Allow surrogacy for live-ins: MPs’ panel

New Delhi: Live-in couples and widows, as well as legally married couples, should be allowed to avail surrogacy, a parliamentary panel said on Thursday, and pitched for “adequate and reasonable” monetary compensation to surrogate mothers.

New Delhi, Aug. 10: Livein couples and widows should be allowed to avail surrogacy service in addition to legally married Indian couples, a parliamentary panel said on Thursday and pitched for providing “adequate and reasonable” monetary compensation to surrogate mothers. The panel also spoke out against altruistic surrogacy, where a surrogate mother agrees to gestate a child for intended parents without being compensated monetarily in any way.

Expecting a woman to be altruistic enough to become a surrogate and endure all hardships of the surrogacy procedure in the pregnancy period and post-partum period is “tantamount to a form of exploitation”, it said.

It observed that altruistic surrogacy only by close relatives will always

be because of “compulsion and coercion” and not because of altruism.

The committee also found “no point” in restricting NRIs, Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs), Overseas Citizen of India OCIs) card holders from availing surrogacy services in India and recommended while foreign nationals should be kept out of the ambit of surrogacy bill, PIOs, OCIs and NRIs should be permitted to avail surrogacy services in the country.

The Union Cabinet had given its nod to the introduction of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016 in Parliament, seeking a bar on unmarried couples, single parents, live-in partners and homosexuals from opting for surrogacy. “Foreigners as well as NRIs and PIOs who hold OCI cards have been barred from opting for surrogacy,” external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj had told reporters after the approval of the bill by the Union Cabinet last year. The Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health noted that the bill limits the option of surrogacy to legally married Indian couples.

“Given our sentiments and sensibility, the social status of a woman in our society is judged by her reproductive life and there is a lot of pressure on her for child bearing,” it noted.