JAIPUR, India — A child born to an Indian surrogate mother and intended for a Japanese couple is in legal limbo after the pair divorced.
Ikufumi Yamada, 45, and his then-wife Yuki Yamada, 41, signed a surrogacy agreement with Priti Patel in November. But the couple divorced shortly before the girl was born almost two weeks ago and the wife no longer wants to adopt, said Sanjay Arya, the doctor looking after the child. The surrogate mother has also left the child, he said Tuesday.
Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002 and the child is then legally adopted by its biological parents. But Indian law does not allow single men to adopt.
The father wants to adopt the baby but because he divorced shortly before the birth, he cannot.
The child, currently in a hospital in Jaipur city in western Rajasthan state, is now being looked after by Ikufumi Yamada's mother, Arya said.
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"The grandmother becomes very emotional when she is told that the child cannot be taken out of India. The lawmakers will have to find some solution for this," Arya said.
Without adoption papers, the baby girl cannot be issued a passport or leave the country, Arya said.
Experts say commercial surrogacy — or what has been called "wombs for rent" — is growing in India. While no reliable numbers track such pregnancies nationwide, doctors work with surrogates in virtually every major city. The women are impregnated in-vitro with the egg and sperm of couples from all over the world who are unable to conceive on their own.
Surrogate mothers, often poor women with little education, earn between $4,500 and $5,000 plus all medical costs for the service.
Most couples end up paying the surrogacy clinic about $10,000 for the entire procedure, including fertilization, the fee to the mother and medical expenses.
