The zeal to end commercial surrogacy may be founded in some logic. But the proposed law to control surrogacy and combat India’s “wombs for hire” reputation seems hastily drafted. In the name of curbing malpractices or commercial ventures, everyone is being lumped together in a virtual prohibition of surrogacy. If this is driven by political ideology, the measure is probably the worse for it. It will affect the fundamental rights of many who want to have babies through surrogate mothers as they can’t bear them in the natural biological process.
The world has changed dramatically in our times. LGBTQ rights are being positively promoted so that people can be treated more equally. Principles governing the making and carrying of children thus can’t be premised forever on the traditional heterosexual norms regarding marriage and procreation, at least after the establishment of formal religions and the taboos they introduced. If the new laws are passed, there can be none of the alternative family norms that are coming into being, with compassionate same-sex couples wishing to bring up children.
Gays are being stripped of one more right, suggesting a clear hardening of attitudes driven by strange political tendencies in a country where Section 377 IPC, based on a 1865 law banning “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”, is still in force. There must be better ways to control rampant surrogacy than a blanket ban. Knowing Indian conditions, surrogacy will be just another business like kidney transplants driven underground by this senseless desire by rulers to try and control everything.
