Commercial Surrogacy and Lack of Regulations

In the year 2007, a somnolent and inconsequential town of Anand, situated in Gujarat, received unprecedented attention from across the globe upon being branded as the Mecca of commercial surrogacy by the American and British Media. Childless couples from all over the world flocked to India in desperate pursuit of happiness with the willingness to pay anything between 6000 to 25,000 U.S Dollars to realise their dream of a perfect family. On one hand is the ideology of perceiving this issue as that of women's choice and freedom, or reproductive autonomy, which accepts contractual surrogacy as a service and justifies "womb renting" as being an equivalent of sperm donation. Opposed to view are the socialist feminists who perceive this issue from an angle of equity and fairness, which accuses the act of commercial surrogacy as opposed to public morals and policy and goes as far as to equate it with prostitution. This debate regards surrogacy as potentially exploitative and raises objectionable but valid questions on India's propriety in allowing "outsourcing" of pregnancy.