India Today Editor-in-Chief Aroon Purie on surrogacy
This week, the magazine gives you a break from the hurly-burly of
politics which seems more of the same-the disruptions in Parliament, the
careening economy, the tumbling rupee, the electoral posturing and
sop-giving. We tell a very human story up close and personal from the
bustling town of Anand. A town, halfway between Ahmedabad and Vadodara
in the heart of central Gujarat, which has long been synonymous with
India's cooperative milk industry. It houses the head office of the
Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd, whose brand Amul
sparked the White Revolution and continues to give India some of its
most creative advertising through a chubby little 'butter girl' in a
polka-dotted dress.
But Anand is now home to a different kind of cooperative cottage
industry. It is fast emerging as an international destination for
surrogate babies, and has so far provided childless parents from India
and 34 other countries a chance to fulfil their aspirations. On August
5, a 28-year-old woman, now known as Surrogate No. 500, gave birth to a
baby girl at Anand's Sat Kaival Hospital and Akanksha Infertility
Clinic, inadvertently becoming a milestone that has come to define what
the surrogacy boom is doing for women from the region. A single mother
of two sons aged five and three, she earned Rs.2,000 a month doing housework. Being a surrogate for a couple from Lucknow has given her Rs.3 lakh now. "I can build my own house now," she says. Anand houses several others like her.
Surrogacy still remains a grey area in terms of how Indian laws deal
with it. Constant government flip-flops on the status of single parents
being used as surrogates, the marital status of couples, permissions for
same-sex parents, and foreign parents, have caused a host of problems.
The Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Bill, 2010, which is
in the drafting stage, is expected to change things for the better. But
full social acceptance may take a little longer. Even in Anand,
inebriated husbands are found hurling abuses outside homes where
surrogate mothers live together during pregnancy, suddenly unable to
bear the idea of their wives carrying another man's baby.
The
local Methodist and Catholic churches, and maulvis and pundits, have all
preached against surrogacy to their respective congregations. But
recent endorsements by Aamir Khan and his wife Kiran Rao, whose baby boy
Azad was born through a surrogate mother in 2011, and Shah Rukh Khan
and his wife Gauri, whose boy AbRam was delivered via surrogacy this
May, are going a long way towards helping lift the social stigma
attached with the procedure. According to KPMG's LifeSciences wing, the
fertility industry in India is today worth $125 million. Surrogacy,
which forms roughly 7 per cent of that, stands at around $9 million.
Experts say that these are just estimates and the numbers will grow when
more such cases are reported.
Our cover story, written by Senior
Editor Gayatri Jayaraman with images by Rohit Chawla, takes you to the
surrogacy clinics in Anand, where they put together an engaging story on
how this new baby boom is affecting the town and the townspeople. "The
most poignant moment of the trip was when a surrogate called the child
in her womb 'hamara bachcha' (my child), and then stopped herself. She
said almost apologetically, 'What to do, we sometimes begin to think of
it as our own'," Jayaraman says.
Born through any method, a baby
is a blessing like no other for any couple craving one. The clinics of
Anand are harnessing this longing. They may be providing a service, but
they're also providing hope.
Ref: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/india-today-editor-in-chief-aroon-purie-on-surrogacy/1/300971.html
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