Pregnancy at a price
IT’S NEARLY NOON WHEN PINKY MACWAN WAKES up and rubs her eyes, shifting uncomfortably. She’s in her second trimester of pregnancy with twins and finds herself constantly sluggish. Still in her floral nightgown, she walks down the fluorescent-lit hallway and splashes cold water on her face in the bathroom she shares with 46 other women, all surrogates at various stages of pregnancy. It’s late February, and Macwan has spent the past four months living in the basement of the Akanksha Hospital in bustling Anand, a town in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Home to the headquarters of the major dairy cooperative Amul, Anand has long been known as the milk capital of India. But booming business at Akanksha has also garnered the town another label: India’s baby factory.
A few months earlier, Macwan, 24, was earning $94 a month as a supervisor in a garment factory, overseeing 50 tailors making women’s clothes. The daughter of an iron-factory laborer, Macwan was a bright child and was sent to boarding school, but left at the age of 16 to support her family during hard times. She was married off at the age of 20 to a security guard from a nearby village, but in 2019, sick of feeling “more like a servant” than a wife, she walked away. Things began to look up when she started to work at the garment factory, but when a tough national lockdown was imposed in March 2020 as the first wave of COVID-19 hit India, Macwan and most of her co-workers were fired. She had no savings and struggled to put food on the table, often relying on support from charitable organizations. Worried about caring for her 3-year-old child, she began to look into surrogacy. “If things continue in this vein, then my son’s future is also going to be like mine,” says Macwan, her soft voice shaking. “I thought, If I go once, then I will be able to stand on my own feet.”
In October, Macwan arrived at the Akanksha Hospital, one of the biggest surrogacy facilities in the country. Her mother—who had been a surrogate herself 10 years earlier—had tried to dissuade her. But Macwan argued that the money was much more than she would ordinarily be able to make. Surrogates at Akanksha are paid in installments during the process for a total of about $6,230 for a successful surrogacy for a single baby; in the event of a miscarriage, a woman receives what she has been paid up to that point as well an additional $135. Because she is having twins, Macwan will make $7,395 in addition to the $245 she earned for egg donation. With her living costs taken care of by the hospital, she is able to save most of that money.
Macwan is one of thousands of women in India who have chosen to become surrogates since 2002, when the
