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Mélina, élène, Inès

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Amany, Kéryl, Francisco and Jean-Michel

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What we think about surrogacy

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Surrogacy laws in EUROPE

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LISTENING: social surrogacy. DECEMBER 13

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LISTENING: social surrogacy. DECEMBER 13

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Listen + write a paragraph in French (//BAC exam)

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Surrogate Births: Rise in Women Using Surrogates for Social Reasons

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Some women choose not carry their own baby so it won't affect their career or body.

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Surrogacy laws in the USA

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Listen to this recording.
Summarize what you understood in French (like in the listening exam

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- what do you learn about the different people mentioned in this Article

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The rules could change as soon as the end of 2016.

We spoke to Indians affected by the proposed law to get a better understanding of how it could change their lives.

THE PARENTS

Ajay and Babita Bhati have been trying to have a baby for 22 years.

The couple, aged in their late thirties, opted for surrogacy after several rounds of failed in vitro fertilization.

"You can't imagine, I'm one of three brothers and both my brothers have children," Ajay Bhati says. "The biggest problem in the whole family was that we couldn't have a baby."

Two months ago, they were delighted to welcome the birth of their daughter Khyati Bhati.

"The whole family, including all of my relatives; were so happy from that day she was born," he says. "That we had a daughter means more to us than having a son."

They are both against the proposed surrogacy bill. "We had no hope and now we have a baby," Ajay says. "If surrogacy is not allowed and there is a ban, then how will people like us become parents?"

THE ADVOCATE

Soumya Swaminathan helped draft the proposed bill, and sees the regulation as a way to correct a system that leaves women vulnerable.

"The whole reason [for the bill] is because of a large number of complaints from women's groups and from the women themselves," said Swaminathan, the Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research in Delhi.

"There are reports of surrogate women and children being abandoned or not properly treated, visa issues with a child being born for foreign couples who were coming in for surrogacy."

Other reasons include the class divide, as surrogacy is often a costly procedure and the surrogate mothers are those who come from poor backgrounds, she said. These women could be pushed to this career by their families to quickly earn a lot of money.

"Our women were literally being used as womb rental factories. So we thought it was very important that we move a bill to protect these women."

THE SURROGATE

She's 26 and from Kolkata, India, and doesn't want to be named in case her family finds out what she's doing.

Pooja, as we'll call her, is a first-time surrogate mother.

She tells CNN she doesn't understand why the government wants to ban what is, to her, a job.

"If we are getting benefited why does the government have a problem with that?" she said.

"The government is not helping with our bills and expenses. We work in big houses, my husband is a daily wage laborer and earns $3 a day, what can we do with that money?"

Like many of the other woman who do this, she plans to use her surrogacy fee to help support her family.

"We will be able to make our children's future with the money."

THE HOPEFUL PARENT

Angad, 27, reached out to Dr. Nayana Patel in early 2015 with a request: he wanted to have a baby through surrogacy. The only problem was that he was not in a committed heterosexual marriage.

The doctor quickly rejected his proposal, saying it was not possible for her to help him because he was gay and it was against the guidelines.

The Indian government issued guidelines in 2012 saying that only heterosexual, married couples could be granted a visa for medical surrogacy. Later, the government issued additional guidelines limiting it to married Indian couples.

Angad, who declined to share his last name for fear of repercussions about his sexuality in a country where homosexuality is criminalized, was not surprised by the doctor's response.

"I was expecting such a reply. But it will not stop me," he said. "I'm the only son in my family and I have to have a child to continue my family hierarchy."

Dr. Kaberi Banerjee has delivered more than 100 babies to surrogate mothers at her Advanced Fertility & Gynecology Center in Delhi.

She says the proposed ban will make it impossible for those who want children because of social norms in Indian society.

"When the couple comes for in vitro fertilization treatment, they don't even discuss that they are coming. Surrogacy is still a taboo word in our families... forget discussing, they won't even be able to ask."

The clause in the ban that will require couples to seek out a close relative to carry their baby instead of a commercial surrogate also presents a dilemma, she said.

"What is the relationship between the baby's relatives and genetic parents? It's going to be very complicated."

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'i have to have a baby': five faces of india's proposed surrogacy ban - cnn

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'I have to have a child': 5 faces of India's proposed surrogacy ban

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The rules could change as soon as the end of 2016. We spoke to Indians affected by the proposed law to get a better understanding of how it could change their lives. THE PARENTS Ajay and Babita Bhati have been trying to have a baby for 22 years.

