Jennifer Kirby explores the motivations and challenges of American would-be parents who seek to conceive using surrogates in foreign countries:
India is one of a few countries, though perhaps the most popularized, where commercial surrogacy is legal. The country emerged as a “hotspot” in part because of lower costs and laws passed in 2002 allowing commercial surrogacy. In the U.S., surrogacy can cost between $80,000 and $150,000, while in India it ranges from $20,000 to $60,000, depending on the types of services and the clinic. That amount rarely includes unforeseen expenses like surrogate hospitalizations, or the basic travel costs such as flight and hotel stay. Yet those “savings can be the difference between being a parent and not being a parent for a lot of people,” says Kathryn Kaycoff Manos, founder of Global IVF, a resource for fertility tourists…
Surrogacy in India is largely unregulated, though the Indian Council of Medical Research is moving toward greater control, including the registration of clinics, says Hari Ramasubramanian, a lawyer who founded the Indian Surrogacy Law Centre. An estimated 2,000 foreign babies are born to Indian surrogates each year, according to research in the forthcoming book Patients With Passports: Medical Tourism, Ethics, and Law, by Harvard law professor I. Glenn Cohen. A recent study by Sama, a resource group for women and health in India, concluded about 3,000 clinics offer surrogacy services to foreigners, generating more than $400 million per year for the economy; the Confederation of Indian Industry analyzed data that put India’s commercial surrogacy even higher, at more than $2 billion.
But tighter restrictions may alter the scope of India’s surrogacy tourism. In July 2012, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs ruled that foreigners needed medical, not tourist, visas to pursue surrogacy. The ministry limited those visas to straight couples who’ve been married at least two years, and who come from countries that also permit surrogacy. The rule change amounted to a bar on singles, gay, and unmarried couples, and on those circumventing their home laws to have children. Though the ministry relaxed regulations so foreigners who had already begun surrogacy in India could complete the process, the Indian government began enforcing the new rules this fall, Ramasubramanian says.
Enter Thailand and the Mexican state of Tabasco, two places where surrogacy clinics now cater to international singles and couples—particularly same-sex couples.
