Birthstory
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Hey, Molly Webster here. Last week, we had a story in collaboration with NPR's Rough Translation about an amateur network of strangers trying to get abortion pills into Ukraine in the early months of the war. Part two, where we go into Ukraine, that's coming out next week.

In the meantime, I've got a little Radiolab rewind for you. I wanted to play you a story that we did in 2015, so eight years ago, because I've been thinking about it a lot while I've been working on the Ukraine piece. It is also a mix of border crossings and ethics and medical questions and pregnancy and crisis. And it just has a really big heart. It's called Birth Story. Here it is. Wait, you're listening? Okay.

All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Rewind. Hey, I'm Chad Iboomrod. I'm Robert Krulwich.

Oh, Maya Let's Talk? Yeah, do it. Oh, I'm Molly Webster. Yeah. You just graduated. Join the party, Maya. Join the party. And today we have a, I don't know, we have a birth story. We're calling this birth story because that's what it is. We're going to tell you about babies who were very recently born and who one day will turn to their parents and say to them, tell me how I got here. Like, what's my story? And the parents in this case will say, well...

That's complicated. This is one where the kids will hear what you're about to hear and they'll go...

Really? This is a collaboration with a team of reporters in Israel called Israel Story. They are a group of folks who do sort of long-form reporting and storytelling. They've been doing it in Hebrew for three years, and they are in the middle of their first English language season right now. Which we're going to be in. Exactly. And this is two producers that we work with in particular, Maya Kosover and Yochai Metal.

And this story begins with Maya. Okay. It was party. We were all dancing Israeli music in the middle of Jaffa.

It was her birthday, they were at her apartment. And this guy Tal... Tal was dancing with his partner. These are friends of yours? Yeah, Tal is kind of a megastar in the deaf community in Israel because he translates the news in the TV to deaf people, to sign language. Oh wow, so he's like the little guy in the corner of the TV. Yeah. And his partner? Amir. Amir or Amil? Amir. With an R. He's a psychologist that works specially with children that are autistic.

Anyway, they're at the party. So we were dancing all together and then Tal was, oh my God, maybe it's going to be the last party that I'm in because I'm going to be a parent. And not only a parent, I'm going to be a father for three. And then we were like, oh my God, three babies? How is that going to happen? And it turns out how that was going to happen is...

It's a crazy story involving four countries. Three women. Two guys. Three babies, as we mentioned. And planes. Jet planes. Two of them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. At least four languages. Yes. Oh, yes. All that. But we should go back a bit to the beginning.

The first thing that I saw in Tal is his ability to be a father. This is Amir. Really? Yeah. How so? Because he was a good man, you know, he was very gentle and really an adult to build a family. I don't know how to describe it. Mench. Mench, yeah. I think in America it's also called mench. But did you see that like on the first meeting or was this like four months in?

My career is established to work with artistic people and to take notice for every sign of communication and to understand other people and to analyze them, so...

It was really immediate, I say. Let's say after two or three times, you say, okay, I want children. So are you interesting? I wrote a manifesto about my future, what I want to do, what I want to do in my career. It's kind of my vision. And I gave it to him and I said, listen, this is what I want. I...

Sign at the bottom, please. Yeah, it kind of was a contract. It's like, this is what I want. If you want to join me... So let's do it. So let's do it. Intel, what was your reaction to the manifesto? I like it. It looks like someone who wants the future. Did your own parents have any... Either of your parents have any views about that? Saying, don't do, or this is weird. LAUGHTER

Suffice to say, their families did not approve, especially when it came to the idea of them having kids. Now, how to have those kids...

That is a question. Basically, there are two options if you're a gay couple and you want to have kids. There used to be three options. That's Yochai Maital from Israel Story. Here is how he and Maya laid it out for us. Option number one, which is now not as much of an option. You could adopt a kid from a third world country. But he says over the last few years, what happened is that those third world countries figured out who was adopting their babies. And one by one,

They banned it for gay couples. The second option, which is becoming very, very popular in Israel, is sort of the new family. That's what it's called in Hebrew, at least. Sort of getting together with another woman who wants to be a mother but doesn't have a father. And then they do a joint parenthood. They all live in the same house? No, the mother lives separately and it's kind of like divorced parents that get along really well. They sign a contract before the process and everything is like in the contract.

Tal Namir said that early on, they tried this route. Tal got an offer from one of his friends to do the co-parenting. But then I spoke with Tal and I asked him, listen, it's very important for me to have a baby of my own with my sperm. And I said to Amir, I want to try, but I don't care if in the end we have only one baby in your sperm. So it will be my baby first.

I think I was more stubborn about it than Natal. Amir couldn't really explain why it was so important to him, just that it was important to him. But reflecting on it later, Maya from Israel Story put it this way. It's very Jewish and Israeli. I mean, if you are not in the Israeli mainstream, if you are gay or if you are different and you'll have your own baby, it's like a signature of being part of the game, you know?

