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.
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