Global reproductive inequalities,neo-eugenics and commercial surrogacy in India

Abstract

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French

India’s commercial surrogacy market literally produces humans and human relationships while sustaining global racial reproductive hierarchies. The post-colonial state’s aggressive anti-natalism echoes the broader global population control agenda framing the global South’s high fertility rates as a ‘global danger’ to be controlled at whatever cost, but is at odds with the neoliberal imperative of unrestrained global fertility tourism. Womb mothers (surrogates) subvert hegemonic discourses by taking control over their bodies and using their fertile bodies ‘productively’. But in controlling their own reproduction through decisions about fertility, sterilization and abortion in order to (re)produce children of higher classes and privileged nations, they ultimately conform to global neo-eugenic imperatives to reduce the fertility of lower class women in the global South. Surrogates creatively construct cross-class, -caste, -religion, -race and -nation kinship ties with the baby and the intended mother, disrupting hegemonic genetic and patriarchal bases of kinship, but fundamentally reify structural inequality.

Keywords

Biosocialities fair trade surrogacy neo-eugenics reproductive travel stratified reproduction transnational commercial surrogacy

Commercial surrogacy is a multi-billion-dollar industry across the world, with India being one of the world leaders. Although often couched in dystopic terms, the topic of surrogacy is not restricted to medical or scientific circles and has been generating feminist, ethical, legal and social debates for over three decades now. While liberal feminists defend the practice as a woman’s right to use her body as she chooses, others focus on the multiple systems of inequality and exploitation that are potentially reinforced by such practices, or debate on the ethics or morality of this practice. A more recent turn presents an empirically grounded or ethnographic scholarship on the lived experiences of surrogacy. Until recently, the predominant focus of this scholarship was surrogacy in Europe and North America – not surprising, since commercial surrogacy is a very recent phenomenon outside the Euro-American context. Curiously, the complete absence of any empirical data about surrogacy in the global South did not prevent feminists from making alarming predictions about the future of these technologies. For instance, feminist Andrea Dworkin predicted in 1978, ‘While sexual prostitutes sell vagina, rectum and mouth, reproductive prostitutes would sell other body parts: wombs, ovaries and eggs’ (Corea, 1985), and sociologist Barbara Rothman in 1988 asked, ‘Can we look forward to baby farms, with white embryos grown in young and Third world women?’ (Rothman, 1988: 100) over the past decade that I studied commercial surrogacy in India, I came to realize that such abstract theorizing through a Eurocentric lens was going to be entirely inadequate for analyzing the booming surrogacy industry in India. At first glance surrogacy in India may well resemble the inhuman baby farms imagined by Rothman but an immersion in the field provided a very different perspective on the impact of new reproductive technologies on women of the global South as well as a more complex theorization of the intersections of reproduction, labor and globalization.

Unarguably, surrogacy is a challenge to the presumed sanctity of reproduction and mothering. But burying surrogacy within the usual debates about morality and motherhood limits our understanding of the critical dynamics of surrogacy outside the sphere of reproduction. Surrogate mothers, or womb mothers, in India navigate much more than their identity as mothers.¹ They grapple with their new identity as participants in an industry that is morally contentious and constructed as deviant and unnatural in India. Some of these women are coerced into surrogacy by their family, but many others negotiate with their families to gain control over their own bodies and their fertility in order to participate in this industry. As womb mothers, they suddenly find themselves in an unfamiliar relationship with a hyper-medicalized system of reproduction, a medical system that has previously been inaccessible to them as lower class women in an anti-natalist state. Finally, as women hired by commissioning parents and clients from within and across borders, they navigate relationships that often cross boundaries of race, class and nationality. A linear emphasis on the reproduction and mothering component of commercial surrogacy discounts these intricacies of surrogacy in the Indian context. Given this new reality of surrogacy, in all my previous works I have analyzed commercial surrogacy as a form of labor that challenges the socially constructed dichotomy between production and reproduction and argued that commercial surrogacy in India is a new kind of labor emerging with globalization (Pande, 2010, 2014).² In this article I further complicate this notion of surrogacy as a labor market by highlighting a fundamental paradox – wherein 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 completing denying others. In her study of the race-based reproductive hierarchy, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts stated,