Whatever the reasons, Amir and Tal talked it over, and then they went back to this woman, Tal's friend who had offered to do the co-parenting. And we asked her if she can obligate us to bring two children, one of Tal's parents and one of my own. In the end, she said no. And at this point, a year had gone by. So then we've decided that maybe the best option will be... Option three is surrogacy. Surrogacy.

Meaning, of course, if you're a gay man, that you take your sperm, take some eggs from a woman, put your sperm and those eggs into the womb of a second woman who carries the baby to term. But surrogacy is illegal in Israel. Only for gay couples, yeah. In Israel, if you're a hetero couple, you can use an Israeli woman as a surrogate. But if you're gay, you can't. So there's a big problem, but that problem also creates a big demand.

As you can imagine, there are quite a lot of gay couples in Israel. And so the companies sprang up, basically offering international brokering of sperm, eggs and ovaries. Babies outsourcing.

You can see this play out every year at these conferences in Israel. Conferences where they get prospective parents together. We are here for our first time in Tel Aviv. So it's this big room of people. Several hundred people. Pretty much all gay men. Pardon me for not being able to speak Hebrew very well. Or at all. Shalom. Basically what happens at these conferences is that surrogacy agencies will get up and basically sell their products. We now offer surrogacy in...

Mexico. Thailand. Panama. The United States. India. Anybody been to Fort Worth? Very nice place. You can go see a basketball game. You can go see a baseball game. These agencies will find women in all of these places who will serve as the surrogate for your child. And depending on which country you choose and whether or not you provide the donor eggs or

they do or a million other factors, the costs will vary. We offer very competitive prices. For example, $36,000 complete start to finish in Mexico, $38,000 in Thailand. Anywhere from $65,000 to $85,000.

That's excluding the donor, of course, but we have a good selection of donors, including Jewish donors as well. Yeah, we have sessions with the lawyers, you have sessions with the families, you have sessions with doctors. Tel Namir went to two of these conferences, successive years, and coming back from the second one... We take a calculator and start to think how we can make it.

Raising money, money, money. They figure if they go with a company that does surrogacy in the US... It's probably going to cost...

$150,000 or... Is that lawyers and... Lawyers, the hospital... Spur delivery, the egg donor. There is a lot of people that we need to pay. And he says, keep in mind, when you pay that money, you are not guaranteed a baby. You buy a process. Yeah. We don't buy a baby. One of our friends did this kind of process and they spent five times and they still didn't succeed. Five times? Yeah. They figured with that kind of risk...

doing it in the U.S. was just too expensive. And so they started looking at surrogacy agencies which operate in India and Nepal. Because over there you can do the same thing and it will cost you about $60,000. So it's almost half price. Almost a half price, yeah. Now...

One of the tricky things, according to Ghekhai, is that in 2013... India basically outlawed surrogacy. For gay couples. I mean, if you are a straight couple, you can do surrogacy in India. But not if you're gay. Also in Nepal, by the way, Nepal also outlawed surrogacy. Effectively, the cabinet said, if you are a Nepali woman, you cannot be a surrogate, period. But there's sort of a loophole.

Indian women are allowed to be surrogates in Nepal. Just Nepali women aren't allowed to be surrogates in Nepal. So what ends up happening is this really strange situation. It looks like a puzzle. These agents in northern India will find Indian women, move them across the border into Nepal, take them all the way to Kathmandu, where the surrogacy agencies have set up shelter houses and work with local hospitals and clinics.

Maya says for Tal and Amir, the decision to do it this way was not easy. They had like different opinions. Tal had a bigger issue with the moral concept of this process. Amir was like, this is the thing that we need to do. I want to be a father. But Tal... Tal was... It was very hard for him. I thought if it's a moral to do things like that, to use...

Is it immoral because you're essentially like just using a woman's body or? Yeah.

He felt like he's using other people's bad luck for his own good. She has no choice. She's not doing it out of freedom. She's just doing it for the money, and maybe it's not morally okay that we'll use this weakness. Tel Namir went back and forth on this for months, and eventually the argument that won the day was this.

That if they're going to do it, they're going to do it with this agency called Lotus, which, to their understanding, paid the surrogates $12,000. I mean, the surrogates were actually paid in Indian rupees, but that would be the dollar equivalent. $12,000. Now, for a rural woman in India, that is a massive sum of money. They figured this won't just help her survive. It will change her life. She'll be changing their life and they'll be changing hers. Maybe this was...

Kind of comfort. Yeah, they get money, they can change their life. They can buy a house, they can send their children to school, to learn in the university. When I thought and understand it will be life changer and it's not exploiting her, so I agree.

It's the start of the whole process. One of the main issues was to pick the egg donor. And like, who are these women? Like, where do they come from? Ukraine. They're from the Ukraine. They're all Ukrainian. That is not a country I expected to be thrown into the mix of countries. The reason the eggs are from Eastern Europe are generally because they're white. So it's like cheap white eggs. Cheap white eggs. That's quite a phrase.

