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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (May 31, 2017)
May 31, 2017 The Skanner Page 9 News Debate Rages in India on IVF for Women Over 50 By Muneeza Naqvi Associated Press ELLENABAD, India— To see Manjeet Kaur around her little daugh- ter is to see joy at its pur- est. The 15-month-old tod- dles about the sprawling courtyard of her parents’ farm, her oily curls tied up in a top knot, her rub- ber-soled shoes squeak- ing. Kaur’s eyes don’t miss a thing, and they often mist up with tears. Gurjeet is the child Kaur yearned for des- perately, after 40 years of being that thing which a rural Indian woman dreads more than almost anything else — barren. She gave birth at 58 years old, with help from a controversial IVF clinic in this corner of north India that specializes in fertility treatments for women over 50. Such treatments have become more common across the world, and “ “You have no idea how I suffered,” she says of her life before her daughter. “The pain I lived with. I used to work all day, but my nights were spent in tears.” Kaur married her hus- band, Gurdev Singh, when she was 18 and he was just a little older than 20. She simply assumed that children would fol- low marriage, and there was no question of wait- ing. Her new relatives were relatively wealthy Sikh landowners in this corner of Haryana, and they had the means to raise a family and prop- erty to leave to their off- spring. But no children came. She felt worthless. “I asked God why he had abandoned me. I had been a good Sikh, a good person. Then why?” she asks, as she nervously fidgets with the green scarf she uses to cover her almost entirely grey hair. ‘You have no idea how I suf- fered. The pain I lived with. I used to work all day, but my nights were spent in tears’ they strike a cultural chord in India, where a woman is often defined by her ability to be a wife and mother. While there are no reliable statistics for how many Indian women undergo fertility treatments each year at what age, tens of thou- sands of IVF clinics have sprouted up in the coun- try over the last decade. Fertility specialists say pregnancies like Kaur’s are troubling because of the potential health risks and the concern that the parents may not live long enough to raise their ba- bies to adulthood. Legis- lation is pending in In- dia’s Parliament setting 50 as the legal upper age cap. But Dr. Anurag Bishnoi, the driving force behind the National Fertility and Test Tube Baby Centre in Hisar, harbors no such worries. His clinic’s web- site home page is domi- nated by photographs of patients who carried ba- bies to term at ages well beyond what most other doctors anywhere in the world may permit. At least two of his patients gave birth at 70. For Kaur, it’s simple enough. Bishnoi made her belong. With each decade she felt the dream slip fur- ther away. The couple tried IVF twice in their 40s at two separate clin- ics in north India. It didn’t work. A woman in Kaur’s setting, without a child, is an inauspicious crea- ture. Her very presence is often shunned at social gatherings, especially at weddings and birth cer- emonies which celebrate fecundity. “What I suffered you will not understand. People would turn their faces away from us,” she says, wiping away the tears that run down her cheeks, lined by age and years of working in the sun. For the vast majority of married Indian women, the inability to produce a child, preferably a son, can result in the taboo of divorce or abandonment by their husbands. For years Kaur begged her husband to take another wife. “I wanted to marry him off myself. I was willing to do anything for this family. I said to him, this property, this house needs an heir. I haven’t been able to give you a child,” she says, as she walks through the guava trees outside her house, plucking fresh fruit for her visitors. Singh refused. “I said I won’t do it,” says Singh, a short man with a smile constantly hidden behind his flow- ing white beard. “If it’s meant to be, God will give me a child with you. If I marry again, what will happen to you?” They lived, like most rural Indians, with ex- tended family, and Kaur showered all her love on the nephew and niece she helped raise. She says AP PHOTO/ALTAF QADRI Tens of thousands of fertility clinics have sprouted up in the last decade In this Dec. 23, 2016 photo, Manjeet Kaur, left, and her husband Gurdev Singh, right, walk with their daughter Gurjeet Kaur in the compound of their house in Ellenabad, India. Gurjeet is the child Kaur yearned for desperately, after 40 years of being that thing which a rural Indian woman dreads more than almost anything else - barren. She gave birth at 58 years old, with help from a controversial IVF clinic in this corner of north India that specializes in fertility treatments for women over 50. it is perhaps her uncon- ditional love that made God and the Sikh gurus turn her fate around. It was Kaur’s nephew who first heard of Bish- noi, the doctor in the nearby town of Hisar, who had built a pros- perous medical practice and tidy little business empire by helping ag- ing women across north India have children through in-vitro fertil- ization. Read the rest of this story at TheSkanner.com
