Abstract
This article examines how military spouses negotiate the decision to become a surrogate with their service member husband and how the two navigate surrogacy together. It is speculated that military spouses are ideal candidates for surrogacy due to their particular status as a military spouse; however, military spouses face structural constraints in their everyday lives which in turn would prove challenging to their desire to become a surrogate. Based on in-depth interviews with 33 military spouses who had been surrogates, this article examines how military spouses discuss, negotiate, and experience surrogacy with their spouses all the while navigating the structural demands of the military and the contractual demands of surrogacy. Findings highlight egalitarian decision making between the spouses, and a mostly collaborative approach to the surrogacy process. Ultimately, this work illuminates how surrogacy is experienced by the women who participate in the practice and provides insight as to how military marriages function.
Over the past 20 years, the practice of surrogacy, when a woman is commissioned to gestate and birth a child for a third party, has grown exponentially in the United States. In 2008, a cluster of media and industry reports emerged citing evidence that military wives constitute a disproportionately large percentage of the growing surrogate population. 1 Even though they constitute such a small percentage of the general population, industry estimates indicate that 15% to 20% of surrogates are military wives. 2 Military wives are considered “ideal” candidates for surrogacy by the industry because they have already established a family of their own (a now standard prerequisite for commercial surrogates), they are often unable to establish a career, and they feel they can contribute to the financial status of their families through surrogacy. It was also largely assumed this was something women could do while their husbands were deployed. These demographic and practical considerations where offered alongside the ideological argument that military wives can draw on the “military mentality” as an asset when undertaking surrogacy.
While women who choose to become surrogates are the ones tasked with carrying the child, many of them argue that it is actually a family endeavor (Berend, 2016; Jacobson, 2016). Women contend that their families are integral support systems, a sentiment corroborated by the industry, with husbands or intimate partners playing a key role in the process. There are many factors that necessitate their cooperation from the contractual nature of the surrogacy agreement, to logistics of providing extra help around the home, and emotional support throughout the process. For any marriage or partnership, surrogacy presents challenges as it significantly interferes with the functioning of the couple or family unit.
From a life course perspective, military spouses are argued to have “linked lives” (Kleykamp, 2013), whereby they spouses are on interlocking developmental trajectories that are dictated not just by their marriages, but by the institution of the military. When it comes to their marriages, military wives face particular challenges and constraints not found in the civilian world. Specifically, they must cater to two greedy, and at times conflicting, institutions: that of the military and the family (Segal, 1986). Despite changing demographics, heterosexual women make up 89.9% to 97.7% of the military spouse population (U.S. Department of Defense, 2013) and therefore the spouse figure is still overwhelmingly female. Marriages within the military institution tend to follow a traditional model, with the service member (and at times military) serving as the patriarchal head of the family, relegating wives to a subordinate role. The rigid structure of the military and the demands placed on service members and their wives alike results in traditional gendered expectations being placed on military wives. This not only structures their daily lives but results in significant barriers for wives wishing to pursue their own interests or employment (Alt, 2006; Kleykamp, 2013; Weinstein, 1997).
Surrogacy, while not a formal institution, has many “greedy” elements which in many ways makes the practice an unlikely fit for military wives, despite previous arguments citing their ideal qualifications (Ali, 2008; Einhorn, 2008; Nosheen & Schellmann, 2010). Based on in-depth interviews with 33 military wives who had been surrogates, this article examines how military wives discuss, negotiate, and experience surrogacy with their husbands. Women in my sample were married to enlisted service members of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Given that it is theorized that many military marriages are “greedy” (Coser, 1974; Segal, 1986) and tend to follow the pattern of a traditional marriage, this article asks, how do military wives negotiate their decision to become a surrogate with their husbands? Furthermore, as women go through the surrogacy process, what support, if any, do women receive from their service member husbands? Although it was speculated that military wives are ideal candidates for surrogacy due to their demographic and structural characteristics, my findings demonstrate that women viewed surrogacy as a shared endeavor and heavily relied on their husbands to perform their surrogate role. Examining how this group of women approached surrogacy with their husbands allows us to better understand how men and women in heavily institutionalized settings navigate decision making within the context of a woman’s nontraditional gendered labor. Despite previous conjecture, the feminized labor of surrogacy flourishes in military households not because husbands are gone, but because the practice actually mirrors the pattern of total devotion military families are used to, while necessitating couples to “flip the script” of who performs gendered labor within the household.
Surrogacy in the United States
The surrogacy industry has rapidly changed since it first appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States (Jacobson, 2016; Markens, 2007; Spar, 2006). Arguably, one of the most significant changes has been the transition from traditional surrogacy to gestational surrogacy. In traditional surrogacy, the egg of the surrogate is used, whereas in gestational surrogacy, an embryo is created in a laboratory using either a donor egg or the egg of the intended mother (IM) and then inserted into the uterus of the surrogate, thereby severing the genetic link between the surrogate and growing child. The expanding market for surrogacy in the United States has evolved without any federal regulations, leaving states to decide on the legality and stipulations of the practice. Fourteen states expressly allow surrogacy and honor surrogacy arrangements, with half only allowing gestational surrogacy and the other half allowing both gestational and traditional surrogacy arrangements (Markens, 2007); four states explicitly prohibit the practice; with the remaining states yet to formally address the practice (Finkelstein, Mac Dougall, Kintominas, & Olsen, 2016).
