News of a controversialsurrogacy center’s expansion in India — where impoverished women have been hired out to birth more than 500 babies for Westerners — has reignited a debate on the ethics of what some have called a “rent-a-womb” practice. But the clinic’s director, Dr. Nayana Patel, is defending what’s become a $1 billion-a-year industry in the country.
“These woman are doing a job. It’s a physical job. They are paid for that job,” Patel noted in the BBC documentary “House of Surrogates,” which aired on Tuesday in the U.K. and provided a look inside Patel’s Akanksha Infertility Clinic. “These women know there is no gain without pain. I definitely see myself as a feminist. Surrogacy is one woman helping another.”
To those who say the practice exploits women, Patel told Yahoo Shine in an email, “It is very easy to criticize, but it is very difficult to face the reality. If the critics can give the surrogate what she dreams and change her life and give the childless couple their baby, one can stop surrogacy.”
Patel, who has run the clinic in rural Gujarat for nearly a decade, is currently building a new, state-of-the-art surrogacy hospital that will contain residences for the surrogate mothers, apartments for the visiting Westerners, delivery rooms, an IVF department, and even restaurants and a gift shop. It will be just another one of India’s 150 known fertility clinics, about 60 percent of which offer commercial surrogacy, according to a recent in-depth story on the subject in the San Francisco Chronicle. see more
source: yahoo news
Tags: India rent a womb
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