A surrogacy’s social price

Founder of Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE) Josephine Quintavalle says one of the biggest downsides to surrogacy is the social stigma that gets attached to a surrogate.

She cites as an example a surrogate in London whose biological children were shunned by their play-mates and excluded from birthday parties because of their mother’s surrogate pregnancy.

If this is the scenario in London, one can’t help but wonder how Indian surrogates, most of who hail from rural India, are socially treated. 

Unsurprisingly most Indian clinics tell a tale of social acceptance.Face of the Indian rent-a-womb industry Dr. Nayana Patel hires surrogates from a small town- Anand in Gujarat.

She says that the surrogates she hires are in no way socially shunned. She says, “People in Anand and surrounding areas have accepted surrogacy now and they know that there is nothing immoral about carrying a surrogacy”

33-year-old Manisha Nuton Macwan who carried a child for a Goan couple says that she was open about her surrogacy and that she told all her friends and relatives about it even before becoming a surrogate.

“The way doctor ma’am explained it to me, I explained it to them. I told them how a test-tube baby is made”, she proudly says in Hindi.

Her 17-year-old daughter however has a different tale to tell. She speaks of how she did not mention her mother’s surrogate pregnancy to anybody in her twelfth-grade class as she was afraid of being made fun of.

She says that she only mentioned the surrogacy to a good friend who she terms as her ‘favourite’ and that she was hesitant to tell this friend as well.