Brad Fister and Michael Griebe, both from Kentucky, paid around 60,000 USD to an infertility clinic in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, where a donated egg was fertilised with Fister´s sperm and carried to term by an Indian surrogate mother.

The result was the birth of baby Ashton, at the end of January.

Holding his 23-day-old daughter in his arms, Fister said it was an amazing experience.

"It´s just overwhelming, I mean to have this beautiful, beautiful little girl. It´s just absolutely overwhelming to think of like…. We are here to take of her for her whole life. It just really makes you appreciate everything now, the way that she´ll grin or the way that she´ll coo, the way she kicks her legs out. It´s just unbelievable. And to think that one day she´s going to be walking and running - it´s just unbelievable how wonderful this is."

Ashton is the first surrogate child case to be handled by the U.S Consulate in Hyderabad and more gay couples are said to be heading to the Indian city to seek surrogate mothers, according to local media reports.

29-year-old Fister said the couple could have gone through a similar procedure in the U.S. but in India, the legalities were simpler, he said.

"The process there, it´s not undo-able, the problem is the mother relinquishing her rights, the difficulty with that and that can take years, if ever and so there´s always the possibility that she could come back and want to have contact with the child. And so, we did not want that to happen, just for the emotional reasons that I couldn´t imagine having to give my child away to someone else. That´s why we chose India because of the mother being able to relinquish her rights to the child," he said.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some European countries and subject to a wide spectrum of regulation in U.S., was legalised in India in 2002.

Under guidelines issued by the Indian Medical Council, surrogate mothers sign away all their rights to the child. In cases where the surrogate provides a womb for an embryo formed from the sperm and egg of the prospective parents, it is only the names of the genetic parents that appear on the birth certificate.

Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in the subcontinent. Foreigners opt for India for surrogate mothers because of the country´s skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low cost.