Publicity:

In Launceston, Tasmania, Kate and Paul Torney yearn for another child. The arrival of their son Ptolemy was a dramatic and damaging event that almost killed Kate and certainly ended her natural capacity to bear another child.

In suburban Melbourne, Victoria Kali and Bill Gerakas have endured a devastating procession of failed pregnancies and miscarriages.

"We tried IVF for four and a half years we did something close to 24 cycles. We fell pregnant 4 times ourselves and lost all four babies. It was the most devastating time in our lives." KALI GERAKAS

Both couples - like hundreds of other Australians - have decided to start or extend their families using a commercial surrogate and for that India has become a hot global destination. 

There are now an estimated 1500 surrogacy centres across the country. In the space of a decade or so the surrogacy industry has grown to what one industry observer has estimated to be a billion dollar industry. But it's exploded in a place where regulation has been lagging well behind the boom. So there are pitfalls for aspiring parents and perils for surrogates as well.

Many surrogates are from very poor backgrounds, have little or no education and certainly limited or non-existent financial literacy. There are concerns that some are pressed into the industry by their husbands and families as a quick way to make an otherwise unimaginable $7000AU per birth. Supporters of the industry say the money is vaulting them out of poverty and into their own homes, an education and the prospect of a much brighter future. 

"If you are just a critic who feels a childless person should live a life of misery and stay childless throughout their life, or a poor person is meant to remain poor all throughout their life then you'll consider this as something wrong, as something immoral. A farm. A baby-making factory.." - Dr NAYANA PATEL

One of the pioneers of the commercial surrogacy business, Dr Nayana Patel grants access to her bustling enterprise in Anand, Gujarat where 100 surrogate mothers live in a house for the term of their pregnancy. They lie in single bunks, hoping for a successful birth, a happy client and a relatively huge amount of money. 

Elsewhere care and concern for surrogates is not so assured.

In this deeply moving Foreign Correspondent we go inside the industry to see just what confronts surrogates and their clients and we'll go there through the experiences of couples trying to chart the most ethical and sensitive course they can in pursuit of a little life to call their own.

General views. Anand.

Music

00:00

Hospital interior

00:06

Latika and Gaurav in hospital waiting room

DANIEL: Latika and Gaurav are about to become mum and dad for the first time. Naturally they're nervous and excited.

00:10

Latika

LATIKA: "I'm speechless. I'm just waiting for my baby to come.

00:17

Latika and Gaurav wait for baby

Just want him to come".

DANIEL: It's been a long trip from their home in the UK to this unconventional delivery room.

00:21

LATIKA: "What's he up to, what's he doing?"

00:29

DANIEL:  This is India and they've paid the equivalent of thirty thousand dollars for a surrogate to carry and bear them a child.

00:33

Midwife enters with baby

Music

00:42

Gaurav takes video of  baby

DANIEL:  Their newborn son is delivered to them, minutes after a caesarean birth in a surgery down the hall.

00:50

Midwife weighs baby and hands to Latika

DANIEL:  He'll be weighed, buttoned up snugly, spend a few minutes in the arms of his new mother...

00:57

Latika holds baby

LATIKA: "Oh he's so gorgeous!!!"

01:04

Baby is monitored

DANIEL: ...and undergo assessment and monitoring in a neo natal cot for maybe an hour or so. Then it's into the baby capsule,

01:07

Latika and Gaurav leave with baby

and as the proud parents make their way out of the hospital,

01:15

Surrogate mother in hospital with family

their surrogate remains in a recovery ward, surrounded by her family. She's just earned an otherwise unimaginable sum - seven thousand dollars.

01:21

Mother-in-law

SURROGATE'S MOTHER-IN-LAW: "My daughter-in-law has had a boy. These are tears of happiness".

01:33

DANIEL: "So she'll go home without the child. How do you feel?"

01:37

SURROGATES MOTHER-IN-LAW: "Sad of course".