The practice of surrogacy affects families in different ways. In the United States, women continue to live with their families for the duration of their pregnancies. 3 Much of the way women construct surrogacy and talk about the practice aligns with dominant gender ideology—the importance that women are expected to place on family and motherhood, the drive to be emotionally and psychologically nurturing to all parties involved, and the desire to create boundaries between themselves and the growing fetus in order to maintain the notion that they are still a good wife and mother within their own nuclear family unit (Berend, 2016; Jacobson, 2016; Teman, 2010). Even when the pregnancy proceeds with little complication, families still must adjust to cover the day-to-day needs of the household. In the event that complications do arise, spouses and other family members may have to take on a lot of responsibilities that were previously overseen by the surrogate. Jacobson (2016) found that surrogates and their husbands engage in a lot of “we” talk when discussing the surrogacy, indicating that they see themselves as an integral part of the process. In some families, older children will also participate in child care, playing nurse, or taking on other responsibilities for their mother (Jacobson, 2016). While some surrogates rely on family members or friends to help them keep the homestead functioning, others will add provisions into their surrogacy contracts so that things like a babysitter, housecleaner, transportation, and so on, will be covered (Berend, 2016; Jacobson, 2016).
Media narratives of military wives described this group as ideal for their demographic characteristics and because, in theory, it gave them something to do while their husbands were gone (Ali, 2008; Einhorn, 2008; Nosheen & Schellmann, 2010). While this folk sociology provided by the surrogacy industry and the media paints is an interesting picture, Ziff (2017) found that it was not so much the demographic characteristics that were potentially advantageous for this group of women in surrogacy, but rather as a result of their lived experiences as a military spouse they were able to bring a specific tool kit and skill set to the practice that was beneficial to a successful surrogacy experience. Additionally, other research pokes holes in the narrative provided by the media by arguing that the surrogacy experience is actually a family endeavor, with husbands playing a key supporting role (Jacobson, 2016).
Marriage Within the Context of the Military
Arguably, marriage has undergone significant changes in the 20th century (Coontz, 2005; Seltzer, 2004), becoming deinstitutionalized (Cherlin, 2004) in contemporary times and has shifted toward that of the companionate model (Finch & Summerfield, 1991) in which we see a heightened importance of love (Coontz, 2005) and a push toward equality between partners and a fluidity in the roles of the relationship. In addition to the changes in the structure and roles of marriage, people in the United States are entering into the institution later in life (Cohn, Passel, Wang, & Livingston, 2011). However, military service members and their spouses appear to be “marriage naturalists” (Kefalas, Furstenberg, Carr, & Napolitano, 2011), falling into marriage patterns from the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to the trends that we see in the general population, where the average age of first marriage for women is 26.5 and 28.7 years for men, service members tend to marry significantly younger than their civilian counterparts, where average age of first marriage for women is 23 and 25 years for men (Bushatz, 2014). They also appear to follow more traditional arrangements within their marriages. Researchers speculate the military seems to be one of the few institutions in American society that has reinstitutionalized family and marriage by incentivizing marriage and embedding families into its core institutional structure (Karney, Loughran, & Pollard, 2012; Lundquist & Xu, 2014).
Military spouses must navigate the demands of two competing and often conflicting “greedy” institutions (Coser, 1974): the military organization and the military family (Harrell, 2001; Segal, 1986) and wives’ identities are tied to their husbands and their careers (Alt, 2006; Hautzinger & Scandlyn, 2013; Lundquist & Xu, 2014; Weinstein, 1997). While daily life does vary from branch to branch, and even between positions within the same branch (Hertz & Charlton, 1989), women report strikingly similar experiences and expectations placed on them due to the overarching influence of the military as an institution. Spouses are expected, in both overt and covert ways, to fully participate in military life, which includes participating in social events on installation, running spouse support groups, offering support to other military families in times of crisis, and consistently being present as the backbone of their own household.
From a life course perspective, military wives have “linked lives,” but they are not only linked to their husbands but also to the military at large as the institution depends on spousal support to function and necessitates attention from wives. This is demonstrated through anecdotes and case studies (Alt, 2006), statistical and historical data (Karney et al., 2012; Lundquist & Xu, 2014), as well as extensive fieldwork and interviews (Hautzinger & Scandlyn, 2013; Lundquist & Xu, 2014). While most families experience tensions and challenges balancing work and family life, it is particularly acute in the military, specifically during times of war (Enloe, 2000; Hautzinger & Scandlyn, 2013; Lundquist & Xu, 2014). Constraints inherent to the military lifestyle including frequent moves, long periods of solo parenting, and intense bouts of spouse unemployment, illustrate how markedly different military spouses are from their civilian counterparts. The main mechanism by which spouses, especially officer wives, are expected to participate in military-focused activities is through volunteerism, which “falls in the category of morale, public relations, and ceremonial duties . . . and is related to the fact that an officer’s wife becomes an extension of the officer . . . ” (Harrell, 2001, p. 60). Arguably, this unpaid familial labor is compensated in part by the benefits families have access to such as housing stipends, access to commissary, TriCare (the military medical insurance), and so forth (Lundquist & Xu, 2014).
Military as a Gendered Institution
In addition to being “greedy,” the military is also a highly gendered institution (Acker, 1992; Christensen, 2014; Karney & Crown, 2007; Taber, 2009; Weber, 2012) that thrives on traditional patriarchal structures where the conforming wife is tasked with holding the family together thus enabling the husband to be free to pursue his career (Gerstel & Gross, 1984; Harrell, 2001; Harrison, 2006). 4 In a report for the RAND Corporation, Karney and Crown (2007) found, “To the extent that military work roles map closely onto traditional gender roles this suggests that the military will select for [service] men with highly traditional views of gender roles . . . ” (p. 20). By strictly following this traditional gender model, military wives may not only become dependent on their husbands but also feel repressed and constrained by their limited options (Burland & Lundquist, 2013). The military and their husbands’ careers dictate where they live, how they should act, and how much time they have for their own pursuits. In addition, their conduct reflects on their husbands and can affect decisions about promotion and relocation (Gassmann, 2010; Lundquist & Xu, 2014).
