An issue

[pavalamani pragasam]

An Issue

This week’s issue of popular Tamil weekly, Ananda Vikadan carried an article on surrogate mothers. In olden days couple without issue had to swallow the grief and live a hollow life. Later many issueless couples were bold enough to adopt mostly relatives’ children and rarely orphans.
The recent option gaining favour is to lease a healthy woman and implant the embryo of the couple with problem, fertilisd outside the wife’s uterus, inside the sponsoring woman’s uterus and make her go through the term to deliver a baby which she shall hand over to the couple even without seeing the face of the baby. All this is arranged with full legal support. The volunteers for this surrogate maternity are invariably very poor women who find this a way for earning some money( not very much though, upto Rs.50,000!) for the pain of gestation & labour. In spite of this issue of bearing issue for others is undertaken out of acute poverty the surrogate mothers doing this service with a basic charity of heart are unavoidably a bit sentimental about parting with the baby that has been kicking inside them for so long.

What do you think about this issue?