New Delhi, December 06: Twenty years ago, a childless couple would simply approach a female member of the extended family to bear a baby for them. This “ Indian style” surrogacy, where things stayed in the family, started changing nearly a decade ago and today it has become acceptable for couples to pay a stranger to bear a baby for them.
Awareness about surrogacy has grown tremendously, and the stigma around the concept has also reduced. While India was a surrogacy destination for NRI couples and westerners five years ago, today more urban Indian couples are opting for it. “ Sixty per cent of couples are from Chennai, 15 per cent are from outside Tamil Nadu and 25 per cent of the couples are from abroad,” Geetha Haripriya said.
Ninety per cent of the women opting to be surrogates are strangers to the family and are bearing their babies only for commercial purposes. A surrogate mother earns anything between ` 50,000 to ` 5 lakh, depending upon her client. “ These surrogate mothers come from lower and lower middle classes. In pregnancy terms, though, they are fed well and taken care of by the couple,” Haripriya, chairperson, Prashanth Fertility Research Centre in Chennai said.
The stress of infertility, combined with a failure of artificial reproductive technology ( ART) to solve this problem explains the new trend. “ Infertile couples opt for surrogacy when they are frustrated with repeated IVF treatment failures or miscarriages and are looking for alternatives,” Aniruddha Malpani, an IVF specialist explained.
“ They have a perfectly normal uterus and would be better of opting for donor eggs or donor embryos. Unfortunately, they don’t know this partly because they don’t read enough and some doctors prefer ‘ pushing’ the more lucrative surrogacy treatment option,” he said.
These days treatment costs have escalated from ` 4- 5 lakh to ` 8- 10 lakh.
-Agencies