Nobal Glomad

Pack your bag, passport, significant other, sperm count and credit card… you’re baby-making vacation bound. Is cash flow a little tight? Perhaps you’re genetically taller than the average bear, German-esque, blue eyed, blonde and abundant in eggs. Get yourself to the front of the queue ‘cause your little waiting-to-be-fertilised ones are currently in super high in vitro demand. Looking to rent a womb? Grab the Amex and jump an international flight to Delhi… there’s a few thousand bargain priced incubator pit-stop options available.

OK so I begin in jest. Yet this is a serious choice made by 1,000s of singles and couples around the globe each year. Families today are a mixed bag of technicolour’d all-sorts. The matrimonially joined can skip down the isle, be self-committed, life partnered, divorced, de facto’d, monogamously gay, open relationship transgender’d or be interracially shot-gun’d with seriously limited conversational skills. Long gone are the religious and societal constraints of a traditional family unit. Today, with our (apparently) more evolved thinking and acclimatisation to these newer kindred units, there still remains a strong innate desire to pro-create.

The thing is, no matter how much love and commitment exists between two humans, or anything else coupled in the mammal world… two penises or two vaginas draw long straws when it comes to producing a baby. It is for now an ‘Adam and Eve still required’ process. Perhaps this is why surrogacy has seriously kicked in as a viable propogative option in the last 30 years.

Surrogacy is an ‘I’d like to legally borrow your baby making facilities for 9 months’ arrangement. It’s a newish concept evolving in the 1970s with the first paid birth happening in 1980. Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002 and has bloomed like a dot com explosion predominately in the country’s major urban hubs.

A woman agrees, most often indirectly through an intermediary company to incubate a little one for another person/persons to eventually raise as their own. The surrogate can be the feed and grow chambers for a pre-fertilised egg or she can throw in an egg for a donor’s little swimmers.

There are two types of surrogacy – cash or freebee. In Australia handshake only surrogacy is legal in all states except for Tasmania when done in good faith… ie not for baby making profits. As soon as it becomes a commercial venture it’s a criminal offence. Most Ozzie states now recognise the parents who raise the child as the 100% owners of their little ones. Western Australia and South Australia still only allow couples of the opposite sex, in partnership, to surrogate. Tasmania plans to join first stage approval club in 3050.

This is in itself pure judicial hypocracy. How on earth can surrogacy fall under any sort of traditional legal authority? There’s nothing remotely bible approved about the surrogacy process in the first place. It’s old school conservative political craziness trying to hold on to a thread of the family unit from the Kennedy era.

India’s the cheapest global surrogacy option right now. Here’s some figures: It works out to be around $20,000 USD for one surrogate… add an additional $3,000 USD if it’s twins. Due to rather low 24% success rate of falling pregnant, often customers will opt to work with two surrogates whereby should they both end up falling pregnant (a 24% chance of that), you score a two for one price of $37,000 USD.

The question is how much of this dosh is ending up in the hands of the surrogate mother? Reports have shown as little as $780 AUD. Putting it in perspective the average salary in India is less than $1 USD a day… does that really justify these women receiving so little of the pie. This is after all just a human life we are talking about.

Should a surrogate receive a median payment of around $5,000 USD this equates to around 10 years of income. Perhaps this money incentive leads to these women being taken advantage of when they have no idea of the personal impact of what they are signing up for. Put this into Western Perspective. If Australian women were to be offered $600,000 AUD to fall pregnant it would become the hot income earner for those who don’t really have the required emotional strength. But money talks right?

India’s surrogacy industry has been estimated to be worth more than $500 million a year with around 3,000 surrogacy clinics across the country (thanks to The Age and National Commission for Women for these truly disturbing statistics)… it’s dot-com boom boom booming. Many of the agencies temporarily remove the surrogate mothers from their families placing them in isolation with fellow surrogates for the duration of their pregnancy. I may be wrong, but I have visions of less than perfect living environments for these women.

Having spent some time travelling the length and breadth of India it’s obvious that no matter how ethical, mutually beneficial the process of money for surrogacy is, in the end it comes down to the cold hard fact that Western money talks. In poorer countries where the comfort of two meals is, for the majority of the population a luxury… surrogacy is a hugely attractive option.

One of the concerning realities of the Indian Surrogacy empire is its presence on the world wide web. Services are promoted like Kindles on Amazon or buying a ‘quality endorsed’ overseas package holiday. ‘Fill form below for a free quote’ says the Medical Tourism Corporation website with links to medical, cosmetic and dental ‘holiday’ options supported by rather odd photography of Russian-esque women in Saris, vacant hospital beds and couples gazing into their Western doctor’s eyes. Or perhaps you prefer the Yashoda site that promises ‘end-to-end solutions’ and to bring ‘Happiness and satisfaction to your face’. The most disturbing is the Surrogacy India website with a homepage featuring a pregnant Eastern European, belly busting out of her t-shirt and sporting a baby equipment tool-belt. They have ‘14 man years experience’ and aim to make your journey as ‘pleasant, cheerful, delightful, enchanting and smiling as possible’.

Let’s compare these figures to the Western option. To buy a ‘surrogate with egg included’ package in the US can work out around $120,000 including all medical expenses according to American Company Circle Surrogacy. That’s a huge difference. It prices the average family out of the US market. It’s the reason why so many people desparate for little ones are jumping continent.

But is it right?

One of the key issues for me is the ethics behind a mother’s maternal desire to keep and protect her child. In western countries where legal surrogacy is an accepted part of culture, there is more opportunity for parents to form a connected and rewarding relationship with their surrogate, possibly leading to a more meaningful collaboration… evolving the definition of a family unit.

At the end of the day, far be it for me to grant you permission to rent-a-birther in India. The pros and cons go far beyond the legal issues of ownership and what financial costs are involved. When two people love each other and have the desire to create, we can try to build brick walls but invariably they will be conquered.

Haven’t I forgotten something? Ah yes… Adoption. Surely with all the parentless, starving, dying children in the world this is a viable means of having children in your life. In 2010 there were only 412 adoptions for the whole of Australia. 222 of these adoptions were from overseas. To think of all the starving children in Africa without parents crammed into caring facilities waiting to die. Isn’t it time there was more focus on giving an already suffering child the opportunity to live rather than all this jetting about, facility building and money exchange for incubator corporatisation?