Surrogacy in India is a multi-million dollar industry, comprising an estimated 200,000 clinics. Couples from all over the world, including Britain, are attracted by the relatively low cost and absence of restrictions, giving India the dubious honour of being one of the world’s most popular countries for fertility tourism. This, in spite of India’s very poor record on maternal health and the inaccessibility of maternity care for the poorest women.
While lauded within some areas of the British media as a mutually beneficial system in which poor Indian women earn a significant sum of money and childless couples are granted their desire for children, I argue that fertility tourism is by definition exploitative, building upon a colonial mentality that sees women from developing countries as subservient to the needs of wealthy westerners. This can be evidenced by the lack of any legal safeguards to protect the rights of the surrogate mother, including the right to refuse to surrender the child after birth, the absence of support networks and post-natal care for the mother following the removal of the child or mechanisms to prevent the exploitation of the surrogate by her husband and family.
The child produced through a surrogacy arrangement is similarly vulnerable, especially if legal disputes arise between the intended parents and the child is not claimed. The child’s right to form a bond with his or her birth mother and the right to information about parentage and biological origins, is explored in the second part of my paper.
This paper is highly relevant to current legislative developments in this area. The Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Regulation) Bill currently before India’s parliament will, if passed, codify in law the rights of intended parents over the rights of the surrogate. A debate on the complicity of nations such as Britain in the exploitation of Indian women is long overdue.