A couple tell today how they are expecting a child by a surrogate mother from an Indian ‘baby factory’.
Octavia and Dominic Orchard travelled to the Hyderabad clinic to get around a UK ban on commercial surrogacy. Their baby – due at the end of the year – will be theirs biologically while being born to an impoverished Indian ‘renting out’ her womb.
Mrs Orchard, a middle-class Oxfordshire housewife, admitted the £20,000 deal sounded ‘cold and clinical’ but insisted: ‘This is a business transaction.’
Describing the surrogate mother as ‘just a vessel’, the 34-year-old former estate agent added: ‘There is no altruism involved on the surrogate’s part: she is being paid to have our baby’.
At A clinic in Hyderabad, southern India, a surrogate mother is carrying Octavia and Dominic Orchard’s second child. The couple, who are as English as their bucolic-sounding name, know only the sparest of details about the woman who is pregnant with their baby.
They know she is 31 and has children of her own. They know her name, and that for reasons not explained — perhaps she has been widowed or deserted — she has no husband.
For the duration of her pregnancy she will live with other surrogates, away from her home and family, in a primitive dormitory within the clinic. It goes without saying that she is desperately poor.
Other than that, their surrogate’s life is a mystery to Octavia and Dominic. They chose not to become acquainted with the woman carrying the baby created from Octavia’s egg and Dominic’s sperm.
‘Our baby has no biological connection to the surrogate,’ says Octavia.
‘Her womb is just the receptacle in which it is being carried. Perhaps it sounds cold and rather clinical, but this is a business transaction.
MORE STORY