So you have like a website and you see a lot of pictures of women. And then you need to choose the most... It's like J-Date? Yeah. Jewish online dating service. Yeah, I think it was the most straightish act that I did in a very long time. Oh, straightest. Oh, because you're picking out a lady. Yeah. How did you decide which criteria you wanted in a donor mom? Oh, God.

The first one was height. You wanted someone tall. Yeah. Why? Why was height your first one? Because it's more easy to live when you're high.

Yeah. Okay. Then eyes. She has these big eyes. They showed Maya a picture. Light brown hair. And she has this nice nose. It was, you know, very strange. It was very uncomfortable to choose. For me, it was very... How do you say it in English? Like a genetical... Like improving... Oh, you sound like you're doing like a eugenics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eugenics. Huh.

Now, since Telamere had each wanted a baby with their own sperm, they told Lotus... We would like to rent two wombs, one of each sperm, and to try to use, like, two surrogate mothers. Lotus said, fine, that's going to run you... About $50,000, $60,000 each pregnancy. Again, no guarantees. So...

Tal and Amir, they give Lotus their sperm in little cups. Lotus freezes the sperm, sends it to a hospital in Nepal. The Ukrainian woman, the egg donor, has flown to Nepal. Her eggs are harvested somewhere along the way. Two North Indian women are moved across the border into Nepal. Finally, the doctors at that Nepali hospital take the Israeli sperm, inject it into the Ukrainian eggs, create some embryos, and they implant those embryos in the wombs of the Indian surrogates. Four countries, one baby.

A few months go by, they get the news that both surrogates are pregnant. The process worked. One is pregnant with twins, three babies in all. They're sent sonograms, pictures of the surrogate's pregnant bellies. I all the time look on the picture of her, all the ultrasound pictures, all the time looking on my cell phone in the picture. Gastel says there wasn't really much he could do because for three or four or five months, not much happened. Until...

Six months in. Six o'clock in the morning. Six o'clock in the morning. Dana from Lotus called us and Amir was answering the phone. And I hear him say, okay, they are okay. I wake up and say, what? Because it was too early. Too early. How early? About eight weeks ahead. Wow. The surrogate who was carrying twins had given birth. I was crying a lot.

This is the surrogate carrying Tal's baby, which turned out to be two babies. Yeah. Were you on the plane the same day as getting that call? Day after. We fly from Tel Aviv to Istanbul and from Istanbul to Kathmandu. It was very crazy day. Then Gil... This is one of Tal's friends who was also in Nepal for surrogacy. Took me to the hospital and... Wow. I was shocked.

Because Gilly was so tiny. Gilly was 3.8 pounds. His brother Yuval, 4.8 pounds. And I was very scared to touch him.

He says he expected the twins to stay in the hospital for a month, but the nurses were like, nope, going home tomorrow. I thought I don't have enough time to think because I understand tomorrow I need to take them home and to be alone, and I never take care of inner babies. So I said to the nurses, teach me how to feed them. And after three days, I took them home.

So where was the surrogate during these days? Was she at the hospital? I think she was in the hospital, yeah. Because she had a caesarean surgery. I was asked if she's okay and if she needs something. They said you cannot see her until she signed all the papers and then you can see her.

The papers hadn't been signed. Yeah, because we need that she's giving up all her maternal rights. And if she doesn't want to sign on this paper, we can lose the baby.

The laws on this get crazily complicated, but basically they needed Israel, India, and Nepal to all recognize that they were the uncontested parents. And hanging in the air was a recent case in Thailand, which is all over the news, where the surrogate, after the baby was born,

changed her mind. Lake and his husband believe the surrogate decided to try and keep the baby because she found out they were gay. We had a little bit of an anxiety, let's say, if they were going to know that the baby is going to grow in a house with two dads. Yenike Stahl is in Nepal with the twins. Amir is back in Tel Aviv. A couple weeks go by and then...

Tal called me and said, Mazel Tov, you're a dad. The second surrogate had given birth. One baby. And the day after, Tel Aviv to Istanbul. And from Istanbul to Katmandu. And then it was very, very, very nice that we went. Only us with the babies. No parents, no friends, no phone. No phones, no work. To build the first...

blocks of our relationship with the babies. And for the next month, they lived in an apartment in Nepal, just them and their three babies. Learning to be dads. And waiting for the paperwork to be done.

