Yonatan Gher and his male partner plan eventually to tell their child that it was made in India, in the womb of a woman they never met, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked out from an internet line-up of candidates.

The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 4,000 kilometres from Gher’s home in Tel Aviv, nurtured by a team of doctors who have begun specialising in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.

As they waited to see if the fertilisation process had been successful, Gher, 29, and his partner sped around the streets of Mumbai in the back of an autorickshaw, drinking in scenes of a country they had never previously visited, staring at the unfamiliar faces of Indian women and children and “trying to imagine our child”, he said.
Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe in recent months, as word spreads of India’s combination of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some European countries and subject to a wide spectrum of regulation in US states, was legalised in India in 2002. The cost of the medical procedures, air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilisation and a second to collect the baby) comes to around $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the US.

“People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,” said Dr Kausal Kadam in her office at the Rotunda clinic, an hour after creating an embryo for Gher and his partner, with sperm from one of the men (they would not disclose which one) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic.

No contacts between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents were permitted.
There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase.

Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a US medical tourism agency, said he expects to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.
In Anand, Gujarat, where the practice was pioneered, more than 50 surrogate mothers are currently pregnant with the children of couples from the US, Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them are living together in a hostel attached to the clinic there, waiting to give birth.

Dr Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford the cost of surrogacy at home were coming to her, because Indian women “were free of vices, like alcohol, smoking and drugs”.
Under guidelines issued by the Indian Medical Council, surrogate mothers sign away all their rights to the child. In cases where the surrogate provides a womb for an embryo formed from the sperm and egg of the prospective parents, it is only the names of these genetic parents that appear on the birth certificate. If an egg donor is involved, her name does not appear on the document, either; only that of the father. This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country.

Surrogacy is an area fraught with ethical uncertainties. Critics argue that the ease with which relatively rich foreigners are able to rent the wombs of poor Indians creates the potential for exploitation. Although the government is actively promoting India as a medical tourism destination, something about the exchange of money for babies has made many uncomfortable.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development said in February that it was considering introducing legislation governing surrogacy, but this is not imminent.

Gher and his partner (who asked not to be named) have worked through their doubts and are certain they are doing a good thing.

They are paying around $30,000, which includes flights, hotels and medical care. The surrogate is paid about Rs 3 lakh.

“Surrogates do it to give their children better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” said Kadam. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”

In the clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some of the contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the signature of the clients.

Rotunda did not allow interviews with its surrogate mothers, but a 32-year-old woman at a fertility clinic in Delhi explained why she is embarking on her second surrogacy in two years.

Separated from her husband, she found that her monthly wages of Rs 2,800 as a midwife did not cover the expenses involved in raising her nine-year-old son. With the Rs 5.5 lakh she earned from the first surrogacy, she bought a house. With the Rs 3.5 lakh she expects from the second, for which she is negotiating with an American couple, she will be able to pay for her son’s education. “I will save the money for my child’s future,” she said.
The process requires a degree of subterfuge in this socially conservative country. She has told her mother, who lives with her, but not her son or her neighbours.