ABOVE a cheap mobile phone shop in a chaotic street in north Delhi, there is a grimy apartment whose peeling walls are decorated with photographs of adoring mothers nursing their babies.

The woman cooing at her child in the biggest portrait is beautiful, white and affluent-looking - in stark contrast to the flat’s five residents, four of whom are pregnant, while the other is being pumped full of hormones in the hope she will soon conceive.

They are all uneducated, bare-footed, dirt-poor Indian women from outlying villages - and given the emotional turmoil that awaits them, one would have thought the very last thing they would wish to do is spend their enforced nine months of confinement here gazing upon images of maternal bliss.

Nominally, this forlorn place is a care home for surrogate mothers - at least that is how it is described by the company that runs it, Wyzax Surrogacy Consultancy, which is cashing in on India’s booming new babies-for-sale business.

It boasts of being the country’s first ‘one-stop shop for outsourced pregnancy’. In truth, though, it is nothing less than a baby factory; the end of a grim production line on which children are being designed to order for wealthy couples, mainly from Western countries including Britain, as if they were custom-built cars.

Indeed, as I have discovered during an eye-opening three-week investigation into India’s burgeoning, billion-dollar surrogacy industry, the motor-manufacturing analogy is all too apt.

For under an astonishing — and many will think nightmarishly futuristic — programme devised to make the most efficient use of resources, or ‘optimise’ their baby producing system, as they put it, Wyzax and their partner agencies now source and assemble the ‘components’ of some babies in a variety of different countries before flying the resulting embryo to India to be implanted in the surrogate.

According to the Delhi-based agency’s whizz-kid young bosses, Vivek Kohli and Jagatjeet Singh, they do this for a small but growing number of clients — about 15 per cent — who, for various reasons, don’t wish to use Indian eggs or an Indian fertility clinic, or even set foot in India until they take delivery of the baby they have ordered.

Just a job: The leaflet that is given to prospective surrogate mothers - the company Wyzax ensures the childbearers don't become too attached though

Just a job: The leaflet that is given to prospective surrogate mothers - the company Wyzax ensures the childbearers don't become too attached though

For all their apparent desperation to start families, these so called ‘IPs’, or intended parents, have also become ever-more demanding in their specifications; many want babies who emanate from a gene pool which maximises the possibility that they will not only resemble them but have, say, blond hair and blue eyes (and hopefully be attractive, sporty and intelligent into the bargain).

Kohli and Singh have therefore devised a ‘protocol’ that works roughly like this: after careful screening for genetic illnesses and an IQ test, attractive young female egg donors from countries such as Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia and Belarus are advertised in an online catalogue for prospective parents to browse.

In Eastern Europe, there are all too many hard-up women willing to endure fertility treatment, a long flight to California or Boston, and an uncomfortable operation under anaesthetic to sell their eggs for up to £750 a batch.

And as human eggs cannot be frozen and transported, and there are few surrogacy clinics or wombs available for rent in Eastern Europe, these donors travel, at the height of their monthly cycle, to the United States, where the eggs are extracted and fertilised with the father’s sperm (which can be transported, frozen, from his country of residence, and stored indefinitely).

Lesbian couples or couples where the male partner is infertile can use donor sperm, which is widely available in America and some European countries.

Another advantage of creating babies in a U.S. laboratory is that many couples have a preference for gender, and the ‘sexing’ of test-tube babies is permitted in some states there. It is banned in India, where the preference for sons drives many to female infanticide.

Few American women are willing to act as surrogates — at least not cheaply — but impoverished Indian women are literally queuing up outside surrogacy clinics these days. It is cheaper to hire a womb here than anywhere else in the world, hence its dubious place at the centre of the sci-fi-style ‘global baby’ boom.

Once created, the embryos are frozen to minus 196c, placed in liquid nitrogen canisters resembling small milk-churns, then flown 8,000 miles from the U.S. to cities such as Delhi and Bombay, where they are implanted.

Here, though, the comparison to a car production line ends. As I saw when visiting the ‘baby factory’, the women who incubate and hatch these identikit children would be better compared to brood mares.



Originally published as Designer baby factory for wealthy mums