Goings on

“At a clinic in Anand in northern India, women give birth to Western children. White women’s eggs are inseminated with white men’s sperm, and the embryo is implanted in the wombs of Indian women. The children will show no traces of the women who bore them. They will neither bear her name nor get to know her. After giving birth to the children, the Indian women surrender them. They sign a contract and receive between 2,500 and 6,500 USD the moment they give up their responsibility for the child they just gave birth to. For the women, most of whom are poor and from nearby villages, the payment can be up to the equivalent of ten years’ salary. The buyers are typically American, European, Australian, Japanese, or wealthy Indians; they are childless heterosexual couples, homosexual men, and single men… With traditional surrogacy, the industry had been limited to the Western world. An Indian mother would have meant a child with Indian features. But suddenly, through the miracle of modern technology, it became possible for an Indian woman to give birth to a white child. Thus, Americans could pay two-thirds less than for surrogacy in the USA and still come home with their “own” child, even though it had spent nine months in an Indian woman’s body. Embryo transplantation also impacted on American courts’ judgments in the child custody cases. In one case from 1993, almost identical to “Baby M”—the mother had second thoughts after the birth and wanted to keep the child—the judgment was that she was not the child’s mother. She “was not exercising procreative choice, but was providing a service.” Because the egg wasn’t hers, the pregnancy wasn’t motherhood but a “service”; therefore, she had no rights to the child she gave birth to. This has now become standard practice in the USA, and even when the egg belongs to a third woman—a so-called egg donor—custody is granted to those who paid for the child.”

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