Surrogacy as a Family Project: How Surrogates Articulate Familial Identity and Belonging

Abstract

This paper explores how surrogates negotiate the meaning of familial belonging and family identity when they discuss surrogacy with their husband, children, and other relatives. We suggest that surrogacy necessitates reflexive explication of what a family is and how this family is implicated in surrogacy. Our comparative study analyzes ethnographic data on Israeli and US surrogates to illuminate key similarities in surrogates’ strategies vis-a-vis their husband and children, pointing to the importance of daily family practices in how people understand family belonging. First, we map out the ways surrogates engage their husbands in order to gain their support and protect their nuclear family unit before entering the process. Next, we look at how surrogates explain surrogacy to their children in efforts to clarify siblingship and the boundaries between the two families, and to make surrogacy into an educational family project. We analyze the metaphors and rituals in surrogates’ family-bounding practices.

Keywords

Surrogacy surrogate mothers familial belonging family identity children of surrogates

Introduction

Critics of surrogacy have often focused on how the practice leads to the commodification of babies and motherhood and the deconstruction of the family (Anderson, 1990; Danna, 2015; Dolgin, 1990, 2019; Rothman, 2000). Others, especially early champions of surrogacy, anticipated that the practice would deconstruct “the patriarchal” nuclear family (e.g., Firestone 2003). Empirically, neither scenario has materialized. Our respective research projects on Israel and the United States explored surrogates’ conceptualizations of “family” and found that they delineated boundaries between their own families and the family they “helped” create.

Our concern here is how surrogates, as part of their nuclear as well as larger family, negotiate the meaning of familial belonging and identity when they discuss surrogacy with their husband, children, and other relatives. We suggest that surrogacy necessitates reflexive explication of what a family is and how this family is implicated in surrogacy. Our comparative study illuminates key similarities in surrogates’ strategies vis-a-vis their husband and children, pointing to the importance of daily family practices in how people understand family belonging.

Literature Review

Our exploration of surrogate’s negotiations with their husband and children draws upon the broader sociological and anthropological scholarship on family, family identity, and belonging. While it is beyond the reach of this article to account for the breadth of this scholarship, much of the scholarship on family identity and belonging is formulated in the context of the deinstitutionalization of family (Cherlin, 2004). The pre-eminence of the nuclear family based on companionate marriage has been the main characteristic of modern family life (Finch and Summerfield, 1991; Stacey, 1996). Accordingly, “family belonging” has been conceptualized as a relationship of solidarity (Schneider, 1980, p. 52). Schneider (1980, p. 50) also contended that the family is the paradigm of “how kinship relations are to be conducted and to what end,” and that living in the same household gives meaning to biogenetic relatedness. The home is the main site of family practices, including couple relations, both in practical and imagined ways (Gabb & Fink, 2015).

“Family identity,” defined as “the family’s subjective sense of its own continuity over time, its present situation, and its character” (Bennett et al., 1988, pp. 212), is a useful concept to comprehend how families distinguish themselves from others. It is, however, important to think of family identity in a dynamic way, as practices (Morgan, 1999, 2011; Silva and Smart, 1999). “Doing family” implies reflexive practices and an “active process” (Morgan, 1999, p. 16). “Family practices exist in the routine talk about family—family obligations, family duties, family constraints. . . . Family talk is family action, re-affirming or modifying the entity under discussion” (Morgan, 1999, p. 29).

Important recent work has explored family practices in the context of reproductive technologies and adoption (e.g., Howell, 2006; Nordqvist and Smart, 2014). The focus of this scholarship, however, is more often on the “receiving” family, that is, the family that is created through adoption or donor gametes. There has been little empirical work on how surrogates’ families make sense of carrying a child for others in comparison to how adoptive parents (e.g., Anagnost, 2000; Howell, 2006; Howell and Melhuus, 2007), or those using donor eggs or sperm (Nordqvist and Smart 2014) or embryo donation (Collard & Kashmeri, 2011), negotiate family belonging, discuss siblinghood and family identity, and decide issues of secrecy versus disclosure.

The scholarship documents that parents of donor-conceived and adopted children employ various strategies, rituals, and narratives to make these children “their own”, to construct a sense of family identity and manage this familial identity as their children grow (Howell & Melhuus, 2007). The project of “kinning” transnationally adopted children in order to create familial and societal belonging without erasing the child’s original “cultural identity” is a prominent research agenda (Anagnost, 2000; Howell, 2006; Howell & Marre, 2006). Suter et al.’s (2008) study on negotiating lesbian family identity through family rituals and symbols is instructive; they contend that given the fragility of their family identities, lesbian mothers draw upon symbols and rituals that will communicate and publicly validate their long-term, permanent relationship and will affirm their family identity to relatives, co-workers, and strangers. Surrogates similarly draw on symbolic manifestations of family belonging and identity when their surrogate pregnancy raises questions from their children and others.

