Outsourcing surrogacy to India?

After watching an interesting Oprah show today, it’s evident large corporations aren’t the only ones outsourcing their interests to India. If you had exhausted your life savings in numerous failed attempts to get pregnant, adoption wasn’t an option, and a surrogate mother was willing to carry your child for a fraction of the costs, would you pursue it? Even if she lived in India?

Surrogate mothers in the United States are paid approximately $30,000 for one pregnancy, some agencies report as much as $40,000. But a clinic in a poverty stricken city in India offers women an average of just $5,000 to carry a child for foreign families. The costs seem clear cut and the business is booming. Over the last two years, Dr. Nayna Patel has impregnated more than 50 impoverished surrogates from nearby villages at her infertility clinic in Gujarat. But just as Corporate America outsources technical support and customer service to low-paid Indian workers, are we not, yet again, taking advantage of people with far less money and a greater misfortune?

On the contrary, two women in such an exchange are able to give each other a life they could not have achieved on their own. The American woman can become a mother and finally fulfill a dream she’s carried since she was a child. The Indian woman can send her children to school and pay for a decent home to raise them in. Payment for one surrogacy is more money than most Indian families would see in a lifetime. Perhaps women from two totally different worlds have more in common than we thought.

~ by jolie3203 on August 16, 2008.