The right to bear children goes to the heart of what it means to be human. The value we place on individuals determines whether we see them as entitled to perpetuate themselves in their children. Denying someone the right to bear children deprives her of a basic part of her humanity. When this denial is based on race, it also functions to preserve a racial hierarchy that essentially disregards Black humanity. (1997: 305)

With the spread of new technologies to the global South, this racial hierarchy is effectively globalized to disregard the humanity of women of color in the region.

To understand the booming surrogacy industry in India, we have to situate it within its rather contradictory reproductive history – the post-colonial state agenda of aggressive anti-natalism at home coupled with the neoliberal imperative of unrestrained fertility tourism. This national agenda resonates with a broader global population control program that frames the high fertility rates of countries in the global South as a ‘global danger’ that needs to be controlled at whatever cost. I argue that at one level, the womb mothers subvert these hegemonic discourses by taking control over their bodies and using their fertile bodies ‘productively’. At another level, as they align their own reproduction through decisions about fertility, sterilization and abortion, in order to (re)produce children of higher classes and privileged nations, they ultimately conform to this global imperative of reducing the fertility of lower class women in the global South. Despite these global structural inequalities, or perhaps because of them, womb mothers creatively construct kinship ties with the baby and the intended mother. These ties cross boundaries based on class, caste and religion and sometimes even race and nation. I discuss the poignancy of these powerful relationships – they disrupt hegemonic genetic bases of kinship ties but ultimately reify structures of inequality. Finally, I connect the ethnographic findings with some policy implications.

The ethnographic field: India

Surrogacy is estimated to be a $2 billion market in India with about 3000 clinics currently offering surrogacy services and 30,000 clinics having the potential to launch surrogacy practices (Kannan, 2009; Krishnakumar, 2003). Although the United States still remains the top global destination for commercial surrogacy, India is fast emerging as a key player. Clients from countries where surrogacy is either illegal or restricted (such as Britain, Japan, Australia, Taiwan and Kuwait), have for decades hired women in the United States to bear babies for them. But while the total cost of such transnational packages is roughly $100,000, in India such packages cost less than one-third of that price. There are other factors working in favor of India as a destination for such travel – large numbers of well-qualified and English-speaking doctors with degrees and training from prestigious medical schools in India and abroad, well-equipped private clinics and hospitals, and a large overseas client population of Indian origin who often combine cheaper treatment with a family visit.

What makes the Indian case all the more interesting is that commercial surrogacy is flourishing with minimum state interference with few laws regulating the procedures, the contract or the womb mother–client relationship. As a consequence, intended parents are able to take advantage of the client-friendly policies of private clinics and hospitals, where doctors are willing to offer options and services that are banned or heavily regulated in other parts of the world. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) made an attempt at regulating the industry when it included some references to surrogacy under the broader National Guidelines for Accreditation, Supervision and Regulation of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) clinics in India in 2005, and in the more recent draft ART Regulatory Bill in 2010. These guidelines remained non-binding. In 2013, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) suggested some changes to the clauses in the ART Bill – that the option of surrogacy be restricted to married, infertile couples of Indian origin. This was a restrictive variant of the 2012 stipulation by the Home Ministry that gay couples, single men and women and couples from countries where surrogacy is illegal be prohibited from hiring a commercial surrogate in India. In essence, the DGHS proposal bans foreigners, homosexuals and people in cohabiting relationships from having a baby born out of surrogacy in India. Despite these new stipulations, in practice, clinics continue to offer client-friendly ‘package deals’.