Critics of surrogacy have largely focused on how surrogates are denied motherhood, without attention to either surrogates’ understandings of relatedness or acknowledgment of surrogates’ own family situation (Danna, 2015; Rothman, 2000). Some legal scholars worry about the small handful of legal cases that “shift the contours of family. . .and the parent-child bond” (Dolgin, 2019, p. 503). Empirical sociological scholarship on surrogacy, in contrast, has situated surrogates in their familial context and examined some aspects of surrogates’ understandings of kin-ties and parenthood (e.g., Berend, 2016; Teman, 2010; Jacobson, 2016; Ragoné 1994; Ziff, 2017, 2019). Findings have consistently shown that surrogates considered intended parents’ (IPs) desire for children as the basis of parental claims and explained that they would not have been pregnant but for the IPs’ intention to create a family (Berend, 2016; Teman, 2010; Jacobson, 2016; Ragoné, 1994; Ziff, 2017).

Some research has also explored surrogates’ understanding of siblinghood and found that they overwhelmingly understood co-residence and caring behavior, rather than simply genetics, as markers of family belonging (Berend, 2016). Jadva & Imrie (2014) found that in the United Kingdom, IPs’ intentions were central to the construction of parenthood, and surrogates’ children struggled to find the “right” terminology to define their relationship to the surrogacy-born child. Our aim is to focus on a less discussed area in the scholarship: on surrogacy as a “family project.” By family project we mean that surrogates undertake surrogacy as a joint endeavor with their husband and children, first convincing them and then involving them in its various phases, and relying on their support and cooperation. Many aspects of this nuclear family project are not visible to outsiders, sometimes not even fully to the IPs, yet it is a key factor of surrogacy both in the United States and Israel.

A Comparative Approach to Understanding Surrogacy

Our comparison stems from discussions about our respective findings over the years. Despite dramatic regulatory and political differences in the social organization of surrogacy between the United States and Israel, we have found many similarities between how surrogates themselves organize and understand the practice, and what strategies they employ in defining family boundaries. We take these similarities to be rooted in the Western sociocultural understanding of family life, with the couple at its center. Similarly to Inhorn et. al’s (2017) comparative study of medical egg freezing among Israeli and US cancer patients, we find the binational ethnographic investigation of surrogates’ articulations of familial identity and belonging fruitful because it sheds light on larger patterns of family practices and meanings. In contrast to other socio-cultural contexts, surrogates in both our samples are typically married with children, and embrace surrogacy as not just a family project but also a positive social contribution. Israeli and US surrogates undertake surrogacy while living at home, together with their families, unlike Indian surrogates who are usually separated from their families during the pregnancy, living in dormitories hosted by the surrogacy clinic (e.g., Pande, 2014; Rudrappa, 2015). Surrogates in the United States and Israel also similarly conceptualize kin-ties, a topic we have comparatively explored elsewhere (Teman and Berend, 2018). Specifically, they do not consider the child their own and do not report “bonding” with the baby, unlike some of the Indian surrogates who seem to consider the surrogate baby kin (Pande, 2014) and some who grieved over relinquishing the child (Rudrappa, 2015). Israeli and US surrogates also differ substantially from the Russian surrogates studied by Weis (2017), who viewed surrogacy primarily as a business transaction as well as a social stigma, rather than a conjoined monetary and gift relationship and a socially praiseworthy practice, as we have found to be the case for Israel and the United States.

It is interesting to note that Israeli and US surrogates articulate similar meanings about surrogacy and family in very different regulatory contexts. Tightly monitored by the state under a comprehensive law, Israeli surrogacy contracts must be pre-approved by a government-appointed committee. The parties must be Israeli citizens, share the same religion, and cannot be related to one another. At the time of this study, the IPs had to be married heterosexual couples who have no or only one genetic offspring. The sperm had to be provided by the intended father (IF) and the egg by the intended mother (IM) or an anonymous donor Teman (2010).