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- Summarize what you understood
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- Write their definitions in English

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Joakim Sundstro&#776;m/Getty Images

About three years after they got married, in 2007, wedding photographer Mari Smith* and her husband began batting around the question of when to have kids. "We gotta get started on this," he'd say.

"I know," she'd reply. "Just not now."

A few months shy of Smith's thirty-seventh birthday, "now" seemed like the worst time ever. After plodding through the recession, her business had finally picked up. She'd come a long way from the early days when she'd made as little as $15,000 a year and had to do family portraits on the side. Now clients booked her months in advance for million-dollar weddings and flew her as far as Thailand and Mexico. Although she and her accountant husband earned a combined income in the low six figures, Smith craved financial stability and was working 60 hours a week to build her brand.

How was she supposed to fit a pregnancy into that schedule? What if she had Kate Middleton's severe morning sickness? Or a complication such as gestational diabetes or high blood pressure, which were more likely in women older than 35? Or, God forbid, what if she became pregnant with twins and was put on bed rest?

Once they had the baby, the couple would rejigger their lives and hire help, but the pregnancy part seemed unnervingly unpredictable to Smith. With a lifelong tendency to fixate on worst-case scenarios, she kept imagining going into premature labor. She could hurt her baby, and it would be her fault, from lugging 80 pounds of camera equipment all day. She visited her therapist for help controlling her anxiety but to no avail.

On a trip to San Diego in January 2013, Smith related her dilemma over cocktails to her friend Saira Jhutty, who was around the same age and also felt pressure to start a family. A clinical psychologist, Jhutty runs a surrogacy agency called Conceptual Options, but the two women knew each other through their husbands, who'd been friends since childhood. "I'm almost 40. When am I supposed to get pregnant?" Smith wondered aloud. "Summer is my biggest season."
Related: Robbie Myers on Leaning In

The women loaded their smartphone calendars and got down to fertility math. "So, I could give birth in late fall, but then I'd be walking around all summer pregnant. I'd have to be pregnant by March," Smith calculated. Then they downloaded an ovulation-tracker app to figure out when to start trying. "This is too complicated," Smith said, sighing. "I wish I could just use a surrogate," she added teasingly, for her friend's benefit.

Since starting as an intake interviewer in 2011 (and taking over the agency a year later), Jhutty had matched surrogates with a handful of women who lacked a medical reason not to get pregnant, but it had never occurred to her that one of her friends might want to do the same. In the moment, though, she took Smith seriously. "Why not?" she asked. "No, really, why couldn't you?"

Smith hadn't been expecting that answer, but she quickly warmed to it. She knew that Jhutty had found a surrogate for an actress who didn't want a pregnant body to keep her from getting roles; why was Smith's situation any different? She was trying to protect her livelihood. Back in Seattle, Smith broached the idea with her husband.

Yes, it was expensive, she told him, more than $100,000 for medical, legal, agency, and surrogate fees, but they could finance it with savings, credit cards, a loan. And that way she could keep going full steam at work.

"Don't you think we'll miss out?" her husband asked. He'd looked forward to things like touching her stomach and feeling the baby kicking, he said. He thought she'd look sexy pregnant.

Smith had asked herself the same question, but she'd never been someone who fantasized about feeling a baby growing inside her lanky 5'10" frame. As a girl, she dreamed more about a wedding; the kids somehow just showed up. Even the parts that were supposed to be fun seemed odious to her: She never forgot a friend's story of feeling her baby kick, then feeling his foot pressed against her rib the entire next day.

"We can ask to touch the surrogate's belly and go with her to ultrasounds," she suggested. "We'll experience it from the outside."

"I guess that's cool, if that's something you want to do," he responded flatly. "But what would we tell our child?"

Smith said they could figure that out later. She worried more about what they'd tell everyone else now.

"Are you joking?" her mother-in-law asked when the couple mentioned their plan one evening. "You'd have a stranger give birth to my grandchild?"

The next day, the mother-in-law fired off an e-mail to Jhutty: "This is not right.... I thought only people who can't have kids do this. But not wanting to do it because of work? Who does that?"
Related: Why I'm Okay With Having Only One Child
* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED[>

In what's become the fertility industry's best-kept secret, a small but increasing number of women use surrogates for so-called social, rather than medical, reasons. "I call these cases designer surrogacy," says Lori Arnold, MD, a northern San Diego fertility doctor. She says she's worked with a socialite "who didn't want to get fat," a runner who had an upcoming marathon, and a fellow MD who, Arnold says, "couldn't really afford to be pregnant-some women work right up to the moment they deliver, but others can be bedridden for several months." Meanwhile, at the Pacific Fertility Center of Los Angeles, Vicken Sahakian, MD, estimates he's overseen 20 social cases. "They're for reasons most people would find offensive," he says. "I don't ask these patients too many questions, because I don't want them to feel judged."