A critical factor drawing international clients to India is that the power dynamics are explicitly in favor of commissioning parents, making surrogacy in India a convenient bargain for many clients (Pande, 2014; Saravanan, 2015). For instance, a major attraction for clients hiring womb mothers at the clinic I studied intensively, and the one that has caught all the recent media attention, is that it runs several surrogacy hostels where the women are literally kept under constant surveillance during their pregnancy – their food, medicines and daily activities can be monitored by the medical staff (Pande, 2010). While fertility clinics from several Indian cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Kolkata have reported cases of surrogacy, this is one of the only clinics where the doctors, nurses and brokers play an active role in the recruitment and surveillance of commercial surrogates. By 2014, the clinic claimed that it had delivered 1000 babies through surrogacy.

Research and respondents

This article is part of a larger research project on commercial surrogacy in India, for which I conducted fieldwork between 2006 and 2013. My research has included in-depth, open-format interviews with 52 womb mothers, their husbands and in-laws, 12 intending parents, three doctors, three surrogacy brokers, three hostel matrons and several nurses. In addition, I conducted participant observation for 10 months at surrogacy clinics and two surrogacy hostels. I lived with the womb mothers in the hostel, cooked lunches for them, prayed with them and even attended computer and English classes with them. I revisited the hostel and clinic in 2012, visited some former and repeat surrogates and organized some participatory livelihood generating workshops with them. I am currently involved in a multimedia docu-drama Made in India: Notes From a Baby Farm based on my research and workshops with surrogates.³

All the womb mothers in this study were married, with at least one child. Their ages ranged between 20 and 45 years. Except for two women, all were from neighboring villages. Fourteen of the women said that they were ‘housewives’, two said they ‘worked at home’, and the others worked in schools, clinics, farms and stores. Their education ranged from illiterate to high school level, with the average surrogate having approximately the beginning of a middle school level of education. The median family income of the surrogates was about Rs 2500 (US$50) per month. For most of the women, the money earned through surrogacy was equivalent to almost five years of total family income, especially since many of women had husbands who were either in informal contract work or unemployed. Thirty of the womb mothers in this study had been hired by transnational clients.

From reckless reproducers to productive producers

Unlike in Europe and North America, where most women (at least most white women) historically had to struggle to get access to the most basic birth control methods, in India, the state forced it on them. This is what Sara Pinto (2008: 18) astutely labels, the ‘irony of eroded choice’ – the obsessive attention that the state pays to population control, often at the cost of broader heath services, erodes the very notion of choice or democracy that ostensibly underlines such policies. The Indian state became the first in the world to initiate an official population program in 1952. The Indian population program, however, cannot be discussed as just a nationalist agenda and cannot be understood without reference to the post-Second World War international population movement dominated by governments and public and private organizations like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United Nations Population Fund and the World Bank, which promoted and funded fertility control programs in the global South. The drought and the subsequent economic crisis of the 1960s increased foreign interference in the population control program when India was pressured by the World Bank to intensify fertility reduction efforts along with a move towards economic liberalization (Chatterjee and Riley, 2001: 824). The international pressures for economic liberalization not only resulted in an aggressive population control program but also meant a further retreat of the state as a provider of services, including health care services. The state abandoned its earlier attempts at building a welfare state and accepted the Structural Adjustment program and policies (SAP). The SAP-mandated health sector reforms included cutbacks, withdrawal of the public sector and opening up the sector to private investments and international capital.⁴ In fact, until now, government expenditure on public health infrastructure continues to remain as low as 1% of its gross domestic product, lower than the average of 2.8% of GDP spent by most less developed countries (The Hindu, 2005). Despite cuts in most areas of public expenditure, the government’s budget for family planning has continued to increase.

While, unlike China, the Indian state has to maintain a liberal democratic front, in reality it continues to promote methods like sterilization and long-term hormonal implants that diminish lower class women’s power to choose. In general, this hegemonic anti-natalist propaganda portrays the fertile bodies of lower class women in the global South as recklessly reproductive and to be blamed for their poverty.