Folding and subordinating the identity of women into their husbands’ lives in the military, or the militarization of wives (Enloe, 2000), upholds certain traditional gender divisions and sex roles while paradoxically producing a flexible gender script that the parties draw on to negotiate the different stages of military life (Ziff, 2017). A tension exists where wives must be self-reliant and strong, especially during periods of deployment or other hardship, but also must be committed to the secondary status necessitated by the institution and community. Additionally, wives must be resilient, a concept used frequently to describe the role and responsibility of the military wife (Bowen, Martin, & Mancini, 2013). Being resilient goes beyond simply being a help versus a hindrance during all phases of the service member’s military career. Resiliency becomes more of a required tool in one’s cultural tool kit (Swidler, 2001) for wives to effectively combat the everyday challenges inherent to the military lifestyle from long bouts of solo-parenting to the uncertainty of deployment.
Method
The impetus for this project originated from a plethora of popular media articles from the late 2000s (Ali, 2008; Nosheen & Schellmann, 2010) indicating that military wives constitute a disproportionate percentage of the surrogate population and are considered by those in the industry to be “ideal” surrogates. 5 This information was also echoed in the 2010 report on surrogacy from the Council for Responsible Genetics, a nonprofit and nongovernmental organization focusing on emerging issues of biotechnology in society. Descriptive demographic qualifications from agencies aside, we actually know little about how surrogacy is chosen and experienced by this group of women and how they understand and navigate their surrogacy arrangement.
Data for this project was collected through semistructured interviews with 33 military wives who either had been or were currently surrogates. One husband was present during the interview and actively participated, for approximately 10 interviews, the husbands were in the house and would meander through the discussion at times, and the rest of the interviews were conducted one-on-one with the surrogate during which she recalled and described discussions with her husband. Given the lack of an accessible database of surrogates in the United States, I relied on purposeful and snowball sampling which produced a nonrandom sample for analysis. For both surrogates and military spouses, the Internet is a rich network of support and information and many women utilize online support forums for information, advice, and networking and I recruited from both online support forums as well as Facebook. The method of recruitment poses limitations as not all women who are surrogates and not all women who are military wives utilize these online groups. My sample is skewed toward women who find use in such online communities. Women profess liking these online groups for the information they provide, for the sense of community they offer, and for finding people who have engaged in what they consider to be a unique life experience on both counts (the military spouse experience and surrogate experience).
Two thirds of the interviews were completed in-person and the remainder were completed by phone. For the in-person interviews, I traveled to 12 states over the course of a year and half to meet with the surrogate and conduct the interview in a venue of her choosing, at times being asked into their homes and to meet their families. Overall, the women I interviewed were geographically dispersed in a total of 17 states. Phone interviews were conducted when the surrogate indicated a preference for that over an in-person interview. Interviews ranged from 45 minutes in length to 2½ hours and all were recorded. The length of the interview correlated to the number of surrogacies and amount of experience each woman had. Interviews consisted of three parts: demographic and background data, their experiences as a military spouse and how they came to be a surrogate, and their experiences with surrogacy.
It was important to let the interviews naturally progress and therefore let the women shape the flow of the conversation. Interviews were transcribed and an abductive data analysis approach (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014) commenced in tandem with recruitment of new respondents which allowed for questions to be adjusted for subsequent interviews to account for emerging themes (Rosenfeld, 2009). Interviews were initially coded for general patterns as they pertained to their experiences as a military spouse and then their experiences as a surrogate. Following the premise of abductive data analysis, transcripts were analyzed for surprising findings in light of would have been expected on the basis on the literature on military wives and surrogacy (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014). Coding was supplemented with memo writing and note taking to fully develop and assess both expected and surprising patterns and to work through emerging themes as they were developing. After initial coding, transcripts were reviewed to assess the fit of the coding scheme and for areas where themes overlapped between the two aspects of these women’s lives. It was during data analysis that the theme of family/husband support, negotiations with husbands, and surrogacy humor emerged.
Demographic and Background Data
With regard to demographics, military surrogates are strikingly similar to other women in the United States who choose to be surrogates. Respondents ranged from 21 to 39 years in age, education ranged from completion of high school to a master’s degree, all were heterosexual, had their own children (as is a requirement for surrogates), and ranged from being in their first surrogacy to embarking on their fifth. The majority of my sample identified as White with four women identifying as Latina. The women in my sample had been married to a service member for anywhere between 3 and 17 years, with five of them being active duty at the time of meeting their spouse and then leaving the military when they had children. All but one woman was married to an enlisted service member rather than an officer. Fourteen women were Army wives, seven were married to men in the Navy, six were married to Marines, and the remaining six were married to men in the Air Force. The narratives did not appear to be affected by the branch of service the women’s husbands were affiliated with. Many of the women reported that they did not see themselves as the “typical” military wife, viewing themselves as independent and their marriages as uniquely egalitarian. Roughly half of the women interviewed were employed in fields such as medicine, education, or customer service. Household incomes ranged from the mid $20,000 range to approximately $120,000 dollars, not including benefits and bonuses, with a mean income of $54,000 and a median income of $48,000.
