The Vagina Is Erased

THE WOMAN IS crying, no sobbing, no hiccupping, just crying; her shoulders do not move, her expression does not change, her eyes run freely.

‘Nothing, nothing,’ says the husband to television correspondent Ravinder Bawa. ‘Don’t pay attention to her. She feels she is going to get attached to the child. We [names another man, presumably the agent] have told her it is not like that.’ The husband takes the camera home, to those parts where his wife’s advance payment has already been put to use, a part of a re-done kitchen, the cementing of a deity-plinth. ‘It is all for her good only. Even when the rest of the money comes it will only go for the boy’s education.’

Camera back to where the woman is, sitting on the floor, eating from a stainless steel tiffin-box. Mercifully for her, the husband does not direct the camera to a close-up of the box and proclaim, ‘See, see, all her favourite foods!’ Perhaps the only thing preventing him from doing so is that he has nothing to do with either procuring or paying for his wife’s food. Squatting a little away from the woman is the boy, their son, face as expressionless as his mother’s when she was crying.

What is he thinking, this boy? Several like him; what are they telling their friends in school, how will this shape their attitude towards women, including their own wives and daughters when they are themselves adults. What is a little girl absorbing, several like her, when she visits her mother at an infant-farm; those barracks where they eat, sleep, as their paid-for pregnancies grow within, day in, day out. The only other daily change that of their maxis, the kaftan-like home wear that freed many an Indian woman from sleeping in nothing other than their voluminous saris and its ancillary yardage.

There they lie in their maxis, on cots pulled close to maximize space usage, in so many more parts of India than the two-three places usually mentioned; these women living between the lines of other people’s procreational lives. ‘We lived in the gaps between the stories,’ wrote Margaret Atwood in The Handmaiden’s Tale , first published in 1985, about women kept in reproductive slavery, fed and given lodging to have subservient sex with the master of the house at their fertile times, as the declared-infertile wives watch. Surreal fiction; impossible, almost.

And yet here they are. Stoic. They might want to enjoy their pregnancies but cannot. They know it is not a healthy time for them but they try to make it a happy one; they know they are different, so there can be no unrealistic expectation of how happy they can be, or how much they can allow themselves to feel. They cannot put their hands upon their growing tummies to seek any special moments as their secret bond with the babies they are carrying. They have to just appear emotionally stable, they do. This disconnect, what is it communicating to that foetus bound to such women from deep within.

They are already cut-down, these women, they could not have been recruited unless they prove past fertility. For their paid-for pregnancy they are cut-up, their uterus is part of the IVF package.They are given the remaining rental money, sent off on their way; before which the milk filling their post- pregnancy breasts is abruptly medically halted with drugs. Some are also told to bind their breasts.

‘That’s because they cannot express the milk,’ says lactation consultant Amrita Desai. ‘The more a woman expresses, the more milk she has, to give. Dosage to stop the milk will depend upon each doctor supplying the surrogate, the tablets have to be taken till it stops. But I do wish their doctors at least request them for the colostrum. It may not come in a breast-pump but it does in hand-expression. These ladies too must be spending around forty-eight to seventy-two hours in the same hospital as the baby. A care-giver can take the colostrum to the baby.’

A surrogate recalls how she oozed through her extra-tight bra which hurt her breasts and cut into her back. ‘I cook food in people’s houses,’ she says. ‘In this one house where the memsahib had also delivered, when I would be making the lunch and her newly born infant would cry, the milk would just spring out of me.’ Striking a warning note is Gillian Weaver, international lactation expert, ‘Not breastfeeding is associated with a range of health-related problems for mothers including higher rates of post- natal depression. Later in life there is an increased likelihood of osteoporosis, as well as a greater chance of developing breast and ovarian cancer.’

Another surrogate says she was paid extra, by the doctor, to breastfeed the commercially produced child while its commissioners went through the immigration procedures to carry the newborn to their own country. ‘I have comfortably breastfed my own two children. In the first surrogacy I had milk, the medicine stopped it. Second time I didn’t have much milk, but my husband said to accept the offer as it was extra money, plus the baksheesh [tip] would be better. The doctor gave me injections, the milk came.’

They could not have been recruited unless they prove past fertility. For their paid-for pregnancy, their uterus is part of the IVF package

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Did she feel any bonding? ‘I have a daughter, she will never be allowed to become a surrogate.’

