Surrogacy law to protect women

The Govt will have a law to regulate surrogacy including protecting rights of surrogate mothers and kids within a year, Renuka Chowdhury said, after ICMR made a presentation to her on the draft legislation.

Updated on: Jun 26, 2008, 24:09:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government will have a law to regulate surrogacy including protecting rights of surrogate mothers and kids within a year, Women and Child Development minister Renuka Chowdhury said, after Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) made a presentation to her on the draft legislation.

“As of now it is free for all situation when it comes to surrogacy. There is no protection against exploitation of surrogate mothers or whether surrogacy is being treated as a business. The rights of children born from surrogacy are not clear. A large number of foreigners come to India to rent a womb and then disappear with the child. We don’t want India to become a cheap destination for surrogacy,” Chowhdury said.

She admitted that there is no data to gauge the magnitude of surrogacy business in India but suggested that middlemen were exploiting surrogate mothers because of their need for money.

Medical experts and NGOs also raised concern over the way business of surrogacy was being conducted in India at a roundtable on surrogacy on Tuesday. Issues like the minimum age limit and health conditions that need to be considered will come up for discussion. The WCD ministry also circulated a note on surrogacy highlighting the ethical, moral, legal and child issues related to surrogacy.

Giving a curtain raiser on the proposed law, the health ministry officials assured that the concern will be dealt in the proposed law, on which a curtain raiser was presented at the conference.

The ministry officials said the proposed law would protect rights of women giving birth to surrogate children so that they were not exploited by middlemen and vested interest. “Specific clauses regarding like the right of the child to know about the surrogate mother and rights of the surrogate mother over the kid has been included in the draft legislation, which would be circulated for public discussion soon,” a Health ministry official said.

As of now, there is no law on surrogacy in India. There are guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on surrogacy and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART). “Now the need of the hour a law to regulate the emerging business aspect of surrogacy”, she said.

There was, however, clear consensus that age of surrogacy should remain between 22 and 45 years and a surrogate mother should not be allowed to give multiple births.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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