All for a child

THE TINY Akanksha clinic in the Indian city of Anand is a world away from the slick, state-of-the-art fertility units found in Britain.

A dilapidated two-storey building, it stands in the midst of the chaotic bustle of life in the small, overcrowded city. Outside its gate, beggars clamour for attention, auto-rickshaws and camel-drawn carts form an aggressive scrum and a thick layer of dust covers everything.

Recommended For You

Veteran actor Prem Chopra recovering after viral infection

Sharjah Book Fair takes 'blind date' route to lure buyers

Airport to home in minutes: Abu Dhabi unveils flying taxi network with over 10 vertiports

Dharmendra discharged from hospital as family decides to take him home: Doctor

Ruud Gullit brings AC Milan Golf Collection to Dubai

 

Yet British couples desperate for children are travelling to this unlikely location to pay Indian women to give birth to their babies. For e3,000, they can rent a womb for nine months, go home, then when the woman gives birth return to take the child away.

The Akanksha clinic, run by infertility expert Dr Nayna Patel, is pioneering the outsourcing of pregnancy. And it is at the forefront of a booming trade in so-called reproductive tourism in India, where there is a more relaxed attitude to paying women for pregnancy, a practice banned in many other countries.

By some estimates, Indian surrogacy is already a e250-million-a-year business, and it's growing rapidly. Virtually every day, Dr Patel says, middle-class Western couples arrive at the clinic, hoping that an impoverished local woman will carry their child. She has more than 50 foreign couples - from Britain, America, Europe, the Middle East and even Africa - and 45 surrogate mothers on her books.

For the surrogate, the money they earn for the service - more than ten years' salary for rural Indians - will transform their lives, allowing them to buy a house for the first time or provide an education for their own children. Yet in order to make such money, many have to lie to their families and friends, telling them they are studying or working away from home. They hide away in order to avoid the potential shame the practice would bring on them: surrogacy is not understood in many parts of India and is seen as 'dirty'.

Meanwhile, critics claim it encourages Western exploitation of poor Indian women. The system certainly invites accusations that Western couples unwilling or unable to pay high fees - and keen to avoid the potential pitfalls in their own countries - happily use the bodies of Indian women for a tenth of the cost they might pay at home. 'At first, the couples we helped were Indian, but now they come from all over the world, including Britain - about ten in the past year,' said Dr Patel, 47.

'It began with British Asian couples, but now white ones are starting to come too. They are just ordinary, middle-class couples who feel they have run out of options in their own country. We appeal to them because in Britain, surrogacy is expensive and legally very complicated. The service we provide is a big relief to the couples we treat because it is not only cheaper, but Indian law makes it much more straightforward for everyone.'

In Britain, surrogacy is a legal and ethical minefield. It is illegal to pay for the service, but expenses of up to e10,000 are permitted. However, few women are prepared to be surrogates for mere expenses.

And because British law does not regard surrogacy agreements as binding, there have been recent cases in which surrogate mothers have decided to keep the child after its birth, resulting in tug-of-love custody battles.

Indian guidelines make the procedure far simpler. The surrogate signs away her rights to the baby as soon as it is born - but this adds fuel to arguments that the women, many of whom are illiterate, are being exploited.

Dr Patel began the surrogacy service following a high-profile case in January 2004, in which a Gujarati woman, Vidhya Valand, 44, gave birth to her British daughter's twins at Akanksha. Unable to have a child naturally, Aakash and Lata Nagla, from Ilford, East London, convinced Vidhya, who lived in Anand, to carry their child.

Lata said: 'The only way we could have children was through surrogacy. It is very expensive in England and I found out there was a clinic in India that had pioneered the technique.'

Dr Patel said: 'When Lata and Aakash first came to me in January 2003, I told them they would need to find their own surrogate mother - I couldn't do it for them. It was only when Lata's mother delivered the twins and I could see how happy the family was that I decided there should be a professional surrogacy programme in which I found the surrogates for couples.'

The doctor now offers her part of the service free of charge, with couples paying only for their IVF treatment and other medical costs. The fee for the surrogates is arranged privately. Most of the couples who approach her learn of the clinic via the internet. Dr Patel then meets them in Anand to check their suitability, before arranging for them to come back once she has found a surrogate. On average, two babies per month are born for Western couples at Akanksha.

Dr Patel insists the couples use their own sperm and eggs to create an embryo, so the children born are never biologically related to the surrogates. The surrogates she uses are all mothers already, so will, she believes, be less likely to become emotionally attached to the babies once they are born.

Inside the clinic, the set-up appears very basic. On the ground floor, pregnant Indian women line up along benches for their check-ups with a nurse. On the walls, cuttings from local newspapers proclaim Akanksha to be 'The Cradle of the World'.

Upstairs is an operating theatre where the embryos are implanted and Dr Patel's gloomy office, with a computer at one end and an ultrasound machine behind a curtain at the other. On the floor above is the surrogate mothers' living quarters. During my visit, 12 pregnant women are living at the clinic, many of whom have not told their friends and relatives what they are doing. They sleep in small beds lined up in the same room. Dr Patel advises couples on the matter before they arrive in India to collect their child, to ensure all arrangements are in place and the baby can be taken home immediately. Unfazed by the critics, she says the process profits all concerned. 'A woman who becomes a surrogate is paid more money than she could earn in her entire lifetime. She is doing something that she believes is good and makes her proud - bearing a child for a couple desperate to start a family, while at the same time providing for her own family. Which would you call exploitation? It is easy for people in India and abroad who have never experienced infertility or poverty to say this is exploitation. But we are providing a service that profoundly changes people's lives for the better.'