Union cabinet clears draft surrogacy bill with certain safeguards

New Delhi: The Union cabinet which met here on Wednesday cleared the draft bill to ban commercial surrogacy. The two houses of parliament are likely to discuss the issue during the next session and pass the bill named as Surrogacy Regulation Bill, 2016.

The government has proposed a number of restrictions in the Bill. One of them is that couples seeking surrogate mother should be legally married and will have to produce an ‘unfit medical certificate’.

What is in the Surrogacy Bill?

• The bill prohibits using the surrogacy method for single parents, unmarried couples and homosexual couples.
• The draft bill only allows Indian citizens and neither NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) nor OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) card holder avail this facility.
• Surrogacy will be permitted only to five years old married couples.
• Couples already having kids or who have adopted one cannot use the surrogacy method.

What Sushma Swaraj said?

• The bill is to safeguard the rights of surrogate mothers
• Surrogacy isn’t a thing for joy
• Surrogacy now a days has become a trend of getting babies without troubling their wives

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It may me mentioned that surrogacy had become a lucrative business in India because of lower cost of hiring a woman. The cost, according to one estimate, was one-third of the cost in foreign countries.

Surrogacy has been in vogue in some of countries, besides India, including the USA.