No, surrogacy is not exploitative

“Motherhood is a state of being which has, from time immemorial, been defined by a set of cliched, internalized words that are as powerful as they are evocative. In our minds, the creation, sustenance and nurturing of life hinges on the blending of these words into synonymity.” I wrote these words in in the preface to my 2014 book Baby Makers: The Story Of Indian Surrogacy, and went on to ask whether being a “mother” necessarily includes the whole gamut of actions like conceiving, carrying and bearing a child. A woman who chooses to carry someone else’s baby in her womb, she is labelled exploited. Since the woman’s womb is an integral part of her body, she cannot be coerced into carrying someone else’s child. When author Taslima Nasreen described children born through surrogacy as “readymade babies”—the same day Chopra and Jones announced their child’s birth—she exposed the monumental ignorance most people have about surrogacy.