Sama, with the support of the Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR), held a national consultation in New Delhi on June 2-3, 2023, titled Assisted Reproduction and Surrogacy: Post-2021 Regulations.
The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, and the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART Regulation) Act, 2021, which went into effect in January 2022, reignited several long-standing concerns about equity, access, exclusion, kinship, and parenthood.
Along with the exclusion of several persons from the eligibility for ART and surrogacy, the Surrogacy Act has sparked debates on several issues including reproductive autonomy, the devaluation of women’s reproductive labour in surrogacy, and its reliance on an altruistic agreement based upon voluntary consent rather than an explicit surrogacy contract, to name a few.
The national consultation brought important stakeholders together to reflect on years of work in this field and discuss the two laws in order to better understand the ongoing challenges and emerging discourses to fair and non-discriminatory access to assisted reproduction. Here’s the consultation report.