The narratives of women reveal this state propaganda. Thirty-eight-year-old Varsha is a mother of three children and is working as a commercial surrogate for a couple from north India. She recalls the many visits by the family planning nurse:

I never used any contraceptive just regulated intercourse according to my monthly cycle. But the didi [woman from the family planning clinic] would stop at our hut on her visits and tell me to think of getting sterilization. But why do you not get it, she would say. She showed me pictures of women with one daughter, where the daughter and the mother would be smiling. She sometimes scolded me and said, ‘That is why your condition is like this. The more babies you have, the poorer you get, do you not understand that?’ Perhaps she is right. If I had not had my last child, the first two would be happier. But now the tables have turned. You see, it is my fourth pregnancy – this surrogate birth – that will make my entire family happy. (emphasis added)

At some levels, commercial surrogacy drives women like Varsha to think of their bodies as a possible source of value, a value historically denied by the state itself. The money earned through surrogacy often becomes a source of pride, and an indicator of their productivity. Dipali is a 24-year-old woman hired by a couple from Cape Town, South Africa. A divorcee with three children, she has been living with her brother for over five years. She wants to use the money earned to buy a plot of land and deposit the rest in a savings account for her children’s education:

When I came here I told Doctor Madam that I am ready for all kinds of treatment – injections, medicines. I have suffered the pain and the bleeding. I almost got paralysis twice and had to be hospitalized, because of side effects of some medicines. But I am not complaining about the pain. I worried, I cried and I complained when my husband used to beat me up in front of my children. That pain is what you do not want. This kind of pain to the body I am willing to take – it will not be wasted – it will give me enough money to make me self-sufficient.

In the women’s narratives, ‘having control’ (over their reproductive lives and bodies) is about being able to use their bodies for work and using the money productively. Simultaneously, it is often about negotiating reproductive decisions with their husbands in order to get involved in surrogacy.

Vidya is a 30-year-old woman hired by a couple from Ontario, Canada. She has repeatedly been told about sterilization by family planning nurses visiting her village but has been postponing the operation. She says:

I have two daughters and one son. My husband wanted one more son so we decided not to get the sterilization done. It must have been God’s wish that I do this [become a surrogate]. If I had got the operation done, I would have missed this chance to earn money for my children. But now that I am successfully pregnant [as a surrogate mother], I don’t think I will try for another son anymore. I know my husband wants a son very badly but I am going to try and convince him. (Pauses) If I have a baby of my own I will lose the chance to become a surrogate again. I want to conserve my body and save my next pregnancy for surrogacy. Doctor Madam does not want surrogates who have more than three babies of their own. (emphasis added)

Vidya has postponed sterilization and resisted the instruction of family planning officials because her husband wanted another son. Now, in order to become a commercial surrogate, she is willing to convince her husband to forego that son. Women like Vidya are ostensibly taking control over their bodies by engaging in surrogacy. But while at one level these women appear to fulfill feminist ideals, their life stories are not simply heroic tales of subversions. The decisions they make about their own reproduction conform to the hegemonic agenda of reducing the fertility of lower class women.

Vidya is not the only one to forego having her own child in order to have a child for someone else. Parvati is 36 and one of the oldest women at the clinic. Her story reveals the multitude of bodily interventions involved in the work of surrogacy:

When I came here the first time the Doctor said I was too old to donate eggs but I could try for surrogacy. I underwent treatment – injections, vagina check. During one of these early checkups they realized that I was pregnant with my own child. We have just one child, and we have always wanted one more. But at that stage, we needed the money more than a baby and I got my own baby aborted.

