The three childless couples sitting in the Akanksha Infertility Clinic waiting room greet each other politely, almost wearily. Strangers on a foreign land, they have only just met, but there seems to be a telepathic understanding to each other’s plight as they begin to share their experiences and the circumstances that led them on the path to surrogacy.
Joe and Susan (not their real names), a Californian couple of Korean descent, shift about nervously in their armchairs. Both 37 years of age, they are veterans of seven Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI) and three In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) procedures, a medical history Susan awkwardly describes as “suicidal”.
Her husband, a college consultant, explained their situation: “We’ve been married for 11 years and that’s a lot of time trying to have a baby. We’ve already busted US$100,000…it’s frustrating because it seems we are exhausting all our options.
“About December 2007, we came across a newspaper article mentioning surrogacy, and I started to do research on it. Then I ‘Googled’ and found a bunch of places. After a period of e-mail correspondence with Dr Nayna Patel and a short wait for available surrogates, here we are.”
Susan elaborated: “Of the four surrogate mothers who were matched up to us, we chose a widow who really needs the money for the family. Her husband died a year ago from cancer and she has three kids — 14, nine and five — so they’re really young. I feel for them.
“If we get a baby, our lives will be changed. We want to make a difference in their lives as well.”
Like Joe and Susan, many foreign childless couples are making their way “from first-world to third-world” in their quest to have a child of their own ever since Dr Kamala Selvaraj performed India’s first case of surrogacy back in 1994.
Akanksha Infertility Clinic claims to have matched 112 couples to surrogates in 2007, with a success rate of 57.1 percent — an impressive statistic considering the latest nationwide estimate of surrogacy success rate stands at 37.9 percent.
Couples usually pay about US$20,000 (S$30,627) for the entire procedure here, out of which between US$3,000 to US$6,000 is given to the surrogate mother who carries their child to term.
Depleted alternatives
Besides being attracted to the low costs of surrogacy, most of them are also in India after being frustrated by fertility experts’ failures and depleted alternatives in their native countries.
Cuddling cosily on the couch are 33-year-old carpenter Haraldur and 31-year-old business manager Ida, a soft-spoken Icelandic couple that has been disappointed by one of Europe’s leading IVF specialists back home. Now they are hoping surrogacy would finally end their wait for a baby.
Ida explained: “We have tried for almost seven years, it just didn’t happen. We don’t know what went wrong. The only other option we have in Iceland is to adopt a baby, but that takes five years or more.
“We don’t want to wait that long but we also don’t want to adopt a baby. We want a big family. We want three children. I have not thought of names for the other two but if we get a girl, I’m going to name her Helga Birna after Haraldur’s mom and my mother.”
Perched on the desk opposite Ida and Haraldur is another Californian couple, Anthony, 42, and Tina, 34, who has lupus, a medical condition that makes it dangerous for her to conceive.
Ruffling through a stack of freshly isSusand receipts with fervour, Anthony, a computer investigator, hardly betrays the fact that they have made a “35-hour trek from San Francisco to Anand”.
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