36 Time July 19/July 26, 2021
is having twins, Macwan will make $7,395 in addi-
tion to the $245 she earned for egg donation. With
her living costs taken care of by the hospital, she is
able to save most of that money.
Macwan is one of thousands of women in India
who have chosen to become surrogates since 2002,
when the country legalized the practice, in which
a woman carries and delivers a child on someone
else’s behalf and is financially compensated for it.
(In some cases, surrogacy uses the eggs and sperm
of the prospective parents, but if there are health
or quality issues, donor eggs or the surrogate’s eggs
are used.) Though official numbers are hard to come
by, a U.N.-backed study in 2012 by the Delhi-based
Sama Resource Group for Women and Health esti-
mated India’s surrogacy business was worth more
than $400 million a year, with some 3,000 fertility
clinics across the nation.
Macwan, like the majority of those making up
India’s workforce, was employed in the informal
sector, which was particularly badly hit by the pan-
demic. Many of the women at Akanksha previously
worked as domestic help or manual laborers or at
small manufacturing units. The amount of moneyiT’s nearly noon when Pinky macwan wakes
up and rubs her eyes, shifting uncomfortably. She’s
in her second trimester of pregnancy with twins
and finds herself constantly sluggish. Still in her
floral nightgown, she walks down the fluorescent-
lit hallway and splashes cold water on her face in the
bathroom she shares with 46 other women, all sur-
rogates at various stages of pregnancy. It’s late Feb-
ruary, and Macwan has spent the past four months
living in the basement of the Akanksha Hospital in
bustling Anand, a town in the western Indian state
of Gujarat. Home to the headquarters of the major
dairy cooperative Amul, Anand has long been known
as the milk capital of India. But booming business at
Akanksha has also garnered the town another label:
India’s baby factory.
A few months earlier, Macwan, 24, was earning
$94 a month as a supervisor in a garment factory,
overseeing 50 tailors making women’s clothes. The
daughter of an iron-factory laborer, Macwan was a
bright child and was sent to boarding school, but left
at the age of 16 to support her family during hard
times. She was married off at the age of 20 to a secu-
rity guard from a nearby village, but in 2019, sick of
feeling “more like a servant” than a wife, she walked
away. Things began to look up when she started to
work at the garment factory, but when a tough na-
tional lockdown was imposed in March 2020 as the
first wave of COVID-19 hit India, Macwan and most
of her co-workers were fired. She had no savings
and struggled to put food on the table, often relying
on support from charitable organizations. Worried
about caring for her 3-year-old child, she began to
look into surrogacy. “If things continue in this vein,
then my son’s future is also going to be like mine,”
says Macwan, her soft voice shaking. “I thought, If I
go once, then I will be able to stand on my own feet.”
In October, Macwan arrived at the Akanksha Hos-
pital, one of the biggest surrogacy facilities in the
country. Her mother—who had been a surrogate her-
self 10 years earlier—had tried to dissuade her. But
Macwan argued that the money was much more than
she would ordinarily be able to make. Surrogates at
Akanksha are paid in installments during the pro-
cess for a total of about $6,230 for a successful sur-
rogacy for a single baby; in the event of a miscar-
riage, a woman receives what she has been paid up
to that point as well an additional $135. Because she
I
Pinky Macwan
lost her garment-
factory job during
the pandemic; she
wants to use the
money she’ll make
from surrogacy
to start her own
business