Childless couples look to India for surrogate mothers

"These amounts are still nearly three times cheaper than what surrogacy in the UK would cost us," they say.

Their search put them in touch with several interested Indian mothers. Now the couple has started www.1-in-6.com, a website to help link up prospective parents and surrogate mothers from India.

Research at the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge University shows that British surrogate mothers did not suffer major emotional problems. "We did find that surrogate mothers did find the weeks following the handover difficult, but this became easier over time," says Vasanti Jadva, a researcher from the same university.

It's a view that resonates with fertility specialists like Dr. Patel: "Many surrogate mothers see this not as 'handing over' the baby, but as 'handing back' the baby, as the baby was never theirs to keep."

Anand's Kaival Hospital has up to 20 surrogate mothers. In the last two years since surrogacy began here, six babies have been delivered and two more are on the way. Some 75 percent of the clients are non-resident Indians from the UK, the US, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

Each day, dozens of inquiries from India and abroad inundate the clinic. Parents and prospective surrogates are carefully screened and counseled by the clinic, and both parties must sign an elaborate legal contract that signs over the surrogate mother's rights to the baby and underlines the financial terms.

Although all surrogates interviewed said that they would not get attached to the baby since they took up surrogacy for altruistic reasons, money does seem to be a motivator.

"How else will us uneducated women earn this kind of money, without doing anything immoral?" asks one of the surrogate mothers at the Kaival Hospital.

Reshma's husband Vinod - not his real name - says his paltry $50 montly pay as a painter would not be enough to educate his two children. He says the extra money will allow him to invest in his children's education and to buy a new home. But surrogacy is yet to be widely accepted here. For the past six months, Reshma and Vinod have been living in a neighboring village to keep the pregnancy a secret.

"Otherwise, we'll be treated like social pariahs," he says. "This isn't a respectable thing to do in our society."

Nor is it entirely accepted in other parts of the globe. Movements to allow for surrogate motherhood have been rejected by voters in places like Sweden, Spain, France, and Germany. Other nations that do allow it, including South Africa, the UK, and Argentina, employ independent ethics committees to evaluate surrogacy requests on a case-by-case basis.

"After IT services it seems it's now the turn of babies to be outsourced from India," says Manish Mehta, a reporter from Associated Press Television who is shooting a film on surrogate mothers.

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