Quest for baby and donor takes US couple to India
MUMBAI (AFP) — Nicole Brown, a 45-year-old acupuncture physician, will soon take a blood test in Miami that will tell her whether she and her husband, Scott, are expecting their first child.
They won't be the only ones waiting to hear the news.
A 27-year-old woman in Vietnam -- Brown's egg donor -- and the two doctors in this Indian city who implanted the embryo in Brown's uterus are eager to hear the results too.
The Browns are part of a growing number of "reproductive travellers," who look beyond borders for help in starting their families.
Now there are now numerous foreign countries vying to help them -- and no longer through adoption as in the past.
The Browns said failed in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in the United States, where they live, convinced them to give other countries a try, drawing them finally to a clinic in India that treats many foreigners.
"I needed a knowledgeable doctor who would know what he was doing. For a woman of my age the procedures aren't the same as for a younger woman," said Brown, who is originally from Vietnam but grew up in France.
Until recently such travellers stuck to the same continent -- Canadians headed to the United States where egg donors are easier to find since you can pay them, while in Europe, Belgium was a preferred destination.
But with many countries positioning themselves as medical tourism destinations, prospective parents are venturing even further afield, including to India.
For people who have spent much of their life abroad or who are part of a mixed-race couple, such as the Browns, going to more than one country to make a baby does not seem strange.
"I'm a traveller so I'm used to travelling everywhere," said Brown.
She was born three years after the Vietnam War started in 1959 and became separated from her parents, ending up a refugee in France and growing up in an orphanage in a small town outside Lyons.
After stints in Africa and Latin America, she moved to the United States and married Scott, an insurance claims adjuster, who is Caucasian-American.
They immediately started trying for a family, first with IVF because of her age.
But it can take several attempts before a pregnancy takes hold, at a minimum of 10,000 dollars a shot in the United States. Using an egg donor can double or triple the cost.
So they headed to Argentina and then to Vietnam, where Brown found a donor who shared her own ties to the country she left when she was just eight years old.
The Browns decided to go to Mumbai's Malpani clinic -- which they identified on Google -- where in-vitro with an egg donor costs no more than 6,000 dollars.
Like the couple, many foreign IVF patients go to private clinics, making it difficult to know how big a role fertility treatments play in India's nascent health tourism industry, slated to be worth 2.3 billion dollars by 2012.
But the Browns' doctor, who runs a prominent Mumbai fertility clinic along with her husband, said the number of foreigners they see has almost doubled over the last two years.
"There's been a tremendous jump in the last two years," in patients from western countries, said Anjali Malpani. Patients from Africa and the Middle East started coming to her earlier, about six years ago.
In the past 12 months, more than a third of her 166 patients were foreigners, including 33 from the United States and Europe, drawn by a five-fold price difference and the lack of waiting time.
At a time when both ordinary people and celebrities adopt children of different nationalities and races, mix-and-match families with far-flung ties are becoming more and more common.
But with parents raised in different countries, half his -- or her -- genes from a donor and "conceived" in a fourth, this baby might have to ponder more than most when asked where she -- or he -- is from.
It might be a bit complicated, but the Browns say the world is shrinking and the more ingredients the merrier.
"If all goes well, God willing, our baby will be well-travelled," said Scott Brown.
"If everything works out we will bring our child here and tell our child that this is where it all began for us."
