IVF expert who helped Shah Rukh Khan-Gauri Khan conceive says it led to a boom in surrogacy: ‘You made AbRam, so we came to you’

“That way, it was good because it brought a lot of awareness about the procedure. There was a big boom in surrogacy after that,” Shah said on the podcast Aleena Dissects. “Till today, people walk into my clinic only because of that. People from the Middle East, Africa, the US, the UK, name the country. They say we found you because you made AbRam. That’s something which will last forever so it’s one of my best memories,” he added.

He claimed more people from Bollywood began visiting him for surrogacy procedures, thanks to word of mouth. “My whole practice is based on that. Somebody got pregnant and told someone else. And women love to talk,” reasoned Shah. He claimed there’s no issue as such in Mumbai of consulting a male gynaecologist like him.

In 2017, Gauri and Shah Rukh’s good friend and filmmaker Karan Johar also announced the birth of his kids via surrogacy. He consulted Shah as well, who claimed that while Johar becoming his client didn’t change his career as such, but it brought about a lot of discussion around single fatherhood.

“It was a big social shift because single father was a very new concept in India. It’s very popular in the West. We were flooded with enquiries by potential single fathers about surrogacy. It’s a very debatable idea. There are always pros and cons. What if it’s a female child? What if it’s a male child? There was a lot of debate going around that. Before we could really get around it, the law came that it’s now prohibited. Now, we can’t do surrogacy around single fathers,” revealed Shah.

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Last year, in an interview with Faye D’Souza, Johar admitted that his kids have started asking him questions about the identity of their mother. “It is a modern family. It is an unusual circumstance, so now I am also dealing with the questions about ‘whose stomach was I born in? But mumma is not mumma really, she is my grandmother (Karan’s mother Hiroo Johar)’. I am going to school, to the counsellor, to ask how do we navigate the situation? And it is not easy, being a parent is never easy,” said Johar.