Now, the paperwork, incidentally, is a beast because after the surrogates sign away their rights, the babies have no nationality. And then they're suddenly illegally in the country. So then the guys have to take a DNA test, send it to Israel, get it verified. Then they've got to get a passport for the babies. Then several sets of visas need to be gotten. And all of that means multiple trips to the Israeli embassy. And it was on one of those trips that the surrogates

that they learned something it was really weird because we went over there with our kids to get the passport and over there there was another surrogate from a different agency an indian woman and standing next to her was an israeli woman who happened to speak hindi and we just like you know out of curiosity we asked her to ask the surrogate in hindu a

How much is she's getting? For the whole process. Yeah. But the surrogate was very shy. Yes. Not very delighted to speak about the money. Which made them even more curious, so they persisted. And then we discovered that she gets only 3,000 US dollars or something like that. 3,000 dollars for the whole pregnancy. Amir was like,

Wait a second. In the agreement, $12,500 supposed to go to the surrogate. That was at least his understanding. Now, this was a different woman from a different agency, and this was just one woman's account, but still. In your narrative, you've described that you thought that the reason that this was okay to do, the surrogacy, is because you were, the phrase used is, this will make a change in the life of the woman that we're paying. Yes, a life-changing sum of money.

Sumaya says they walked away from that meeting... Wondering if they should do something in Israel. You know, call the agency at the very least, say, hey, we heard some rumors, I'm sure they're not true, but what do you think? We started to ask questions, but then... Literally the next day... Horrendous scenes of death and destruction from Nepal today, after a powerful earthquake that started outside Kathmandu... A really big head of earthquake. And every pole are moving like that...

The death toll is now over 5,800, nearly 14,000 were injured. Officials say it is the most destructive earthquake to hit Nepal in more than 80 years. The death toll would ultimately rise to somewhere between 7 and 10,000.

Maya says she was in New York in a meeting, and she gets this voicemail from Tal. And he was shouting, an earthquake just happened here. We saved the babies, and we got down to the street. We're half naked. We don't know what to do, and he's crying over there. And then it suddenly stopped. He lost the connection.

It was like 12 hours with no connection to them. We didn't know if they're alive or not. You know, everything was...

Amir says they ran out of the apartment, down the street, half naked, holding the babies and the phone. On the way, they ran into their friend Gil, who had four babies, another couple who had two babies. We are in this street and we are nine babies. They actually shot a video on Tal's phone. You see Tal only in shorts.

A bunch of other couples holding babies, and they're all literally standing on a pile of rubble. As they're standing there, a guy with a badge walks by. You're a policeman? Ah, no. You're from the American embassy? Yes. We are Israeli citizens. We have here nine babies. We need help, please. We don't have food for the babies. Thank you. We need to go out from this place very quickly. To go out from here. Thank you. Ah! Ah!

So they took us in to the embassy. The U.S. embassy? No, the Israeli embassy. They went to the Israeli embassy and the Israeli embassy sort of went into emergency mode. They gave us some blankets and they put out tents and

And shortly after, the news cameras arrived. And Tal... Tal is, he's like in the media and stuff because he's the sign language translator. And so he realized that he doesn't have any way of communicating back home that he's alive. So Yechai says Tal shoved his way in front of one of the television cameras and started signing. Twelve hours after the earthquake... Maya says she got a call from her partner back in Tel Aviv. And she said...

They are on the news now. I can see Tal speaking sign language to his parents, saying everything is okay, they are alive, the three babies are with them, and they are waiting for the rescue team to come and take them. But what the cameras also captured was this scene...

that hadn't really been grasped yet. So this whole thing has been going on kind of quietly. Now you have an international earthquake. Everybody's watching the television. And in the middle of the story, there are like 10 Israeli babies and gay people. It was a lot more than 10 babies. Yeah, it was like 24 babies. 24? 24?

Yes. Whoa. Because there is another agency that also... It's like all of a sudden you realize there's this pipeline of babies... Yes. ...moving from Nepal to Israel. Yeah. Yeah.

Maya says when the images of those 24 babies splashed across Israeli TV screens. It was like the first time that surrogacy was discussed in the Israeli media in such a way. She says a huge debate broke out. One side of the argument was, OK, we are using women and it's un-moral.

And from the other hand, there was like, okay, in Israel, for gay couples, they don't have a lot of choices, I mean. And everyone was asking, what do we do with all these babies and the surrogates? There was like a huge argument in the Israeli media about the questions of there are women that are waiting to give birth and we need to bring them to Israel to give birth here because the fathers are here. So they would fly the women to Israel, have the baby and then fly them back? Yes, yes. They were stuck about.

Yeah, they talked about it, but I don't know. I think that legally they could not do that. Well, because that just, it feels like kidnapping a lady. Yeah. And so what happened was that very quickly Israel sent over a search and rescue and medical aid delegation. And all the babies and their parents. They were basically just all put on a plane and sort of the process was expedited and they just brought everybody over to Israel.

Back in Israel, a parade of newborns. They will celebrate together, knowing the medical stress they've been through and very much aware that many in Nepal are still going through it. So what happened to the surrogates?

Any idea? They checked with the agency what is the situation with the surrogate mothers and the answer was that two of them are back in India already and they weren't there in the earthquake. And what about all the surrogates who were in Nepal but hadn't given birth yet? Yeah, I mean, about them, there's a big question. I mean...

