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Foreign Correspondent: Apr 15

Foreign Correspondent looks at surrogacy in India, and Australian couples who go to great lengths to start a family.

2014-04-14_0011This week Foreign Correspondent looks at the booming ‘industry’ of surrogacy in India, and Australian couples who go to great lengths to start a family.

Surrogacy is big business in India. It’s now a worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year – some estimate more than a billion – fuelled by tax breaks for medical tourism, childless couples around the world trying to start a family and young Indian women desperate for a pay day that could set their families up for life. But are ethics and adequate regulation being dismissed in the rush to supply thousands of foreigners and rich Indians with babies? We follow the paths of two Australian couples navigating India’s booming baby-making industry, paying and doing what it takes to succeed and bring a baby home. As we’ll see, results seldom play out according to hopes and dreams.

In Launceston, Tasmania, Kate and Paul Torney yearn for another child. The arrival for their son Ptolemy was a dramatic and damaging event that almost killed Kate and certainly ended her natural capacity to bear another child.

In suburban Melbourne, Victoria Kalli and Bill Galakis have endured a devastating procession of failed pregnancies and miscarriages.

“We tried IVF for four and a half years we did something close to 24 cycles.

We fell pregnant 4 times ourselves and lost all four babies. It was the most devastating time in our lives.” Kalli Galakis 

Both couples – like hundreds of other Australians – have decided to start or grow their families using a commercial surrogate and for that India has become a hot global destination.

There are now an estimated 1500 surrogacy centres across the country. In the space of a decade or so the surrogacy industry has grown to what one industry observer has estimated to be a billion dollar industry. But it’s exploded in a place where regulation has been lagging well behind the boom. So there are pitfalls for aspiring parents and perils for surrogates as well.

Many surrogates are from very poor backgrounds, have little or no education and certainly limited or non-existent financial literacy. There are concerns that some are pressed into the industry by their husbands and families as a quick way to make an otherwise unimaginable $7000AU per birth. Supporters of the industry say the money is vaulting them out of poverty and into their own homes, an education and the prospect of a much brighter future.

“If you are just a critic who feels a childless person should live a life of misery and stay childless throughout their life, or a poor person is meant to remain poor all throughout their life then you’ll consider this as something wrong, as something immoral. A farm. A baby-making factory..”

One of the pioneers of the commercial surrogacy business, Dr Nayana Patel grants access to her bustling enterprise in Anand, Gujarat where 100 surrogate mothers live in a house for the term of their pregnancy. They lie in single bunks, hoping for a successful birth, a happy client and a relatively huge amount of money.

Elsewhere care and concern for surrogates is not so assured.

In this deeply moving Foreign Correspondent we go inside the industry to see just what confronts surrogates and their clients and we’ll go there through the experiences of Australian couples trying to chart the most ethical and sensitive course they can in pursuit of a little life to call their own.

8pm Tuesdays on ABC1.

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