By Kritika Malik
Karan Johar became a single father via surrogacy and soon after small screen personalities Gurmeet Singh and Debina Choudhry adopted two girls from Patna. More people know about this than there are who know about newton’s laws.
But which one of two is a better option? SURROGACY OR ADOPTION? Let’s find out.
Welcome to India; a country of 1.25 billion with sex education for none. The only time we ever talk about parenting, pregnancy, adoption, surrogacy etc is when some celebrity does it.
So I would like to take this golden opportunity, this glorious moment when one of the most famous movie directors and a famous idiot box couple have taken these baby steps (pun intended) that have helped bring a topic like parenting in the trending section.
For those of you who do not know what surrogacy is, I hope you had a pleasant stay under the rock when SRK had his youngest child AbRam.
That was the time the term made its first entry in most of our lives (as I previously mentioned, we talk about it ONLY when celebrity does it.)
Surrogacy is an arrangement where a woman agrees to carry a pregnancy for another person or persons who will become the new born child’s parent(s) after birth.
The embryo is created using the sperm and/or egg of the parents, the surrogate mother only carries the foetus hence the child is genetically related to the intended parent(s).
Celebrities like Aamir Khan, Shahrukh Khan, Tusshar Kapoor (who is a single father) have opted for surrogacy.
On the other hand, everyone is well aware of the concept of adoption. Adoption is the process where a person assumed the parenting of a child from its biological parents by following a legal procedure and transferring all rights and responsibilities.
We have a lot of examples in the Bollywood who have adopted babies like Sushmita Sen, Ravina Tandon, Mithun Da, Salim Khan and Rahul Bose to name a few. Sushmita was just 25 and single when she adopted her first daughter and there were appeals in the court against her but she got full custody of her daughter and it was kind of a revolution, to say the least.
Ravina Tandon adopted 3 baby girls when she was just 21, her daughters are all grown up now and she is a grand mother already.
The basic difference between surrogacy and adoption is that the baby is genetically related to the parent in surrogacy while you may or may now know anything about the child’s background in adoption.
On a totally different note, remember how years ago from today, Indian society was shackled by an evil called the caste system. Well, we haven’t really broken those shackles. Parents avoid adopting because of the uncertainty of a child’s caste, background, etc.
In a country with a population of more than a billion, there are more than 20 million orphan kids. That’s 4% of the total child population in India. To give you an estimate, it’s more than the number of people living in Delhi.
These 20 million children need nothing more than a loving home and care but people are still inclined towards expensive IVFs and surrogacy. Why? All babies are equally cute and equally annoying. You can never estimate how they’ll grow up to be. Most of their development depends on their education, the society and how they are brought up.
Isn’t giving an unfortunate child a life of happiness better than adding to the already exploding population?
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