The Indian Parliament has approved the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2019 on 17 December 2021. Now in India, the legal recognition and commercialization of surrogacy or surrogacy has been declared illegal. Now the major provisions under this law are as follows.
- Married women or widowed women can take advantage of surrogacy. For this, their age should be between 23 years to 50 years. A man who is unmarried or divorced cannot ask a woman to be a surrogate mother. And a man who is unmarried or divorced will not have any right to adopt a child born through surrogacy.
- Divorced women can take advantage of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and surrogacy according to other circumstances.
- Foreign couples have to follow the laws made in India for surrogacy. The child born through surrogacy will have to be adopted even if there is any disorder of any kind.
- A surrogate mother can only become a woman who is married. And payment of any kind of rent or money to her to become a surrogate mother will be considered illegal.
A surrogate mother is available on rent in many places in India, who becomes a surrogate mother for someone by taking money and after giving birth to the child, hands the child to its real parents. Such women were becoming surrogate mothers every year in the greed of money, which was ruining their health and in many cases such surrogate mothers also died. Many gangs became active in India to make surrogate mother, who were making surrogate mother even to unmarried girls from poor houses by luring them with money. Sometimes even unmarried men were becoming fathers through surrogate mothers. In many cases, it was seen that even childless couples from abroad used to come to India and give birth to children through a hired surrogate mother, but if there was any congenital deformity in that child, then they used to run away after refusing to adopt that child. To prevent surrogacy from becoming an illegal business, it has now been declared illegal in India to become a surrogate mother on rent.