Conversely, in the United States, surrogacy is regulated state-by-state rather than by federal law; state regulation differs greatly. New York, for example, has until recently considered surrogacy contracts void and unenforceable. In the most surrogacy-friendly state, California, courts generally reinforce surrogacy contracts; however, there are no statutes regulating surrogacy, and a free market model prevails in which private commercial surrogacy agencies and fertility clinics operate with little oversight. States that allow compensated surrogacy do not limit who can contract a surrogate nor require mandatory contracts or screening; thus surrogates and IPs negotiate the conditions of their arrangement through an agency, lawyers, or privately. In this state-by-state regulatory situation, parties to surrogacy often find ways to sidestep the hurdles presented by one state by drawing up contracts or working with agencies or clinics in another, more surrogacy-friendly one.

In both countries, albeit in somewhat different ways, surrogates—now most often married mothers—are active agents, negotiating the legal, medical, and relational aspects of surrogacy. Thus, surrogates negotiate both the bureaucratic/public and the private processes of surrogacy, in stark contrast to the Indian and Russian surrogates referenced earlier who are typically not involved in contract negotiations and may never meet, let alone form a relationship, with the IPs. Our respective findings are a logical basis for the comparative exploration we are undertaking in this paper.

Context and Methods

While expanded upon elsewhere Berend (2016); Teman (2010), the following is a brief outline of the methods for each of the studies, highlighting the common ground of these studies as a basis for our comparative analysis. The Israeli study included in-depth, open-format interviews, lasting about 1.5 hours, with 20 Jewish-Israeli surrogates who gave birth between 2014 and 2016. All interviewees were age 23– 38 years and lived within driving distance from the IPs. All surrogates were married, with two or more children. This study was a follow-up to an earlier study on Israeli surrogates who gave birth between 1998 and 2006; previous regulations allowed only single or divorced women to become surrogates Teman (2010).

Part of the inspiration for this follow-up study was to expand upon the ongoing comparative conversation between the two authors on the similarities and differences between surrogates’ understanding of relationships and relatedness in these two contexts Teman and Berend (2018). Thus, the interview guide included questions about the surrogates’ negotiations with their husbands and children.

The American study, conducted from 2002 to 2013, employed online ethnographic observation of www.surromomsonline.com (SMO), the largest and most important mediated public surrogacy forum in the United States; thousands of members discussed surrogacy-related questions and offered advice to newcomers. It was complemented with email exchanges with 35 surrogates recruited from SMO. This study focused on the ongoing communications among surrogates, the issues they took up and revisited, the ones they settled, and the changes in definitions about surrogacy-related emotions, behaviors, and standards. For the purposes of this article, we selected discussion threads about surrogacy-related conversations with family members.

It is important to point out that not all surrogates in the United States participated in SMO discussions, yet for over a decade it was the “backbone of the surrogacy world”, a treasure-trove of information and advice, as members pointed out. SMO members were a mix of traditional and gestational surrogates—although more often the latter—from many different states across the United States; mostly married, White, with two to four children.

While the challenges and benefits of comparing sets of different qualitative data have been discussed by others (Seale et. al 2010), our data sets had commonalities that were unique to the world of surrogacy. In the US sample, immersion in SMO discussions offered a comprehensive understanding of collectively defined meanings amongst surrogates, while the Israeli interviews yielded insights into the conversion of meanings and expectations formulated through participation in these groups.

Both authors wanted to understand how surrogates themselves formulate meanings. These meanings in turn inform surrogates’ actions and have consequences for the practice of surrogacy. Both authors adopted the same interpretive and analytic grounded theory approach to analyze data. First, each author openly coded her data for emergent themes. Next, we each made lists of recurring meta-themes in our data that related to the surrogate’s family. Third, we organized our data into one combined document under headlines such as “surrogate’s husband” and “explaining to children” so that we could begin to identify commonalities and differences. Finally, we were able to identify the theoretical framework of family identity and belonging.

Findings

Protecting the Nuclear Family Unit

Surrogacy, both in Israel and the United States, requires a strong commitment from the surrogate’s nuclear family. The data from both countries show that surrogates carefully consider their nuclear family’s interests before they embark on a surrogacy “journey.” Husbands’ possible misgiving or concerns were the first issues surrogates considered. One family could not and should not help the other if there was any threat to the integrity of the first. We both found that surrogates’ efforts of persuasion focused on their nuclear family. Contrary to Ragone’s (1994) earlier argument about surrogacy empowering women in the domestic sphere, we found that companionate marriage and joint decision-making were characteristic in both settings; these findings are consistent with more recent research results on surrogacy (Jacobson 2016; Ziff 2019). This emphasis on joint decision-making is not particular to surrogacy; other studies on contemporary families have found that communication is quite central to how couple relationships are conducted (Gabb and Fink, 2015; Peters, 2000); mutuality and reciprocity are the cornerstones of the “democratization of the interpersonal domain” (Giddens 1992:3) and decision-making equality between spouses has increased (e.g., Hochschild and Machung, 2012).