01:42

Latika and Gaurav and baby into tuk tuk

DANIEL: Very soon, Latika, Gaurav and their little son will be winging their way back to the United Kingdom - one transaction in India's booming surrogacy business.

01:51

CU Baby

But as the baby making industry has taken off, regulation, safety and transparency has left behind in a cloud of dust.

02:12

Kishwar

KISHWAR DESAI: "And people are forgetting that there are human beings involved, there are emotions involved".

02:23

Torney family at airport/Indian woman and children on street

DANIEL: And for hundreds of families looking to Indian surrogacy to start or grow their own family, there are perils and pitfalls....

02:27

Darren

DARREN PINKS: "All they seem to care about is making money".

02:37

Kali

DANIEL: Joy...

KALI GERAKAS: "The happiest I've ever been in my life".

02:39

Kate crying

DANIEL: ...and heartbreak. 

02:43

Surrogacy clinic/Kate and Paul/Kali and Bill/Baby cries

Tonight, a very personal journey as two couples take their hopes and dreams to India.

02:45

Anand GVs

02:59

In no time at all, it's become a lucrative industry in many parts of India - from here in provincial Anand in north-western India to Mumbai and the capital, Delhi.

03:06

Surrogacy lab

India has seized on what's called assisted reproductive technology and opened the door for customers worldwide.

03:19

Baby

Of two thousand babies born for foreign customers, hundreds will be for Australian clients.

03:28

KALI GERAKAS: "There is so much bureaucracy in Australia surrounding this issue.

03:35

Kali

Yes, it is a state by state thing as well. In some states it's legal, in some states it's illegal - so you can't commission surrogacy. We're privileged here in Victoria that we are able to do so".

03:40

Bill and Kali walk in cemetery to daughter's grave

DANIEL: Melbourne couple Kali and Bill Gerakas have tried just about everything to start a family, but in six years all they have to show for their efforts, is heartache. 

KALI GERAKAS: "We tried IVF for four and a half years. We did something close to twenty four cycles. We fell pregnant four times ourselves and lost all four babies. We ended up having our little girl and she lived for an hour and I think the hardest part in all that was to actually see our baby in our arms struggling to take breath.

03:54

Kali. Super: Kali Gerakas

It was the most devastating time in our lives and not to only go through it the once, we ended up going through that twice within eleven months of each other".

04:46

Kali and Bill at grave

Music

05:01

BILL GERAKAS: "We are just average Australians out there, you know, struggling, working and, you know, we want to come home and, you know, come to our family".

05:05

Kali

KALI GERAKAS: "If it's something you really want you will find the way to do it".

05:18

Plane landing in India

05:21

Kali shopping in India

DANIEL: They'd already spent $100,000 on failed IVF in Australia, but the Gerakases were prepared to make sacrifices and dig deeper in the quest for a family. They took their savings and their dreams to India,

05:28

Mariam gets out of car

where they found multinational surrogacy entrepreneur, Mariam Kukunashvili.

05:45

Mariam into clinic

MARIAM KUKUNASHVILI: "We started in India three years ago. We had only agency, a small office, two employees and doing IVF cases with another clinic. Then later on, last year, we opened our own IVF clinic".

DANIEL: Her India operation is showing all the signs of the

05:53

Clinic waiting room

success of her surrogacy centres in her native Georgia and another in Thailand.

MARIAM KUKUNASHVILI: [New Life Global Network] "There are a lot of controversies in society about reproductive issues but I think when

06:11

Mariam. Super:
Mariam Kukunashvili
New Life Global Network

a couple are childless... so we cannot call this is a baby making process. We are helping them to have families, to complete their families and have children".

06:24

Torney family in car in India

Music

06:34

DANIEL: Tasmanians Kate and Paul Torney have come to New Delhi in the hope of expanding their family, a sister or a brother for four and a half year old son, Ptolemy. 

06:39

KATE TORNEY: "Family is everything to me.

06:52

I love Ptolemy almost without measure. You know, I love him so much and we've got more love to give. We're not complete. We just don't feel that this is it".

