India seeks to shut down surrogacy services for foreign would-be parents

THANE, India— Long before she married at 14, Sushila Sunar had stopped going to school. She never learned to read. After her two children were born, she broke rocks at a construction site for a few dollars a day, the only work she could find.

Then a woman approached Sunar with a job that paid nearly $6,000, a sum so large she and her husband felt she could not refuse. She became a surrogate mother, delivering a light-skinned baby for a foreign couple she never met. Three years later, she has decided again to become a surrogate.

Thousands of poor Indian women have found work as surrogate mothers, helping to turn this country into a favored destination for foreign couples who can’t become pregnant on their own.

Now India’s government is taking the first significant steps to rein in commercial surrogacy, citing fears that the women are being exploited by a mushrooming industry that pays them a small fraction of what surrogates earn in the West.

In October, authorities barred foreign couples from hiring Indian surrogates, following an earlier ban prohibiting single people and gays from contracting with Indian surrogates. The government has proposed a law allowing surrogacy only for married Indian couples, or those recognized by the government as being of Indian origin.

The new legislation, which has yet to be taken up in Parliament, also would prevent women from becoming surrogates multiple times, or after they turn 35.

India’s low medical costs, lack of regulation and large numbers of women willing to carry someone else’s child have long fueled concerns about corruption and malpractice by doctors eager to satisfy foreign clients. A surrogate birth in India can cost $15,000 to $20,000, about a tenth of what some clinics in California charge.

Studies suggest that Indian surrogates lack a detailed understanding of the contracts they sign with fertility clinics, which include sometimes risky medical procedures to ensure that paying couples get children.

By banning foreigners — who account for the vast majority of the industry’s clients and usually are charged higher fees — the government is trying to end India’s reputation for what critics call “rent-a-womb” services. Experts oppose the blanket ban, saying the government should instead set up a national registry of fertility clinics and enforce stricter rules.