The idea for surrogacy was typically initiated by the surrogate, who then approached her husband to make sure that he was willing to be supportive. Israeli surrogate Maya explained that she had to gradually draw her husband in, discussing his initial hesitation:

At first he was very against it, so for a whole year I explained it to him drop by drop, I explained every little detail. He had a lot of concerns, also for himself. He said, “I’m a man and I will have to support a pregnancy and a baby that is not my own.” We processed it over that year and in the end he agreed and understood. In the end he was very supportive and his commitment to this whole thing was very important.

Husbands’ concerns focused less on their own role and more on physical and emotional risks. Employing common metaphors we will discuss further, Israeli surrogate Lea relayed:

My husband had reservations about. . .how I will deal with it emotionally. I explained to him that I am a babysitter, an oven, he can call it whatever he wants. I wanted to bring him to the stage that he could support me and not just agree with my decision.

US surrogates also believed that their husband’s support was essential, and expressed their hope that the husband would want to undertake surrogacy as a partnership rather than simply agree to it. As in Israel, it often took a while, sometimes even years, for SMO surrogates to convince their husbands. Women advised one another not to rush this process and all recommended talking it over in detail with their husband.

At first my dh [darling husband] was unsure. He said he had never entertained the idea and therefore couldn’t give me a truthful answer until he learned more about it. He was right there with me, doing research, reading, learning. As all things in our marriage it was a joint decision, it affected his life as much as my own.

Lori’s characterization of joint decision-making was common among SMO surrogates: “Marriage should be a partnership. . .we make decisions TOGETHER.” In the few cases when a newbie complained that her husband objected to surrogacy, but she still wanted to go ahead, fellow surrogates were very critical. When a new SMO member reported that she had already scheduled a doctor’s appointment despite her husband’s hesitation, she received harsh responses like the one below from fellow surrogates:

Are you really going to do this without your husband’s support? You really want to wreck your marriage and your children’s home for someone else? It seems your IPs don’t care about you or the fact your pregnancy will be stressful and your home destroyed. . .. OR the IPs haven’t been told that DH is not supportive in which case they may choose not to work with you at this time if they have any sense of decency.

Similarly, Israeli surrogate Maya noted how she and her husband considered themselves a team in surrogacy:

It was as if we were on the same platform, we both understood that we are going on some kind of shlichut (a word connoting being sent on a unique mission either from G-d or for the nation or an organization that helps others), some kind of cooperative act together.

Surrogacy as a joint undertaking sheds light on how couples negotiate spousal involvement in one another’s work. Although none of the surrogates’ in our studies discussed surrogacy as market “work”, they were fully aware that it requires considerable adjustments and sacrifices from husbands. While even in post-industrial countries women’s lives are often structured by their husband’s work requirements (Finch, 2012), our findings reveal the underlying companionate logic of joint decision-making in this somewhat reversed gender situation.

SMO surrogates noted that husband-involvement was a gradual process: it was possible for a husband who opposed this “journey” to gradually become a strong advocate of it, as Alice advised:

When I first told my hubbie I wanted to be a surro, he said, ‘Are you nuts????!!!!!’ I left it at that, then approached him again and talked a little more about it! I finally said, “If you don’t support me in this, I won’t do it! Helping another family is not worth hurting mine!” Anyway, he came around and fully supports me in this! In fact, he is proud of me and has even told some of his friends at work! So, it is possible for your hubbie to come around gradually! Just give him time.

SMO surrogates offered advice on strategies for getting husbands on board, primarily by encouraging husbands to think of surrogacy as benefitting the whole family and by creating empathy for a particular couple:

If you want him on your side, then show him the benefits to him and the rest of your family. Your children are so young and they need a stay-at-home mom. You can do this and still contribute to the household. Sometimes the husband is not all for this journey until he meets a couple that he can relate to and want to help. Make him feel that this is his journey too and that he plays a very vital role. If he still balks and his reasoning is sound, then back off for a while. There is always later.

