Essay On Commercial Surrogacy

COMMERCIAL SURROGACY- NEED FOR LAWS IN INDIA

INTRODUCTION ON SURROGACY

The word surrogate is derived from its Latin root word ‘surrogatus’ meaning substitute, that is, a person is appointed in place of another. Colloquially, the term surrogate mother means a woman who carries a baby on behalf of another woman

According to the Black’s Law Dictionary, surrogacy means the process of carrying and delivering a child for another person.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica defines ‘surrogate motherhood’ as the practice in which a woman bears a child for a couple unable to produce children in the usual way. The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology or the Warnock Report (1984) defines surrogacy as the practice whereby one

But from 2002 onwards commercial surrogacy has been legalised in India.

LEGAL STATUS OF SURROGACY IN INDIA The first case of commercial surrogacy in India happens to be the Manji Yamada Case 5. As far as the case is concerned, it involved Baby Manji, who was born on 25th July, 2008 under a surrogacy agreement between the Japanese genetic parents and an Indian surrogate mother. She came to limelight soon after her birth on account of the crisis arising due to the divorce of her parents. The genetic mother refused to own the baby while the father and grandmother did want to raise the child. It was through this case that commercial surrogacy was legalised in India. Again, in the case of Jan Balaz v. Union of India 6, the Gujrat High Court is to decide that the question whether a child born in India to a surrogate mother, an Indian national, whose biological father is a foreign national, would get Indian citizenship by birth, is an important question which has no precedent at all in this country. It conferred Indian citizenship to the twin babies fathered through compensated surrogacy by the