Aggregated News
On August 24, 2016, the Union Cabinet approved the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016, banning commercial surrogacy in India. In essence, the Bill limits the practice of surrogacy to heterosexual Indian couples who have been married for five years, have no children, and are able to persuade a relative to become a surrogate altruistically for them.
Let me start by giving credit where it is due: there are glimpses of sanity in this Bill, especially the plan to have a national regulator to oversee clinics that offer surrogate services, and provisions for providing legal aid to surrogate mothers. But before we start celebrating its alleged ability to protect the “rights of women”, let’s delve a bit deeper into not just its assumptions about surrogacy but also the underlying conviction about women, reproduction, and parenting.
Changing frames
Commercial surrogacy is not new and has been inducing anxiety for decades now. The commodification aspect repulses some, while others are troubled by its potential to be utterly exploitative of women. In recent years this anxiety reached panic levels after the technology and the related...