Outsourcing pregnancy – Womb Renting
February 22, 2009
In 1997, a very talented playwright from India by the name of Manjula Padmanabhan wrote Harvest —- It was later made into a movie called Deham or body by Govind Nihalani which is a futuristic play about the sale of human body parts and a new kind of trade-off that it establishes between the developed and the developing economies.
Although pessimistic in its theme and treatment, Harvest so much interest in the international media, it got selected from among 1470 entries from 76 countries for the Onassis Prize in 1997. The story of Harvest revolves around a high-tech racket in body organs; a company by the name of InterPlanta that in lieu of modern-day trappings, such as running water and video equipment, lures gullible donors, namely a couple that survives on the fringes of the society in a shantytown of India to pledge the unemployed husband’s select body parts to a rich Westerner. Ironically, InterPlanta’s slick but sardonic tagline for this campaign is “We Make Lives Worth Living!”
“A cross between the 2002 thriller Dirty Pretty Things and an episode of The Twilight Zone, Harvest posits a not-too-distant future in which a Big Brother-like multinational company, headhunts for organ donors in third-world countries,” wrote a New York Times reviewer almost a decade ago when the play got staged in NYC.
Cut to Circa 2009, and the term “futuristic” does not appear applicable any more, nor Padmanabhan’s plot so outlandish, given recent media reports about rising surrogacy in India.
Reports have begun to pour in from every nook and corner of the billion-plus country (See Surrogacy is soaring in India, an article that appeared in Hindustan Times last year based on a study revealed by the National ART (artificial reproductive techniques) Registry of India (NARI). Also check out a DNA report on the same subject.
The NARI survey, conducted by the Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecological Societies of India (FOGSI) and the Indian Society for Assisted Reproduction found that in 2006, 290 surrogacy cases were reported from India compared to 158 in 2005. In 2004, there were 50-odd cases. The data for the NARI survey was collected from 116 fertility centres run across the country and was tabled in Mumbai on September 20, 2008.
Although split data is not available for each state, according to the NARI report, Gujarat recorded the highest number of surrogacy in 2006, with 110 cases and the eastern states contributed the least. Nonetheless, a WebMD report dubs this phenomenon “reproductive tourism” (Similar to Medical Tourism) of India and reveals that surrogacy costs about $12,000 in India, including all medical expenses and the surrogate’s fee, whereas in the US, the same (on in-vitro fertilization) would cost up to $70,000 to an infertile couple!
Thus the biggest advantage for infertile couples in getting their treatment done in India is not just cost saving (which of course is substantial) but also an easy availability of womb-donors who can’t be so easily recruited in the West. A combination of poverty, ignorance and desperation make poor Indian women an easy prey to such trade-offs, which would have been OK in terms of Laissez-faire (I am a firm believer in free market economics) if not deep-entrenched patriarchal values, the very sorry state of women in India and the presence of monetary inducements smack of a nexus in this trade, where their consent to participation in such a trade, cannot always be voluntary. Worse, since reports indicate that most such women are unlettered, there is the always-present threat of corruption and extortion by intermediaries. One wonders how much of this $12,000 are actually landing with the womb-donors and what is being cornered by touts (numerous unregistered fertility clinics that have sprung up across the country) who may indeed be operating as pimps in the flesh trade.
The WebMD report for instance estimates that Indian surrogacy could already be a $445-million-a-year business. This throws up ticklish legal and ethical issues (“do these women find it easy to give up contact with their babies later?”) to which there could be no easy answers, nor have laws in India begun to tread into this danger zone, one that throws up unaddressed ethical minefields. That’s just what makes the practice so non-transparent in India.
To be sure, there are ethical guidelines proposed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) but these have yet to be framed into laws that can regulate the new outsourcing practice.
What are your views on this controversial subject? Can the trade be regulated if yes, how?
Comments
2 Responses to “Outsourcing pregnancy – Womb Renting”
Got something to say?
-
Advertisements
Text Links
I never read such article before. It made up my mind. It is too bad to sell human organs. Police and Government should take actions to remove that.
Such acts are ridiculous. this is also prevelant in the thakur clans in north India, where old thakurs buy off young girls to get an heir to the family. As wierd as it sounds, people give in to such acts because of poverty