No one knows there were like worried fathers in Israel. It's terrifying. All my thoughts, all my prayers are for the surrogate mother and for the unborn child. Tal and Amir made it back to Israel with their babies. They were fine, but there were still a lot of questions. And if I were one of you guys, I would still be wondering, after all, both of these women gave you, as you point out, a remarkable gift.

Both of you believe that you hope, rather, both of you hope that that gift was well rewarded and was life changing. But both of you don't know at this point, you're just a little suspicious that maybe it wasn't.

And don't you have this funny feeling that you need to find out whether they got paid what you thought you'd paid them? Yes. Like, this is why we're so glad that we made the connection with you guys and we heard that you can... Find them, maybe. Yeah. So?

We started kind of a whole new leg of the story. Hello? Hello? Hi, Molly. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Ooh, I hear some other things, too. Oh, what do you hear? Actually, it might just be static on the line, but it kind of sounded like the ocean. I'll just switch off the fan. Just give me a second.

Our producer, Molly Webster, was able to track down a reporter in India, Nilanjana Bhaumik, and she asked her if she could find those surrogates. Okay, so you had given me a name, right? Lotus, yeah. Lotus. Lotus has a representative in Nepal. I actually called that person in Nepal.

And they did tell me, you know, the location of the clinic. And I spoke to the doctor and she said that, yes, I will put you in touch with one of the surrogates. And the next morning we were supposed to touch base again. But then, you know, she just totally went incommunicado. That's when the same day I opened my mail and there was a mail from Israel, you know, them asking me like, just like to stop the search for some time. And I was like, I was so near them.

As far as we understand what happened was that the doctor contacted Lotus. Lotus contacted Tal and Amir saying, "Call off the reporters. You're putting these women's lives in danger. If someone in their village sees a reporter hanging around, they'll know those women were surrogates. That's not something these surrogates want people to know. Stop." Here's my understanding, and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, is that we had asked someone to look for them, and that person got kind of close, and then word got back to the agency, and that's created some pressure.

for us to change. And, you know, that's really what we're sort of staring at right now is how to respond. We heard that there is a real threat on their life because of the culture of the society that they live in. One of them was Muslim. I don't know if the Muslim society is going to accept the fact that she carried the pregnancy to a gay couple and... To Israelis. And to Israelis. Yeah. So that's a very...

very weird, very delicate situation. We don't want anything that may hurt the surrogate. Well, I mean, we want to tell this story. We definitely don't want anyone to get hurt, but I do feel like we have an ethical obligation to hear from the women who do this.

if not the specific women in this case, then people who represent their experience to whatever degree it can be represented. It would feel wrong for that to be a voice that we don't hear. I don't know. It's like...

For us, we don't want that anybody will contact our surrogate. And if it says that it's not going to be without a story, so let's be it because it's not worth it for us. Okay, understood, understood. We won't make any further attempts to contact those two women. Yeah, yeah. Just so we're all clear, I think what I'd like to do is to continue to pursue people who have been in similar situations but are not in any way connected to those two women or to you guys.

Okay. I mean, again, we need to only make sure that nobody's going to be hurt. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's where we left things with Tal and Amir. And then the story changed a lot. That's coming up.

Hey, I'm Jed Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. I'm Molly Webster. This is Radio Lab, and we will return now to our collaboration with Israel Story, producers Maya Kosovar and Yuchai Maital. The story of Tal Namir and their three babies. Now, that's how it started for us. It was a story of two guys trying to have some kids.

But around the point of the earthquake, the story really shifted for us. I mean, as it did for the entire world, really. Because we've been concentrating the tale so far on the fathers, but with 24-some-odd babies, that's an awful lot of women. Who had to carry those babies. So what could they be thinking? What is the story about them? How were they feeling about this transaction, this...

How much are they getting? Will it actually change their life? These are some of the questions we had. We gave those questions to Molly and she sort of ran with it. Yeah. Yeah. So in the months after the earthquake, I guess you could say the like the political situation in Nepal changed. How everyone started looking at surrogacy changed. Once everyone saw these pictures of all these babies outside the Israeli embassy being put on airplanes and sent back to Israel, it just cracked open this huge debate, not just back in Israel, but in Nepal and India, even internationally. Yeah.

And basically, you had groups coming out and saying, like, you know, the feminists were saying this is exploitation, and we're just using these women for their wombs. And there were op-ed articles about should we be shifting women across borders? Is this the way you want to do surrogacy? And then sort of the next thing that happens is...

like three weeks after we talked to Tal and Amir, is that Nepal actually decided to ban surrogacy. Completely. Completely. For both same-sex couples, foreign couples, local couples, and for Nepali women couldn't do it, and Indian women couldn't come into their borders and do it. No more surrogacy, no more loopholes. No more surrogacy, no more loopholes. But then the confusion was that they banned surrogacy, but there were still pregnant surrogates on the ground.

And so they sort of existed in this gray zone. And in the midst of that was when we went out to try and find surrogates.

