A Forgotten Mother

TechnoparkToday.com>>Last week the world celebrated Mother’s Day in the form of adorable selfies with mommies, cute ads featuring celebrities with their mothers, Tweets and songs dedicated exclusively for them. A complete day devoted to Moms, to celebrate her, to cherish her. As she is the one who bought us to this world, who bore us for 9 long months in her womb and lived with all our tantrums and kicks, who threw up every single time she wanted to have something delicious, who had to go through hours of painful labour to pop us out, who was slit open at the stomach and still lives with those ugly scars.  She is the one whom we owe our life to. A divine creation in every sense!

But amidst all the celebrations of motherhood we forgot another very special mother who never received her due as she happens to be a surrogate mother!  She indeed has gone through all the challenges of any regular mother but the reality has it that her womb is just a rented oven to bake someone else’s bun.

Surrogacy is a multimillion dollar industry in India which is definitely a boon to the couples who are not medically capable to conceive. Surrogacy is also a means of exploitation and unfortunately there haven’t been any stringent laws in our country to deal with it. It is a much talked about topic in India as Filmstars like Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan have opted for it but the fact remains that adequate measures are never really taken for the wellbeing of a surrogate. Though money is good for being a proxy,  a major chunk of the earnings go to the middleman and if the woman suffers a miscarriage she is paid nothing. A surrogate is also used by medically fit couples who don’t want to undergo the hardships and get a readymade baby in their hands. In IVF, due to the implantation of more than 1 embryo there is a good chance of multiple babies like Phoebe in the popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S, leading to an extreme trauma on her uterus. But no one questions if anything happens to the lady as her duty was to deliver a healthy baby and get paid for it. The post delivery complications, her health, her womb is of no concern to anyone.

There is a legal law which states that a surrogate shouldn’t be of below 21 years and above 35 years and that she is not allowed more than 5 pregnancies in her lifetime but often medical details get unchecked behind those fat cheques and handsome pays. There are very few fertility clinics that go by ethical standards and work towards welfare of these women making sure that they get their fair share. They are also counselled in every phase of pregnancy, post delivery and effective measures are taken.  However there is still not much provision to check the magnitude of their misery

Imagine a woman going through all kind of torture, where she screams and strains and gets bombarded with every other distress associated with pregnancy only to get cut open, have her baby taken away and never get to see the child again. Not even a chance to breastfeed her just- delivered baby as lactation is already induced in the Real mother. Isn’t that brutal? A nameless rented commodity who acts like a cocoon and protects the foetus but sadly known to the world as a mere” Surrogate Mother”.  Isn’t she also a Mother?