When asked how they arrived at surrogacy, my sampled mirrored other groups of surrogates. Eighteen women said they had a close friend or family member with infertility problems and as a result they learned about surrogacy. Some of these women encountered infertility stories early and have known since they were teenagers that they wanted to be a surrogate. Three women were friends with someone who was a surrogate and as a result became interested in the process. The majority of women in my sample also professed a love of being pregnant and were eager at the opportunity to experience pregnancy again even though they were done with their own families. As Jacobson (2016) points out, people are generally suspect when surrogates claim to enjoy pregnancy as our culture socializes us to associate pregnancy with discomfort, pain, and a lack of pleasure.
Women in my sample ranged from completing one surrogate pregnancy to five, with the average being two. All but two women were gestational surrogates. Eight women reported that their husbands were gone for at least some, if not all, of their surrogacy. The rest of the sample had husbands were who home while they were acting as a surrogate. Twenty-two women reported going through a surrogacy agency, seven elected to do an “independent journey” which means they did not work with an agency, and four of my respondents had done both a surrogacy with an agency then elected to go independent for their subsequent surrogate pregnancies. The decision of which agency to work with appeared to be a mixture between personal preferences, referrals from people they trusted, to location of the agency, with some preferring a local agency and others an agency outside of their own state. Twenty-seven women in my sample received compensation for their surrogacy, ranging from $18,000 to $25,000.
While this group broadens our understanding of military wives and how marriages within the military function, it must be noted that this group might not be representative of how military wives navigate decision making and everyday negotiations with their husbands. Given that not all military wives are interested in or embark on the surrogacy process, there might be something unique about this group of wives. Perhaps they see themselves as particularly independent, view their relationships with their husbands as more egalitarian than other wives do, and of course, find something interesting in the idea of having a baby for a third party. Keeping this caveat in mind, understanding how this group if wives and their husbands navigate a significant decision such as this one expands our understanding of military marriages, marriages within institutional settings, as well as the practice of surrogacy in the United States.
Findings
Negotiating Surrogacy With Their Husbands
All of the women interviewed were married at the time of their surrogacy, necessitating conversations with their husbands before embarking on their surrogacy endeavor. The majority of my sample reported positive interactions with their husbands, and even when men initially were uneasy about surrogacy women were usually able to sway them through research and long conversations. As noted in the introduction, while the woman executes the embodied, psychological, and emotional labor of pregnancy, husbands must agree to the process as they are vital when it comes to support, and also must participate in the legal and medical aspects of surrogacy. For example, most husbands must undergo testing for sexually transmitted diseases, abstain from sex for specific periods of time, and also sign the contracts that are drafted for the surrogacy arrangement.
While previous research has shown highly traditional roles in marriages between military wives and their service member husbands (Karney & Crown, 2007; Lundquist & Xu, 2014; Taber, 2009), my research indicates that military marriages can exhibit much more egalitarian and companionate elements than previously assumed. The wives in my sample considered themselves to be equal to their husbands and professed to actively participate in decision making. Some decisions, that is, when a partner receives orders to relocate are not necessarily negotiable; however, women actively decided with their husbands if the family would indeed relocate with him, if the service member would reenlist for another term, and other significant life altering decisions. While all couples must figure out their roles and how to make decisions within their marriage, the military adds an extra variable.
When it comes to surrogacy, Judy, a two-time gestational surrogate in her 30s who lived on base in the south, knew even before marriage that she wanted to be a surrogate and made a point to tell her husband as much during their whirlwind courtship. While she had very strong convictions about pursuing the process of surrogacy, she does make a point to note that it is something that has to work for her husband. When asked how her extended family feels about the process, she replied, “When it comes to my life, unless I ask for your opinion I could care less about it. Because it’s my life. It’s my husband’s life, and kids.” This sentiment is reflected in other studies on surrogates in the United States (Berend, 2016; Jacobson, 2016) who were adamant that the decision was for them and their husbands to make (and in some cases their children as well). At the time of the interview, Judy was attempting to start a new surrogacy arrangement but did note, So I know what he [her husband] doesn’t like. And I feel bad, but . . . if he were to put his foot down, and say no, which he doesn’t normally do . . . so if he does then I would respect it. But when I talked to him about it he just kept saying that he hates the shots and then he asked if he was back on cleanup crew [for her intense morning sickness], and he was like, “I hate that. But ok, if this is what you want to do.” So, it’s not a whole lot of strain [on our relationship] but I know what he doesn’t like. Um, but he doesn’t dislike it enough to put his foot down.
Judy is aware that her husband is not enamored with all aspects of surrogacy but is also confident that if he cannot abide her actually going through it again he would let her know.
Alice, a five-time gestational surrogate in her 30s who lived off base in the western region of the United States, and her husband detailed a little more back and forth with the initial decision. He was present during our interview and the two of them described how they first got into the practice:
So I started thinking about donating my eggs so I contacted an agency and she said, “that’s great but have you ever thought about surrogacy because it’s so much more rewarding in so many ways.” I told her, we had thought about it before but we weren’t sure about it so she explained everything about being a gestational surrogate and that I wouldn’t be related to the baby, just the carrier.
And that was the key.
It clicked that time and I thought it made sense and it sounded a lot easier. So I approached him [Matt] again and again and he wasn’t around [due to deployment] but he was like, “I can tell you are really passionate about this and you supported me being in the military and I can support you on this,” so we kinda set it up, moved to San Diego and started looking at agencies.
Matt’s point of view highlights two important themes: first, the stated importance on mutual support within the relationship, and second, the lack of genetic connection between the baby and the surrogate.