In Nepal, all the surrogates are kept in what are called shelter houses, which are just like houses that agencies rent out that have a lot of pregnant women. Even though this is banned, they still have these houses. Yes, they still have the houses. The rumors are that they move the houses further away from the city center, like attract less attention. And so we found a Nepali reporter... I'm Prikuti Rai, and I'm a freelance journalist based in Kathmandu. ...to go try and get into one of these shelter houses. ♪

So the shelter house is actually quite far from the main city center. Almost half an hour or 40 minutes drive from Kathmandu. It's on a hilltop because these are the outskirts of Kathmandu where new settlements have just started. It was actually a school building which they turned into a shelter because I think the school had left after the earthquake.

The moment I reached the first floor, I was so surprised. It was very noisy, a lot of children playing around. And it turns out a lot of women bring in their young children if they're too young to be left alone. Really? Yeah. And how many women were there? There were around, I think, 20 or 22 women there. 20 or 22 women on the first floor of this building? Yeah.

This shelter house was run by another Israeli agency, so not Lotus, but a different one. And we're guessing that most of the women were carrying babies for Israeli couples. And at least the women I saw who were outside the room or who had their doors open, they seemed to be around 30 to early 40s. Really? Yeah. I mean, the first time I saw, I saw the first woman I talked to. How old are you? Me?

She was wearing like a mustard color sari. She had some bangles. All the women had some bangles in their hands. She said she was 36 years old. From Kolkata. She has two girls. Brikudi asked, how old are your girls? And she said 8 and 12. So we have to give them a proper marriage. We don't have money, so what can we do?

And then Burkuti asked, like, why are you doing this? And the woman said, oh, I'm doing it for them. It's because, you know, we have a lot of financial problem. My husband is a rickshaw driver and we don't make enough. She worked as a maid in Delhi.

And ultimately, she said she had no other way to raise money for her daughters to get married because... In Hindu weddings, the bride's family pays off the groom in the form of a dowry. And the plan was to use the money from surrogacy for the dowries. She'd been in Kathmandu for three months, so she was in her first trimester. And when Bharkuti asked her...

Does she know who the baby is for? She said no. But she knows it's not hers. And actually, all the women that Prakuti talked to were very, very clear about this. This is a job.

30 years old, also a maid in Delhi, also two daughters. She had just given birth, and she put the job sentiment pretty plainly. So she said, and I'm translating here, I will give gladly.

I will give the baby from my womb. If I will think this is my baby, then how will it work? I have two children. I cannot take this child home. I will have to give. I have no sadness, no problem.

Anytime Brikuti asked these women, are you conflicted? Will you have trouble giving the baby up? She always got the same answer. They all said that we would happily give away the child. And one of them even said, If the baby comes out right now, I'll just give it right away. And then she laughed. Did you get a sense that these women didn't want it known that they were doing this? I mean, some of them did and some of them didn't.

Because some women were like, they said, like, now that I'm here, my neighbors, my family, everyone knows. And then when Rukudi asked her, you know, did they have an opinion? Is it right or wrong? She answered, no. I'm here for the money. So I would not listen to any opinions. If it was wrong, I would not come here.

But some of them were like, why would I tell anyone? There was one particular woman, 32 years old, very cheerful, nail polish on, and she had this pink lipstick on. She said, people in my village simply do not believe these things, that one can have children by getting injected or taking medicines. They won't believe this. She kind of drew parallels with

how some of the people in a village had done something similar when they bred cows or fishes. She said, like, maybe they'll understand, but my family will not understand. She says, I have told lies to them. So how much in the end do they make? How much money do you get here? I talked to four women and the figure was the same. I get 3.5 lakhs. I get 3.5 lakhs. I get 3.5 lakhs.

3.5 lakhs. What does that mean in dollars? So if you do the conversion today, it's 5,300 U.S. dollars. And the way it works is that they get paid a small amount of money every month that they're pregnant, and then at the end, they get a lump sum.

Brikudi says that for these women, at the end of the pregnancy, that lump sum... Is like, let's say, around $2,000 or $3,000. Which is the amount that Tal and Amir heard outside the embassy. The total sum that they have when they go back home is quite, you know, it's not a lot. So $5,000 is what you're hearing? Yeah. Wow, that's a difference. To sort of see if this was a number that was just coming out of that shelter house, or if it was something that was like the going rate, I guess, uh...

We talked to six surrogates who were in India. That same rate, around $5,000, kept coming up. And we did hear a range from one surrogate, and this was about a friend of hers. We heard as low as $1,000. A surrogate getting only $1,000 for a pregnancy? Yeah. Hello? Hello?

Hello, this is Jerusalem calling. Hi. This is New York answering. Ultimately, we took this information back to Tal and Amir because this was originally their question. Yeah. So let's talk about the money part now. All right. So the last time we talked to you, you thought you were paying your surrogates $12,000. Yes. Around-ish.

