Associate Professor Sharmila Rudrappa has been traveling to India in the summers, interviewing surrogate mothers about their role in the growing industry of exporting surrogate babies from India.

Dr. Rudrappa is featured in this edition of Contexts in an article entitled: India’s Reproductive Assembly Line.

According to Dr. Rudrappa:

India is emerging as a key site for transnational surrogacy, with industry profits projected to reach $6 billion in the next few years, according to the Indian Council for Medical Research. In 2007, the Oprah show featured Dr. Nayna Patel in the central Indian town of Anand, Gujarat, who was harnessing the bodies of rural Gujarati women to produce babies for American couples. Subsequent newspaper articles and TV shows, as well as blogs by users of surrogacy, popularized the nation as a surrogacy destination for couples from the United States, United States, England, Israel, Australia and to a lesser extent Italy, Germany, and Japan.