Surrogacy: Laws and Rights in India​​

Dolly Chhabda and Vaibhav Gattani
Amity University Chhattisgarh, India.

Volume IV, Issue I, 2021

The gift of motherhood regrettably is not distributed evenly by God to every woman. Today, approximately 15% of couples around the world are infertile. Being a parent is what every couple dream and also in Indian society a child is believed to be old-age insurance. However, due to infertility, some couples have a child, for those medical technologies have bought a great change by resorting to the practice of Surrogacy which involves various types of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART). Surrogacy is an arrangement where a surrogate mother bears and delivers a child for another couple or person. Surrogacy has been a gift to these couples as it has granted them the joy of Parenthood. There are mainly two kinds of surrogacy, first Gestational Surrogacy and second Traditional Surrogacy. Despite that surrogacy has helped many intended parents, still, in India, it has raised several questions regarding its ethical concerns. India allows Commercial Surrogacy that is also known as ‘Rent a Womb’ which was legalised in the year 2002, and India soon after that became the hub of surrogacy. However, it has not got any legal status by the legislature. Recently, in the year 2020 the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2020 was approved by the Union Cabinet. This 2020 amended bill is the advanced bill of the draft legislation which was passed in August 2019. The bill aims to put a bar on commercial surrogacy and to permit altruistic surrogacy.

The main aim of the paper is to provide the Present Laws on surrogacy of Different Countries, Laws related to Surrogacy in India along with Landmark Judgements, Types of Surrogacy that are allowed in India, the Key Features of the 2020 Bill, and also What are the Rights and Duties of a Surrogate Mother.

DOI: http://doi.one/10.1732/IJLMH.25612