By Avigayil Kadesh
The obstetrician offers a prayer to Krishna before plucking an infant out of her patient's abdomen. A single tear trickles down the patient's face as she strokes the baby boy's cheek on his way out of the delivery room to his waiting parents.
This is the world exposed by Google Baby, a documentary by Israeli producer-director Zippi Brand Frank that recently won an Emmy Award.
In this world, prospective parents from the West (including many gay couples) who cannot - or choose not to - become pregnant arrange through an "pregnancy producer" to pay rural Indian women to give birth for them using sperm and eggs selected and paid for online, frozen and shipped to India. All they have to do is pick up the newborn at the hospital. "Now you can order a baby and get it nine months later, like ordering jeans from Gap," says Frank, 41, a Tel Aviv native and resident. "I wanted to raise awareness of this issue, with the focus on the surrogate rather than the parents-to-be."
Frank, a former Israeli television political reporter, investigative journalist and anchor news producer, learned about the phenomenon in 2006 by reading a bulletin board posting at Harvard University while on a Neiman Fellowship. The notice offered $50,000 to $70,000 for eggs from young, good-looking, highly educated women. "I was intrigued by how technical baby-making had become, and how pregnancy could be disassembled into its elements only to be put together again through an online mix-and-match," she wrote on her website.
The research and filming on three continents took nearly three years. "When we started filming in Dr. Patel's clinic in Anand, India, she had 70 surrogate mothers in process. During our last filming session she had over 250 surrogates and other doctors in Mumbai started offering the same service. The field is obviously growing rapidly," reports Frank, who endeavored to present the facts non-judgmentally.
A need for ethical guidelines
As the mother of two preschool girls, it was challenging to keep her personal feelings in check. "It wasn't easy for me to watch [the births] and stand next to the mothers," says Frank, who is now expecting her third child. However, she began seeing another side to the picture. "I came in with the assumption that these women are being exploited, but when I got to know them as much as I could, given the language gap, I realized that they are really well prepared to do their job and move on. They seemed very feminist and very brave."
The surrogates, she continues, are mothers raising families in rustic areas that Western tourists never visit. They have so few options for earning a livelihood that they jump at the chance to earn significant money by doing something that comes naturally. The hard-won earnings aren't used for cars or vacations. "Surrogacy makes the difference between living in the street or having a roof over their heads," says Frank.
As for the ordering parents, "There are people who really need this service and I totally respect them. But there might be people who can exploit it, and maybe some ethical guidelines and restrictions need to be formulated," she says.
Frank was particularly disturbed to learn about a Japanese couple who divorced by the time their child was born and refused to pick her up in India. Three months passed before her paternal grandmother in Tokyo agreed to take custody of the infant. "This is unacceptable to me," says Frank. "The [ordering parents] must be required to pick up the baby no matter what happens. You shouldn't be able to return a baby like a t-shirt."
Prize-winning documentary
Google Baby was broadcast in Israel in 2009 and then in the rest of the world in 2010. It won first prize at the annual Tel Aviv documentary film festival and the Magnolia Golden Award in Shanghai for best documentary. Frank had to make some slight changes for an American audience after the American cable network HBO bought the film from her and executive producers Sheila Nevins and Yona Wiesenthal.
A former army intelligence officer, as a reporter Frank gravitated to telling longer stories. In 2001, her first documentary work provided an in-depth look at Israeli women in the military. Two years later, she directed and produced Somebody to Love, which followed singles in search of relationships. Next came Wakeup Call, a close-up look at the lives of exceptionally motivated people.
"Documentary work is a little harder to start in Israel, because there aren't many outlets or budgets," she says. "Google Baby was more expensive than an Israeli budget usually allows, so I did all the post-production work myself. Most independent filmmakers in Israel, even the big ones, have to do the little jobs to save money for shooting and editing." She was inspired, she says, by her maternal grandmother, a widowed Libyan immigrant "who was inventing herself all the time," and by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris.
Following a year-long break after Google Baby was in the can, Frank began working on two new projects. One concerns mega-wealthy Americans and Europeans purchasing leftover frozen embryos to be used in anti-aging treatments at clinics in South Korea, China and Ukraine. The other project is an Israeli series about "extreme parenthood," documenting people who go to unusual lengths to have children. "I am attracted to the connection between technology and society in terms of regulations and ethics," Frank says.