Humans have two fundamental drives, explains Dr Nayna Patel in House of Surrogates, a carefully observed and subtly questioning documentary about commercial surrogacy in India. We have a drive to reproduce, and a drive to survive. Commercial surrogacy fulfils both of these, says Dr Patel. The client couple get a child, the surrogate gets a life changing sum of money. Who could object to the mutual satisfaction of our most elemental desires?
The fee for the surrogate is paid in instalments through the pregnancy, adding up to $8,000 if the surrogate carries a single baby to term – a little over six times the GDP per capita for India. Vasanti, one of the surrogates and mother to two children of her own, puts it another way: “They’re all here out of their own desperation,” she says, looking at her fellow residents in the dormitory they share.
Dr Patel makes sure the surrogates get much more than just the money, though. For starters, they are given food, medication and accommodation for the duration of the pregnancy. (This isn’t just generosity, of course. Residency is compulsory for women, because controlling their nutrition and sanitation reduces the risk of miscarriage. It’s a way of protecting the clinic’s investment.)
They get advice, too: Dr Patel isn’t content to turn her surrogates loose with their sudden wealth, and during the film we see her advise her charges on getting bank accounts, purchasing property and disposing of abusive husbands. Dr Patel calls herself a feminist, and I don’t doubt her principles. If you feared seeing a reproductive class that looked something like the brutalised Handmaids of Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, this will be reassuring viewing.
At times, House of Surrogates feels like an advert for international sisterhood: this is redistribution by way of the uterus. And then, you catch sight of the profound inequality in which this common womanhood exists. In a consulting room, a Canadian couple size up a prospective surrogate with an agricultural eye: is she sturdy enough, do they trust their precious genetic material to the width of her hips?
Next to the Canadians, an Indian woman holds a baby: the baby is the Canadians’, and she is their first surrogate mother, retained as a wetnurse for the first few weeks. For Barbara, the Canadian mother, this is clearly a kindness: “What could be wrong with more than one woman loving my son?” she asks. The implicit opposing question – what could be wrong with taking a baby away from a woman who loves and cares for him? – hangs unasked.
While Dr Patel is clear that the women understand the rights they have to the child (none whatsoever), the surrogates do bond with the babies they carry, and they do grieve when the legal parents carry them off. However rationally it is accepted, that combination of empty belly, sore breasts and empty arms seems a terribly wrenching one. And it’s not only the physical cost that the surrogates bear. There’s a stigma against surrogacy in India, one that means Dr Patel must live under heavy security while Vasanti talks about using her money to move so she won’t have to live with neighbours who know what she’s done.
Surrogacy is an act of altruism, but even when the client parents take the time to thank the birth mother of their child (which most do, but not all), do they truly understand what they’ve been given? Not simply a child, but the pain, shame and sacrifice borne by another woman so that they could reproduce? Barbara speaks of wanting her newborn son (born from egg donation) to explore the Indian side of his heritage; Vasanti, having delivered the baby of a Japanese couple (she calls it “my baby” though she never gets to see it) and bought her new house, only hopes that her own daughter will never have to take the decision to become a surrogate.
Neither simple exploitation nor an uncomplicated exchange of money for goods and services, commercial surrogacy is where two great needs collide. Both sides clearly benefit, but how can it be possible for hundreds of families and individuals to meet like this without great hurt occurring? After watching House of Surrogates, the moral consequences of this collision are felt more keenly but not necessarily any clearer - Dr Patel’s calm and smiling certainty the only beacon in the mist.
If you missed it, you can catch up with 'House of Surrogates' on iPlayer. Do come back and tell us what you thought here on the thread.
Guest posts
BBC4's House of Surrogates - what did you think?
MumsnetGuestBlogs · 01/10/2013 11:52
but all surrogates do it for the money, even those in the UK. The only difference is that in the UK it is dressed up as "expenses," in order to legitimise it.
I have far more issue with a surrogate who uses her own eggs and uterus in order to then pass over her own biological child to a couple in return for 
"expenses." Now that is buying/selling a baby.
I do think the notion of encouraging couples to take the adoption route is hypocritical because adoption is a long, hard, deeply emotional process that is not for everyone.
But I am also of the opinion that just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should, and as heartbreaking as it is to be unable to conceive, doesn't mean that morally it is ok to use whatever means necessary in order to have a baby, such as exploiting women in third world countries in order to buy their eggs/use of their uterus (for surrogacy/egg donation).
I also don't believe that only the infertile have the right to judge, infertility does not absolve one of moral responsibility, and there are roads which IMO should not be taken.
I was unable to conceive a second child, but even when trying for my first I struggled, and I faced the possibility that it might not happen. But no amount of desperation would have changed my opinion that buying a baby, or indeed an egg, is wrong, and I would haverremained childless rather than enter down that route.
I would consider being a surrogate for someone I love where I would have a continued relationship with the baby for the rest of its life but I honestly don't think I could be a surrogate just for money however large the sum. The heartbreak of giving up a baby I'd carried and felt growing inside me is not worth the gain of wealth. But then, I am not living in a third world country and desperate to provide a better life for my family. It's easy to see why these women do it and, lets face it, in India there are many ways for women to earn money which have very questionable morality and for a pittance of a wage which makes little difference to their situation.
The Canadian woman featured came across as very selfish. To employ her surrogate as a nanny/wet nurse while she waited for her green light to take her baby home was just so cruel. This in my opinion was a far greater form of exploitation than that carried out by the clinic. The Canadian lady used the surrogate mothers desire to earn more money and to stay with her baby (because it is her baby as well, she gave him life and nurtured him). The poor woman had as strong a bond as any other mother and to see her having to say goodbye after caring for him everyday for 4/5months (?) was just heartbreaking. What help does she receive to deal with the grief she will feel?? My heart bled for her
I agree Coldtea- recipients cant gave it both ways. Though imagine complicated reality of making up baby formula with unreliable water/lengthy exit process for baby make the wet nurse option attractive to the new parents. And the women too poor to turn them down
Wonder what a documentary revisiting all this in 25 years time would make of it all? What would the grown up children think?
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