baby farming? December 31, 2007
Sharon Cobb points to a new trend in outsourcing to India: houses full of poor women being paid to serve as surrogate “wombs for rent” for infertile couples in the U.S., Britian and elsewhere.
A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.
The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand’s surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.
More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.
Dr. Nayna Patel, the woman behind Anand’s baby boom, defends her work as meaningful for everyone involved.
“There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her [own] family,” Patel said. “If this female wants to help the other one … why not allow that? … It’s not for any bad cause. They’re helping one another to have a new life in this world.”
Your thoughts?
I am always hesitant to cast judgment on other women’s reproductive choices. Also, as someone who has never faced the hell that is infertility, I can’t imagine what that’s like or what previously unimaginable options it might present.
But I think this story raises some big issues about exploitation. And how is it that prostitution is illegal but it’s legal for women to utilize their bodies in this way?
I read this last night and am considering writing about it in the life issues column I write for the Catholic paper. To those of us who find ART morally problematic in general, this is just a predictable consequence as we slide down that slippery slope. This may not seem so bad–the women are doing it willingly; it helps make their lives better–but where will it lead? And why should these women get only $4,500 for a service women in America are paid so much more for?
I’m trying to figure out why this makes me feel a bit squeamish, even though logically, I find it hard to argue against.
Is it the idea of the surrogacy in general, or it is the fact that they’re doing “mass production” surrogacy?
Is it ok if you have a surrogate here in the U.S. who does it out of the goodness of her heart for someone — like a sister or friend, etc. But if you’re a poor woman in a 3rd world country, then you’re being exploited?
These women have working wombs, and they need work. These parents need working wombs, and are willing to pay someone to provide it. It’s their babies — I guess I don’t have a problem with it. I guess…
If they were inseminating the women, and then the women gave up their own biological babies to the foreign couples, then I think it would cross the line.
I think its pretty creepy. The Oprah show on it was disturbing to me. I also haven’t known infertility and I hesitate to judge too, but I think it bothers me that the reason its outsourced us because they will do it for so much less $$ in India. I know its complicated. I was also bothered by the couple on the Oprah show joking that it was gouing to have be a c/s for their surrogate b/c the husband was 6′5. Pregnancy and childbirth are a lot to put yourself through for money.
I never had fertility problems, but I don’t think I could ask any woman in any country, for any amount of money, to carry a child for me and then have to give it up to me. With each of my pregnancies, I was quite emotionally attached to the baby growing in my womb; I can’t imagine giving up a baby that I’d felt move inside of me for several months. It seems to me that these women in India are being exploited. In their quotes in news reports, they appear to me to be repeating the message that they are trying to internalize–that they are happy and are okay with giving up the babies they carry.
I read this article yesterday. It’s exploitation. And it’s sick.
I didn’t see this quote in the cnn article, but it’s at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22441355/ :
“Dodia’s own three children were delivered at home and she said she never visited a doctor during those pregnancies.
“‘It’s very different with medicine,’ Dodia said, resting her hands on her hugely pregnant belly. ‘I’m being more careful now than I was with my own pregnancy.’”
I get antsy every time I see the name Sharon Cobb.