We've been off reporting and it seems like the number that's coming up most consistently for what surrogates are reporting as their rate is 5,300 US dollars. What? I need this first team, I'm sure. Wow. It's too low. It's too low. Really? Yeah. I want to cry.

We explained to them that if you actually look at the contract, the line that looks like it's payment straight to the surrogate doesn't actually say this is payment for the surrogate. It says this is payment to surrogacy services. And it's sort of like once you add in that second word, it opens the door to all kinds of things. She's getting less than half. It's very, it's like, we feel like suckers. So who get the money? So who got the money?

That question, it hung in the air for a few weeks until... I have around seven minutes before I go into something. I'm just in my car now. I was finally able to talk to Donna McDossie, who is the head of LOTUS, which is the agency that Tal Namir used in Nepal. She had just, the morning I talked to her, she had just flown in from Nepal to Israel, and I caught her in a car on her way back to the airport, and she was going to fly off to Australia. And I asked her, how much do the surrogates actually get paid? I

She's saying she has no idea. And the reason she has no idea is because...

She said this and other agencies I spoke to said this, is that when you're working on the ground in foreign countries under the umbrella of surrogacy, you are dealing with a lot of middlemen. And the middlemen have middlemen and there are sub-middlemen, the people who find the women in India, who get all the paperwork done, who get them to the border, who get them over the border, who then bring them to Nepal. Someone meets them in Kathmandu, gets them to the shelter house. And all those people...

They need to get paid. I truly can tell you that I truly don't know after the agent, you know, how much the surrogate they have in their hand. We don't come and ask the agent exactly how much goes for her compensation, exactly how much goes for her allowance. We don't go into that. I can tell you that. Well, I guess I was thinking about I would feel conflicted as the head of an agency to be like, I

I think the money is going to some people, but I just don't know. Like, I think that would niggle at me. Yeah. Well, that's a good thing that you're doing what you're doing and I'm doing what I'm doing. Because, you know, you can't look at the whole world and say, okay, I'm going to make it brighter. I cannot deal with all the problems in the world. We are trying to give them as much as possible. We pay the money for everything.

This woman gets life, and now we understand it's not exactly like that. It's not right. I think the deep question here underneath, after everything is over, is when we do a generous thing, like we give people families who couldn't have families before, but that becomes a business, is there something about the business of making a family that...

is always going to be a little troubling and there are no perfect ways to do this or is there a way to pull this off in some I just don't know I mean like I still have three more embryos that they're in the freezer in Nepal I don't know if the next time I would not do the process maybe in the state

The U.S. is like an entirely different surrogacy scene, which we're just not going to get into here. But the interesting thing that Donna said and a head of another agency was that they think that in the next five to ten years, the U.S. will be one of the only countries where surrogacy is still happening. Things are closing down. Most of the things are closing down.

So obviously Nepal has a ban, Thailand. It looks like in a few days after this piece comes out that India may ban it for foreigners. Cambodia, there's rumors that they're about to ban it. And even in Canada, there are talks of new restrictions on surrogacy. And these are bans like not just for same-sex couples, but hetero couples, single people, everybody. Oh, wow. And the main reason for all these bans and restrictions is worries about exploiting women? Yeah.

I feel weird about that a little bit, though. Because? Because if you're trying to... As we heard, these women are making a business decision. Whether or not we agree with it as an entirely separate thing, they seem like they're making a decision. Then we're going to take it away in order to protect them feels... I don't know. It's funny because at times it also feels...

You just think like, okay, these women can decide how they're going to use their own bodies. Right. It's a little bit like the abortion debate in a way. It totally is. But by the same token, it's not wrong for a society to say, hey, there are certain things we just won't allow. We won't give you that choice because we find that the choice itself is –

is wrong. I mean, it's fair, but like one of the arguments against banning it is that there's still a

for surrogacy and that that's not going to go away. And so it just pushes the system underground. And so... And that way it's a lot like abortion. And then that way it's a lot, you know, shadier. Yeah. But the other thing was is that then Brikuti actually went and talked to the women about like what this job does for them. Like, okay, so it's not...

the crazy amount of money we thought it might have been. It's $5,000. Like, what does that do for you? One woman said... That, you know, when I get this money, I'm going to go back home and start something on my own. Start a small shop. You know, my own little enterprise. The other women? All of them wanted to use this money to build a house. Buy some land.

Can you buy a plot of land in New Delhi for five grand? You definitely cannot get a plot of land in New Delhi for five grand. But what these women do is they take the money and they go back to their original village and they use it there to buy a small plot of land. And that's totally doable. And it's actually no small feat. Having that ownership of land is so important in our societies in South Asia. Once you own land in South Asia, it raises your socioeconomic status. It's something that's passed down through generations. So you're like creating something for your family.

And if you're one of the women that maybe already have land, the thing you can do with that $5,000 is build a house on it. Let's say a very small, like a mud house or, you know. Keep in mind, like these women, their day jobs are all made, right? And so they make less than $100 a month. They said they had it not been for this, I mean, they would have never, I mean, probably never earned this much money at a single chance.

