The Catholic Church has always rejected surrogacy. Many countries like France, Germany and China and have done the same making it illegal. Canada and the UK have banned commercial surrogacy, or surrogacy for money. Everyone has heard stories of how surrogacy can turn ugly with the child caught in the middle. But there are other victims. Surrogacy is becoming more popular. As rich westerners go to poorer nations like India to pay women to carry their IVF babies for cheap, these poor women are being exploited for their uterus. It is the outsourcing of pregnancy and birth.
The new documentary Google Baby films the creation of babies across three continents. The review asks:
...who is the parent of a child when the sperm comes from Israel, the egg comes from the United States and the surrogate pregnancy takes place in Gujarat, India?
Eggs are donated by young American women looking for quick cash and embryos are created by IVF in American clinics, sometimes with sperm from men from other countries. Then they are frozen and shipped to India where Dr. Nayna Patel has a surrogacy business. Her surrogates are implanted with the western embryos at bargain prices. The surrogates carry the fetuses and are then given an automatic C-section. The baby is taken to its "parents" and the surrogate is left to cry on the operating table. These poor women can earn upwards of 15 years worth of salary for a single surrogacy.
From the UK DailyMail:
The tiny Akanksha clinic in the Indian city of Anand is a world away from the slick, state-of-the-art fertility units found in Britain.
A dilapidated two-storey building, it stands in the midst of the chaotic bustle of life in the small, overcrowded city.
Outside its gate, beggars clamour for attention, auto-rickshaws and camel-drawn carts form an aggressive scrum and a thick layer of dust covers everything.
Yet British couples desperate for children are travelling to this unlikely location to pay Indian women to give birth to their babies...
The Akanksha clinic, run by infertility expert Dr Nayna Patel, is pioneering the outsourcing of pregnancy.
And it is at the forefront of a booming trade in so-called reproductive tourism in India, where there is a more relaxed attitude to paying women for pregnancy, a practice banned in many other countries.
By some estimates, Indian surrogacy is already a £250 million-a-year business, and it's growing rapidly.
Virtually every day, Dr Patel says, middle-class Western couples arrive at the clinic, hoping that an impoverished local woman will carry their child.
She has more than 50 foreign couples from Britain, America, Europe, the Middle East and even Africa and 45 surrogate mothers on her books.
Watch the heart wrenching video from "Google Baby" of an Indian surrogate fulfilling her contractual duty and watching the life she carried in her womb being taken to his purchasing parents. My heart breaks for the surrogate and the baby who is crying for his "mother."
This is one more phenomenon that cheapens procreation and turns it into a business. This really does remind me of "The Island" where clone surrogates give birth and then are "dispatched" and Huxely's Brave New World where babies are mass produced in hatcheries.
Hat Tip: Biopolitical Times