Which they are, perhaps needless to say. "So WE are supposed to RISK our LIVES for someone who doesn't want to be 'inconvenienced' by a pregnancy??!!! Un-freaking-believable," responded one commenter to a thread on the topic on the message board Surrogate Mothers Online. When actresses Nicole Kidman and Sarah Jessica Parker announced they'd hired surrogates a few years ago, the blogosphere exploded with accusations that they were lying about being infertile and really just buying their way out of pregnancy to avoid risking a stretch mark or disrupting a film schedule. So selfish! So shallow! So unwomanly!

In fact, after the first formal surrogacy contract was written in the United States, in 1976, there was speculation that we'd turn into a two-class nation of breeders and the wealthy who exploited them, à la Margaret Atwood's dystopian The Handmaid's Tale. While the fears today seem outsize considering that the number of babies born to surrogates for any reason in the United States was only 1,898 in 2012, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, the culture still seems uncomfortable with the whole notion of what's derided as "baby selling." Some states, California among them, allow it, while others outlaw it altogether or forbid surrogates from being paid or refuse to honor contracts between surrogates and intended parents.

As for social cases, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) issued guidelines in 2012 stating that surrogates should be used only "when a true medical condition precludes the intended parent from carrying a pregnancy or would pose a significant risk of death or harm to the woman or the fetus. The indication must be clearly documented in the patient's medical records."
Related: Cradle Robber? The Cost Of Raising A Child
But such guidelines aren't binding, and some in the field question their rigidity. Why shouldn't this labor be outsourced, they ask, as long as surrogates are compensated well and treated fairly? "The surrogates have leverage and can command $30,000 to $50,000 tax-free income per pregnancy, more if they carry twins or need a C-section," says journalist Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of The Baby Chase: How Surrogacy Is Transforming the American Family. Surrogates also may be given maternity clothes, access to support groups, housekeeping services, nutrition lessons, babysitting during doctor's visits, compensation for breast milk or lost wages if bed rest is required, and so on.

David Smotrich, MD, a San Diego fertility specialist who's widely regarded as the world leader in the field, even offers a scientific rationale for social surrogacy, though he says such cases make up less than 5 percent of the 2,500 he's done. "If you take the same embryo, there's a medical benefit to putting it in a woman who's been pregnant before; we have proof that her uterus works," he says, estimating that using a tried-and-true womb can boost IVF success rates by up to 20 percent.

Or consider this logic: Even though Mari Smith's story is not one of medical need, it is one of medical urgency. She's 37. If she has a partner and good eggs, she should have a baby ASAP, says Smotrich-inadvertently making surrogacy sound almost like a solution for women caught in the double bind of being told both not to wait to have a family and to lean in to work.
Related: Patients With Benefits: Cheryl Cohen Greene On 40 Years in Sex Surrogacy
And the definition of "medical need" is different for different women and doctors. Paula Amato, MD, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, who helped write the ASRM's strict ethics guidelines, said it would be appropriate for doctors to offer the option to patients who suffer from severe anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. "We give a lot of leeway to doctors to make those decisions," she says. Other potential candidates: a woman at risk for postpartum depression or who doesn't want to risk going off certain anxiety or depression medications for 10 months. Or someone who had a difficult first pregnancy, like Kim Kardashian, who recently announced she wouldn't "wish it upon anyone" and is terrified to repeat it. "I've had patients who were traumatized by pregnancy. That creates a medical necessity, in my opinion," says Joel Batzofin, MD, a Manhattan fertility doctor. "Why put them through that again?" Jhutty agrees: One of her clients requested a surrogate after a stillbirth.

Sahakian offers yet another psychological rationale for choosing surrogacy: the fallout of years of failed infertility treatments: "Emotionally, they're done. Physically, they're burned out. They say, 'Just use a surrogate and get me a baby.'"

Lisa Fisher*, 46, a contracts specialist from Los Angeles who used a surrogate to bring twins into the world last June, fits this description. At 41, her second IVF attempt in two years resulted in a positive pregnancy test, but the fetus couldn't be detected via ultrasound. "I was crushed. I'd given so much of myself. I've battled depression much of my life, and this took me down the rabbit hole again," she says. "I felt so defeated we went out and got a Chihuahua." Over the next few years, she and her husband tried adoption but were rejected by several agencies.