Parvati’s life decisions starkly highlight what feminist anthropologist Shellee Colen calls ‘stratified reproduction’: power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce while others are disempowered (Colen, 1995). Surrogacy in India is definitely one of the clearest manifestations of such stratified motherhood. But the label ‘stratified motherhood’ seems too benign – this stratification did not happen by accident but is a consequence of conscious national and global priorities. On the one hand, state expenditure on public health infrastructure is shrinking and poor women are being subjected to population control targets. On the other hand, the state continues to invest in new (reproductive) technologies and incoming reproductive travel is booming.

Reproductive (medical) travel and commercial surrogacy is yet another paradox of the post-liberalization era and an explicit instance of a global reproductive hierarchy, or what I have analyzed as ‘neo-eugenics’ (Pande, 2014). Scholars have previously discussed what they call the ‘revised eugenics script’ in the policies of the (international) population movement (Hartmann, 2006). On the one hand, negative eugenics, targeted mainly at minorities, continues with policies like voluntary or incentivized sterilizations. On the other hand, positive eugenics has appropriated the language of ‘individual choices’ to strategically emphasize assisted fertility options for upper class, white couples (Hartmann, 2006). Neo-eugenics, then, becomes the new, subtle form of eugenics whereby the neoliberal notion of consumer choice justifies promotion of assisted reproductive services for the rich and, at the same time, by portraying poor people (often in the global South) as strains on the world’s economy and environment justifies aggressive anti-natal policies.

Womb mothers, kin ties and biosocialities

The fundamental reason why surrogacy produces such intense moral anxieties is that it allows for the extension of the market into the ‘private’ sphere of reproduction and motherhood. As producers of such an intensely controversial service, womb mothers have a variety of negotiating strategies – to counter not just the contractual nature of their service, but also the transient nature of their role as mothers. From recruitment to delivery, nurses and doctors periodically highlight the womb mothers’ transience and dispensability as mothers. They are told that their role is only as a vessel, they have no genetic connections with the baby and it will be taken away from them immediately after delivery. Most are not allowed to breastfeed the newborn. The doctors argue that these rules ensure that the womb mothers do not get emotionally attached to the baby and intended parents face no legal trouble. These disciplinary discourses, however, do not go unchallenged. The women resist these discourses of disposability by forging kinship ties with the baby.

In ‘classic’ kinship studies, kin relations were frequently grounded in the domain of nature and genes very often with a patrilineal focus. For instance, this patrilineal focus can be seen in the notions of ‘seed’ and ‘earth’, where the seed symbolizes the father’s contribution and the field represents the role of the mother. Women are expected to behave like earth, as the ‘mere receptacles of male seed and give back the fruit’, preferably male children. Simultaneously, since in popular understanding as well as in Ayurveda, the indigenous system of medicine in India, semen is understood as ‘derived from blood, being the product of the father’s seed, a child inherits the father’s blood and is therefore placed in his group’ (Kumar, 2006: 289). The mother’s blood thus becomes significant in nourishing the fetus but not in imparting identity to a child. The women I spoke to, however, use a very different interpretation of the blood tie. They not only claim that the fetus is nourished by its (womb) mother’s blood but also emphasize that this blood/substance tie imparts identity to the child.

Parvati, as mentioned earlier, is 36 and one of the oldest women at the clinic. I meet her immediately after a fetal reduction surgery in which one of the fetuses had to be surgically eliminated. She tells me that she was against the surgery:

Doctor Madam told us that the babies wouldn’t get enough space to move around and grow, so we should get the surgery. But both Nandini didi [the genetic mother] and I wanted to keep all three babies. I told Doctor Madam that I’ll keep one and didi can keep two. After all it’s my blood even if its their genes. And who knows whether at my age I’ll be able to have more babies. (emphasis added)

Parvati, thus, uses her interpretation of the blood tie to make claims on the baby/fetus. Raveena makes a similar claim. But, in addition to the substantial ties of blood, Raveena also emphasizes the labor of gestation and giving birth. Her ‘sweat’ ties with the baby become another basis for making claims on the baby. Raveena is carrying a baby for a couple residing in California. I bump into Raveena right after her second ultrasound and she says:

