Desperate mothers fuel India's 'baby factories'

Anoop Gupta slumps in his swivel chair and surveys what the day has brought his Delhi fertility clinic: a rich housewife who wants to check on the pregnancy of her 21-year-old peasant surrogate; a rural farming couple, both past middle age and seeking an heir after their son was killed in an accident, who need an egg donor; a mother of a developmentally delayed teenager shepherding the surrogate carrying the quadruplets that will maximize her chance for a "normal boy;" a British IT consultant who needs a hormone injection as part of in-vitro fertilization that would cost five times more back home; a Montreal woman who wants profiles of egg donors; and a Toronto mother of two toddler girls who wants a male embryo implanted.

It's a regular day in his packed and humming clinic, where poor women in bright saris and tribal jewellery wait beside women whose vast Louis Vuitton handbags spill over the sides of their chairs.

When 60-year-old Ranjit Hayer gave birth to twins in Calgary two weeks ago - babies conceived with donor eggs collected, fertilized...