The Union Cabinet on Wednesday cleared the draft Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 that prohibits commercial surrogacy, a move aimed at curbing unethical practices in the sector and protecting the rights of surrogate mothers and such children.
The draft Bill also bars foreigners, even overseas Indians, single people, live-in and gay couples from opting for altruistic surrogacy. “It doesn’t go with our ethos”, said Union Minister Sushma Swaraj at a Press briefing after the Union Cabinet gave its approval for the introduction of the Bill.
Couples who have been married for at least five years and are infertile can seek a surrogate, that too from among close relatives. The age of the married woman should be between 23 and 50 years and for the man 26 and 55. Also a woman can be a surrogate mother only once.
A couple who already has children cannot go for a surrogate baby, said Sushma who headed a Group of Ministers that recently cleared the Bill and referred it to the Union Cabinet for a final call. The GoM was constituted at the behest of the Prime Minister’s Office.
Apart from Health Minister JP Nadda, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Food Processing Industries Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal were part of the GoM.
The Minister said the Bill prohibits commercial surrogacy and allows ethical surrogacy for needy infertile couples for which they will have to produce a certificate.
The Bill when passed by the Parliament, which Swaraj said may happen in the Winter Session, is expected to put a brake on the lucrative $400-million-a-year surrogacy business with over 3,000 fertility clinics in the country. Childless couples from abroad prefer surrogate mothers from India because of the low cost of surrogacy here.
“Under the new Bill, couples abandoning a baby risk 10-year imprisonment and a Rs 10 lakh fine, or both. It also makes it illegal for doctors to do procedures that hurt the surrogate mother and the baby’s physical and mental health,” said Swaraj.
As per the proposed legal framework, the surrogate child will have all the rights at par with the biological child, including property.
Without taking names, the Minister lashed out at celebrities for opting for surrogacy saying it has become a trend. “Celebrities are having surrogate babies. Big celebrities, who not only have one but two children, a son and a daughter, went ahead with surrogacy. In spite of having two children, they had a third, just because the wife couldn’t take the pain, and got someone else to bear their child,” Sushma said.
People already having one child or a widow or divorcee cannot go in for surrogacy. “They can adopt a child,” she added.
The Government has also decided not to allow any more surrogacy clinics. At present, there are about 3,000 fertility clinics in the country. A new board will be set up at the national, State and district-level to monitor these clinics and surrogacy cases.
Under the Bill, parents will only be allowed to meet medical bills of surrogate mothers, and no other payments can be made. It also outlines rights of surrogate mothers over their infants and simplifies issues of parentage.
On a question for allowing surrogacy for homosexual couples, Sushma said, “You can say it is looking forward and we can say this doesn’t go with our ethos.”
Surrogacy clinics under the Bill will have to maintain their record for 25 years to ensure that documents are made available in case of a legal dispute.
The Minister said the new law will be notified ten months after it is cleared by the two Houses to allow mothers, who are already pregnant then, to have the surrogate baby.
The need to regulate the surrogacy sector has been constantly felt following incidents of exploitation of surrogate mothers, abandonment of children born out of surrogacy and rackets of intermediaries importing human embryos and gametes.
Swaraj was of the view that the proposed Bill will check exploitation of poor women especially in the rural and tribal areas and prevent “womb trade”.