06:54

Street vendors at car window

DANIEL: Conventional conception or even IVF isn't an option. The birth of Ptolemy brought a medical emergency and an end to Kate's ability to conceive.

07:06

Photos. Kate in hospital

Music

07:22

KATE TORNEY: "It was incredibly traumatic. I ended up having seizures and that's the last thing I can remember.

07:25

Photos. Baby Ptolemy in hospital

When I woke up I was told that I did have a baby - he was alive. It was a bittersweet moment because I was told that, Paul that told me, that

07:37

Kate. Super: Kate Torney

part of keeping me alive, the only way that I was still there... the doctors had made an emergency decision to perform an emergency hysterectomy. That was the only thing that they could have possibly have done to keep me alive and it was devastating, absolutely devastating.

07:53

Photo. Kate holding Ptolemy in hospital

That was the end of my family dream. There would be no more children.

08:13

Kate

I just remember bursting into tears, and yeah, it was very difficult".

08:22

Paul. Super: Paul Torney

PAUL TORNEY: "She came to me one night when we were in bed and just said that, you know, how do you feel about trying surrogacy, to having another child? And I pretty much discounted it straightaway.

08:30

Photos. Torneys in hospital with Ptolemy

We had a good chat about it and well, she swayed me".

08:42

Music

08:48

GFX World map highlighting India/

08:53

Medical Tourism/Surrogacy dollars

DANIEL: Since it was legalised in 2002, commercial surrogacy in India has grown exponentially. It's now a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars - fuelled in part by tax breaks to encourage medical tourism.

 From a couple of hundred clinics in the early years, there are now an estimated 1500 surrogacy centres.

 One calculation has about 25,000 babies produced by Indian surrogates - more than 12,000 for Western clients. But a lack of clear regulation means precise figures about the scale and nature of the sector are hard to come by.

08:56

Kishwar

KISHWAR DESAI: "It's an unregulated industry, it's a mysterious industry. We do not know what is going on. It is a bazaar. Those are the things that we need to worry about".

09:40

GVs Women on Indian streets

DANIEL: Author and surrogacy critic, Kishwar Desai, investigated the Indian industry in her book "Origins of Love".

KISHWAR DESAI: "I do see surrogacy as an attack on women in many ways, because it is being propagated in the absence of law,

09:49

Kishwar. Super:
Kishwar Desai
Author

so we do not even know whether the surrogates are being given the proper care and treatment that they deserve or who are the parents who are coming in for the surrogacy? There is no kind of a legal framework within which is it happening".

10:09

Torneys meet with lawyer and Nasni

DANIEL: Kate and Paul have decided against a surrogacy clinic. They've hired a local lawyer and directly engaged a surrogate. Her name is Nasni, a New Delhi local in her early 20's, married with two children of her own. 

KATE TORNEY: "What she was doing is a huge thing. We didn't want her to feel that we're exploiting her in any way.

10:23

I just feel that this way we are reducing the degree of exploitation as much as we can".

DANIEL: Nasni will get more money than many clinic surrogates and during pregnancy will be able to stay at home with her children. Clinic surrogates are routinely placed in group houses until they're ready to deliver.

10:51

PAUL TORNEY: "To me it sounded a little bit like a puppy farm

11:14

Paul

and that will probably annoy a lot of people to say that because a lot of people have had great success from these places, but to me that's just how it felt and how it sounded".

11:16

Torneys visit Dr Bannergee.

11:27

Dr Bannergee

DR BANNERGEE: So the injections are going to start from today. I think I Paul can be of help to give you the injections. Overall we get a pregnancy rate of about 70% to 80% in three tries.

11:35

Kate having ultrasound

On the left I can see at least 7 or 8.

KATE TORNEY: That's good, yeah?

DANIEL: Kate has retained the ability to generate eggs but she'll undergo 12 days of injections to stimulate production.

DR BANNERGEE: On the right side I can see about four to five. 