If her husband pushes her into it too? ‘If government does not allow, it means no money, why will anyone push?’

And if government allows?

The surrogate’s face tightens, fate she says, grinding-unto-dust fate. ‘Naseeb.’

THE SUPREME COURT of India, on 25 February, 2015, admitted a public interest litigation filed by senior advocate Jayashree Wad who sought a ban on commercial surrogacy. The gist of Ms Wad’s plea: rampant commercialization of motherhood and the exploitation of poor Indian women turn them into baby-vending machines. On 14 October, 2015, the Supreme Court expressed serious concern about India leading in surrogacy tourism and strongly advised for the stopping of all forms of commercial surrogacy. The top court gave the Central government a fortnight to respond; it did, it said it was against the renting of uteri, non-Indians were stopped from doing so with immediate effect.

The backlash was immediate. Those who stood to lose the most lined up select surrogates—the poor but not too desperately poor, so as to perception manage the several degrees of exploitation; the not-too-young; the visually appealing to television cameras; the articulate—to present the case of how they should be allowed to be oppressed. Such sexless rape is in order, insisted others who have never known the imbalance of income disparity versus power dynamics, and added, ‘Money must equal free choice.’

The medical-mart, which treated her body as their temporary property and got someone else to pay for the property damage, premiered the rights of the buyer as their right to parenthood with a maudlin cliché: ‘Only a mother can know of the joy when she holds her newborn for the first time in her arms.’ Snatched from the body of one mother who ‘consented’ to give it away, to be positioned in the arms of the paying other—can a child consent to be bartered?

Can it consent when it is passed off as a surrogate child to an unsuspecting Indian couple who will not go in for DNA-testing like foreigners do? A woman, with two children of her own, got pregnant a third time with a man not her husband. It is not known if the pregnancy was intentional and if the man was a consensual schemer. Since she had signed up at a fertility clinic to be a commercial surrogate, the nurse there spoke to the doctor [whose wife was the city’s ex-mayor], the woman carried the foetus to term and the baby was routed to a couple. They paid more money since it was a son. The woman got pregnant again and signed up with another doctor, in the guise of commercial surrogacy, for the same purpose of infant-selling. This cannot be seen as an isolated instance; when there is medical power and several men, not all women are passive victims— some collaborate.

‘Bad apples are everywhere,’ dismisses a doctor from the same city. ‘All surrogates cannot be punished for the criminal acts of the few who sell their own children. Payments are the surrogate’s right to earn a living.’ The doctor could not answer on how ‘empowering a surrogate not only through financial independence but also a sense of working for a noble cause’— as said by another who specializes in the assembly-line infant—could be equated with achieving a life of dignity. After one or two surrogacies there is no next-time, the woman is back in a state of economic uncertainty. For her body is marginalized, replaced with an exact other except that the new one is younger, less medically manipulated. Some IVF-wallahs, constantly seeking a fresh supply of surrogates, claim to care a great deal for her social empowerment. But they choose not to answer when asked whether they would give the surrogate’s genetic-children an education in medicine or paramedical skills training. Or at the very least, instead of recruiting more from the same family, put her younger genetic-sister through nursing school and provide employment in their own hospitals.

The surrogacy lobby argued, ‘So much equipment has been purchased, the systems are in place, networks have been established.’ But medical tourism has not stopped, nor have IVF cycles for anyone’s own body, be it of any colour. It will go underground, maintained others; everything evil does, including drugs and child porn. It’s the duty of a sensible government to protect every citizen by ensuring each is treated equitably and to this end lay down laws with stringent punishment—to include the medico and the commissioning party—to minimize misuse.

And then, walk the talk with that law.

The Supreme Court and the Government of India’s statements also created ripples all over the world. Commercial surrogacy is not recognized in several countries neither is altruistic surrogacy in some [as of September 2016]. There was praise from many countries. There was patronizing from some, ‘Well, we would much rather have paid a poor woman from a poor country to put food on her family table than someone who will blow it all up on a holiday.’ There was indignation from people who wanted to pay much, much less than what is charged by commercial surrogates in Ukraine, Russia and some American states—India as their infant-shopping e-paradise for mega-discounts.

(Excerpted with permission from Politics of the Womb; The Perils of IVF, Surrogacy & Modified Babies; by Pinki Virani; Viking; Rs 599; Pages 304)

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Pinki Virani