Surrogate Mothers in India
By Fred de Sam Lazaro,
PBS
| 09. 30. 2011
FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Minutes after delivering a slightly premature infant by C section, Dr. Nayna Patel was back in her office and on the phone to the parents.
Dr. Nayna Patel: Congratulations, it’s a baby girl. Where are you, in Mumbai right now?
DE SAM LAZARO: They were en route from their home in England and didn’t reach the small town of Anand, India in time to watch a surrogate mother give birth to their child.
Dr. Patel: Surrogate is also fine. The baby is also fine. We have taken the picture.
DE SAM LAZARO: Dr. Patel has delivered some 400 surrogate babies since 2004. Her clinic implants embryos in surrogates she recruits from the area and pays around $7,000 for a pregnancy carried to term. Biological parents come from across India and around the world. Kirshner Ross-Vaden came here from Colorado to pick up her baby girl named Serenity. She was born four weeks premature, but after a week in neonatal intensive care she was ready to be discharged. Serenity’s 46-year-old mother traveled here with her...
Related Articles
By Grace Won, KQED [with CGS' Katie Hasson] | 12.02.2025
In the U.S., it’s illegal to edit genes in human embryos with the intention of creating a genetically engineered baby. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Bay Area startups are focused on just that. It wouldn’t be the first...
Several recent Biopolitical Times posts (1, 2, 3, 4) have called attention to the alarmingly rapid commercialization of “designer baby” technologies: polygenic embryo screening (especially its use to purportedly screen for traits like intelligence), in vitro gametogenesis (lab-made eggs and sperm), and heritable genome editing (also termed embryo editing or reproductive gene editing). Those three, together with artificial wombs, have been dubbed the “Gattaca stack” by Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency company...
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...
By Emile Torres, Jacobin | 11.15.2025
Watching tech moguls throw caution to the wind in the AI arms race or equivocate on whether humanity ought to continue, it’s natural to wonder whether they care about human lives.
The earnest, in-depth answer to this question is just...