Some women detailed a much more involved decision-making process with their husbands. For example, women professed that many of their husbands wanted to know more before giving their opinion on the process. As Jessica, a two-time gestational surrogate in her late 20s that lived on base in the south told me, He just wanted me to do research. He was like, “you have always supported me in my career and I will support you,” but he wanted me to find out more. Because you have to have your significant other sign the contract with you because you can’t do it without their support.
Her husband did not initially reject the idea but did want to know more about what she, and by proxy their family, would be getting into. This theme of research was very common among both surrogates and their husbands. On one hand, the importance of family is normalized in military families; however, this particular version of pregnancy falls way outside of the “traditional” lifestyle this group is accustomed to and raised many questions for husbands when approached by their wives.
“It’s Not Our Baby”
According to the women in my sample, a key point that they had to illustrate to their husbands was that the baby would not be in any way related to the surrogate, as we saw with Alice and Matt’s exchange. Women reported that many men felt relieved once they understood the process of gestational surrogacy and that the baby would not be related to them or their wife. Jacobson (2016) noted similar patterns in her work where husbands were generally more supportive of gestational versus traditional surrogacy. Zoe, a one-time gestational surrogate in her mid-20s who lived off base in the south told me: My husband was like, “I don’t want you carrying some other man’s baby.” I was like, “but it won’t be my egg at all. It won’t be your kid!” At first, he thought it would be my egg with some other guy and I was like, “that’s not at all what it’s going to be.” So we talked about it like two or three times and each time that we did talk about it I Googled more information to give him and eventually, after I sat down and discussed everything with him he was like, “well now that I think about it, it doesn’t sound all that bad.” He was like, “well okay, if that’s what you really want then you know I’m for it.”
This sentiment was echoed in other recaps of the negotiation phase. Tiffany, a one-time gestational surrogate in her late 20s off base in the Midwest told me, “Let me add, my husband is only supportive of me being a gestational surrogate, not a traditional surrogate” and Shannon, a two-time gestational surrogate in her late 30s living off base in the Northeast recalled, “At first, he probably thought that I’m crazy when I brought it up until I explained to him what it is, it’s not our baby, I’m not giving up our child and he has been supportive ever since.” These exchanges are illustrative of one of the particularities of surrogacy in the United States where surrogates are active and present members in their own nuclear families, while simultaneously are in the process of contributing to the nuclear family of a third party. As noted by Jacobson, the “public face of the surrogate is a married, heterosexual woman” which maintains association with the “traditional family” and occludes the transgressive nature of surrogacy. Ultimately, questions of kinship and relationships abound and many rely on biogenetic models (Berend, 2016; Jacobson, 2016) to navigate this unusual terrain. By assuring themselves that this baby is not “theirs” or “their wife’s” the cohesiveness of their own family, and in some respect’s marriage, remains intact.
Another common theme that emerged was the importance of the compensation in surrogate negotiations with their husband. In general, the relationship between compensation and assisted reproductive technologies in our society is acutely gendered. When engaging in practices such as egg donation or surrogacy women are expected to be altruistic and not place importance on the compensation of the practice (Almeling, 2011; Berend, 2016; Jacobson, 2016). When men donate sperm, however, it is perfectly acceptable for them to cite compensation as a motivating factor (Almeling, 2011). This double standard extends into the world of surrogacy. As Shannon told me, Like I said I have easy pregnancies . . . he [her husband] says I’m nicer when I’m pregnant anyways (laughs). He liked the money, I’m not going to lie. For me it was never about the money but for him he was like “I’ll deal with it for the time period then I’ll get the money and I can buy whatever.” Like this last one, we got our new deck out of it.
Or as Diana, a one-time gestational surrogate in her 20s who lived on base in the west recalled, I’m like, “Oh, and I have question [to her husband], What do you think about me being a surrogate?” . . . and he’s just like, “I don’t know.” He’s like, “That’s kind of weird,” like he was very uneasy about it at first. Then I was like, “Well, how would you feel if there was 30,000 dollars involved?” and he was like, “Oh, okay!”
Diana went on to detail more involved discussions with her husband regarding his actual concerns, namely, how she would even get pregnant and what happens if she gets attached to the child, but the news of the money was definitely what helped him start to open up to conversations. This use of money as a tool to sway husbands on board is also echoed in other reports on surrogates in the United States (Berend, 2016; Jacobson, 2016). Even though men were more vocal about the monetary aspect of surrogacy, about half of my sample detailed collaborative decision making when it came to the question of what to do with the money. Echoing the view the surrogacy is a family practice, what to do with the monetary component of surrogacy was also a collaborative decision.
Getting Through Surrogacy
For both spouses, navigating and narrating a surrogacy arrangement demands creativity and collaboration. As Jacobson (2016) points out, surrogacy creates family work, a kind of third shift for reproductive workers and their families. . . . In fact, family work—the labor of third-party reproduction—is not quite work or family, but a liminal state in between. . . . Rather, for the surrogate—and often for her husband and sometimes for her children as well—the experience of surrogacy becomes part hobby, part job, part sociability, and part domestic work. (p. 152)
However, challenging family work may be, being connected to a greedy institution such as the military adds an extra layer of complexity for the women in my sample. Even if a husband is willing to participate in the third shift of surrogacy if he were to get orders to deploy, for example, the demands of the military would take priority. For example, Zoe’s husband received orders to relocate a couple of months into her surrogate pregnancy. When I asked her how he had been during her pregnancy, she responded, Yeah, well, it’s hard now because with the whole surrogacy because he’s in another state so I stayed behind to finish this . . . but surrogacy isn’t legal [where he moved to] . . . so I stayed behind because I started this before he was ever sent over.
While he had been helpful to Zoe in the beginning of her surrogacy, she was now left to go through the rest of the pregnancy on her own to fulfil what she saw as her obligation to her IPs.
