Abstract
In this essay, I complicate the notion of commercial surrogacy as reproductive labour by highlighting two fundamentally paradoxical characteristics of this labour market. One, that a market in assisted reproduction and pro-natalism is booming in an otherwise aggressively anti-natalist state and two, that a market that literally produces humans and human relationships is critically dependent on the maintenance of a global racial reproductive hierarchy that privileges certain relationships while completely denying others.
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Notes
- 1.
The origin of the term ‘surrogacy’ and its social and political implications have been widely discussed by feminists (Stanworth 1987; Snowdon 1994; Rothman 2000). Critics have argued that the terminology ‘surrogate’ suggests that the womb mother is somehow less than the genetic or social mother. The respondents in this study refer to one another as ‘surrogate mothers’, and when I explained what the term ‘surrogate’ meant in English, most agreed that the description was fitting. In this article, however, I have chosen the term gestational mothers over surrogates to avoid disparaging the work done by the women and as an attempt to recognize and label the relationships forged by the women with the foetus and the baby. There are two types of surrogacy: the first, called traditional surrogacy, involves the surrogate being artificially inseminated with the intended father’s sperm. The second, termed gestational surrogacy is done through in vitro fertilization, in which the egg of the intended mother or of an anonymous donor is fertilized in a Petri dish with the sperm of the intended father or of a donor and the embryo is transferred to the surrogate’s uterus. All the cases in this study are gestational surrogacies; that is, the surrogate has no genetic connection with the baby.
- 2.
For details on the making of this docudrama and the process by which I reworked my academic research into a creative interactive performance, see Pande and Bjerg (2014).
- 3.
For more on such seemingly contradictory reaction to biomedicalization read Pragmatic Women and Body Politics (1998) ed. Margaret M. Lock and Patricia Alice Kaufert, which compares the responses of women (in a variety of cultural settings) to modern medical technologies. Several contributors to this volume report similar trends in other countries in the global south.
- 4.
- 5.
In Australia, it is illegal to pay a woman to carry a child for someone else, except in the Northern Territory where there are no laws concerning surrogacy. For more on recent debates in Australia, see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-18/commercial-surrogacy-should-be-legalised-family-court-justice/6402924 and http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/push-to-make-surrogacy-legal-in-australia/story-fnihsrf2-1227308579743.
- 6.
- 7.
Private correspondence with clinic staff, also see http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/australian-framilies-in-limbo-as-nepal-joins-india-and-thailand-in-banning-commerical-surrogacy/story-fnet08ui-1227508246150.
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Pande, A. (2016). The Paradox of Surrogacy in India. In: Banerji, D., Paranjape, M. (eds) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures . Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3637-5_11
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