AFP/New Delhi

Childless couples from around the world have been left in limbo after the Indian government revealed plans to ban them from the country’s booming multi-million dollar surrogacy industry.
The industry has exploded in recent years with thousands of infertile couples flocking to India, one of only a handful of countries offering cheap surrogacy using skilled doctors and with relatively little red tape.
But the unregulated industry’s growth has sparked debate about exploitation of the 25,000 mainly poor Indian women whose wombs are hired to carry couples’ embryos through to birth.
After announcing plans last week for legislation banning commercial surrogacy, the government issued a notice to the country’s 350-odd fertility clinics, ordering them “not to entertain any foreigners.”
The move sparked an outcry from fertility specialists, along with rallies by surrogate mothers.
“Why should foreigners be discriminated against? We are all human beings,” Nayana Patel, one of leading IVF specialists, said.
“I have been doing this for 11 years and it’s a beautiful arrangement. Banning it is not the answer,” Patel, who heads the Akanksha clinic in Gujarat, added.
Clinics scrambled to reassure confused and anxious foreigners who have already started the process, but others have been told to put their plans on hold.
“We have told couples who are still at the very start to wait and watch what happens,” Patel said, adding her clinic has given such advice to 30 to 40 couples in recent days.
Two clinics in Mumbai were this week successful in getting the ban lifted temporarily for couples already expecting a surrogate birth, after taking legal action. But their lawyer Vikrant Sabne said that the Bombay High Court’s order did not apply nationally.
Shivani Sachdev Gour, head of Surrogacy Centre India in Delhi, said it was “logical” that parents already signed up be allowed to continue. “There are no guarantees but if they have started the process they should be able to keep going,” Gour said.
A health ministry official declined to comment until after the Supreme Court resumes hearing a lawyer’s petition later this month that seeks to shut down the “unethical” industry.
After arriving from Ireland this week, one couple said they were determined to go ahead, confident that since they already registered with a clinic, “our case holds up in a court of law”.
Unable to have children and born with a heart defect that rules out IVF treatment, the woman said they turned to India as a last resort after learning adoption was outlawed in Ireland for people with certain medical conditions.
“Realistically this is our only option,” the 35-year-old from Cork, who did not want to be named, said at a Delhi clinic.
“Ninety-nine percent of the children born this way will have a more loved life because their parents have made so much of an effort to have them,” her husband, also 35, added.
“It would be madness to ban it.”