DANIEL: There'll be plenty of scans and blood tests

11:50

before her eggs are removed, fertilised with Paul's sperm and implanted in Nasni's womb. 

12:10

The Torneys will return to Launceston and cross their fingers for good news.

DR BANNERGEE: And we are quite excited with how things are progressing as of today.

KATE TORNEY: Yes, thank you.

12:17

Kali arriving at clinic

v

12:30

Kali with Mariam. Soma enters

 She's arrived in New Delhi to meet with clinic boss Mariam Kukunashvili and to meet her surrogate Soma for the first time.

12:35

Soma's pregnancy is the result of eggs from an Eastern European donor and Kali's husband, Bill's sperm.

12:53

Soma and Kali hug

Soma is well into her third trimester and she's carrying twins. 

13:14

Kali's hand on Soma's pregnant belly

KALI GERAKAS:  "If they can hear me, and I'm sure they can, I just wanted to let them know that their father and I love them so much.... [crying] and it's the most amazing thing".

"I cannot describe how I feel about somebody who I've never met in my life."

[with surrogate mother] "Little ones be safe!" [crying]

13:19

Mariam takes photo of Kali and Soma

"If she was to knock on my door and ask for the world, I would move heaven and earth to give it to her.

13:40

Kali

There isn't enough words to convey how I feel or how Bill feels".

13:47

Bill

BILL GERAKAS: "Love to be a father".

13:54

Kali and Soma inside clinic

DANIEL: Until recently Soma's been living at home with her husband and two boys of her own.

13:58

Soma has ultrasound

Now she's moved into the clinic's surrogacy house under medical supervision. She'll earn around $7,000 for carrying the twins". 

14:07

MARIAM KUKUNASVILI: "We make sure surrogate mothers are near delivery hospital from seven months because sometimes delivery occurs earlier from seventh or eighth month, so it's better,

14:17

Mariam

especially if baby delivers premature we need very good hospital with the proper equipment. This cannot be organised in villages".

14:32

Surrogacy clinic house

KISHWAR DESAI: "But they have been brainwashed and because they are so poor. This is the kind of money they will never see in their entire lives. You know, they earn as little as a 1000 rupees a day, 2000 rupees a day.

14:42

Kishwar. Super:
Kishwar Desai
Author

How can they ever hope to say no when something like this comes up and when their husbands are the first ones to say please go out there and have this child because it will make a huge difference to our family. How can she say no?"

15:46

GVs Indian streets

DR NAYANA PATEL: "This is definitely an opportunity. A poor lady who has a dream of living in a house of her own or educating her children and

15:09

Dr Patel

she cannot do anything else. She cannot earn this kind of money and if she gets this opportunity to help some other female and bring a beautiful baby in this earth, for them this is a wonderful arrangement".

15:19

GVs Anand streets

DANIEL: India's surrogacy industry took off from an unlikely setting, a small rural town called Anand about 500 kilometres north of Mumbai. 

DR NAYANA PATEL: "I'm happy that I'm in a

15:32

Dr. Patel's clinic

smaller town where I can devote more time for my practice and my surrogates".

15:48

Photos. Dr Patel/Newspaper headlines

Music

15:53

DANIEL: Local doctor Nayana Patel helped a British couple have twins. The unorthodox procedure drew international attention. 

15:55

Dr Patel walks up stairs to visit surrogate mothers

She's now India's best known baby maker, overseeing about 700 surrogate births.

DR NAYANA PATEL: "If you are just a critic, who feels that a childless should live a life of misery and stay childless throughout their life, or the poor is meant to be remain poor all throughout and should remain poor throughout their life,

16:06

Dr Patel. Super:
Dr Nayana Patel
IVF specialist

then you will consider this as something wrong, as something immoral, a farm, a baby making factory".

16:29

Surrogate mothers

DANIEL: Nayana Patel's surrogacy house is home to about 70 women, some carrying babies for local clients - others for international clients. During their stay, the women become close and as each one's due date arrives, celebrate a traditional baby shower, praying for all to go well. 

