The Other Woman

Dr Nayna Patel over the phone. It’s the only detail she hasn’t covered yet. She knows one of her babies is underweight, that Seema’s weight is steady, that the sonography reports have come back fine, that there is a possibility the babies will be premature.

In Dr Patel’s Akanksha Fertility Clinic, sympathy pains and anxiety have a different dimension. She has six cases of surrogate pregnancy, five of which are for NRIs. ‘‘They call up each day from the UK and US since money is no issue, but they prefer to be around only during the delivery,’’ says Dr Patel.

It began after Radha Patel. On January 31, 2004, the 47-year-old Anand-based mother delivered the twin children of her UK-based daughter at Dr Patel’s clinic. But outside this cash crop and NRI-rich (every second family has one) town, and across the country, surrogate mothers are becoming the third phantom parent—they give birth, then in most cases, disappear. The trend is egged on by new statistics—almost 12 per cent of the reproductive population in India suffer from infertility—and an old credo that every married couple must procreate and have a genetic heir.

The two come together most profitably in Anand, where some women have made a veritable business tool out of their wombs. The average cost to the genetic parents for hiring a surrogate is usually more than

Rs 5 lakh, including the cash payout to the surrogate. These are the vital stats of a surrogate: A married woman from a lower middle-class family, physically and mentally fit, preferably not above 30 years.

Patel fits the bill to the T. It was her mother-in-law who encouraged her to become a surrogate, just as Patel’s sister-in-law had before her. It’s Patel’s first time and she will make about Rs 2.5 lakh. ‘‘We live in a kuccha house and the money is security for my two children,’’ she says. If she has a normal pregnancy, Patel can go through the process at least three more times.

But her family’s compliance is crucial, especially to maintain a semblance of normalcy. In many cases surrogate mothers opt to move to a new place during the course of their pregnancy to keep prying neighbours and inquisitive children at bay. ‘‘Worst comes to worst, we can always say that the child died,’’ says a surrogate.

Thirty-one-year-old Sunita Kumar is not as clear cut about her decision to become a surrogate. The Mumbai receptionist has the blessings of her husband, but she doesn’t think the rest of the family will understand her decision, money or no money.

She’s at the doorstep of the surrogacy process, where her womb is being prepared to receive the fertilised embryo. She has been prescribed just three hormonal supplements a day and there’s no guarantee yet that she will be successfully impregnated (most surrogates need at least three attempts).

Though individual contracts differ, generally, a surrogate is first paid upon successful conception, and every trimester from then on.

Kumar also has a deeply personal reason for choosing to go through this pain. She can never bear children of her own because her ovaries were damaged in a childhood bout of tuberculosis. ‘‘My husband and I thought it would be nice to do this for someone else,’’ says Kumar. The couple she is carrying for searched for months before finding Kumar through a doctor. Kumar says she’s gearing up to give up the baby.

It’s the most difficult part of the whole process and so complicated that many prefer professional surrogates to altruistic relatives. ‘‘A woman gives up her rights to the child the moment she signs the contract, so there’s no issue of keeping the baby,’’ says Dr Kamini Rao, a Bangalore-based member of the Indian Society of Assisted Reproduction (ISAR) and one of the panelists who drew up the guidelines for surrogacy.

Shanthi and Muthugounder Raja have not seen the birth mother of their five-year-old twins Sarath Varshan and Saran Vishwa since the day their babies were born in a Chennai hospital. ‘‘I will tell my children all about how they were born when they are about 14 or 15. I think they will understand,’’ says Shanthi, who lives in Villupuram, about 250 km from Chennai. But during the pregnancy, Shanthi was with the surrogate mother throughout. ‘‘Every time she felt the baby kick, I felt it too. I went through all the pain and anxieties she went through,’’ she says.

For Shanthi, surrogacy was the only viable option for a blood-related child. The 38-year-old beautician was born with Mayer-Rokintansky-Hauser syndrome, which in layman’s terms meant she had no vagina and uterus. She’d spent most of her childhood between doctors and quacks, looking for biological and spiritual solutions; marriage, let alone raising children, seemed impossible. When she met Muthugounder in 1987, he fell in love with her deeply enough to not care about the physical complications. And unlike the triangular romantic complications of Bollywood movies on the subject—like Chori Chori Chupke Chupke—according to the instructions of Shanthi’s doctor, Dr Kamala Selvaraj, Shanthi’s husband was not allowed to even meet the surrogate mother.

But despite the precautions, pessimists say surrogacy can be a gigantic manhole. ‘‘When there are human beings concerned, there’s no such thing as an easy solution. And under the present law situation, I don’t understand how the parents are even allowed to take the child home,’’ says Mumbai-based in-vitro fertility specialist Dr Malpani. Other than the broad guidelines set out by the ISAR, there is no law in the country pertaining to the issue.

The problems came into focus when earlier this month, Amit Banerjee, a 45-year-old Kolkata-based divorced chartered accountant became the first single father in the country to have a child through a surrogate mother, in fact two women.

On October 3, baby Arjun was born in Dr Sudarshan Ghosh Dastidar’s south Kolkata fertility clinic, weighing 2.8 kg; Banerjee, who only realised surrogacy was an option last year, had his sperm fertilised with the eggs of one woman, while the embryo took form in the womb of another. ‘‘One cannot deny the right of procreation to a married adult, who unfortunately in this case was divorced,’’ Dr Dastidar reportedly said.

But his single status and the involvement of two women have raised questions about the parental rights of Banerjee and the ladies, either of whom, or both, can lay claim to the baby. Banerjee had a normal sperm count and the intent to have a child. The clinic issued an ad, which produced 20 applications out of which three women were selected for clinical trials. The final candidate, in this case, was not paid, but given medicine and transportation when she and her husband went to the clinic, according to Dr Dastidar.

So by the time baby Arjun came home earlier this month, his father was juggling lessons on nappy changes with those on the legal issues surrounding his fatherhood. But like Banerjee, many people are ignoring the nitty-gritty of surrogacy right now. Take 55-year-old Gurnam Singh and his 52-year-old wife Parminder Kaur from Tarn Taran, who had a child through a surrogate two years ago because Kaur had an irreversible hysterectomy; or 38-year-old Gowri and 40-year-old Narasimha M from Bangalore, whose family friend gave birth to a child for them two months ago.

Then there are the women who take on the task of responsibly bearing a child, for money or for nothing, and on the promise that they’ll give it up. Like 29-year-old Vejalpur native Rehana Begum—a mother of two who rented her womb so she wouldn’t have to depend on her husband (she also went vegetarian during the whole term because the parents were Jain); or 27-year-old Kerala-based Sunaina, who is in her fifth month for a Ludhiana-based couple, she will leave Kerala in her eighth month so the genetic parents can be present for the delivery; and last month, a Mumbai-based woman became pregnant with the child of a Singaporean couple, who contracted her after going through several unsuccessful fertility treatments.

When the stork and fortune let you down, there’s always science.