COIMBATORE: In an incident that is bound to throw up complex legal, ethical and humanitarian questions about surrogacy, a surrogate mother has been booked by the Coimbatore police for criminal breach of trust and extortion after she allegedly demanded Rs 5 lakh to hand over the baby to its biological father.This is believed to the first such case to be registered in Coimbatore where the medical concept of ‘rent a womb’ is fast catching up.In the absence of a proper legal framework to deal with this controversial case, the police justified booking the woman under provisions of the IPC saying she had demanded an amount in excess of what she had agreed to in a signed contract for surrogacy. Legal implications aside, the development has put the future of the two-day old baby in jeopardy.The surrogate mother Meena (name changed), from Dindigul, had entered into an agreement with the Coimbatore-based Iswarya Women’s Hospital and Fertility Center late last year to rent her womb and carry the child of a doctor. She had agreed to hand over the baby on delivery for a compensation of `1 lakh.Hospital authorities alleged that three months into her pregnancy Meena had opted to cancel the surrogacy agreement and left the hospital.However, her lawyer M V Vijayaraghavan alleged that she was not taken care of properly by the hospital and therefore decided to leave for her hometown when “the hospital coerced her into nullifying the agreement.”On Sunday, Meena delivered a baby boy weighing 2.75 kg at a hospital in Dindigul. But a month ago, K M Balakrishnan, manager of the Iswarya Hospital had lodged a complaint at the Race Course police station alleging that Meena, accompanied by her husband, had visited the hospital when she was nine months pregnant and demanded Rs 5 lakh to honour the agreement. Cadre of a fringe political party had allegedly intervened in support of Meena.Agreeing that this was a complex case, Race Course Inspector T H Ganesh said: “There is no proper law governing this issue. But her act of demanding money in violation of the surrogacy agreement would amount the extortion and breach of trust. We booked the woman and her husband on Monday after we learnt that she had delivered the baby.”According to officer, the baby’s biological father and his wife had come forward to pay up to Rs 3 lakh to get custody of the child, which Meena had rejected.
Comments
0 comment