I love to trickle down the crevasse of our social fibre, away from software emperors PowerPoint and Excel sheet, or cyber gods demanding cut, paste, save before loads of hard work disappears forever into irretrievable temporary files. I always carry my small movie camera and notebook when wading into the ocean of humanity. By chance, I recently discovered Vasundhara, who said she helps make babies. Seeing my raised eyebrows imagining her seductive powers over men, she quickly elaborated, ?What should normally happen in the bedroom, I create in a test tube in my laboratory. I am an embryologist.?
For married women in India, it?s almost a crime not to have children. The whirring pressure is from the family, society, being ostracised from religious functions, and her own knock in confidence. Nobody checks if low sperm count could be the problem. Previously, early marriages made the family proudly recognise women for being baby containers. Of course, when it?s a male baby she gets more respect. Curiosity made me drive a quick research across a hundred girls between 20 and 28 years in metros today. About 40% of these career women don?t want a baby as their bodies would deform for nine months, and they?d rather avoid the pain and future responsibility. In fact, 24% prefer a live-in relationship while 46% opt to marry only after they are financially independent. They?d rather live separately from in-laws. From some other research at the workplace, we found that when middle management women get thwarted in career growth on account of largely hidden male chauvinist attitudes, or due recognition is denied them, their frustration sets in. They then become mentally weak, and change their life?s direction and priorities towards family, marriage and children.
Vasundhara said a new problem has emerged in society in the past ten years. It?s the weakening of the male sperm due to overuse of pesticides and chemicals in food and drinks. Environmental pollution from cigarette smoke, synthetic estrogens in poultry and dairy feed, tight fitting jeans and underwear, gonorrhoea among others, are reasons for male infertility. This male problem has seriously increased in the age group of 25 to 40 years. So, educated young couples who can afford it frequent IVF (in-vitro fertility) clinics to have their babies conceived in test tubes. In villages, men undergo a second marriage without first checking their own fertility.
It seems statistically the birth rate has gone down in India, and those below the poverty line decreased from 55% in 1973-74 to 26% in 1999-2000. According to demographer Professor PN Mari Bhat of International Institute for Population Sciences, there is a strong corelation between this poverty reduction and decline in fertility rates in the past three decades. But my social fibre journey into test tube babies suggests that it matters little whether India has over a billion people with millions of unwanted babies. Every couple?s birthright is a happy marriage with a child, and their desire is for procreation.
The world?s first test tube baby was Marie Louise Brown, born on July 25, 1978, in England, and the second was Durga, born 67 days later in Kolkata. Dr Subhas Mukhopadhyay brought her into the world, but the medical profession disbelieved his achievement, and he committed suicide in 1981. At the IVF clinic, Vasundhara explained that the wife?s egg is sucked out of the ovary under anaesthesia and cultured for a couple of days in an incubator with 37 degree Centigrade. The husband?s sperm is simultaneously taken and used to fertilise the eggs in laboratory conditions. About two or three fertilised embryos are then injected into the wife?s womb for the baby to grow naturally inside. Of course, if either the egg or sperm is not up-to-the-mark for fertilisation, a donor egg or sperm is used under strict confidentiality. Should the wife be unable or unwilling to bear the child, a surrogate uterus can then be used.
Surrogacy is a subject fraught with controversy, dilemma, emotional upheavals and rackets. A surrogate mother lends her uterus, and when she delivers, genetically the baby will belong to the couple whose egg and sperm were used. In India, a childless couple is generally willing to pay around Rs 10 lakh for the donor egg or sperm. This is where the racket begins. Touts get poverty-stricken girls and boys to donate, pay them a few thousands and pocket the rest themselves. It appears that sophisticated college going girls and boys donate eggs and sperm directly to IVF clinics as the money is good. The stakes are much higher for touts at the surrogate mother stage. Married women are used as they are less likely to get attached to the baby they are renting their uterus for.
Commercial surrogacy is banned in countries such as Sweden, Spain, France and Germany, while South Africa, the UK and Argentina allow and evaluate surrogacy requests on a case-by-case basis. India legalised surrogacy in 2002, and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has set national guidelines to regulate it.
Reproductive outsourcing is a new and rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics providing surrogate mothers to NRIs and foreigners say they are flooded with requests from USA and Europe as India?s skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices have become well known. The industry value was estimated to be $449 million in 2005, and reportedly surrogacy cases have doubled in the past three years. In the US, an estimated 4,000 babies were born to surrogate mothers in 1992. Typically, surrogate mothers are paid $15,000 in the US, and agencies claim another $30,000. The difference in India? The entire cost ranges between $2,500 and $6,500.
Meandering the social fibre, I stumbled into emotional potholes aside from the commercial, legal and ethical connotations. What can the couple do if the surrogate mother does not give them the baby? Technology has no heart but will the surrogate woman?s heart allow her to forsake the baby for money? How much is the right payment for her? If pregnancy makes the surrogate mother ill, who will pay the medical bills? What if she dies at childbirth? Should the child know about the surrogacy? If the child is handicapped and not wanted by anyone, what happens? A child of foreign genes born to an Indian surrogate mother will be the citizen of this country or the genetic parents? country? What about the birth certificate and passport for immigration?
In his 1936 film Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin was ahead of his time depicting the frustrating struggle during the Great Depression of proletarian man pitted against the dehumanising effects of the machine in the Industrial Age. Surrogacy and test tube babies take me back to his great vision of how the world is becoming so artificial.
?Shombit Sengupta is an international creative business strategy consultant to top managements. Reach him at http://www.shininguniverse.com