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Monday, March 10, 2008

Yes, Virginia, EVERYTHING can be outsourced to India
Posted by Jill | 6:16 AM
I have one of those freebie subscriptions to Information Week that go on forever and serve mostly to add to the paper coming into the house. Most of the time, IW has at least one article on how you can save your company money by shitcanning those greedy Americans and farming out your programming (and in creasingly your remote data center administration) to other countries, primarily India, where you can pay peanuts and not have to worry about pesky things like health insurance and 401(k) plans that interfere with your ability to give your CEO a forty kazillion dollar pay package and make Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow happy.

But why stop at sending corporate jobs to India? Why not outsource the very work of replacing ourselves as well? Yes, folks, foreign adoption isn't enough, because it doesn't serve the needs of western people to perpetuate their gene pool -- something an adorable Chinese baby just doesn't do. Now the hard work of pregnancy is going to India too:


An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).

“People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,” said Dr. Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai. Just an hour earlier she had created an embryo for Mr. Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them (they would not say which) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic.

The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda — The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents. The donor and surrogate are always different women; doctors say surrogates are less likely to bond with the babies if there is no genetic connection.

There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase.

Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.

“Every time there is a success story, hundreds of inquiries follow,” he said.

In Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate mothers are pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them live together in a hostel attached to the clinic there.

Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.” She said she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad.

Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.

This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.”


It's hard to know where to begin on the many appalling aspects to this. There's the obvious one of exploiting poor women, but there's also the whole Handmaid's Tale aspect to women being kept in special hotels as incubators for Westerners, where they live under rules that keep their Sacred Wombs™ free of Bad Things like alcohol and tobacco. There's the ethnic/racial aspects of dark-skinned women being used as incubators for Caucasian babies (note how these surrogates don't provide the eggs either).

What does it say about the Americans and Europeans who are perfectly able to justify this kind of exploitation with warm fuzzy thoughts that they're helping these women to eat? The article goes on to say that of the approximately $30,000 that is paid for Indian surrogacy, the actual surrogate woman only gets around $7,500.

That, folks, is exploitation, I don't care how many pictures of happy American couples with babies they couldn't have otherwise you show me.

It's unfortunate that the article focuses on one couple in Israel, leaving the door open to the "Rich Jewish Princesses Who Don't Want to Ruin Their Figures" image and thus exonerate the many Americans and Europeans who are going in for this practice.

It's easy for me to judge, because I was mercifully spared the kind of baby madness so many women go through that makes women resort to desperate measures to have a baby. So I'm not necessarily opposed to reproductive technology (though I question how much of the American health care dollar it warrants). Given how American surrogate contracts have gone (such as the Baby M case), it's understandable that those who want to use this method to reproduce want the person who went through the pregnancy to be as far away as possible. And I'm in no way certain that a woman who needs to carry a baby for others in order to eat and put a roof over her head is exercising anything resembling free will. But if you're going to start outsourcing pregnancy to the developing world, at least make sure the woman herself is handsomely paid, not the middlemen who seem to be making the real bucks off this kind of womb-selling.

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4 Comments:
Blogger missy said...
It's doubly creepy that "The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents."

How could you go with a surrogate you never get to meet? Don't people realize that the environment of the womb is not a sterile incubator, and that their child will be affected by everything from the surrogate's stress hormones to the geometry of the surrogate mother's pelvis?

I'm not saying that we should exploit these women further by measuring them before choosing a surrogate, but the whole no-contact policy indicates that the surrogate is just a vessel, both to the parents and to the clinic. No one thinks it matters in the slightest who the surrogate is, and there's no acknowledgement that nurture in utero has a profound impact, particularly on brain development.
3/10/08, 12:39 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...
Oh god...please this is the limit..I think its about time people started thinking of cutting down costs and started thinking of ethics and humanity..
3/10/08, 3:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
First, just look at Enron. A 401K can actually be a GREAT way for your corporate masters to funnel off your money.

I agree that exploitation is exploitation, and I don't think people are talking enough about the fact that a lot of outsourcing businesses or businesses which exploit people in foreign countries get away with it by saying that they pay more than local employers, but still don't pay a living wage. Which means they're giving a little bit more of an incentive to keep people working there, but not actually solving their problems.

I also wouldn't necessarily trust a service where the sperm and egg to make my baby have to be shipped to another country. I'd like them to stay in the same clinic, actually, just to avoid any "mixups".

Something similar happens in Argentina, and probably in other countries as well, but I'm living here and I see it on the local news: There is no lack of demand for illegally adopted children. The mothers are desperate for money, and sign up to give up their babies in exchange for a little money or even household appliances or a television. They are then locked up in a baby production prison, just in case they change their minds. When the babies are born, they are sent to the U.S. and Europe.
3/10/08, 3:49 PM  
Blogger DawnDoings said...
Before I begin, let me be upfront and state that my husband and I are considering using an Indian surrogate. We would us an egg donor (mine are defective) and my husband would be the father. I came across your article while researching the subject.

I understand that some people have an ethical issue with surrogacy. That doesn't bother me. However, I think you are doing the infertile women of the world an injustice by suggesting that women consider surrogacy primarily to save their figure.

Anyway the real reason for my post is to request that you to reconsider your comment regarding the fees.

Look again at what the listed amount covers. It approximates the costs of Air Fare, Hotel, Medical Care and the fee for the surrogate. The Air Fare is for two trips.

My goal in pointing this out is to emphasize that the majority is not going to some surrogate mother pimp, but covers legitimate costs.

BTW, shortcircuitnewswire is concerned about sending sperm/eggs to India. The entire process happens in the clinic in India. Sperm and eggs are not shipped anywhere. Our research has shown that clinics don't even like to ship across state lines.
7/12/08, 3:57 PM  
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