Anne [the genetic mother] wanted a girl but I told her even before the ultrasound, coming from me it will be a boy. My first two children were also boys. This one will be too. And see I was right, it is a boy! After all they just gave the eggs, but the blood, all the sweat, all the effort is mine. Of course it’s going after me. (emphasis added)

This sweat (paseena) and the blood (khoon) tie between surrogate and fetus is often advocated by womb mothers as stronger than a connection based solely on genes. Sharda is one of the few women who also breastfed the baby that she delivered. This, she feels, intensifies her ties with the baby:

I am not sure how I feel about giving the baby away to her [the genetic mother]. I know it’s not her fault that she could not raise her own baby [in her womb] or breastfeed him. She has kidney problems. But she does not seem to have any emotional ties or affection for him either. Did you see when the baby started crying, she kept talking to you without paying him any attention? She keeps forgetting to change his nappies. Would you ever do that if you were a real mother? When he cries I want to start crying as well. It’s hard for me not to be attached. I have felt him growing and moving inside me. I have gone through stomach-aches, back aches and over five months of loss of appetite! I have taken nearly 200 injections in my first month here. All this has not been easy.

According to Sharda, her substantial ties with the baby (blood and breast milk) as well as the labor and effort she has put into gestation make her relationship with the baby stronger than that of the genetic mother. The relationship between the two mothers – the womb mother and the genetic or intended mother – is not merely competitive. Much like the kin ties forged with the baby, the ties with the intended mother allow womb mothers to cope with the emotional isolation and also challenge the medical construction of their relationships as merely contractual and easily disposable. Divya, formerly a commercial surrogate, emphasizes the continued effort made by Karen, the genetic mother from the US, to maintain a relationship even after delivery:

Karen came in on the eighth month and for two months she stayed with me. We lived together like a family. My husband got her passport fixed from the American Consulate. We have been in constant touch even after they left. See, she brought me these earrings this time. (She shows me her diamond and white gold earrings.)

Deepa, another former surrogate, also believes her relationship with her client from Japan is based on mutual respect and reciprocity. Deepa reminisces about the intended mother, Jessy:

Jessy came to visit me during the godh bharai ritual [baby shower organized by the hostel matron for all surrogates], showered me with gifts and gifted Rs 1500 (US$30) for my children. It’s been three years and today she [the baby born out of surrogacy] would have been three years old. I [emailed] Jessy in the morning on computer and they sent me pictures. You know, they paid me Rs 1.5 laks (US$3000) extra out of happiness and gifted me a laptop when they came to take the baby. Now I can email them using that laptop and they send me pictures by email.

But such stories of relationships sustained beyond the contract period are rare. Most clients, apprehensive that the commercial surrogate will change her mind about giving the baby away, prefer to sever all ties with her. In 2008, Tejal was hired as a surrogate by a non-resident Indian couple settled in the US. When I meet Tejal again in 2011, she recalls the delivery day rather bitterly:

There was a lot of problems with the delivery and I had to have 15–20 bottles of IV in just two days. Ultimately I got a scissor [Caesarian section]. I was unconscious when the couple came and took away the baby. They didn’t even show it to my husband. The baby would have been three years today. But I don’t even know what he looks like. I used to think they would invite us to America. I used to think of her as a sister – all of it went to waste. Forget an invitation, they did not even call to see if we are dead or alive. They just finished their business, picked up the baby and left.

Munni has a similar tale of the relationships going to ‘waste’. Munni delivered a baby for an Indian couple settled in the US in 2007. Like Tejal, Munni is bewildered by the change in her clients’ behavior immediately after the delivery:

My party was from America but they used to come here [the city where the clinic is situated] often to visit their parents. They would call me every day from America and come visit me almost every month. They even allowed me to breastfeed the baby. They always said that when the baby grows up they would tell her about me – about her second mother in India. It’s been over a year now; she would have been one year old last week. There have been no phone calls, nothing. I don’t know what has gone wrong.

