At the inauguration of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) / IVF Centre at Goa Medical College & Hospital – GMC in the presence of (l to r) Gynaecologist & Obstetrician Dr Kedar Padte, GMC Dean Dr Shivanand M Bandekar, IAS Secretary Arun Kumar Mishra, Health Minister Vishwajit P Rane, Chief Minister Dr Pramod Sawant, Rajya Sabha MP Sadanand Shet Tanavade, Head of the OBG Department at GMC Dr Pia Muriel Cardoso, Director of Directorate of Health Services Dr Geeta Kakodkar, Dr Karla Carvalho and Dr Rajesh Patil. and others. It is a significant day in the journey of providing comprehensive healthcare services to the people of Goa. The advanced facility will provide hope and solutions to couples having problems conceiving children.

WHICH reminds me a lot of schemes are being introduced in Goa and it’s left to be seen how much good they do and to whom in the long run! We folk in the opposition media are necessarily cynical, you understand. But to Health Minister Vishwajit Rane (along with Chief Minister Pramod Sawant) go the credit for bankrolling Goa’s (and the country’s) first public hospital Assisted Reproduction Technology (ART) IUI/IVF Centre. It’s started functioning on the 8th floor of the Super Speciality Block of the GMC and couples having problems with fertility may seek help here to conceive children in or out of the human womb. There’s a team of experienced and seasoned obstetricians and gynaecologists led by HOD Dr Muriel Cardozo (who in a brief conversation with me said that actually only 10% of Indians have problems having babies, it is much higher abroad presumably).
Ever since the first test-tube baby happened reproduction has become a huge business opportunity for the medical fraternity, especially since a growing number of couples are having problems in the pregnancy department, something or another failing in the traditional nine months of growing a baby in a natural mother’s womb….couples don’t make it for a host of reasons, perhaps mostly to do with modern-day lifestyles and attitudes.
The wealthy have no problem adopting or acquiring their own biologically related children courtesy the wonders of the medical world today, what was once impossible has become possible today… bringing a ripe ovum and donated sperms together in a petri dish may be easy in a laboratory, but an embryo can live only for so long in an incubator and sooner or later has to be transferred into a human womb.
We know test tube babies and human surrogate wombs are now a thriving business (especially in Gujarat) and if couples don’t want to adopt for whatever reason, they look for assisted reproduction at some state-of-the-art facility…which now Goa has at the GMC. Thanks to the milk of human kindness overflowing our Health Minister Vishwajit Rane thinks children are every couple’s right including the poor folk…Goa’s rich government is okay about spending Rs6 to Rs7 lakh helping couples to have a child or two. After all medical science is a great facilitator today. Also, Goa’s most famous “baby doctor” Dr Kedar Phadte is going to oversee the running of GMC’s latest super-speciality department, he confirms that cost is always a barrier to having children for the less privileged…but if the state is going to help out a big barrier is removed and having a child through artificial means is possible – although you should be prepared to be patient for the “failure rate is high.”
Despite this he is confident and proud that the GMC has this super-speciality in assisted reproduction and promises to give the GMC’s “baby doctors” a valuable helping hand. His clinic is the only one in Goa which reportedly has first-class laboratory with storage equipment to store live ovum at the right temperature…the rest is done with patience and skill and a couple may have to try and try again.
Reproduction is not an easy game even if you do much of it out of the natural womb! A doctor sitting next to me at the mega function to announce and celebrate the new venture at the Taj Convention Centre on August 14, 2023 whispered to me that “Nowadays working women are thinking they cannot marry or have a baby in their 20s…but they want to preserve their young ovum for conception later on!” The younger the age at which you preserve an ovum, the better it is qualitatively, definitely before a woman enters her 30 plus years…then the baby can be conceived at leisure when the situation in the couple’s private life is more relaxed! Like you want to be a grandmother to your baby?
Anyway, the less said on this subject the better. One may argue till the holy cows come home! After all didn’t Priyanka Chopra (who doesn’t know her) do that, preserve her ovum in a “reproduction freeze bank” and several years later she just had her child recently? More and more well-to-do young women are thinking of freezing their ovum for future reproduction when the time is right or ripe!
So much has changed and so much is changing in our world and I dare say tomorrow even the institution of marriage will go for a toss…and folk will be having their babies through several options open to them as single parents!
ON that it’s avjo, selamat datang, poiteverem, au revoir, arrivedecci, hasta la vista and vachun yeta here for now. Think about all this and don’t just think! How would you like to have your children – naturally like your grandparents and parents did or artificially without investing in too many sacrifices of the body, mind, heart and soul or so to speak! Would it be a bit like giving birth to human robots?

—Mme Butterfly