FromJudith Warner's Blog:
‘Because what’s going on in India – where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business — feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale.” (One “medical tourism” website, PlanetHospital.com, refers to the Indian surrogate mother as a mere “host.”) Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.’
Judith Warner's excellent critical analysis brought back my Romanian experience. In my book you can find examples of these practices too.
For example, how I visited a Bucharest maternity clinic end 2000 where abandoned babies were kept for intercountry adoption in a backroom, while just next door a luxurious fertility clinic was offering IFV for Romanian nationals. I could only wonder why those Romanians could not adopt the babies next door.
In January 2005 that same fertility clinic made international headlines as a 66-year- old woman had given birth after IVF treatment, the oldest mother in the world.
But the most striking was Romania’s trade in human egg cells which came out in April 2005. A US/Israeli company was harvesting the eggs of students for a financial ‘compensation’. These eggs could be ordered via the Internet, and shipped to New York or London for fertilisation. The European Parliament had adopted a resolution to call for the European Commission’s full investigation of this.
In ‘Romania-For Export Only’ I mentioned this as a side issue and did not enter into much detail.
However, let me now give the details.
The Romanian trade in human eggs was done by GLOBAL ART USA (ART = Artificial Reproduction Technology), run by Dr. Sanford Rosenberg (USA) and Dr. Ilya Barr (Israel) .
I don’t think the Romanian branch of Global Art still exists. After all, Romania is now a member of the European Union, where such practices are not allowed. So, they relocated outside the EU, to Ukraine, as can be read in this article The misery behind the baby trade.
Years ago I saw a TV programme about the Italian fertility doctor Severino Antinori in which he announced his intention to use Indian women to breed children for Italian couples, with eggs and gamete from Italy.
It is not unlikely that now or in future eggs harvested by companies like Global Art will be bred by Indian women, or women in other countries with weak regulation.
Just imagine the children looking for their roots…
And I wonder, is this the world we want to live in???
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1 comment:
A friend of mine told me she once replied to an ad asking for a "health y young woman to keep company to a pregnant woman". She went and met a 40 year old woman, who was supposed to be the mother of the pregnant woman. She told me that this woman was asking weird questions; for example, how you have any disease. She said it was weird but she needed the money. At the end, that lady asked her whether she has any friend that would be interested in donating an egg to an infertile couple she knows- of course the couple would pay some money. My friend was shocked and threaten to go to the police. She talked to her parents and gave the contact number of that woman; but they couldn't contact her. I don't know what happened next but this doesn't look like something that happened only once in history. I'm sure many students could be approached like that and offered money. Shocking yet real.
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