FEATURE: Indian clinic pioneers outsourced pregnancies

Surrogate mothers are seen at Kaival Hospital in Anand, India, in February last year. A small clinic at the hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. PHOTO: AP

Every night in the quiet western Indian city of Anand, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.

A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.

The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand's surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.

More 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the US, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.

Nayna Patel, the woman behind Anand's baby boom, defends her work as meaningful for everyone involved.

"There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her [own] family," Patel said. "If this female wants to help the other one ... why not allow that? ... It's not for any bad cause. They're helping one another to have a new life in this world."

Experts commercial surrogacy -- or what has been called "wombs for rent" -- is growing in India. The women are impregnated in-vitro with the egg and sperm of couples unable to conceive on their own. India is the leader in making commercial surrogacy a viable industry rather than a rare fertility treatment. Experts say it could take off for the same reasons outsourcing in other industries has been successful: a wide labor pool working for relatively low rates.

Critics the couples are exploiting poor women in India by hiring them at a cut-price cost to undergo the hardship, pain and risks of labor.

Patel's are aware of the risks because they've watched others go through them. Many of the mothers know one another, or are even related.

Ritu Sodhi from Los Angeles, spent US$200,000 trying to get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization. Then, on the Internet, she found Patel's clinic. Sodhi and her husband now have a four-month-old baby and plan to return to Anand for a second child.

"Even if it cost US$1 million, the joy that they had delivered to me is so much more than any money that I have given them," Sodhi said.

Patel's is believed to be unique in offering one-stop service. Other clinics may request that the couple bring in their own surrogate and some place classified ads. But in Anand the couple just provides the egg and sperm and the clinic does the rest.

Patel she carefully chooses which couples to help and which women to hire as surrogates.

The surrogate mothers and the parents sign a contract that promises the couple will cover all medical expenses in addition to the woman's payment, and the surrogate mother will hand over the baby after birth. The couples fly to Anand for the in-vitro fertilization and again for the birth.

Counseling a major part of the process and Patel tells the women to think of the pregnancy as "someone's child comes to stay at your place for nine months."

For now, the surrogate mothers in Anand seem as pleased with the arrangement as the new parents.

"I know this isn't mine," said Jagrudi Sharma, 34, pointing to her belly. "But I'm giving happiness to another couple. And it's great for me."