Surrogacy has become a complicated legal, ethical and social problem in India, especially when the nation is shifting between a liberal business-surrogacy cultures to a highly controlled altruistic culture. During the last ten years, more and more concerns were raised about the exploitation of economically disadvantaged women, the absence of coherent medical legislation, and uncertainties about parentage and citizenship basis, which led to the adoption of laws. The introduction of Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021 constitutes a major change in the reproductive governance, trying to regulate the assisted reproductive activities but at the same time provide ethical safeguard and protection to all the parties involved in surrogacy plans. In the current paper, the author discusses the history of the development of the surrogacy regulation in India; analysing the history of the act, the main points of the legislation, the criteria an intending parent and a surrogate mother should meet to become eligible and the system of institutional control created to guarantee compliance with the new regulations. The paper also discusses the ways the legal system aims at balancing reproductive autonomy with social justice factors, which include the protection of surrogate mums by the way of informed consent, medical examination, and insurance coverage, as well as the legal status and well-being of the children born as a result of surrogacy. Besides, the study emphasizes the influence of judicial interpretation in the development of the application of the surrogacy legislations and especially the rulings of the Supreme Court of India concerning transitional cases and the exposition of the eligibility requirements in the present legal framework. Although these regulatory improvements have been made, the law still has criticism because it is limited in its coverage, excludes some groups, and has implementation problems. Problems like ambiguity of the definitions, the non-existence of enforcing policies, and the threat of unregulated surrogacy procedures are still problematic. In general, this paper describes how the current legal environment can adequately address ethical issues and guarantee reproductive rights and ensure that they are strictly regulated. It also reveals the necessity of the reforms that could be applied in future and make the legal provisions more consistent with the changing values in the society, medical developments and the facts of the assisted reproductive technologies.
Arti Singh (Fri,) studied this question.