Contrary to popular speculation, the majority of the women in my sample were surrogates while their husbands were home thus necessitating the participation in family work from all parties (also echoed in Ziff, 2017). In cases where their husbands ended up being deployed or on assignment during periods of the surrogacy, women reported it to be quite difficult for them. For example, when I asked Shannon if she would consider being a surrogate again she replied, If my husband was here I would. Because I wanted to be done by the time I’m 40, which basically gives me one more year but with him not being here, and my own kids, it’s just too stressful. I have to do everything on my own. I could do it after he gets back but I don’t want to do it after I’m 40.
While there are many variables that go into a woman’s decision to become a surrogate, for Sarah, and others, having a husband around to assist them was considered to be crucial.
For many of the women in my sample, surrogacy was like their “mommy deployment” (Ziff, 2017) where militarized narratives were transposed and applied to the practice of surrogacy as a way for women to contextualize and make sense of the surrogacy practice. Drawing on militarized narratives also helped their husbands and children navigate the practice and the new roles that were expected of them as many of their husbands now had to contribute to managing the day-to-day demands of surrogacy as well as the broader emotional and psychological demands of the practice. During interviews, some key themes emerged when women discussed how their partners experienced surrogacy along with them. Many women noted their husbands use of humor, their willingness to play nurse, and in a few cases, their husbands’ detachment from the process.
Laughing Their Way Through It
During interviews, one of the most surprising themes that emerged was how many husbands loved making jokes about surrogacy. Unlike surrogacy in India, where women live away from their families during the pregnancy (Pande, 2014; Rudrappa, 2015), surrogates are not taken away from their everyday lives and their families and as a result, their pregnancies are visible to their communities, extended families, and general public places. This necessitates surrogates and their husbands alike to be agentic and arguably creative when navigating discussions about the pregnancy. As Riley, a two-time gestational surrogate in her mid-20s who lived on base in the south put it, “You gotta’ have fun with it sometimes.” To a certain extent, joking seems to be common in the surrogacy world, and in some ways this group is not an anomaly. As Alice and Matt recalled:
Like when I first started out . . . I thought how do you talk about it when someone comes up to you? Like this lady came up to me in a store and she was feeling my belly and asking me questions and she was foreign and I was having a hard time understanding her and it was really hard to explain to her that this is not my baby. So I started making different t-shirts and different things it would say like “I’m not the mom, I’m just the stork” and things like that.
I loved it when people would say “your wife is pregnant” and I would be like “yeah” and then they would say congratulations and then I would say “it’s not mine” and then they would just say something like “I’m sorry” but I would always be like “it’s all good man.” And I would either explain it or let it sit for a bit. It’s always fun just to watch their face change.
This amusement while watching other people process the information was not specific to Matt and was enjoyed by some surrogates as well. As Judy recalled: We do mess with people a lot—like that’s one of the fun parts of surrogacy. Like, my husband’s officer said, “Hey man, I didn’t even know your wife was pregnant.” And I don’t even know how he found out but he’s like, “Oh yeah it’s cool because it’s not my kid.” And the officer was like, “Oh my God what happened? Why didn’t you tell me you were having marital problems?” and my husband was just like, “No, I’m cool with it.” And so, we do mess with people. We’ll be at a restaurant and we’ll be in a crowded room and I’ll say, “God I love how you let me have another man’s baby.” And that’s the fun part.
For many of these spouses, the humor acted as a way of bonding them through a rather unusual situation as well as deflecting stigma, both to outsiders as well as to themselves, of this somewhat unconventional mode of family making. Additionally, for these couples, it was a way to lighten the moment and create levity and connectedness during a relatively intense process in which there is heightened responsibility.
In addition to the general mechanism of distancing and stigma avoidance that humor provides for the surrogacy process, it also functions specifically in the context of the military. Military wives inherently exist in a subordinated position within the institution of the military and stereotypes about wives are quite rampant. For many women, specifically the younger wives of enlisted members, one frequent stereotype they must combat is that of the “dependapotamus,” where it is assumed that all they do is frequently reproduce to leech off of the military and are generally irresponsible with said children. This was alluded to by Lily, a two-time gestational surrogate who lived on base on the west coast, who has two kids of her own, when she described:
People knew that I was pregnant and they would be like “Dude, you’re having twins!” and my husband would be like, “They’re not mine” and they would be like “huh?” and then he would say, “don’t worry, they’re not hers either.” And they would just look at us like I was crazy and they were like, “what?!”
So you two liked messing with people?
Yeah . . . but I did notice that in the military housing, a lot of the wives were looking at me like “how could you have more kids?” and I was like, “lady, you’re eighteen and have five kids, how dare you look at me like that?” That was one thing I did notice that when you’re pregnant in that setting, everybody knows your business and knows that they’re not your husbands. And when they would hear us joke they would be like, “you must be the worst wife ever!” and my husband would be like, “naw, she bought me a car. We’re good.” He would laugh at the wives.
Lily was acutely aware of the stigma and stereotypes that exist within the specific community that she is part of and engaged in both deflection and stigma avoidance. Other women alluded to the stigma of being pregnant within the military community and the judgment they felt from other members in the community. This was particularly articulated by the younger women in my sample.
