by Puneet Nicholas YadavF
OR seven months, Asha (name changed)
has been pregnant with a child she
can’t call her own. Her seven-year-old
son had met with an accident last year,
plunging the impoverished family into
a debt trap. Then a couple, who couldn’t
conceive due to medical complications,
asked if she would be a surrogate mother for
Rs 3 lakh. Her rickshaw-puller husband and
mother-in-law agreed and Asha underwent
an in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedure at a
clinic in Delhi.
Now, two months away from her delivery,
Asha is nervous, not for the child she is carrying,
but over a law that the central government
hopes to enact. The Surrogacy (Regulation)
Bill, 2019, introduced recently in the Lok Sabha,
seeks to ban commercial surrogacy. It also
proposes stringent penalties, including jail
terms and stiff fines, for violators. “Many
women like me are willing to become surro-
gates because their family needs the money,”
says Asha. “The government, which has never
bothered about our healthcare, debts andsocial security, wants to rob us of even our
autonomy over our bodies.”
The bill has also triggered panic in India’s
burgeoning IVF and Artificial Reproduction
Technology (ART) sector. Over the past two
decades, commercial surrogacy has emerged as
a $2-billion industry in the country. The parlia-
mentary standing committee for the depart-
ment of health and family welfare, which
submitted its report on the bill to the Rajya
Sabha in August 2017, had estimated 2,
surrogacy births in India—i.e., in a population of
1.3 billion—over the preceding three years.
Lack of a proper legal framework is largely the
reason why commercial surrogacy has been
possible in India since 2002. The pitfalls att-
racted global attention in 2008 when the
Supreme Court ruled in the Baby Manji Yamada
case. Baby Manji was born on July 25 that year
at the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in Gujarat’s
Anand to a surrogate mother who had rented
out her womb to an infertile Japanese couple.
During the pregnancy, the Japanese couple got
divorced and refused to accept Baby Manji,
leaving the newborn’s fate in a limbo. While
granting Baby Manji’s custody to her grand-Introduced
recently in
the Lok
Sabha, the
Surrogacy
(Regulation)
Bill, 2019,
has triggered
panic in the
ART sector.Throwing Out
The Baby
SURROGACY LAW
Lacking proper regulation,
rent-a-womb was a bad mess.
Now it is on the brink of a ban.18 OUTLOOK 5 August 2019