FROM ITS POCKMARKED EXTERIOR WALLS and stark interior, you’d never guess that this pink three-storey building a few blocks from the train station houses India’s most successful surrogate childbirth business. But when Oprah Winfrey raved about the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in the fast-growing city of Anand, it became an overnight success. The clinic fertilises eggs, implants and incubates embryos in the wombs of surrogate mothers, and finally delivers contract babies at a rate of nearly one per week.
For the past three to four years, Dr Nayna Patel, Akanksha’s founder, has been the subject of dozens of gushing articles in addition to that game-changing 2007 Oprah segment, which all but heralded Patel as a saviour of childless middle-class couples, and helped open the floodgates for the outsourcing of American pregnancies. Autographed photos of Winfrey are displayed prominently throughout the clinic, which claims to have a waiting list hundreds deep. According to news reports, Akanksha receives at least a dozen new inquiries from potential surrogacy customers every week.
The doctor, clad in a bright red and orange sari, sits at a large desk that takes up about a third of the room. Heavy diamond jewellery dangles from her neck, ears and wrists. Her wide grin projects a mixture of politeness and caution as she beckons me to sit in a rolling desk chair. I showed up here without an appointment, fearing Patel would refuse to see me if I phoned in advance: despite all the laudatory press, in the weeks prior to my visit a spate of critical articles had appeared, focusing on the clinic’s controversial practice of cloistering its hired surrogate mothers in guarded residency units.
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