DEBATE RAGING IN INDIA OVER IVF FOR WOMEN OVER AGE OF 50

ELLENABAD, India—To see Manjeet Kaur around her little daughter is to see joy at its purest.

The 15-month-old toddles about the sprawling courtyard of her parents’ farm, her oily curls tied up in a top knot, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking. Kaur’s eyes don’t miss a thing, and they often mist up with tears.

Gurjeet is the child Kaur yearned for desperately, after 40 years of being that thing which a rural Indian woman dreads more than almost anything else—barren. She gave birth at 58 years old, with help from a controversial IVF clinic in this corner of north India that specializes in fertility treatments for women over 50.

Such treatments have become more common across the world, and they strike a cultural chord in India, where a woman is often defined by her ability to be a wife and mother. While there are no reliable statistics for how many Indian women undergo fertility treatments each year at what age, tens of thousands of IVF clinics have sprouted up in the country over the last decade.

Fertility specialists say pregnancies like Kaur’s are troubling because of the potential health risks and the concern that the parents may not live long enough to raise their babies to adulthood. Legislation is pending in India’s Parliament setting 50 as the legal upper age cap.

But Dr. Anurag Bishnoi, the driving force behind the National Fertility and Test Tube Baby Centre in Hisar, harbors no such worries. His clinic’s website home page is dominated by photographs of patients who carried babies to term at ages well beyond what most other doctors anywhere in the world may permit. At least two of his patients gave birth at 70. For Kaur, it’s simple enough. Bishnoi made her belong. “You have no idea how I suffered,” she says of her life before her daughter.

Kaur married her husband, Gurdev Singh, when she was 18 and he was just a little older than 20. She simply assumed that children would follow marriage. But no children came. She felt worthless. “I asked God why he had abandoned me,” she says, as she nervously fidgets with the green scarf she uses to cover her almost entirely grey hair.

With each decade she felt the dream slip further away. The couple tried IVF twice in their 40s. It didn’t work.

A woman in Kaur’s setting, without a child, is an inauspicious creature. Her very presence is shunned at social gatherings, especially at weddings and birth ceremonies which celebrate fecundity.

They lived, like most rural Indians, with extended family, and Kaur showered all her love on the nephew and niece she helped raise. It was Kaur’s nephew who first heard of Bishnoi, the doctor in the nearby town of Hisar, who had built a prosperous medical practice and tidy little business empire by helping aging women across north India have children through in-vitro fertilization. “Doctor sahib was like a god to us,” Singh says. Dr. Anurag Bishnoi is called many things. God and quack top the list.

His critics accuse the embryologist of making money off the dreams of the desperate, and of taking wildly unnecessary risks. When Bishnoi helped a 70-year-old woman to give birth last April, Dr. Hrishikesh Pai, who heads a federation of Indian gynecologists and obstetricians, called him a “rogue doctor” who ignores the self-imposed guidelines that most fertility specialists follow.

Dr. Narendra Malhotra, who heads the Indian Society For Assisted Reproduction, says Bishnoi has been attempting to “play God.”