But more than that, like, when you go into this, or at least when I went into this, the thing that I expected to see was like, okay, these are poor, desperate women that are being forced into this. Like, right, they've been dragged across the border. I think the thing that I was surprised to see when I looked at the transcripts was that even though these women don't have a lot of options, and yes, they are poor, they had chosen to do this.

Out of the limited options that they had, they looked at them all and they thought, like, this is the thing that I'm going to do to get what I want. It felt like these women were making a choice. I asked them...

Like, why would I do that? She says that here the kids can come, their husbands can visit. The surrogates get good medical care. And for those whole nine months, they're sending money back home.

And back home, there's one less mouth to feed. I think, you know, we, I mean, the way we pass judgment, you know, you just pity on these women. But I think they are very aware of what they're doing. They might be exploited to some level, like you said, but it seemed like the women are, in some ways, they are in charge of deciding how they want their life to be. And we don't have to look at them with pity.

The last woman that Burkudi spoke to, she was a 32-year-old woman from Darjeeling. She spoke in Nepali, and she told Burkudi, I came here in March.

My embryo transfer was done once, but I don't know if it was due to the earthquake or something else, but it didn't get heartbeat and it got washed. She said that she lost the fetus in two months and they tried it twice on her. Prakuti, how did you feel when the child got washed? Surrogate. I felt bad. What to say?

It felt like it was my own. And they won't give money if it's unsuccessful. Wow, wait. I'm like, I didn't know. If you miscarry, you don't get paid? Yes, yes, yes. She says it's treated like a business. You get paid for every month you successfully carry money.

And if you do lose the baby, depending on where it is in the pregnancy, part of the money is refunded to the intended parents.

Surrogate. Most of my friends had successful stories to share back in Delhi. Some of my friends made a house with the money. Some bought land. I felt good. She basically says she wishes she had done this earlier because now with the ban, she was being sent back to her village. She was still weeping a little of what could have been if she was

You know, if the eggs were healthy enough, if her health was all right. For Kuti, will you come again if this opens back up and try again? Surrogate. Yes, I will come. Producer Molly Webster. There's something on your face that says we're not quite done here. No, we're done. We're done. We're done. No, no, no. Say what's on your mind. Well, I'm just thinking. I'm thinking about...

All the different ways we've thought about this story along the way of making it. I mean, you can read it as like this is a story about the business of family making, the outsourcing of babies. You can hear it as a story about exploitation. All these different things are happening in this story. They are. But it occurs to me that this is also a story about the inventiveness of people.

In some weird way. You mean, what do you mean by that? I guess what I mean is, like, the way that cultures will cross-fertilize in these really unexpected... That's true. These are two sets of needs that are sort of reaching out and fighting each other half a world away. And there's a kind of symbiotic benefit, even while it's troubling and maybe unfair. But it's still kind of there.

And like, so I feel like we could talk about this story in any number of ways, but I also feel like one of the things that's happened here is this is a story about dreams and about aspiring to have a better life and how, in this case, those aspirations meet in this really uncomfortable transaction. Yeah. Well, let's thank people. That's what we should do next. Let's thank them. Yeah.

So many people. Okay. Well, first we should begin by thanking Posse at Israel Story and Maya Kosever. We have just... We went in deep with those guys for this story. They are in the middle of their first English language season, which is happening right now. Check them out. It's really cool stuff at prx.org and israelstory.org. What was the one you were just telling us about? Oh, I love this one. There's a story that they did last season in which they went...

to every town in Israel that has a Herzl Street. Herzl's like the George Washington of Israel. They all have Herzl Streets. They knocked on 48 because Israel was found in 48. They go, knock, knock. Who's there? And they open the door and they interview whoever's on the other side of the door. It's just a wonderful, cool idea and they get to meet a

A crazy quilt of Israelis. Yeah. Well, huge thanks to the Israel Story team and to Barry Finkel. Yes. And to our reporters in India, Nalangina Bomek, and in Nepal, Burkuti Rai, and the International Reporting Project for connecting us with porters and translators in different countries. We talked to a lot of agencies for the Story Surrogacy Agency. Special thanks to Doran Mamet and Dr. Naina Patel. To our translators, Tome Wasserman, Aya Keith, Karthik Ravindra, Turner Ray Franz, and Adhikar, which is a Nepali community organization out of Ridgewood County.

Queens, and thanks to Ivan Zimmerman. And for music, special thanks to Naz Jiwa and to the Balkan Beatbox. We had production help for this story from Andy Mills, and this piece was produced and reported by Molly Webster. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. I'm Molly Webster. Thanks for listening. Oh, one last note. We should tell you that Tal Namir did meet their surrogates

Very briefly, one time. And it's kind of a cool moment. We couldn't figure out where to put it in this story. But we have that scene on our website at radiolab.org. And it's worth listening to.

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