Wombs for Rent and Egg Donors

Marie Claire has an interesting article on Wombs for Rent in Anand, Gujarat, India. The author, Abigail Haworth describes, Dr. Nayna Patel the doctor that has started the begginings of surrogate motherhood in India. The women mostly lend their wombs for economic reasons, earning $5,500 per pregnancy.The Indian laws for surrogacy are still not very well defined, unlike in the US, where a financial transaction cannot take place. Also the Indian women need to sign a contract that they will not claim this child once born as their own. In the U.S. a woman can change her mind after the baby's birth.

Peggy Orentstein raised very perplexing questions in the NYT magazine a week ago, in her article, Your Gamete, Myself.


With egg donation, science has succeeded in, if not extending women’s fertility, at least making an end run around it, allowing older women who, for a variety of reasons (lack of money, lack of partner, lack of interest, lack of partner’s interest) didn’t have children in their biological prime — as well as younger women with dysfunctional ovaries — to carry and bear babies themselves. It has given rise to the mind-bending phrase “biogenetic child,” meaning a child who is both biologically and genetically related to each of its parents, by, for the first time in history, separating those components. In that way, it is fundamentally different from sperm donation, though it also levels a certain playing field: mothers can now do what fathers always could — conceal the truth about their blood relationship to their children. And as with any new reproductive technology, it has provoked a torrent of social, legal and ethical questions about the entitlement to reproduce, what constitutes parenthood, children’s rights to know their origins and the very nature of family.

She raises dilemmas then that parents face dealing with how to tell the kids how they were conceived.

Once a child knows she was donor-conceived, what then? How far do her rights extend? Should she be able to meet her donor, and who gets to decide? It was clear to Marie, the donor recipient who is also an adoptee, that knowing one’s genetic lineage should not just be an option, it should be an entitlement. “There’s no way I would have a child of mine go through what I went through in terms of the not knowing and the questioning and the search.” she said. Not only did she and her husband, a 65-year-old lawyer, plan from the get-go to be open with Catherine about her conception, they also wanted to ensure that their daughter would, whenever she was ready, have access to the donor.

When it comes to the question of whether to reveal a donor’s identity to a child, at least for now, we leave the decisions to parents. Other nations say that prerogative is trumped by a person’s right to know his heritage: Britain, for example, recently banned anonymous donation; any children conceived after 2005 will have access once they turn 18 to identifying details about their sperm or egg donors. Since 2000, when the debate over this issue began, the number of registered egg donors in Britain has dropped almost 25 percent.

Yet egg donors and recipients may have less to fear from open donations than they imagine, at least if the experience is comparable to sperm donation. According to Joanna Scheib’s research, teens who were conceived with “open-identity” sperm — who when they turn 18 can have access to their donor’s name — said that, while more than 80 percent were interested in meeting their donors, fewer than 7 percent wanted to establish a father-child relationship with them.


Both articles raise a lot of ethical questions, is it fair for another woman to carry your child? Is that child hers or yours? What is motherhood? When does it begin? How do you tell your child, about her conception? Is surrogate motherhood so popular in India, because the government has not realized the ethical questions that are involved in this equation. I am all for Indian women to earn more money by renting their wombs, but they should have rights that any Western woman has, in deciding what she wants to do with the baby once it is born.
Here
is more information on Dr. Patel and her program.

Here
is a Canadian documentary on Wombs for Rent.