Outsourcing Pregnancies To India….

ANAND, India (AP) – Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.
A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world. The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand’s surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.

Dr. Nayna Patel, the woman behind Anand’s baby boom, defends her work as meaningful for everyone involved.

“There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her (own) family,” Patel said. “If this female wants to help the other one … why not allow that? … It’s not for any bad cause. They’re helping one another to have a new life in this world.”

Experts say commercial surrogacy—or what has been called “wombs for rent”—is growing in India. While no reliable numbers track such pregnancies nationwide, doctors work with surrogates in virtually every major city. The women are impregnated in-vitro with the egg and sperm of couples unable to conceive on their own.

Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002, as it is in many other countries, including the United States. But India is the leader in making it a viable industry rather than a rare fertility treatment. Experts say it could take off for the same reasons outsourcing in other industries has been successful: a wide labor pool working for relatively low rates.

Critics say the couples are exploiting poor women in India—a country with an alarmingly high maternal death rate—by hiring them at a cut- rate cost to undergo the hardship, pain and risks of labor.

“It raises the factor of baby farms in developing countries,” said Dr. John Lantos of the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. “It comes down to questions of voluntariness and risk.”

Breitbart

Again, make thou own mind up

Don’t Let This Happen To You

There was a story of interest in the Herald Sun today (no link), about a drop bear attack. Here’s an extract:

Melissa Kerrin, 15, was on a school camping trip at Mt. Macedon National Park when she encountered one of Australia’s most vicious creatures. The year 10 student, a native of the United States, was attacked by a drop bear (koalus ataqus) while hiking along a bush trail in the National Park.

Drop bears are a common species in Australia, and live mostly in gum and eucalypt trees in the eastern States, and are most prevalent in Tasmania. They look remarkably similar to the koala, although their claws, used for climbing trees and attacking prey, are larger, and they have two large fangs, used to hold their prey while excising flesh with a row of smaller, more jagged fangs behind the two larger ones.

Ms. Kerrin’s guardian and school teacher, Mr. Peter Healey, told this reporter that “We just didn’t know what was happening. First, we were walking, and then suddenly there was a flash of gray, a scream, and it was all over. Mel was on the ground, unconscious, and it wasn’t until the park ranger saw the wounds that we knew what had happened. We had to carefully carry Mel back to the ranger station and call an ambulance.”

According to Mr. Healey, the park ranger, Michael Porter, then organized a search team led by Aboriginal tracker Marjoria Toowombat, to track down the dangerous animal before any other casualties occur. Mr. Porter reportedly then tried some of the traditional bush healing techniques to tend to Ms. Kerrin’s injuries, without success.

Parks Victoria released an official statement early this morning, in which they stated “The ranger at the scene responded to the incident in accordance with the official guidelines, including the use of the animal tracking team. We regret that this incident has occurred, and wish Ms. Kerrin a speedy recovery.”

Ms. Kerrin’s parents are reportedly on their way to Australia to be with their daughter, who is in the Alfred Hospital in a serious condition. She was unable to be reached for comment.

Dangerous little fuckers, those drop bears. Don’t mess with them.