At that point, Fisher knew she could use donor eggs and have an embryo implanted in her uterus. "But I just couldn't bear to learn that my body had failed again," she says. So last year she asked her 31-year-old friend Amanda*, who'd had a son with her lesbian partner using the sperm of a gay friend, if she knew anyone who wanted to be a surrogate. To Fisher's surprise, Amanda herself volunteered for the job. Rather than pay for donor eggs, the Fishers brokered an agreement with Amanda that included using both her eggs and her womb. Now she's considered an "aunt" to the family and drops by the Fisher house to visit the babies a couple of times a month. "The biological tie wasn't such a big deal. I was somewhat detached, and it felt very different from my first pregnancy," says Amanda, who, though she was paid $15,000 by the Fishers, considers her surrogacy an altruistic act. "We have beautiful babies who wouldn't be here if I hadn't done what I did. I think about how much joy they'll bring to this family."

Therein lies perhaps the biggest challenge of social surrogacy. Women want to feel like heroes (or "angels," in message-board parlance) for doing it. "The whole idea is wanting to help someone who couldn't have a baby otherwise. When it's for nonmedical reasons, it's harder to wrap your head around," says Kymberli Barney, spokeswoman for Surrogate Mothers Online and a mother of four who's twice served as a surrogate. "Pregnancy is a sacrifice. If you're not willing to make that sacrifice for yourself, why would you ask someone else to do it for you?"
Related: En Pointe and Pregnant: Mary Helen Bowers on the Benefits of Ballet for Moms to Be

Like it or not, says Ruth Faden, PhD, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the "why" influences the ethical dimension of surrogacy. Since pregnancy-even for those who say they "love" it-has some risks (sore back, difficulty sleeping, and, rarely, dangerous medical conditions), these must be weighed against what the other party will gain. If the benefit is giving a child to someone who desperately wants one but can't have her own, the trade-off may seem justified. "But when the reason changes, the equation isn't as compelling," Faden argues. And you can't ignore that it's typically affluent women who seek surrogates and the less privileged who become them. "How many women would really choose to be surrogates if they had less emotionally complicated ways to earn the same kind of money?" she says.

Baby Chase author Morgan Steiner recognizes the disparity-"The surrogates often don't have college degrees. They might be stay-at-home moms who work part-time"-but says that, counterintuitively, the experience can offset at least a psychological sense of inferiority. "The surrogates feel as if they're giving couples the gift of life," she says. "It makes them feel very powerful. They have something that others don't." Fisher's surrogate, Amanda, for one, is glad the job was available to her, and she doesn't really care about people's motivations. "Would I help out a model? Sure, if she paid enough. I need to help support my family."

Many women are willing to do virtually anything to have their own baby, which explains why surrogacy is relatively rare and donor eggs popular: You may not be genetically related to your baby, but you still get to carry her and give birth to her and breast-feed her. It's up to you to protect her during gestation, to go to prenatal yoga and drink kale juice four times a day.
Related: Fertility Treatments: Would You Get Selective Reduction?
Given this, it can be hard to understand Mari Smith, who's had two rounds of egg stimulation and stashed away 12 embryos (fertilized by her husband) for transfer to a surrogate. Couldn't she just adjust her schedule a bit to allow for a pregnancy? Couldn't she hire an assistant to carry her photo equipment? Surely that would cost far less than 100 grand.

These arguments don't seem to move Smith. She considers her choice empowering, rather than validation of the dubious concept that pregnancy and a big-deal career are categorically incompatible. "I could be out [of work] three or four months," Smith says. "People could forget about me. I have to be out there constantly producing and being visible."

Still, her fear of pregnancy may ultimately be what drove her toward surrogacy. A few months ago, she visited a friend in the hospital who'd just become a new mother. The woman moaned about how miserable she was, how she'd been ripped from "head to toe" delivering a 10-pound baby. "Oh, God!" Smith exclaimed to Jhutty in an e-mail. "I don't want to go through that if I don't have to." It was just a week later, in fact, that Jhutty says she received a bank wire from her friend for $20,000, the retainer required to start the search for a surrogate.

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Should a Woman Be Allowed to Hire a Surrogate Because She Fears Pregnancy Will Hurt Her Career?

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Joakim Sundström/Getty Images About three years after they got married, in 2007, wedding photographer Mari Smith* and her husband began batting around the question of when to have kids. "We gotta get started on this," he'd say. "I know," she'd reply. "Just not now."