Rekha Patel a restaurateur from Britain held her newborn baby at a medical clinic in India’s northwest, as Daniel, her husband stood by smiling looking through a glass door.
Patel, who is 42, said she was amazed they finally had their baby and were grateful for the surrogate mother who was able to get pregnant and deliver a healthy baby.
The surrogacy industry in India is booming as thousands of couples who are infertile, many from around the world, hire the wombs of women in India to carry embryos to birth.
However, a big debate is raging over whether the industry, which is unregulated, exploits the poorer women. That in turn has prompted authorities in the government to draft legislation making it tougher for people from outside India that are seeking babes made there.
One Mumbai-based operation has produced over 295 surrogate babies, of which 90% were for clients overseas and 40% for couples who are same sex, since the fertility bank opened in 2007.
However, if the new law creates tighter rules, as the ministry of home affairs has suggested, which would disallow surrogacy for couple that are same-sex as well as single parents, then a clear impact would be felt in the industry and keep many clients from coming.
In 2002, India first opened to surrogacy on a commercial basis. It is one of just a few countries including Russia, Ukraine, Thailand and Georgia and a couple of states in the U.S. where women are allowed to be paid to carry to term another’s genetic child via the process know as in-vitro fertilization.
Skilled doctors, little bureaucracy, low-cost technology and a huge supply of possible surrogates have made India one of the preferred destinations for today’s fertility tourism drawing in nationals from the United States, Britain, Japan, Australia and others.

Deborah Campbell
