ABSTRACT
In Chapter 8 we explored public expressions of US surrogates that were captured through their publicly available blogs. We now turn to the voices of Indian surrogates. In India, which legalized commercial surrogacy in 2004, the estimates of the overall economic value of surrogacy have been reported to be as low as $445 million annually (Haworth, 2007) while other estimates range beyond that sum. Although official statistics are not available, India is thought to rival the United States in surrogacy arrangements taking place in that country every year,
with the numbers growing (Bromfield & Rotabi, 2014; Pande, 2014), and India receives the bulk of the media’s attention. While many of the commissioning parents seeking surrogacy arrangements in India have been transnational and citizens of other countries, there may actually be equal numbers of non-resident Indian couples seeking the service “who combine a cheaper treatment with a family visit” (Pande, 2014, p. 13). There were an estimated 1,500 surrogate births in India in 2010 (Magnier, 2011) and that number climbed steadily until controls were put into place in recent years, as we will discuss later. One policy change was made in 2012 when India banned surrogacy for same-sex couples (Pande, 2014), which forced those people to look elsewhere for surrogacy arrangements.
