The Sacred Thread

January 2, 2012
In this rather rosy account of employing an Indian fertility clinic in order to conceive, a San Francisco media specialist constantly returns to the question: is surrogacy an opportunity for Third World mothers or exploitation? Arieff and her lawyer husband were well off, in their mid-30s, and desperate for children of their own after several miscarriages. Fearful of the legal snags of surrogacy in America, as well as the inflated costs, Arieff and her husband enlisted the services of the Oprah-approved Akanksha Infertility Clinic, in the northern small rural town of Anand, Gujarat, run by the charismatic, capable Dr. Nayna Patel. After a round of hormone shots, Arieff and her husband supplied the necessary egg and sperm to be fertilized in vitro and implanted in the surrogate, Vaina, a married mother of three from a nearby rural village. Twins were successfully conceived and over the latter course of Vaina’s pregnancy, Arieff returned to Anand, where the surrogate mothers live at the clinic, and provided gifts and company to Vaina, who showed little ambition to better her life and evidently gave her money and gifts to her husband and brother-in-law. In her breezy, upbeat narrative, Arieff does try to show both sides of the surrogacy equation, depicting the long-suffering, well-intentioned Western women who nevertheless can pay for the “Surrogacy Camp,” and the impoverished, uneducated women under patriarchal strictures that consider surrogacy a form of prostitution. For Arieff, the birth of her healthy girls far outweighed the ethical dilemma.

January 1, 2012
A debut memoir recounting how a San Francisco–based couple became parents with the help of a surrogate mother in India. By age 36, marketing and communications executive Arieff had suffered three painful miscarriages, one of them in the middle of her second trimester. The discovery of large uterine fibroids portended that a successful, full-term pregnancy would be almost impossible. She and her lawyer husband, Alex, looked into surrogacy options, and their research led them to the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in India. Initially Arieff made the trip there solo to undergo several weeks of IVF treatments. Two weeks later, Alex joined her and Arieff's eggs were harvested, fertilized and implanted into the couple's hired surrogate mother, Vaina. A young married mother from a rural village, Vaina spent the next nine months living at the clinic, under a doctor's care and free from the judgments of her neighbors. She planned to use the money, equal to 15 years of salaried work, to buy her husband a taxi and pay for her children's schooling. Writing in the present tense, Arieff chronicles all of the minutiae involved in their choice, including their fears, deep gratitude for and connection to Vaina for birthing their two twin girls ("no matter how far apart we are geographically, Vaina, my daughters, and I will always be connected by this sacred thread"), and the reactions of their friends and family. The author provides a smooth, compelling read that will surely interest prospective parents exploring their options for surrogacy abroad. A personal, optimistic take on a controversial subject.

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October 1, 2011

In San Francisco, thirtyish Arieff despairs of having a child after a miscarriage. In India, Vaina has a husband and three children but not enough money. So they work out something between them. International surrogacy is big business, projected to hit the $2 billion mark in India alone by 2012. A memoir about shared motherhood but also divergent culture; e-blasts will be sent to travel and yoga blogs as well as mommy blogs. And look for an excerpt on Scribd.com. I'm thinking that this could be big.

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