The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare has just been reviewing the conditions of the Surrogacy Regulation Bill, which concerns the conditions under which a woman can opt to become a surrogate mother.

The Bill only allows Indian heterosexual couples who have been legally married for at least five years and are medically certified as infertile to opt for surrogacy.

It leaves out the following categories of parents opting for surrogacy: live-in couples, single people (including divorced people, widows, and widowers), members of the LGBTQ community, foreign couples, and couples who are fertile but which to opt for surrogacy instead.

The Committee has now, for the most part, come to an agreement that marital status should not be an essential criterion for parents commissioning for surrogacy.

Most of the respondents favored allowing surrogacy to live-in couples, homosexual couples, and single people.

They favored allowing surrogacy to live-in couples because of the societal ways of urban life, and they favored allowing surrogacy to single people because of the significance of the reproductive life of women to their social status.

Additionally, the Committee favored broadening the eligibility criteria for NRIs (Non-Resident Indians), POIs (Persons of Indian Origin), and OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) cardholders, since they cannot technically be classified as foreigners.

Additionally, a majority of the Committee agreed that infertility should not be the only reason for a married couple to opt for surrogacy. They made note of the fact that there could be other medical reasons for which a couple opts for surrogacy, and that those reasons should be taken into consideration.

The Committee also brought other surrogacy issues to the table, such as surrogacy agreement, abortion during a surrogacy period, and the rights of a surrogate child.

With these controversial issues having been tackled by the Committee with a very progressive mindset, it remains to be seen how the government will react to their stance on the surrogacy matter.

Image Credit: Surrogacy-UK / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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