Sunday, March 25, 2018

BY INVITATION 
 
Only a Surrogacy Act can shut down India’s baby factories

PINKI VIRANI   times sof india 25.03.2018

Responding to the question on whether NRIs can use Indian women as ‘gestationers’, the Bengaluru gynaecologist’s voice takes on a nationalist fervour: “The PM says ‘Make in India’. We must allow them.” This is in Delhi, at a parliamentary standing committee meeting for the surrogacy bill which, if and when it becomes law, will regulate surrogacy and outlaw commercialisation.

Surrogacy is part of third-party reproduction which can include oocytes (eggs bought in the baby bazaar), sperm, and embryos. Aggressive in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) is used, even though global research shows that it can harm mothers and produce damaged babies.

The abetted human reproduction industry involves high stakes, made higher by a failure rate of 75%. The practitioners set themselves up as benevolent fertility fairies even as they perpetuate patriarchy, making a woman feel worthless if she doesn’t have a child on her hip. Many women feel the need to believe them. They don’t seem to mind the higher-than-average risk of cancers afterwards. It doesn’t seem to matter that the more convoluted the process of starting a tiny human in a lab, the more complex its after-effects on that child.

Should NRIs be allowed to use surrogates as mere handmaids, thereby separating babies from their birth mothers, putting oceans of distance between them? One’s view to the parliamentary standing committee: India must not racially discriminate between white, black and an NRI shade of brown. Nor should anyone be encouraged to break the laws governing surrogacy in their own countries. India’s external affairs minister, consulates and courts need not be embroiled in situations where foreigners abuse female bodies in other countries and use infants with their genetic material to slash through their own country’s rules.

The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill was announced in late August 2016. The bill has loopholes, but these are pluggable. It shifts the exploitation of an unknownpaid woman to a known-unpaid one with its “close relative” insistence. It ignores male infertility. It lacks clarity on whose genes — egg and sperm — will make the child’s DNA. It encourages inbound human trafficking by not stating the surrogate’s nationality. It doesn’t specify the number of embryos to be inserted per IVF cycle. There is enough evidence that singleembryo transfers are adequate. Internationally, doubletriple transfers per cycle are being discouraged.

Concern is also mounting about the long-term welfare of premature babies; most IVF-produced twins undergo acute foetal distress and have to be cut out of their mother too soon. Its outcome? The journal JAMA Paediatrics carries the latest proof of “large deficits in intelligence”.

The Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha in late 2016. There has been silence since. Silence of the lambs. Instruments are still being sharpened, for poor women paid to go under knives. If more surrogates die — two cases are known — it’s “collateral damage”. Mine the gap till the bill becomes law, medical ethics be damned.

In June 2017, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh police raided “fertility clinics” in posh areas, finding more than 100 surrogates including tribals. Around 20% of these were pregnant for “single men”. Unknown: was it the sperm of the same single men; who supplied the oocytes; how many are carrying twins or triplets, how many babies are being manufactured for end-use in child-porn videos? In November 2017, a 63-year-old Rajkot male and his 58-year-old wife with a severe heart condition were “blessed” with twins through surrogacy. Unknown: whose sperm and eggs were used?

Last month in Pune, while ensuring themselves free national publicity, doctors declared their happiness in seeing a grieving (grand)mother “having her son back in the form of twins” through surrogacy. The son, who succumbed to cancer, had frozen his sperm before chemotherapy. Has a gullible woman been emotionally encouraged for a favourable business outcome? Was the possibility of cancer being genetically transmitted pointed out to her? Will these twins, orphaned before birth, ever know their genetic egg-mother, or their surrogate birth-mother? Is it always a coincidence that IVFtwins tend to be “gender-balanced”? And had the dead man given written consent for his sperm to be used?

The standing committee report, submitted to Parliament on August 10, 2017, is a recommended read. It includes nuggets like the story of a doctor suckering a buyer into lab-mating his sperm with a “Bollywood egg” for several lakhs.

An AARTH (artificial-assisted reproductive transplant health) Act is needed to deal with such practices, to protect teen girls from eggsploitation, and to tackle uterus transplants which are threatening to go the commercial surrogacy way. Will Dr J P Nadda’s health ministry plug the loopholes? Will the surrogacy bill surface in the Rajya Sabha in the current Parliament session?

Meanwhile, reproductive slavery continues.

Virani has authored ‘Politics Of The Womb: The Perils of IVF, Surrogacy & Modified Babies’

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DON’T MAKE IN INDIA: The abetted human reproduction industry has a failure rate of 75%

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