“Give Me Children, or Else I Die”: Baby-Hunger, Surrogacy, and Family-Making by Any Means Necessary

Abstract

This chapter, by focusing on two exemplary crime novel, Sarah Dunant’s Birth Marks (2005/1991) and Michael Robotham’s Night Ferry (2007), explores questions of commercialized surrogacy and reproductive justice. Unlike most mainstream novels and television shows that have helped normalize paid reproductive work, these detective novels, by casting surrogacy as potential crimes, raise urgent ethical and moral questions about the power imbalance between those who commission and those who undertake the labor of marketized reproduction. The novels’ criticism of surrogacy should be seen as part and parcel of a larger critique of domestic and familial ideologies which gives rise to “baby hunger”—a desperation to have genetically related children as the only acceptable basis for family-making. The novels not only draw attention to legal, emotional, and financial consequences of commercial surrogacy, they show how the pursuit of the socially endorsed desire to have “one’s own children” under structurally unequal conditions can lead to violence. Mainstream popular culture represents the contract to deliver particular goods and services (sex, babies, or body parts), too often made under duress of debt and desperation, as “choice.” By contrast, the detective novels by registering “choice” as an ethically murky, even coerced act, allow us to interrogate paid reproductive work in terms of reproductive justice.