Planes, Trains, and Fertility Clinics |
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JPAGE_CURRENT_OF_TOTAL  Many babies are conceived right in their future parents’ bedrooms, but some couples voyage far from home to get the fertility treatments or third-party help they need to create their families. And now more and more insurance companies are recognizing the savings and picking up the tab. Ritu Sodhi and her husband so longed to become parents, they spent a whopping $200,000 on infertility treatments, and when those didn’t work, planned to invest another $80,000 for an American surrogate. “It was simple for me to get pregnant, but just as easy to miscarry,” says Ritu, the former director of IT (information technology) at The Walt Disney Company in California, who tried from the age of 30 to 38 to carry a baby full term, and experienced eight devastating miscarriages, each time before her 20th week. “Once, we were in the middle of the ultrasound. I could see my baby’s fingers moving. Then, as we watched, the heartbeat slowed, and just stopped completely. I totally lost it. It was beyond heartbreaking.” Because she traveled a lot for her job, she began to work from home, and then finally quit altogether, in case the stress of her job was a factor. But nothing changed. The couple underwent every kind of testing. “All the doctors came to the same conclusion: They didn’t know why I couldn’t carry a baby to term,” she says. It was only when Ritu, then 38, overheard a woman in a store remark, “We now outsource everything to India, even babies,” that she got online and began researching fertility clinics in India, the country of her parents’ birth. Today, Ritu and her husband Deepak are the exceedingly proud parents of 2-year-old son Neel. Using Ritu’s egg and Deepak’s sperm, a young Indian gestational surrogate carried the baby for them at the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in Anand, India. “May God bless my surrogate forever for giving us this priceless gift,” says Ritu. “We were there when Neel came into this world, and I held him for the first time when he was 35 seconds old.” The center’s medical director, Nayna Patel, M.D., made front-page headlines around the world in 2004 when one of her patients, an Indian woman living in Great Britain, traveled to the clinic so that her 43-year-old mother, living in India, could act as her surrogate (and carry her own grandchildren). “In all, with travel to India, the $8,000 the clinic pays to the surrogate, and medical costs, we spent some $25,000, instead of the almost $100,000 it would have been here” says Ritu. “In the U.S., infertility treatments are seen as major profit makers. It’s a big business, and none of the $200,000 we spent was reimbursable by health insurance.” Other couples have mortgaged or sold their homes to pay for costly treatments. |
