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Single man challenges India’s surrogacy law: ‘It’s my right to be a father’

  • Under a new law passed to regulate India’s surrogacy industry, single men and women, live-in couples and same sex couples are excluded
  • Lawyer Karan Balraj Mehta, who wants to be a dad, agrees regulation was urgently needed but says the government ‘went too far the other way’

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India’s surrogacy industry was huge due to its affordability and became known as “the world’s baby factory”. Photo: Reuters

India’s new law against surrogacy is being challenged in the courts – by a single man who wants to become a father.

Lawyer Karan Balraj Mehta, 32, has his family’s support to become a parent via the procedure. Under the new law, passed in December to regulate the hugely successful surrogacy industry, he is ineligible.

Mehta said he fully supported the law when it was passed because surrogate mothers needed to be protected against unscrupulous middlemen, touts, and hospitals out to exploit them.

As a lawyer who practises in the Delhi High Court, he said he understood that this exploitation went unpunished because the women were mostly uneducated, unaware of their rights, and with no group protecting them.

Lawyer Karan Balraj Mehta is challenging a new law passed to regulate India’s surrogacy industry, which excludes single men and women, live-in couples and same sex couples.
Lawyer Karan Balraj Mehta is challenging a new law passed to regulate India’s surrogacy industry, which excludes single men and women, live-in couples and same sex couples.

Many women, desperate for the money, signed contracts without reading them. Others signed nothing at all. On payment day, some were paid less than the amount promised to them.

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