The designer baby factory: ...and embryos implanted in desperate women

Above a cheap mobile phone shop in a chaotic street in north Delhi, there is a grimy apartment whose peeling walls are decorated with photographs of adoring mothers nursing their babies.

The woman cooing at her child in the biggest portrait is beautiful, white and affluent-looking — in stark contrast to the flat’s five residents, four of whom are pregnant, while the other is being pumped full of hormones in the hope she will soon conceive.

They are all uneducated, bare-footed, dirt-poor Indian women from outlying villages — and given the emotional turmoil that awaits them, one would have thought the very last thing they would wish to do is spend their enforced nine months of confinement here gazing upon images of maternal bliss.

Nominally, this forlorn place is a care home for surrogate mothers — at least that is how it is described by the company that runs it, Wyzax Surrogacy Consultancy, which is cashing in on India’s booming new babies-for-sale business.

It boasts of being the country’s first ‘one-stop shop for outsourced pregnancy’. In truth, though, it is nothing less than a baby factory; the end of a grim production line on which children are being designed to order for wealthy couples, mainly from Western countries including Britain, as if they were custom-built cars.

Indeed, as I have discovered during an eye-opening three-week investigation into India’s burgeoning, billion-dollar surrogacy industry, the motor-manufacturing analogy is all too apt.

A couple further excerpted points:

For all their apparent desperation to start families, these so called ‘IPs’, or intended parents, have also become ever-more demanding in their specifications; many want babies who emanate from a gene pool which maximises the possibility that they will not only resemble them but have, say, blond hair and blue eyes (and hopefully be attractive, sporty and intelligent into the bargain).

Kohli and Singh have therefore devised a ‘protocol’ that works roughly like this: after careful screening for genetic illnesses and an IQ test, attractive young female egg donors from countries such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia and Belarus are advertised in an online catalogue for prospective parents to browse.

In Eastern Europe, there are all too many hard-up women willing to endure fertility treatment, a long flight to California or Boston, and an uncomfortable operation under anaesthetic to sell their eggs for up to £750 a batch.

And as human eggs cannot be frozen and transported, and there are few surrogacy clinics or wombs available for rent in Eastern Europe, these donors travel, at the height of their monthly cycle, to the United States, where the eggs are extracted and fertilised with the father’s sperm (which can be transported, frozen, from his country of residence, and stored indefinitely).

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Another advantage of creating babies in a U.S. laboratory is that many couples have a preference for gender, and the ‘sexing’ of test-tube babies is permitted in some states there. It is banned in India, where the preference for sons drives many to female infanticide.

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Once created, the embryos are frozen to minus 196c, placed in liquid nitrogen canisters resembling small milk-churns, then flown 8,000 miles from the U.S. to cities such as Delhi and Bombay, where they are implanted.

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An increasing proportion of clients are gay couples — though as homosexuality was only recently decriminalised in India, and remains widely taboo, I was urged not to tell the surrogates I met that they might be carrying babies for same-sex parents.

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During my inquiries among companies who offer such services, I uncovered some deeply disquieting practices, such as the termination of unwanted pregnancies that can occur when clients pay a premium for multiple embryos to be implanted to maximise the chances of conception. If too many embryos develop, some are then selectively terminated.

Euphemistically, the Indians call this ‘reduction’. Many would call it abortion, even though it takes place only a couple of weeks into the pregnancy.

I was also told how imported sperm and embryo canisters are sometimes ‘mistakenly’ opened by customs officers, so that the contents thaw and have to be destroyed. The potential for mistakes is terrifying.

This is such a sad, blatant disregard of human life. The sad thing is, this is partially facilitated through the U.S. Human beings are being created in labs, frozen, shipped halfway around the world, and the "excess" humans or the "imperfect" humans that fail to meet the demands of the parents who paid for their creations are then disposed of as waste. The women in India are so desperate for money that they are doing this, and people are exploiting this. People are so concerned with what they want that morality is tossed out the window. I don't know how much longer God will put up with all this.

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