42 Time July 19/July 26, 2021
Pooja, a nonresident
Indian who lives
in the U.S., with
her 2-week-old
son, born through
surrogacy at
AkankshaWorld
Patel has been at the center of the ethics debate
surrounding surrogacy in India. When she is not
in scrubs, she can be found in her office wearing a
gleaming string of pearls, several diamond rings and
a graceful silk sari. People stream in and out, handing
her papers to sign and asking her advice on medical
procedures. Patel argues that regardless of what you
think of the moral debate, the altruistic approach is
simply impractical. “Of course it should be a will
ing woman. You should not force anyone; the sur
rogate has to voluntarily understand the procedure,”
she says. “But if she comes, stays for nine months,
gives the baby and in return is not compensated in
any way, how will it work? Why would anyone do
this for free?”
If she’s right and the number of surrogates plum
mets, that would leave few options for women like
Navpreet Gambhir, who has been trying to start a
family for 12 years. In November, with the pandemic
still raging, she and her husband drove 700 miles
from her home in Dehradun, a small city in the north
ern state of Uttarakhand, to Anand. “I had almost lost
hope in being able to have a child,” says Gambhir, re
calling how she cried when she first met the young
woman who would be her surrogate. “She said, ‘Don’t
worry, I will do this for you.’ I was so touched.”
Gambhir, 34, who runs a small catering business
from her home, was married in 2009 and began plan
ning for a child soon after. But she is a lupus patient,
which made her journey to motherhood complicated.
Pregnancy for women with lupus, a chronic auto
immune disease, can be very risky if the disease is not
under control, and may lead to flareups of the con
dition, miscarriage or stillbirth. After trying unsuc
cessfully for many years to get pregnant, she finally
conceived in 2016, only to have a miscarriage. She
thought about adoption, but the process is extremely
complicated in India, with prospective parents often
waiting several years to be matched with a child.
When she and her husband began considering
surrogacy, their family voiced concerns, Gambhir
says. They had heard rumors of surrogates asking
for more money than was agreed upon, blackmail
ing the family and even terminating the pregnancy.
Gambhir and her husband visited a fertility clinic in
New Delhi, closer to their hometown, but were trou
bled by the clinic’s plan to put them in touch with a
middleman who would find a surrogate and bring