Surrogacy is one of Indian women’s sources of livelihood.
Surrogacy might soon be banned in India because of some health and social issues in the practice.
In a report by BBC, the Indian government has unveiled a draft law which would ban commercial surrogacy.
India is called the “surrogacy hub” of the world, where infertile couples, including many from overseas, pay local women to carry their embryos through to birth.
The industry is estimated to be worth more than $1bn (£65m) a year. But there have been growing concerns over the unregulated business.
Sushma Swaraj, India’s foreign minister, said on Wednesday the new law would prohibit prospective gay parents as homosexuality went against the country’s values.
“We do not recognise live-in and homosexual relationships … this is against our ethos,” the Indian Express newspaper quoted Swaraj, a member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, as saying.
In 2013, India’s Supreme Court reversed a 2009 high court decision to decriminalise homosexuality. According to Article 377 of the Indian penal code, homosexuality is a crime, which can attract punishment up to 10 years in prison.
If the draft law would be approved by parliament, the law will also ban people who do not hold an Indian passport, as well as Indian single parents and gay people, from having children through surrogacy.
Infertile couples would be able to seek a surrogate, which must be a relative.
Infertility groups have criticised the proposed law, saying it could lead to an illegal industry.
Infertility specialists were critical of the law, saying it could lead to an illegal surrogacy industry. The draft law is also likely to face opposition from surrogate mothers who had staged demonstrations last year after a government announcement to ban foreign couples from hiring Indian surrogates.
The process of surrogacy is achieved through in-vitro fertilization, commonly called IVF, in a lab where eggs harvested from a woman are fused with sperm from a man. Healthy embryos are transferred to a surrogate mother, who is paid in advance, besides a monthly stipend until the birth of the baby.
The child is then handed over to the couple who commissioned the birth.