Playing Nurse
As noted, women need a strong support system when embarking on the surrogacy process. For many, this naturally falls on the shoulders of their husbands and women report needing their help in a myriad of ways during their surrogacy process. Some husbands took a hands-on approach during the surrogacy, offering to help their wives administer medications, wait on them hand and foot, and be active participants in the delivery room. For the women in my sample, who had their husbands present during the surrogacy, about half of them reported their husbands or children were helpful around the house and picked up the duties she could no longer perform. This finding was unexpected given the argument that the military is a greedy institution that perpetuates traditional gender roles. Judy, who had extreme morning sickness, reported: With the surrogate pregnancies, I’m sick from the first few days I’m pregnant until a month or two after they are born. I am sick, nonstop. I travel with a trash can in my car. If we go to any store, we are constantly looking where the nearest bathroom is, the nearest trash can. I’ve stopped walking my daughter to the bus stop and the bus stop is right in front of our house, it’s right there. But I had to stand in the kitchen and I would get sick in the trashcan and watch her from the window. So he [her husband] needed to be around for the second one because we knew what it was going to be.
Judy’s ability to do day-to-day activities on her own was severely impeded and she needed her husband’s support and ability to be able to assist her at a moment’s notice. However, there were limits to what her husband could do. After her birth, which ended up being a cesarean section, he was not able to take time off of work, With the first pregnancy, he couldn’t get out of deployment because it wasn’t his baby and with the second pregnancy, he couldn’t get leave because they weren’t his babies. Although both times, I had a c-section he couldn’t get off work. He kept saying, “But it’s my wife,” but the military comes first. So after I calmed down I was like, “You’re right. Duty does come first.”
Judy described her husband as very supportive, however, there were institutional barriers to when he could be present.
For some couples, this attention extended well past the birth. As Lucy, a two-time gestational surrogate in her 30s that lived on base in the south recalled: When I was recovering he had to wait on me hand and foot. We kind of got closer because he had to look out for me. You never really think that your spouse is going to have to help you go to the bathroom or stuff and other gory details, but it’s like we got closer because of that. There wasn’t a baby or anything to show for it . . . just seeing him helping me out and being so attentive it helped us, I think, because I’m like, “oh, my, gosh he did such a good job because I was in so much pain I couldn’t do anything for myself.” The whole experience, he had to adjust to the idea of me being a surrogate and he was awesome about it of course the whole way, but in the end it’s just something unexpected that happened that kind of brought us closer.
In many respects, surrogacy can “flip the script” on couples, and especially in situations where the relationship follows traditional gender patterns or the couple is secondary to an institution such as the military, this can be the first time that the male has found himself in the role of caretaker.
Difficulty/Lack of Support
As many surrogates argue, their families sacrifice as much as they do during a surrogacy. For husbands of surrogates, this sacrifice manifests in many ways, and often, husbands take everything in stride. A key barrier some experience is strictly institutional, such as in the case of Zoe whose husband had to move or in the case of Judy, whose husband could not take of time after her cesarean sections. For some men though, the process can be quite unnerving, even when they are supportive. As Bonnie, a one-time gestational surrogate of triplets who was in her 30s and no longer lived on base told me: He [her husband] said that I could do whatever I wanted and that he would support me but he did feel a little weird at times because I was carrying someone else’s baby. And he said that part was a little bit weird at times but aside from that he did everything. He is such a great support person. Actually, after his experience he wants to do something where he can help other husbands of surrogates. He wants to talk to them and tell them what they can and can’t expect, what they should do and how involved they should be as well.
This was also echoed by Emily, a one-time gestational surrogate in her 20s on base in the south, who reported, My husband had a difficult time wanting to be intimate since there was a baby in me, let alone from another man, so that caused some marital friction, but he was still supportive. I had crazy emotional moods while pregnant and that also strained how I reacted to my kids and husband.
The unease with intimacy is echoed in Jacobson’s (2016) work and many couples have to navigate these issues and questions as they arise.
Few people have been in a situation where their wives are carrying a child for a third party, and in many ways, it challenges the way we tend to think about family formation and reproduction. Furthermore, a husband’s reaction to surrogacy might have been affected by other issues in the marriage and the institutional barriers within the military that prevent couples from seeking formal help. For example, women reported issues of posttraumatic stress disorder, questions over power dynamics in the marriage, and other issues even prior to the surrogate pregnancy. Some of these marital issues are experienced by civilians and military spouses alike; however, particular strains such as posttraumatic stress disorder and deployment are acute to the military spouse experience. For Bonnie’s and Emily’s husbands, at times, this was a bit too much to wrap their heads around. Victoria, a two-time gestational surrogate in her 30s living off base, reported issues with her husband as well. She recalled, He knew my couple, because we were friends, but after I became pregnant he started to refer to them as “these people” saying “I don’t want to go hang out with these people.” It became like almost a territorial thing because he . . . he never came out and said it but I got the sense that he felt like they owned a part of his wife and he didn’t like that. It was a little weird. But uh, he was just supportive enough for me to think “ok well, you said yes. You can’t take that back.”
He rationally could acknowledge the responsibility that his wife had signed up for, but found it to be emotionally and psychologically difficult to deal with the new boundaries and relationships that were being forged.
Mary, a one-time gestational surrogate in her 20s living on base on the west coast, detailed her husband as ultimately supportive, but only after initial doubts and ambivalence. She recalled, Yeah . . . he really . . . he’s not been unsupportive but he’s not been a thousand percent on board the whole time. He’s much better now. Now, he’s like great about it. But um . . . it took us two tries [to get pregnant] so the first try, he was like, “whatever, I don’t care . . . do what you gotta do . . . ” he helped when I needed it but he’s like, “I don’t care. I don’t know why you’re doing this. I don’t get it.” So he was ok but not ok . . . but much better now . . . um . . . he was raised Catholic so a lot of him feels that if they were supposed to have a baby, they would’ve been able to have a baby. That was part of it and I think just the whole cranky, hormonal . . . he has to deal with it . . . he says, “The intended father is lucky . . . he doesn’t have to deal with this . . . his wife is not pregnant . . . he doesn’t have to deal with crankiness and cravings and uncomfortableness . . . all that.” I think there were reservations about how it was gonna be.