16:38

Baby shower ceremony

17:03

Most of these women are uneducated, many from simple rural villages and few, if any, could be described as financially savvy.

17:07

DR NAYANA PATEL: "They do not know what a bank is, how to deposit money, what is the importance of cheque book. Here they get an exposure to the outside world. They gain confidence when they come over here".

17:17

AMIT KARKHANIS: "Yes, the prime motive is money,

17:34

Amit

but what's wrong in helping them? We look at it from the point of view that yes there is someone who needs help, and there is someone who's willing to offer help. 

17:36

Baby shower ceremony

What other options these women would have had?"

DANIEL: Mumbai surrogacy lawyer Amit Karkhanis estimates India's baby-making business has passed the billion dollar mark, with each year better than the last in terms of profits and babies born. The only real restriction came last year when the government imposed new visa regulations on foreigners.

17:46

Kali with Mariam at clinic

Now, surrogacy is restricted to couples who've been married for at least two years. They have to use a registered assisted reproductive technology clinic and provide proof a child born through surrogacy will be accepted by their home country. He still insists it's a win for India's medical sector and for surrogates searching for a path out of abject poverty.

18:16

AMIT KARKHANIS: "So there is a synergy here and I don't see any reason why that synergy should something that is a mystery to me".

18:40

Amit. Super:
Amit Karkhanis
Surrogacy lawyer

Be, you know, looked upon with the prism of ethics and morality. You know, there are a lot of other things that we do which are unethical and immoral, but why only surrogacy is looked upon from that prism - that's something which is a mystery to me.

18:44

Surrogate having examination

KISHWAR DESAI: "If it was a part of a male body which was being used like this, which was being used as a rental space for some other body to be inserted into it, then I think there would have been a very, very different kind of thorough movement you would have seen in India. You know now you're seeing a movement which is just to hush it up

18:57

Kishwar

or it's a win-win situation, it's brilliant, everybody's happy, the woman gets some money, but you know the question I want to ask over and over again - how much is that money? It's a very small amount".

19:19

Tasmania GVs

Music

19:31

KATE TORNEY: "It's quite stressful to sit there waiting, waiting - too scared

19:41

Torneys at home

to pick up the phone because you didn't know what the answer would be and it was going to be all or nothing".

19:45

Tasmania GVs

Music

19:50

Kate on couch crying

DANIEL: In Tasmania, the Torneys have just received word their surrogate's pregnancy has failed.

KATE TORNEY: "When we found out that it was negative I was absolutely distraught. When people say oh you know, move on, be happy with your life, you've got a great son, love him, just carry on where you left off. Of course we love him, but that does nothing to address the deep... the deeper sadness that is always going to be there. 

19:53

Ptolemy

[to son] Sometimes these things just don't work and the lady doesn't get the baby - the baby doesn't grow, okay? But you understand how completely important you are and we're so lucky that you're here with us. So so lucky aren't we? You and me and daddy okay?"

DANIEL: The Torneys had steered clear of India's surrogacy clinics in pursuit of what they considered to be a more ethical arrangement -

20:25

Branches

a direct caring relationship with the woman who would carry their child. 

20:53

Paul and Kate

PAUL TORNEY: "I guess selfishly at the end of the process what we want to get is a child at the end. It's all very well to want to go into the process as ethically as possible, but you know we had to bend a little bit I'm afraid. Is that a bad thing to say?"

20:59

Ptolemy

KATE TORNEY: [to her son] "We're going to think really hard and see if there's another way we can try and do this. Okay we'll think really hard but we just have to get over this one first, don't we?"

21:22

Kate at computer

PAUL TORNEY: "Again, Kate has gone back to the computer and done stacks more research and she's come across another clinic which is in Mumbai this time".

21:32

KATE TORNEY: "There are people who would think that we're crazy to try again

21:43

Ptolemy playing with train set

because of the emotional stress that we would be putting our family under again, but that's

21:46

Kate

a side of me that really wants the end result to happen and knows how positive and how perfect it could be - keeps talking to me".

