The stout Indian woman wearing golden bracelets would very much love to become a grandmother. “It is 13 years since my daughter’s wedding,” she says with a sigh. But still no grandchild. “There was one miscarriage,” adds the would-be grandmother, who is dressed in a fine green-and-black sari for a very important consultation.
Her eyes are fixed on a door, behind which the daughter and the husband have vanished.
Behind the door sits Dr Nayna Patel, medical director of Ankasha Fertility Clinic. Patel and her husband Hitesh have converted the dusty city of Anand into a place of hope for the globe’s childless couples.
From all parts of India, as well as from the United States, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong, they flock to the city of 200,000. They want a child that is genetically their own from the womb of another woman. Anand is the city of surrogate mothers.
The young women who offer their wombs for the nine months of pregnancy mostly come from the region. Their husbands may be pedi-cab drivers, clothing salesmen, electricians, diamond polishers or field workers. The men’s wages are enough to survive on, but not much else.
The clinic pays the women about $10,000—equivalent of several years’ work by their husbands—for a surrogate pregnancy. Patel says the women usually spend the money on education or for a new house.
“When one’s own child ought to go to a better school, or if the rent is in arrears, or the house is in danger of collapsing, the women are ready to make this sacrifice,” she says. “And they make others happy.”
At the clinic entrance, amid long rows of plastic seats, four surrogate mothers in advanced stages of pregnancy await a routine examination.
Nurses in blue dresses are bustling about them while the women caress their stomachs.
Asha Damor, 33, who is carrying the twins of a Canadian couple, says emphatically, “These are not our children. They are the children of that couple.” Damor and the others live in a hostel near the clinic. “We sleep well, knowing we’re doing something good.”
Salma Vora, 32, is now in her second surrogate pregnancy. She is saving up in order to be able to send her son to a good college. “I do think every day about that other child,” she says of her first paid pregnancy. “That is only natural. But when I’m together with my own family, I forget it.”
One of the doctors at the clinic points out that for this very reason it is important that the surrogate mothers already have their own children.
Other pre-conditions to become a surrogate mother include no sexually transmitted diseases, the approval of the surrogate mother’s husband, and a commitment to make no claims on the child after its birth. “If there is any kind of complication, the infant is aborted,” the doctor says.
At the moment there are 85 surrogate mothers living together in houses that the clinic has rented nearby. The women are separated from their families for at least nine months. This allows them to be kept under close medical observation.
The women say they are cared for from breakfast on through until they go to bed at night.
During the day they learn skills such as sewing and weaving, cooking and English.
“We’re doing fine here,” says a woman named Dharmistaben. “Besides, it wouldn’t be good for me if my village community were to learn about all this.” She is sitting on her bed together with her seven-year-old son who is paying a visit. She shares the room with two other women.
“If my parents-in-law knew what I am doing, they would be constantly talking behind my back about me.”
Surrogate motherhood is legal in India, but by no means accepted throughout society. All the same, business is booming.
There are some 3,000 clinics with revenues of several hundred million dollars annually, according to a United Nations-supported study by the women’s rights group Sama.
“These figures reflect the status of India as the most favoured destination for commercial surrogacy,” it said.
Last year the laws were tightened. Since then it is no longer possible for homosexual couples or unmarried couples to have children by Indian surrogate mothers.