Munni seems surprised by the sudden severing of ties. Her relationship with her clients was unusually friendly while she was carrying their baby. But once she completed her contract, her reproduction became, in some sense, a classic example of alienated labor. Her clients honored the capitalist contract; they paid her and appropriated the surplus value of her labor – the baby.

From biosocialities to regulations

So where do we go from here? One possibility is to decide that commercial surrogacy is inherently immoral and undesirable and impose a formal ban. This is what many countries across the world have decided and implemented in national law. Restrictive laws, however, have not stopped people from demanding and acquiring genetic babies. With globalization, most clients bypass their national laws by crossing borders to make use of these technologies. I believe that banning surrogacy in India will just push it underground, and would reduce the rights of surrogates even more. Imposing a blanket ban on surrogacy in India will as likely just shift it to another country in the global South. We see instances of that with the 2013 stipulations restricting surrogacy in India to married heterosexual couples pushing cases of ‘gay surrogacy’ to Thailand, and more recently to Nepal. The second option could be to advocate for a ban on commercial surrogacy, i.e. surrogacy for pay. There are several countries, like the UK, Canada and South Africa, which do not allow surrogacy for pay but permit altruistic surrogacy – surrogacy arrangements in which the surrogate is not paid for her services, and is motivated mainly by a desire to help an infertile couple. But all countries that have national laws that only allow women to be unpaid surrogates, end up pushing people to other countries to find women to be surrogates with pay. Not too many women, it seems, are willing to be pregnant for selfless reasons. Essentially, restrictive national laws export the morally contentious industry to some other country.

Instead of restrictive national laws, I advocate a carefully thought out law that regulates the industry and protects the rights of the women workers – the surrogates themselves (Pande, 2014). But I also as strongly believe that a global and complex issue like surrogacy cannot be resolved or regulated within national borders. A global issue like surrogacy needs a global dialogue. Medical practitioner Casey Humbyrd (2009) proposes a move towards such an international dialogue and regulation in her guide to ‘fair trade practices’ in international surrogacy. Humbyrd provides a provocative argument in favor of ‘applying Fair Trade principles to international surrogacy’ in order to ensure that the benefits of surrogacy ‘are justly shared between the participating parties’ and that it is beneficial to those who are the ‘weakest in the supply chain’ – the surrogates. Although Humbyrd fails to address how this regulatory and compensation framework can be implemented, it might be constructive to evaluate and extend some of her policy insights. For instance, Humbyrd briefly mentions that a ‘fair price in the regional or local context’ is ‘one that has been agreed through dialogue and participation’. She goes on to add that there is a need for ‘transparency and accountability … of financial transactions between surrogacy brokers, prospective parents and surrogate mothers’. I have previously extended Humbyrd’s insights to propose an international model of surrogacy founded on openness and transparency on three fronts: in the structure of payments, in the medical process and in the relationships forged within surrogacy (Pande, 2014).

Let me expand a little on the third, final and I believe, most critical front – transparency in relationships forged through surrogacy. American anthropologist Paul Rabinow coined the term biosociality to capture the ‘new’ kinds of identities, social grouping and social interactions made possible by developments within genetics (Rabinow, 1996). Since then scholars have extended the concept to explore emerging bonds of community grounded in new biotechnologies – from genome projects to IVF (Gibbon and Novas, 2008). For the analytics of biosociality to be relevant for surrogacy we need to pay closer attention to the relationships emerging in and through these markets, relationships that are often abruptly terminated in our pursuit of anonymity and privacy. In the name of preserving the privacy of individuals involved in the supply chain, the providers of essential, emotional and bodily services are made nameless, faceless, anonymous and disposable, and buyers can conveniently forget that what is being produced is not just a baby but also relationships. What if, for once, we abandon our single-minded pursuit of privacy and instead advocate for open acknowledgment of these relationships – an appreciation of the complex and demanding nature of labor provided by each individual surrogate? What if we make visible the gestational, emotional work, bodily labor done by the surrogates in (re)producing humans (Hochschild, 2009)?

