CHILDLESS Britons are travelling to India to hire surrogate mothers willing to undergo medical procedures banned in Britain.

Indian doctors will implant up to six embryos in a surrogate mother’s womb to increase the chances of pregnancy, despite the risks of multiple birth. Current British regulations limit the number to two for women under 40; any more is considered dangerous for the mother and babies.

Fertility clinics in Delhi and Mumbai have reported a sharp increase in British patients, lured to India by the easy availability and low-cost of in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment.

The complete IVF package, including eggs, sperm and a surrogate womb, costs less than £6,000 in India, compared with up to £15,000 in Britain and £51,000 in the United States.

India’s “embryo tourists” are also able to dictate how their surrogate mothers will behave during pregnancy. One British couple, a 35-year-old interior designer and her engineer husband, paid an Indian woman to move her family from Calcutta to Delhi, rented a flat for them and stipulated which foods the woman should eat. Other women are told that they are not allowed to smoke, drink alcohol or have sex with their husbands.

About 10% of surrogate mothers are domestic servants or employees carrying babies for their bosses, while others are lower-middle-class women who want a lump sum to invest for their own children’s education, according to the Delhi IVF and Fertility Research Centre.

Rajni, born in Calcutta but now settled in London with her English husband, chose an Indian clinic because it was cheaper and there were no restrictions on the number of embryos. “I’m 35 and time is running out,” she said.

Dr Anoop Gupta, her consultant, examines 10 foreign patients a month at his small clinic in Delhi, including two or three from the UK.

The doctor defended multiple embryo implants. “Twenty-five per cent of our births are twins and 10% triplets. In India everyone is looking for two babies. So if they have twins straight away, good. We put four, five embryos in, no problem. It is better to put more embryos in at the first attempt,” he said.

Later this month Wendy Duncan, 41, from Lincolnshire, will return to the Mumbai clinic where she carried out an “embryo adoption” to repeat the procedure that saw her give birth to an Indian daughter. She became pregnant after having six embryos implanted.

Professor Peter Braude, head of the women’s health department at King’s College London, described the practice of implanting more than five embryos as “absolute madness”.

“An average triplet is born nine weeks premature and multiple pregnancies can have awful outcomes. Triplets have 17 times the rate of cerebral palsy than a single born child,” he said.

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