Protecting the integrity of the surrogate’s own family and marriage came first, and surrogacy was considered a joint undertaking. Interestingly, while husbands’ support was essential, none of the women in either study were willing to forego surrogacy because of the opinions of other family members or friends. Many Israeli and SMO surrogates relayed that they had kept surrogacy a secret from their parents and siblings until they were pregnant with the surrogate baby; some only told their other relatives after the birth, if at all. Yet surrogacy is not, on the whole, a “reproductive secret” (Smart, 2011). When it is kept from some relatives, secrecy is aimed to protect the nuclear family from unnecessary tensions. These findings concur with other studies on assisted conception, particularly Nordqvist and Smart (2014) who found that in the case of donor conception by lesbian and heterosexual couples, the wider family, including the future grandparents, was usually held at bay at least until pregnancy was achieved.

Surrogates were often not surprised by an initial lack of support from their parents or in-laws, let alone from others. In both countries they seemed to consider it from the outset that some family members would need convincing, but even if relatives never “came on board”, these women did not hesitate to proceed. Israeli surrogate Hadar reported:

There are not many people in my inner circle that understand this desire, this need to make a difference in the world for someone. [. . .] It was especially hard for my grandmother. [. . .] My father is not an easy person. We told him. . .and it was pretty uncomfortable.

Many surrogates in both countries acknowledged the lack of initial enthusiasm from parents, siblings, and in-laws, but none viewed it as critical, in contrast to their husband’s support. Even women who reported good relationships with parents and in-laws were clear on whose opinion mattered: “We’re close with DH’s parents and mine, but I really don’t give a crap what anyone other than DH thinks.” Surrogates thus articulated a family hierarchy, relegating other family members to a level of lesser importance and thus also indicating lesser solidarity. As one SMO surrogate advised: “if that’s the worse they do [i.e., oppose surrogacy], stand your ground and tell them you’ll just have to agree to disagree, but you’re not living their life, you’re living yours.” There was also agreement that friends’ opposition was a confirmation of their incompatibility as friends. One surrogate summed up the general sentiment: “The only opinion that matters to me is my husband’s :)”

When hesitant husbands eventually came on board, their support was crucial to the women, although their levels of participation varied between supporting from the sidelines and being an active partner in the process. Israeli surrogate Gal, for instance, said her husband “was not part of the process itself but he is part of me”, while Shir noted that her husband was so fully involved that he accompanied her to every doctor’s checkup and every meeting with the couple. SMO surrogates encouraged one another to involve their husband in the every-day tasks of surrogacy: “He felt really included in the whole process because he did my shots. He sent my IM e-mails all of the time. He and I both tried to do this as a partnership.”

As husbands became more involved, they often bragged about their wife to others, saying that only “special women” would be able to do that much for others. Israeli surrogates similarly found that as their husbands became more involved in surrogacy they expressed pride about this “joint project”. Hadas noted:

At first I told him I wanted to be a surrogate and he said “no”. So I said, “when I wanted to take in a foster kid you said no, when I wanted to adopt a lone soldier you said no, now surrogacy you say no.” But when he finally said yes, he was totally behind me and ready for anything.

After witnessing the emotional moment in the delivery room, Hadas’ husband further solidified his commitment:

The powerful feeling in the delivery room after you give birth and you understand that you. . .created a family, it was awesome. No children and now they have a family because of you. In the delivery room my husband said “wow. Now I am ready to do it again.”[. . .] After the baby was born he would walk around with a photo of the baby and show it off like a proud uncle.

While surrogates’ stories often focus on their sense of individual agency and closeness to the IM during the birth Berend, 2016; Teman, 2010, Hadas articulates the importance of the event in her couple relationship as she and her husband created a “shared couple memory” (Gabb and Fink, 2015) of birthing a new family together. Together, our data reveal that surrogates were not only interested in protecting the nuclear family unit whilst undertaking this “family project” but also attempted in various ways to make surrogacy into a “couple project”, a vehicle for strengthening the marital bond.

Surrogacy as an Educational Project

Carrying a baby that will not be part of the family is a more complicated plan when the surrogate considers preparing her children. How do surrogates define surrogacy, the baby, and siblinghood for their own children, and how do they delineate the boundaries for them between the baby “in the tummy” and their own siblings? And what is the definition of family that they employ to normalize the project?

Surrogates in both Israel and the United States constructed surrogacy as a family project, albeit one that involves husbands and children differently. While surrogates in both countries waited to start the journey until their husband was fully ready, they generally talked to their children about it later, once they embarked on the “journey”. They very often presented surrogacy as a joint project for the whole family, an educational opportunity for articulating and teaching the value of helping and an occasion for modeling the values of giving and tolerance for their children. Hadar noted that just as she taught her daughter about her civic duty by donating her hair to cancer survivors, she taught her through surrogacy as well. Lea said: “I am showing my children that to me education is. . .is to give them a personal example. And this is the personal example that I want to give them, to show them what giving really is.”

