UK couples outsource `wombs'

Daksha, a shy Gujarati woman in her early 30s, wants a child -- but not for herself. The baby is for the "Britishers," the couple seated in the lobby of the Indian fertility clinic.

It is the first time that the British Asian couple, Ajay and Saroj Shah, from Leicester in central England, have met Daksha. The 31-year-old is "loaning" her womb to them for 150,000 rupees (US$3,377) and is candid about needing the money.

She said her friend was a surrogate mother.

"She was paid well. I am not rich, so the money will help me a lot. I have no problem bringing joy to this family. I do not need another child. I have two of my own," Daksha said.

For the Shahs, who have spent six years and £60,000 (US$105,318) on fertility treatment in the UK with little success, the mixture of money, science and light regulation in India has reignited the hope that they will finally have children.

The British couple appear to be part of a flourishing trade in reproductive tourism in India, which has a more relaxed attitude to paying women for pregnancy, a practice prohibited in many other countries.

Indian clinics report that the incidence of surrogacy has more than doubled in the past three years, with the demand driven by fertility requests from abroad.

The treatment is becoming big business in India and is worth about 20 billion rupees a year. The increase in requests from abroad is partly fueled by the relatively cheap costs. At about £3,000 in the UK, an in vitro fertilization cycle costs five times what one might pay in India.

In addition, in the UK, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority has outlawed payments, but a surrogate can be reimbursed a maximum of £10,000 to cover expenses.

India's newspapers have highlighted the trend with reports of couples from Europe and east Asia making flying visits in search of surrogate mothers.

Apart from lower costs, there are other factors drawing patients from abroad. Indian medical guidelines allow doctors to implant five embryos into a surrogate mother; in the UK, the maximum is two.

In India, the surrogate mother's right to the child is not given the same importance as in the West -- she signs away her rights to the baby as soon as the child is born. By contrast, UK law says that a surrogate mother who has provided the egg can claim the baby as her own at any time during the first two years of the child's life.

However, campaigners in the UK question the ethics of such businesses.