Indian Ovum Finds World Market

[Guest guest]

NEW DELHI (AUGUST 26, 2003) - From all doom and gloom to boom and

bloom. Away from all the humdrum about multinationals outsourcing

their business processes to India, there's another sector which is

witnessing a BPO boom -- biological process outsourcing. This time,

it is the Indian ovum that's in demand.

 

Fertility clinics in countries like United Kingdom, Israel,

Australia, France, Spain, and Denmark which are finding it

increasingly difficult to meet the demand for donor eggs are now

turning to India.

 

Also, a higher success rate in helping infertile couples build a

family coupled with the advantages of highly-skilled manpower and a

substantially lower cost of treatment are making India the 'mother

destination' for those seeking 'our own child'.

 

"Yes, ovum donation programme is getting popular in our country,"

says one of the country's leading infertility specialists, Dr.

Neelam Sood of India IVF Centre in New Delhi. "Fertility clinics all

over the world at present are facing difficulties to meet the demand

of egg recipients and are approaching India. I do have Asian

patients who come from UK, USA, Philippines, Canada and several

other countries. I have a long waiting list in my clinic."

 

Although it is difficult to get ovum donors, fertility clinics deal

with this problem mostly through an egg sharing programme. According

to Dr Sood, psychological counselling and medical advice and support

is given to the patients who then find out ovum donors for

themselves. These ovum donors are other infertile patients who need

IVF treatment but cannot afford it. Patients who need ova agree to

undertake some of the financial burden of the donors so that both

patient and the donor get the same IVF treatment.

 

Apparently, to ward off the stigma attached to childlessness, US and

UK-based NRIs who experience some form of infertility, numerous

childless foreign couples and even women seeking single parentage

come from Africa, West Asia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and

Pakistan are visiting in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics in India

every year desperately to have a child at any cost.

 

The clinics sometimes advertise for donor eggs according to a

patient's demand. The new-found urge for Indian eggs among some

foreigners also arise from the fact that the country produces

innumerable beauty queens and children with high IQ level.

 

"We have many NRI patients from the US and UK and foreigners who

come to us for donor egg IVF since it is very difficult to find

suitable egg donors in these countries and their waiting lists are

as long as three to four years," says Dr Aniruddha Malpani of the

renowned Mumbai-based Malpani Infertility Clinic.

 

"We also have over 30 foreign couples from the world over coming

every year for IVF.treatment in good infertility clinics is as good

as anywhere in the world; and it costs a fraction of the amount

which clinics in the West charge," says Dr Malpani.

 

Says a beaming Maria D'miler from Sri Lanka, who managed to conceive

after five cycles in a leading IVF fertility clinic in New Delhi: "I

had exhausted all my resources in several tests in London before

coming to India. Here I could manage to undergo IVF with whatever

money I was left with and get positive results."

 

An in-vitro fertilisation cycle in the US costs $15,000 as opposed

to $2000 in India. The cost goes up to a whopping £3000 for a cycle

of treatment in a UK clinic.

 

Childless Indian couples settled abroad favour infertility

treatment, IVF and surrogacy. They are reluctant to go in for

adoption because of religious and social pressures – as well as

cumbersome laws and procedures to take him or her back to the US or

UK after a particular child is chosen from their homeland. Several

NRI women these days use their holidays to get back to their

motherland and to attain motherhood.

 

Dr Anoop Gupta, an infertility specialist who runs the Delhi IVF

Fertility Research Centre, says apart from hundreds of couples from

all over India his clinic gets about five to six NRI couples every

month for IVF treatment.

 

"We are also treating several Nigerian and Afghan nationals," Dr

Gupta, who had returned from the US about eight years back to set up

his centre says.

 

"Once we dispel negative ideas about India, we will see a large flow

of patients," says Dr Gupta, adding, "We have always had the skills

and expertise, and now even our hospital facilities are improving."