US surrogates also used surrogacy as an educational opportunity, yet they tended to frame surrogacy for their children as an example of individual selflessness and helping a specific couple, rather than contributing to the national community as a civic duty. They used surrogacy as an opportunity to model the importance of altruism and also equality, especially when carrying a baby for a gay couple. Their message of equality centered on how a loving gay couple deserves to be parents just like other loving couples. One surrogate posted the story of how her young son “corrected” another kid who said that two men cannot marry:

My son chimes in and says “Well, two boys can get married” to which the other boys in the car try to deny and say no they can’t, and so then my son says “Yes they can. My mommy is having a baby in her belly for our neighbors. . .and they are two boys and they are married because I saw wedding rings on their fingers.”

Other surrogates loved the story; many commented on how great it is to teach kids tolerance. “I bet you’re a very proud Mama for teaching him how to be non- judgmental and accepting of any couple who loves each other.” In such discussions, surrogates are vocal about the values of tolerance and acceptance, but in taken-for-granted ways also uphold the value of marriage and the nuclear family based on marriage. “This is how we raise our kids right, so that by the time they are grown, ‘gay marriage’ will just be ‘marriage’.”

Metaphors of Home and Babysitting to Establish Boundaries

Beyond transforming surrogacy into a family project and educational opportunity, surrogates were challenged to define and make explicit for their children what constitutes family, kinship, and siblinghood. Surrogacy necessitates that surrogates articulate a familial identity for their children because they have invited a fetus/baby into their intimate familial space: their home, and the surrogate’s maternal body. The pregnancy often interferes with family routines that also need explanations. The need to articulate familial identity is brought into sharp relief when we compare it to the scholarship on adoptive families in which adoptive parents, especially in transnational and trans-racial adoption, attempt to create belonging, familial identity and relatedness in order to incorporate the adopted child through “kinning” practices (Howell 2006; Howell and Melhuus 2007). Surrogates make belonging, familial identity, and relatedness explicit for the opposite aim; they work to distinguish marks of family connectedness in order to make sure that the children understand that, although their mother is carrying a baby in her body and in their home, this baby does not belong to their home or family. To make these definitions tangible, surrogates draw on various rituals as well as notions of home and babysitting, as we explain further.

Surrogates’ articulations of the boundaries demarcating the two families first and foremost draw upon the idea that families share a home where a sense of belonging connects the inhabitants. It was common in both settings for surrogates to explicitly draw on the notion of “home” or “our house” versus “their house” when explaining surrogacy to their children, as the following quote from an SMO surrogate conveys: “Kids are smart, just tell the truth. You are helping someone have a baby who can’t. Remind him that it’s not ‘our baby’ we are just growing it until it’s big enough to go home with its family.”

Making sure that the idea of the baby belonging to a separate home is tangible and graspable to the children, some surrogates on SMO recommended introducing their children to the IPs whenever possible, so that they would know from the beginning whose baby it is and to visit the IPs home so that their children would be able to visualize where the baby belongs. “Our children go with us every time we visit my IPs.. . . Surrogacy is a journey with the whole family, not just the surrogate!!!”

When personal visits are not possible, surrogates often show their children photographs of the baby’s future parents and home. Social scientists have established the connection between photography and the construction of family identity and heritage (Holland, 1991; Sontag, 1973). Marianne Hirsh (1997, p. 6) argued that after the invention of Kodac “photography quickly became the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge.” Through photographs, families can show others who they are. Photographs can serve to convey family belonging even before the baby is born, as the example of an SMO surrogate with four children of her own shows:

After we met the parents and decided to work together we told them [her children] about my IPs. We used the “broken tummy” story. After transfer, beta etc., we told them about the pregnancy and how the baby would go home with my IPs. My 1st set of IPs handled it so well, they sent pictures of their house, IF putting the crib together, etc. My kids really had a sense of where the baby would live and who would take care of it.

Photographs work well as reminders during the surrogate pregnancy and after the birth. One SMO surrogate advised another to keep a photo of the IPs on the fridge “so your daughter can see them. You can easily refer to the picture when you talk about the baby. Than after the baby is born, replace the pic with one of your IPs holding the baby. This is a great visual reminder for your daughter about what happened to the baby.”

