Outsourcing a Life
By Stephanie M. Lee,
San Francisco Chronicle
| 09. 30. 2013
[Quotes CGS's Marcy Darnovsky]
Anand, India - Eyes pressed shut, jaw clenched, Manisha Parmar strained beneath the delivery room lights. The exquisite pain of this moment was familiar. But little else was.
Years ago, after her second baby was born, a doctor had performed a tubal ligation, ensuring she would never conceive again. But now, somehow, here she was, moments from giving birth. And for this child, everything was different.
Manisha's son and daughter had been born at home, a tiny, ramshackle dwelling in northwestern India. Only after both infants were kicking and crying was a health worker summoned to snip the umbilical cords.
But here, at the Akanksha Infertility Clinic, nurses hovered, checking her vital signs, monitoring the progress of her labor. Nothing about this birth would be left to chance.
Manisha didn't quite understand how the clinic staff had made her pregnant again. She grasped their urgency, though.
For nine months, she had been paid more than she ever imagined to carry a baby created from the egg and sperm of an American couple. Now she was on the verge of delivering...
Related Articles
Reproductive rights have been a flashpoint in national politics for decades, with the stakes surging after the Supreme Court shredded the right to an abortion. In the current presidential campaign, the battle over abortion has swelled and morphed to encompass in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has now moved rapidly from widely accepted to partisan hot button.
This dramatic shift was highlighted by the February decision of the Alabama Supreme Court that granted personhood rights to frozen IVF embryos, signaling that...
By Deirdre Walsh , NPR | 09.17.2024
Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic bill to provide a nationwide right to IVF treatments. It was the second time Senate Democrats tried and failed to advance the measure.
Reproductive freedom has remained a central issue in several Senate contests that...
By Matthew Rozsa, Salon | 09.15.2024
When a person with a uterus decides to freeze their eggs, any number of things can go wrong. Ice crystal can form, killing an otherwise viable ovum. A fertilized egg may fail to properly implant, or the egg may...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
Image by Stephen Andrews from Unsplash
Yale agreed on Monday to pay dozens of patients who had filed lawsuits claiming that they had endured excruciatingly painful egg retrieval procedures after a nurse at its fertility clinic secretly swapped their anesthesia...