Saturday, May 1, 2010

Sydney Morning Herald - “Babies left in limbo as India struggles with demand for surrogacy” by Matt Wade

NEW DELHI: Most new parents expect to take their baby home after a few days but a German couple, Jan Balaz and Susan Lohle, are still waiting after more than two years.

Their twin sons, Nikolas and Leonard, have been trapped in citizenship limbo ever since an Indian surrogate mother gave birth to them in February 2008.

The boys were refused passports by their parents' homeland because German nationality is determined by the birth mother.

That left the slow-moving Indian judicial system to wrestle with their citizenship status. The case has now reached the country's highest court.

Lawyers say a Supreme Court hearing in New Delhi on Monday could be crucial in deciding whether Mr Balaz and Ms Lohle will finally be allowed to take the twins back to Germany.

India's reproductive tourism industry is booming thanks to low-cost surrogate mothers, inexpensive medical services and lax regulation.

It is likely that hundreds of infertile couples from the West hire Indian surrogates each year. But Nikolas and Leonard show that things can go badly wrong.

Another heartbreaking Indian surrogacy controversy, this time involving two Canadian doctors, was revealed by the Toronto Star this week. The couple received a devastating shock when they applied for Canadian passports for what they believed were their twins borne by an Indian surrogate. A DNA test ordered by the Canadian high commission in New Delhi revealed the twins were not related to the Canadian couple - or to the birth mother - but were the product of fertilised eggs from an unknown mother and father.

The doctors left India childless and the twins may spend their childhood in an orphanage.

The number of Australians hiring surrogates in India has been rising and officials admit privately they are concerned that something similar could go wrong for an Australian couple.

There are more than 1000 IVF clinics in India, but no laws govern assisted reproductive technology (ART), which includes surrogacy, and no watchdog has been authorised to police it.

"Most of the ART clinics in this country are not following these guidelines because they do not have any legal strength," said R. S. Sharma, the deputy director-general in the division of reproductive health and nutrition at the Indian Council of Medical Research.

A surrogacy debacle that left a Japanese baby stranded in India in 2008 increased pressure on the government to tighten its surrogacy rules. The child's parents hired an Indian surrogate mother but divorced during the pregnancy. The Japanese mother-to-be disowned the baby and Indian law prevented the single father from claiming the child.

It took nearly six months of legal wrangling before an Indian court finally allowed the baby, called Manji, to leave India with her biological grandmother.

A bill to govern assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy has been drafted but, as the Herald reported on Monday, it threatens to make it much harder, and maybe impossible, for Australian couples to hire Indian surrogates.

Under the proposed law, a foreign couple wanting to enter an agreement with an Indian surrogate would need a written guarantee of citizenship for the child from their government.

In a response to questions from the Herald the Australia High Commission said it expected Indian laws to change in response to the growing demand for surrogacy.

''Any changes to legislation in India could impact on eligibility for Australian citizenship,'' the statement said.

The Indian legislation would also prohibit gay couples from hiring surrogates unless local laws change to recognise same-sex relationships.

[Source: Original Article]

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