The idea of the baby going home to its family is especially easy for both Israeli and US children to understand, as the idea of children being away from home at daycare or school and then returning home is a normative familial practice when parents work. As Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik (2013) suggest, part of what families “do” in middle-class America is to follow a daily pattern of being apart for at least six hours a day during the work and school week and then to “come home.” This idea that babies can be away from home and their parents and then return home is evoked to explain that “caring for” the baby in their home does not make their home its permanent place of belonging. It is not surprising that surrogates often call the pregnancy “babysitting” when explaining why the surrobaby is a temporary guest in their house.

Israeli surrogate Carrine’s explanation to her children followed this line, emphasizing that the baby belongs in a different family’s “house”: “when the baby [is] grown in the tummy and mom goes to take him out, he won’t live in our house, he will go to his parents. He isn’t ours, we are just growing him in our tummy and when he leaves he will go to his mommy and daddy.” Dana similarly explained: “We used to babysit a baby girl while her mom was busy and afterwards the mom would come to pick her up, so I told them (my kids) that this is the same thing, we are watching over a baby and then they will come and pick her up and that’s it.”

Surrogates’ use of the babysitting metaphor alongside their emphasis on the baby belonging to another family’s home evokes the basic questions regarding houses and kinship that anthropologists have discussed, expanding upon Lévi-Strauss’ (1987) classic work on house societies and kinship. Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995, p. 2) remind us that the house is also symbolic of the body: “The house and the body are intimately linked. The house is an extension of the person.” If houses are often thought of as bodies, and as the extension of the person and of the self, as Carsten and Hugh-Jones suggest, then it is not by chance that surrogates draw upon the house in order to not only articulate family belonging but also to explain how the baby they carry in their body does not belong to them. Hadar used a wide array of metaphors to strengthen her children’s understanding that the baby does not “really” belong to her family, her home, and her body:

It is like being a babysitter. Like if a friend comes to visit my son, I want him to stay whole, fine and safe and that nothing will happen. I will watch him and return him whole to his parents. This is the same the way I see it. It is like if you let me borrow your car and I give it back to you, t/hey left a sapling and I returned it to them when it was a tree. I don’t become attached to a tree.

Hadar’s words here echo those of surrogates in both Israel and the United States who claim almost across the board that they do not become emotionally attached to the baby. Elsewhere, we have discussed surrogates’ articulations of their emotional distance from the babies they give birth to as surrogates as well as their understanding of relatedness and parenthood. Here, however, we wish to call attention to how Hadar draws upon the babysitter metaphor to emphasize her sense of responsibility as a surrogate and her use of analogies, comparing her role as surrogate not just to a babysitter, but also to a mom hosting her son’s friend for a playdate, a friend borrowing a car, and a gardener growing a sapling into a tree. This creative use of analogies is particularly useful for surrogates when explaining siblinghood to their children, as we will discuss further.

Clarifying Siblinghood through Analogy and Ritual

Anthropological evidence shows that the significance and interpretation of siblinghood is culturally varied (e.g. Cicirelli, 1994; Marshall, 1983). In the scholarship on assisted reproduction, Collard and Kashmeri (2011, p. 311) argue that “there is little indication. . .that any consideration is given to the potential siblingship between the surrogate’s own children and the intended parents’ baby by virtue of their having been carried in the same womb.” However, while gestation may not be the issue for most surrogates, clarifying siblinghood was pertinent. Involving one’s children in the stages of the process, including the “job” of babysitting the hosted baby necessitated that surrogates, such as Maya, clarify the difference between temporary hosting and siblinghood:

I told my daughter: “you will help us watch over these babies.” I pulled her in to the whole subject. . . . She attended the ultrasound, she saw them (the twins) and the whole pregnancy and she understood that she is not waiting for the birth so she can have more brothers and sisters. . . . And the height of the whole thing was at the circumcision ceremony [bris]. . .when we got there and she saw the fruit of her labor, just as it is the fruit of my labor and also my husband’s, and all of ours really.

In both countries, surrogates often employed the plural form of “we” to describe caring for the surrogacy baby, appointing their children as partners in “babysitting someone else’s kid”. Galia explained how she defined surrogacy as a family babysitting project for her daughter:

I asked my daughter, “do you like to help people?” and she said, “yes.” So I said that mommy and daddy like to help people too, and we have friends who want to have a baby and they can’t. The mommy has a wound in her tummy and the doctors put the baby in my tummy and we are guarding over their baby until he comes out and they can take him. So that is how she understood it. She didn’t become attached and she didn’t ask questions. It was just the clearest thing in the world to her, the most natural and clear.

