A Fact-Finding Report on Surrogacy in Anand

Post Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2016

There, the team met with a variety of players in the surrogacy industry.  The team interviewed numerous former and current surrogates, both in their residences and at a privately run surrogacy center currently housing approximately sixty-five pregnant surrogates.  The team also visited the offices of Dr. Nayana Patel at the Kaival Hospital, a major centre for surrogacy and In vitro Fertilization (“IVF”).  As a result of Dr. Patel’s work, Anand has become a hub for the Indian surrogacy industry, and the Kaival Hospital has an international reputation for assisting approximately six hundred (mostly Western) families deliver by surrogate.  Observations regarding these visits and interviews are included within. 

In recent years, fertility tourists have flocked to India, in part because the Indian surrogacy industry is virtually unregulated.  In fact, “there is no legal provision dealing directly with surrogacy laws to protect the rights and interests of the surrogate mother, the child, or the commissioning parents.”HRLN’s investigation sought to look into concerns recently raised by the national and international media that the industry’s lack of regulation results in inadequate protections for surrogate mothers with regard to compensation, informed consent, quality of healthcare, and surrogate living conditions.

The dominant impression emerging from the trip is that there is a significant need for regulation of the Indian surrogacy industry to ensure protections for surrogate mothers.  Surrogates throughout Anand are agreeing to employment without being informed of the likely procedures and actual risks involved, and well before signing any contracts.  When contracts are signed, they are often not in the surrogate mother’s language, and the surrogates are rarely provided with a copy of the document.  Similarly, surrogate mothers earn only a small percentage of the total payment made by the commissioning couple to the doctor for the surrogacy service.  For these reasons, and numerous others discussed within, there is the significant potential for proper and fair regulation to improve the conditions faced by Indian surrogates.