Inde : utérus à louer : 5.000 dollars pour la mère porteuse.
Rather than join her other three children, the newborn will be handed over to a U.S. couple who are unable to bear a child on their own and are hiring Mehli to do it for them.
She'll be paid about $5,000 () for acting as a surrogate mother, a bonanza that would take her more than six years to earn on her salary as a schoolteacher in a village near here.
"I might renovate or add to the house, or spend it on my kids' education or my daughter's wedding," Mehli said.
Beyond the money, she added, there is the reward of bringing happiness to a childless couple from the , where such a service would cost them thousands and thousands of dollars more, not to mention the potential legal hassles.
Driven by many of the same factors that have led Western businesses to outsource some of their operations to India in recent years, an increasing number of infertile couples from abroad are coming here in search of women willing, in effect, to rent out their wombs.
The trend is evident to doctors such as Indira Hinduja, perhaps 's most prominent fertility specialist, who receives an inquiry from overseas every other week. It can also be detected on the Internet, where a young Indian woman recently posted an ad on a help-wanted website offering to carry a child for an expatriate husband and wife.
"It's win-win," said S.K. Nanda, a former health secretary here in
Others aren't so sure about the moral implications, and are worried about the exploitation of poor women and the risks in a land where 100,000 women die every year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth. Rich couples from the West paying Indian women for the use of their bodies, they say, is distasteful at best, unconscionable at worst.
"You're subjecting the life of that woman who will be a surrogate to some amount of risk," said C.P. Puri, director of the National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health in Mumbai (formerly
Both sides of the debate agree that the fertility business in , including "reproductive tourism" by foreigners, is potentially enormous. Current figures are tough to pin down, but the Indian Council of Medical Research estimates that helping residents and visitors beget children could bloom into a nearly $6 billion-a-year industry.
Now the town also boasts about 20 young women who have volunteered to be implanted with embryos at Patel's clinic. A few have already gone through the process once and are eager for a second go-round.
Prospective foreign clients hear of Patel through word of mouth or informal online networks and websites dealing with infertility issues.
By the time they contact her, and spend the time, energy and money to get here, they are usually desperate for children and often emotionally battered from long years of trying and failing.
Patel has set some criteria for those she'll help: only couples for whom the baby would be their first and where the wife is either infertile or cannot physically carry a child to term.
Likewise, potential surrogates must be between 18 and 45, and in good health. They also must already be mothers, so that they know what awaits their bodies during pregnancy and are less likely to be troubled about giving up the new baby because they already have kids at home.
The egg that contributes to the embryo is never one of their own, coming instead from an anonymous donor or the intended mother, and then usually fertilized in vitro.
Both parties sign a contract under which the intended parents pay for medical care and the surrogate renounces rights to the baby, a provision that relieves the fears of many foreign couples.
In the , for example, where laws vary from state to state, the surrogate sometimes has a window of opportunity after birth to stake a claim on the child.
In Anand, volunteers are repeatedly reminded by Patel and her staff that the fetuses in their wombs are not theirs. They give up the newborns within one to two days after delivering. Patel said no problems have arisen yet with too strong a bond forming between surrogate and child.
LOS ANGELES TIMES 20060412