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to about fifteen years’ wages, on average. The rise in infertility in industrial nations is certainly fuelling this ‘business’, as commercial surrogacy is banned in most of Europe and in many US states. Couples, most commonly from the UK, US, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia, go to India to take advantage of these services, because, even with the travel costs, it will cost them just one third of what it would in their home countries.

There are complications to this outsourced labour. Women in India are sixty-nine times as likely to die from childbirth-related issues due to inadequate access to good medical facilities. The Indian government has not put in place any regulations to protect the rights of surrogate mothers. As it stands, surrogate mothers are looked after during their pregnancies, but they receive no compensation for medical difficulties that arise after childbirth. These women are at risk of long-term liver problems – a side effect of being pumped full of the hormones used to prepare the body for pregnancy. They also may face the common complications of pregnancy: the risks of toxaemia, anaesthesia, and haemorrhage, to name but a few. Further, it has been documented that many couples who have returned from using surrogate services in India have delivered twins. Multiple births generally mean lower birth weights for the babies and more dangers that arise to the mother during childbirth – so much so that implantation of more than one embryo during IVF is frowned upon by the National Health Service.

Plus, we just do not know what are the true risks of carrying a child to term who has no genetic relation to you. We do know that a mother who has been exposed to a partner’s sperm before she conceives his child is less likely to suffer from pre-eclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition in which blood pressure and urine protein levels soar. Pre-eclampsia may be related to immune recognition, that is, when the mother’s immune system antibodies, after being exposed to the father’s foreign antigens, allow the placenta to penetrate the wall of her uterus more deeply. Researchers have found that the many genes that control the growth of the placenta are expressed from only the father’s DNA. This could mean that the growth of an embryo and its supporting placenta in the body of a woman who has never been exposed to the genetic father’s antigens, and who herself has given no genetic input into that embryo, may be up against an as-yet-uncatalogued threat to her immune system – as well as that of the foetus she is carrying.

There are also looming issues unrelated to health. In one recent case, a Japanese couple who had paid an Indian surrogate ended up divorcing, and the ex-wife no longer wanted the baby – who had not yet been born. The surrogate mother didn’t want the baby either, and under Indian law, she was prevented from handing over the child to the father. After much legal wrangling, the paternal grandmother was given custody of the infant.

Surrogacy in India is a lucrative business, and family hierarchies in the country still hold great power – especially over their female members – which raises the question of whether all of the women caught up in the system are truly doing so out of choice. Could some families be putting pressure on their young women to join the ranks of surrogate mothers in order to benefit household economics? One family, for instance, was recorded to have three sisters pregnant as surrogates at the same time; their sister-in-law was pregnant with her second surrogate child too. Likewise, many surrogate mothers live in houses that have been described as akin to a fertility reality show. For the duration of their pregnancy, up to fifteen expectant mothers may be packed into a house, where they are overseen, Big Brother-style, by a former surrogate mother.

A doctor who implants embryos in surrogate mothers at a prominent Mumbai clinic reported to the London Evening Standard that business is very fertile indeed. ‘Surrogacy is spreading at a very fast pace here and there have been very few complaints,’ he said. ‘Our email inquiry box is full of messages from people from all over the West.’ Another fertility specialist at the clinic emphasizes the convenience in his pitch: ‘There is no paperwork involved; the couples don’t have to go through any lawyers; it’s a clean issue – and there is no litigation.’ While such loopholes may be attractive to the doctors’ relatively wealthy clients, the Women’s Protection League of India disagrees that surrogacy is a positive development for the surrogates themselves, especially with respect to their health. A spokesperson for the group said, in no uncertain terms, ‘This is exploitation and I totally condemn surrogacy.’

An artificial womb could be the great equalizer for women – a way to end the exploitation of another woman’s body in order to bear a child when one woman discovers that her own body cannot do so for her, or even if she decides that it’s simply not convenient to do so. It would mean that a woman’s big life choice would be whether she will bear her child, rather than when she might do it. And this liberated mother could carry on with her life as usual up until the moment of birth, much as most fathers do.

The invention of a human artificial womb might also mean that the divide between mother and father can be dispensed with; a womb outside a woman’s body would serve women without wombs, transsexual men, and male same-sex couples equally without prejudice. For this reason, some feminists have argued that the quest for the artificial womb comes from a deep-seated desire to displace women and dissociate birth from the maternal body – effectively, to erase the mother. And in a case of fact