Surrogate Exploitation or Empowerment of Women?

Why is it that empowerment of women should follow a socially acceptable formula? 

Here in India teaching lower income women sewing, making earthen pots and jute baskets and of late teaching them computers is really not empowering them. All these aims at teaching them a particular skill which they may or may not use further to earn a livelihood. They all sound like a Nirmala Niketan course to me (Nirmala Niketan is a women’s college aimed at teaching specific domestic skills to women in Mumbai).

True empowerment of women would mean empowerment of mind. Women should be able to take decisions for themselves, reason what’s good what’s bad for them, safeguard their and their family’s interest, freely bond with other women from different cast and creed to create a network or a support group.

At SI we don’t like to follow any conventional methods, else I guess SI would not have conceptualized and nurtured such great heights at the first place.

AT SI we:

• Facilitate and thus empower women to take bold decisions of doing surrogacy. With all the information received from us the women decides to do surrogacy and then seek to convince their husbands and other family members. 
• All through she thinks of ways how surrogacy will better their lives. 
• She thinks of her family and their children’s future. She makes plans for their children’s future with the money that she earned. 
• At SI we also encourage them to reject us (a certain surrogacy center) if they feel exploited. It is not just we selecting them into our process; they too accept us into their lives.

If it was exploitation, they have many avenues of escape, but they keep coming back, for the trust they have in us…Logically if you feel exploited, will you not want to escape or will you keep coming back for every monthly appointments?… Will u try to get in your sister, nieces, cousins and other close family members into it if you feel exploited?

A Child labor tries to escape...; women sold for flesh trade try to contact social service authorities and want to be rescued…; but here at SI even with having a completely open system, absolutely no confinement the women just keep coming back to us. 

So this has lead me to believe that if some section of the people do wish to name surrogacy as exploitation of poor women, then ok I say its exploitation as in not misuse but exploitation as in development of their curbed potentials and exploitation of their inner needs to make a change to their and your family.

MELISHA KAR

(CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST @ SI)