Gender, Labour and the Social Reproduction of Motherhood: A Study of Commercial Surrogacy in Mumbai

Abstract

Commercial surrogacy in India is currently practised amidst an ambiguous, uncertain legal landscape (Kotiswaran, Indian Law Review 5(1)85–105, 2020). While some scholars argue that commercial surrogacy must be understood as informal labour (Saravanan, A Transnational Feminist View of Surrogacy Biomarkets in India, 2018), some others have argued that it replicates colonial labour relations (Vora, 2015). Some others have also called for a ban on commercial surrogacy, citing either unchecked commodification of women’s bodies (Rao, Economic and Political Weekly 47(21):15–17 2012), or that it would reduce women to a ‘breeder class’ (Raymond, The Hastings Center Report 20:7–11, 1990). The state argues that commercial surrogacy must only be altruistic in nature, to protect women against trafficking or exploitation. Arguing against the logic of altruism which produces the false dichotomy of selfless surrogates versus ‘baby brothels’, the paper locates surrogacy within a framing of paid and unpaid labour relations. The paper begins by looking at how relations of altruism either seek to devalue women’s reproductive labour as work or maligns it through moralising comparisons to baby selling and womb-renting. Through this critique of altruism, the paper will draw from ethnographic findings to look at the ways in which surrogate mothers position their own labour—at the intersections of familial and financial obligations—to articulate their own roles within the process of commercial surrogacy. The latter part of the essay then looks at structural inequalities that constrain and enforce these labour practices, to understand how gendered, racial and casteist divisions of labour limit women’s access to safe and equitable opportunities for employment and work. Through the lens of paid and unpaid forms of work, the paper hopes to able to shed light on the indeterminacies between public and private, ‘free’ and coerced forms of labour.