An exclusive dependence on national and international policy-makers to initiate a meaningful dialogue on reproductive labor, visibility and recognition would be naive. Is there another space for dialogue, collective consciousness and collective action? Given the obvious gendered nature of this industry, an appealing aspiration is to envision solidarity among the women involved in surrogacy, whether the womb mothers or the intended mothers. Over the years, the need to recognize diversity, situatedness and multiplicity of experiences has been pushing feminists away from the concept of ‘global sisterhood’ towards the notion of ‘transnational feminisms’. While the concept of global sisterhood allegedly glosses over the differences between women, ‘transnational feminisms’ may have the potential to forge solidarity across the globe, between women of different positioning and interests. In the seminal book Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) argues that that for transnational feminisms to be possible, the politics of solidarity has to be based on ‘mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities’ (Mohanty, 2003: 7). Sociologist Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta (2011: 31) applies this notion to new reproductive technologies to ask: ‘Can the need of infertile women for donor eggs or surrogacy services and the financial need of women that drives them to offer the same, thus creating a relationship of mutual dependency, be a basis for mutual solidarity?’ To make the leap from global sisterhood to transnational feminisms, the difficult task of envisioning a politics of solidarity cannot be left to the two sets of women involved in surrogacy – the womb mothers and the intended mothers. Placing surrogacy and womb work within the continuum of reproductive labor, with sex work, care work and other intimate forms of labor, may well be the first step towards imagining a broader community of women with common interests. A long due recognition of mutual dependencies, between sellers of reproductive labor and buyers of the same, is critical for an effective politics of solidarity.

Placing surrogacy within a broader continuum of reproductive labor, however, reveals its fundamentally paradoxical characteristic. A characteristic, which resonates well with other, gendered forms of labor like domestic work and sex work. On the one hand, commercial surrogacy becomes a powerful challenge to the age-old dichotomy constructed between production and reproduction. Women’s reproductive capacities are valued and monetized outside of the so-called private sphere. As commercial surrogates, women use their bodies, wombs and sometimes breasts, as instruments of labor. But just as commercial surrogacy subverts these gendered dichotomies, it simultaneously reifies them. When reproductive bodies of women become the only source, requirement and product of a labor market, and fertility becomes the only asset women can use to earn wages, women essentially get reduced to their reproductive capacities, ultimately reifying their historically constructed role in the gender division of labor. The second paradox is more specific to the Indian context, where a labor market in assisted conception is booming in a country with a historically aggressive anti-natalist agenda. The fertility of lower class women in India has previously been constructed as not just undesirable at individual levels but a social danger. With surrogacy this fertility gets temporarily revalued as lower class women become reproducers for clients who are relatively more privileged. In this article I have argued that this is not simply a glaring example of stratified reproduction but a product of conscious state policies and a neoliberal eugenic imperative. The stratified reproduction in India, surrogacy being one of its manifestations, is a result of conscious state priorities and an inevitable consequence of the present global division of both productive and reproductive labor.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received funding from the Social Science Research Council and the Research Office of University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Notes

Author biography

Amrita Pande, author of Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on the intersection of globalization and reproductive labor. Her work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender and Society, Critical Social Policy, International Migration Review, Qualitative Sociology, Feminist Studies, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Anthropologica, PhiloSOPHIA, Reproductive BioMedicine and in numerous edited volumes. She has written for national newspapers across the world and has appeared in Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed on the BBC, Sarah Carey’s Newstalk on Irish radio, DR2 Deadline (Danish National television) and Otherwise SAfM, South Africa to discuss her work on surrogacy. She is also an educator-performer touring the world with a multi-media theatre production, Made in India: Notes from a Baby Farm based on her ethnographic work on surrogacy.

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