21:51

Darren

DARREN PINKS: "We'd never considered the fact that we would be exploited. We'd heard and read and were very concerned about surrogates being exploited but it never crossed our mind that we would also be exploited".

22:02

Darren at home with child

DANIEL: With hopes and emotions high, large sums of money in play and little or no transparency it shouldn't surprise that some customers are being stung by predatory practices.

22:13

DARREN PINKS: "The strange thing is that everybody's got the same stories. Nobody had told us before we went into it and it doesn't look like anybody's telling anybody else as they go into it either".

DANIEL: Darren Pinks and his wife have a beautiful, healthy baby daughter now,

22:26

Darren leaves apartment with baby in pram

but a $30,000 surrogacy agreement soon became $50,000 as charges rolled in that just didn't add up.

22:41

Darren and baby on street

DARREN PINKS: "So despite being very lucky in having our daughter born, there were some things that just weren't right,

22:51

Darren. Super:  Darren Pinks

things that the clinic did that we've since found out that not only have upset us, but actually have made us worry that they're doing it to other intended parents".

22:57

Darren at home on computer

DANIEL: The Pinks believe their clinic systemically overcharged them and ordered unnecessary procedures to inflate the bill. They commenced legal action, but withdrew when it became too expensive and too difficult. 

23:07

DARREN PINKS: "There's a certain point where people don't want you to say anything.

23:23

Darren

They don't want you to rock the boat because the fear is if you say something and then there's legislation that prevents other people from actually going through surrogacy, they'd much rather go through a bad experience than no experience at all".

23:27

Sunset/rooftops

SFX:  Baby crying

23:39

Bill and Kali at home with twins

23:44

DANIEL: Bill and Kali Gerakas are getting to know Costa and Christina Gerakas. 

23:59

Bill holds baby Christina

BILL GERAKAS: [to baby] "Hello. Daddy loves you".

24:04

Kali changing Costa's nappy

KALI GERAKAS: Every time I do this he pees himself. Every time I do this he pees Mama.

24:08

"I thought I would cry,

24:15

Kali

but I was just so happy I had no tears. All I wanted to do was hold them and kiss them". 

24:21

Kali picks up Costa

24:26

DANIEL: The twins arrive six weeks early. The Gerakas raced to New Delhi to collect their newborns. Their crash course in parenting is underway in this Delhi hotel.

BILL GERAKAS: "Getting to see them for the first time we were just -- brought tears to your eyes really. And just holding them there.

24:30

Bill

Just amazing the way that they respond to you. You know, to your touch and all, and it's just amazing. Two perfect babies".

24:49

Bill and Kali in hotel with babies

DANIEL: For this couple, India's commercial surrogacy has been a resounding success. 

24:58

Torney home. Ptolemy's birthday

Music

25:06

DANIEL:  For Kate and Paul Torney, it continued to fail. 

25:14

KATE TORNEY: "For the last year Paul and I have been... we've put ourselves through a lot. We've

25:22

Kate

experienced a lot of stress, a lot of emotional ups and downs".

25:30

Ptolemy's birthday celebration

DANIEL: In the months beyond their first unsuccessful pregnancy, the Torneys engaged a surrogacy clinic in Mumbai, but separate attempts with two more surrogates, didn't result in pregnancy either. It's been costly and distressing.

25:38

KATE TORNEY: "And I'm just so glad that we did try, because I feel that even though we haven't had the result that we wanted,

25:57

Kate

we've tried. We've done everything we can possibly do to get that elusive end result and yeah, I've got no regrets about that".

26:04

Kate at home with Ptolemy

Music

26:18

Credits:

Reporter: Zoe Daniel

Cameras: David Leland, Aaron Hollett

Editor: Nicholas Brenner

Graphics: Betsy Baker

Producers: Mavourneen Dineen, Bronwen Reed, Simi Chakrabarti

Executive producer: Steve Taylor

26:26