 

"Times have changed since I first started this centre in 1994. For

the first six months, we didn't have any success and there was time

when I even thought of giving it up all. Failures apart, the

acceptability factor was also rankling, instead of backing me, many

people thought that I was out of my mind trying to add to the

already bloated population in the country," says a proud Dr Gupta

who has till now seen over 800 couples walk away with a bundle of

joy from his clinic.

 

Dr Gupta narrates how an affluent Indian woman, now settled in

London, who was very sceptical about the Indian clinics went to UK

to receive egg donation. She conceived and later delivered a blonde-

haired boy. Her family refused to accept her and the baby.

 

A couple of years later she returned to India for a second cycle.

However, Dr Gupta declined fearing an Indian-looking baby could add

on to her already troubled feelings.

 

Dr Malpani says most Asians would rather use Indian egg donors and

Indians do not want to use a Caucasian egg donor for understandable

reasons. Today the IVF success rate has touched 50 to 60 per cent

and with news spreading, numerous NRI childless couples are getting

in touch with us to desperately have a baby of their own, he adds.

 

But in a country where IVF still is a sort of taboo it is very

difficult to convince parents to come out in the open with their

babies. Most of them want to keep it a secret that they have

conceived a baby through the IVF.

 

Moreover, since there are a lot of emotional factors involved, egg

sharing takes place within the family in most cases among Indians.

As Dr Gupta says 50 per cent of his patients receive egg donation

from their own family members for obvious reasons.

 

There is still not enough education and public awareness about the

need and importance for egg donation, which is why it is still hard

to get egg donors in India.

 

"Egg donation can be a very altruistic gesture, and needs to be

actively promoted, so that it does not deteriorate into becoming a

commodity or a commercial activity," says Dr Malpani, whose clinic

has an active egg donor programme and performs about 40 donor egg

IVF cycles every year. "We advertise for our egg donors and we hope

that public awareness about how egg donation can help infertile

couples to have baby will make egg donation as common and as easily

accepted as blood donation is today."

 

Dr Gupta also feels that there is a lot of scope for egg donation

and exudes confidence that it would be the future in India.

 

Another saddening factor is that colour, sex, religion and caste

obsessions have permeated down to sperm banks and ovum banks.

According to doctors at the IVF centres in the country almost 70 per

cent of the couples who resort to artificial insemination by donor

semen want a male child while 90 per cent ask for a fair child.

 

"Couples do come for designer babies. But we look only at the IQ

level and physical appearance and also try to match the features of

parents while selecting a sperm sample," Dr Gupta says adding "some

people do have a preference for a male child but we do not do sex

selections."

 

Being infertile can be very expensive. Tests and treatment cost

considerable money. But some Indian companies have started

reimbursing medical expenses incurred on infertility treatments.

 

Also, patients have devised ingenious methods to overcome these

financial hurdles. For example, young women who can grow lots of

eggs and who need IVF but cannot afford to pay for this, have agreed

to "share " their eggs. Older women, who need donor eggs and are

well-off, can then pay for the entire IVF cycle, and the two can

share the eggs, giving both of them a chance to get pregnant. Egg

sharing allows the doctor to match financial and reproductive

resources, and is beneficial for both donor and recipient.

 

So will the ovum become yet another commodity to be traded? Doctors

agree that any system is open to abuse. The Indian Council of

Medical Research (ICMR) is in the process of finalising the national

guidelines for accreditation, supervision and regulation of Assisted

Reproductive Technology (ART) clinics in India.

 

According to an ICMR spokesman the Assisted Reproductive Technology

draft guidelines, which was developed by an expert committee

representing eminent scientists/ professionals guidelines was

circulated, discussed and is in its final stages after making

several amendments.

 

The draft guidelines had ruled out egg/sperm donation of relative

and friend, surrogate motherhood by relative and friend and separate

storage room, semen collection room, scrub room etc.

 

However, experts feel over the next 25 years, experts anticipate

that IVF will become more standardized, more affordable and hence

available to all of the roughly one in six couples who experience

some form of infertility. Around a million babies have been born by

IVF in the past 25 years worldwide.

 

By C.R. JAYACHANDRAN

Source: TIMESOFINDIA.COM

URL:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?

msid=147047