, 27, have a
Sreemantham or seventh month ceremonial blessing performed jointly at the surrogate house.
charge. What differs though, is how they are treated. Indian parents rarely encourage an engagement with
the surrogate after birth.
Inside a room on the ground floor of Surrogate House, Suresh, a 28-year-old autorickshaw driver from
Ahmedabad, has cooked rice for his wife Seetal, 26, pregnant with her first surrogate child. Their own two
children, aged 7 and 11, are in boarding school. They want to buy a house with the 4 lakh from the
surrogacy. He understands, he says, that the child is not his, but has trouble not feeling affection for it. He
caresses his wife's stomach affectionately. Local Methodist and Catholic churches, maulvis and priests
have all preached against surrogacy to their respective congregations. In vain. "It used to be much harder
when I started. Now I don't fight because I know no one who is talking is going to give these parents a child
or save these surrogates from their poverty," says Dr Patel.
Surrogates keep coming back because the money counts. Kaushal, 37, has three children and works as a
cook now, earning 2,000 a month. Her small rebuilt home in Anand has a light and fan in the hall, and a
television with a cable connection. But there are no bulbs in the inner room or the kitchen. Most of the
money she earned through her two surrogacies since 2007 went into unsuccessfully treating her alcoholic
husband's cirrhosis and heart condition complicated by diabetes. A devout Catholic, her parish and the
home she works in would both dismiss her if they found out what she had done, she fears. But thanks to
the babies she carried, she doesn't need their approval to put a roof over her head. She can look God in the
eye because she knows she hasn't done anything wrong. The rest, she says, she will manage.
Pics by Rohit Chawla.
7 of 9 12/7/2013 8:03 PM

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