For Mary’s husband, it was a process to comes to terms with what his wife had signed up for. And in many cases, there is a significant fear of the unknown: What is it going to be like? Will my wife be safe? Will she be sad after the birth? The couple needs to make this up as they go along, so to speak, and for some, this proves to be quite the challenge. As the practice has grown there are more resources for husbands and partners to access as their significant others go through surrogacy in an effort to make the experience as positive as possible. However, for some significant others surrogacy will remain an uncomfortable and potentially unwelcome experience.
Discussion
This article takes an in-depth look at how military wives who become surrogates negotiate the decision to embark on surrogacy with their husbands and how the two navigate the surrogacy process together. As noted, the military is a greedy and acutely gendered institution (Acker, 1992; Christensen, 2014; Segal, 1986), affecting not just how women perform the spouse role but in this case, how women perform the surrogate role. At one point, military wives were considered ideal candidates for the surrogacy process due to demographic and ideological characteristics. As a demographic, these women tend to marry and complete their families at a young age, they have TriCare, are steeped in messages of valor and sacrifice, and spend ample time without their husbands. However, women in my sample paint a distinctively different picture from the general view of military wives and surrogates in a few significant ways. First, most women in my sample had husbands who were present for the surrogacy process and considered them to be a valuable support system. Second, they detail egalitarian decision making and describe surrogacy as a process ideally experienced together rather than one where their husbands are absent. In fact, there is a stark lack of reference to the military as an intervening factor, which is contrary to what I had anticipated based on preliminary research.
Once women were initially interested in surrogacy they had to discuss it with their husbands. For many of the women I spoke to, they detailed equal decision making, noting they and their husband were a team and they would never make a decision this big without him. This was also necessitated by the structure of the practice in general as husbands are required by the industry to sign the legal contracts and participate in various modes of screening and testing before a woman is cleared to become a surrogate. When recounting how they approached and discussed surrogacy with their service member husbands, women noted themes of mutual support and collaborative discussions. While women did detail aspects of their lives that they had little control over due to their status as a military spouse, they emphasized how they and their husbands navigate these things as a pair.
In many respects, this contradicts some of the speculation as to what made military wives attractive to the surrogacy industry. Military spouses do indeed have “linked lives,” but little has been writing about the consequences of this linkage on service member husbands. Largely, the work on “linked lives” focuses on how wives are limited in their opportunities and ability to make decisions (Kleykamp, 2013; Lundquist & Xu, 2014); however, there are also consequences of this connection on their husbands and it is a result of this linkage that women can successfully perform their surrogacy. Rather than this being something the “little wife can do while her husband is deployed,” husbands were seen as key to the process and some amount of effort and time is usually required of a surrogate’s husband as well.
Interestingly, this highly feminized labor of surrogacy that is rooted in traditional gendered imagery necessitates the woman’s needs take priority over that of her husband and her family, temporarily changing the gendered duties and roles within the military household. To a certain extent, military families are used to having to acquiesce to the demands of one family member, typically the service member, and wives live in a space where traditional gender roles are expected of them at the same time they are expected to be self-sufficient and keep the household running when their husbands are not present (Ziff, 2017). Women are used to drawing on unique gender roles and responsibilities at a moment’s notice, depending on the context. Surrogacy mirrors this pattern, demanding husband’s now live in this space of transposable gender roles.
While most women in my sample detailed a positive experience with their husbands some did report that their husbands took issue with surrogacy at various stages of the arrangement. Some men were never completely comfortable with the idea that their wife was carrying someone else’s baby, or more specifically another man’s baby. Women also reported tensions between themselves and their husbands over daily responsibilities and dismay at having to put up with a pregnant wife when the pregnancy was not even for their own family. Many of the women who reported problems with their husbands with regard to surrogacy also alluded to other issues in their marriage, leading to the speculation that surrogacy exacerbates currently present issues.
Overall, the women in my sample detailed a collaborative relationship with their husbands where they do see each other as part of a team. Together, they must find a way throughout the surrogacy process to handle the unique situation they are in, navigating third-party reproduction while maintaining their established family structure. Women detailed thoughtful discussions with their husbands when negotiating becoming a surrogate and companionate efforts to navigate the surrogate pregnancy together. This runs contrary to previous understandings of how decisions are made in military marriages and flips the script as to whose needs come first in these marriages. At times, surrogacy demands a pattern of total devotion from not just the surrogate but her whole family, contradicting the expectations that are usually put on military couples.
These findings indicate that there is more research needed on military families, as well as families in other total institutional settings. As more industries move toward the model of the total institution, understanding how families navigate decision making in this type of setting could be helpful. In addition, this work gives us a glimpse of how individuals conceive third-party reproduction in the United States. The way these couples approach the decision and practice of surrogacy show us how people conceive of family formation, both their own as well as others’. Ultimately, we see new and adaptive patterns not previously assumed of this group that could provide insight into how other couples navigate highly structured or institutionalized lifestyles and communities. Additionally, this work allows us to better understand how husbands respond to the responsibilities necessitated by their wives’ decision to engage in nontraditional labor.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Iddo Tavory, Laura Martin, Kumiko Endo, and the reviewers from this journal for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article. Their criticisms and suggestions have been invaluable. I am also grateful to Zsuzsa Berend for the discussions we have had about this topic.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. 1332926.