Galia’s explanation above included two typical tropes common among both Israeli and US surrogates. The first trope is the “broken tummy” explanation: surrogates tell their children they are helping a couple become parents because the mother’s tummy is broken, so the surrogate offered to “carry the baby” in her tummy for her. The second trope is that they were taking care of “the couple’s baby” and reminding the children not to become emotionally attached or form expectations of siblinghood. As one SMO surrogate, who was carrying twins for the same IPs she carried her previous surrogate baby, N., also explained:

I told my children that “we” were helping a family grow, so they had ownership in the process. Also, every time my 5 year old hugged my belly I would tell him, “give N’s baby siblings a hug for him” or “aren’t we taking good care of A and C’s babies?” So that we were always reminding ourselves that we were just “babysitting”.

Surrogates also remind their children of family practices, of “doing family” (Morgan, 1999), in order to establish that taking care of another family’s baby did not make them that baby’s family. Along these lines, Hadar drew upon a weekly ritual activity that she and her children did as a family—baking challah for their shared Friday night Sabbath meal—to explain to her children that gestation does not lead to siblinghood:

I explained to them that mommy has a baby in her tummy, here is a picture of the baby (ultrasound photo), and the baby isn’t ours. She is theirs because her womb is broken and they asked us to watch over her until she goes out and we can give her back. I said it is like if our oven breaks down so we go to our neighbor and ask her to bake our challah for us and then she returns them to us when it is baked. And they were great the whole pregnancy. When someone said, “hey you are pregnant” they right away spoke up “yes, but it isn’t ours.” I think one of the reasons they accepted it so well is because we presented it to them well.

Galia made sure both her children understood; she tested her son on his comprehension:

I said sometimes there are mothers who have a weak tummy and they can’t take care of their babies in their own tummies. It’s a problem, what can they do? I said there are other mothers who can take care of the baby in their tummy for them. So when the baby comes out, who is he? So he said to me, “What do you mean? It is the baby of the mommy. . .with the weak tummy.” I said, “right”.

When her daughter challenged the paradigm Galia had constructed, she made sure to set the record straight: “My daughter came to me a month before the birth and said, ‘mom, the baby told me she wants to stay with us, she doesn’t want to go’. . . . So I looked at her and said, ‘tell the baby that her mommy and daddy are really, really waiting for her’.” Surrogates’ persuasive strategies include emphasizing the consequences of the child’s helpful action for others, in these cases for the IPs, and are central in conveying family values (Wilson and Morg, 2004).

Many SMO surrogates said it was easy for the kids to accept that the baby was someone else’s, or that their kids were relieved that they would not have a new sibling. One SMO surrogate wrote: “I think people make more of a deal out of this than it needs to be. It’s a simple concept and kids can easily grasp it.. . . It would be far weirder for him to have a new baby around the house than for life to continue as normal, don’t you think?” Another SMO surrogate responded:

My son is 4 and I didn’t discuss the pregnancy until I was well into my 2nd trimester because I didn’t want to have to explain any loss to him. But, once I was showing . . .I explained to him that I was helping another family have a baby. He was actually relieved that he didn’t have to share me with another baby.”

According to SMO stories, not all kids are fine with surrogacy. While young children usually do not have any problems with it, somewhat older kids and teenagers may not be sanguine at first. Surrogates with such children reminded others that kids eventually get on board if the parents are matter-of-fact and explain the issue. Once children are a little older, picture books about helpful koalas and kangaroo pouches no longer suffice. “When I told my 10 yr old. . .he was like NO YOU ARE NOT DOING IT! I had to explain to him for months the reasoning behind it. That we are helping someone to have a family they can’t have one without the help. I had to explain to him how it works and that it is NOT his sibling that we are giving away. It seems to be ok now. He understands it more. . .and knows that I am doing it for a good reason.”

In some other cases the older children changed their minds about surrogacy when their friends found it “cool”. However, all the discussions about the topic testify to surrogates’ confidence that their children will understand and be accepting of the family project. They sometimes remind one another: “don’t forget, you and your husband are the adults”. While children have a say, they are not fully equal partners.

Surrogates’ explanations to their younger children are strikingly similar; they reference family belonging and helping others much more often than genetic relatedness. They use babysitting metaphors rather than sperm-and-egg stories. Surrogates talk about shared time, affection, and family rituals (Bühler & König, 2015; Daly, 2001) much more than the shared substances of kinship (Schneider, 1980). It is helpful to apply Kaja Finkler’s (2001, p. 236) definition of family as the “‘significant same’ group of people. . .who perceive themselves as similar and who consider themselves related on grounds of shared material, be it land, blood, food. . .or ideological or affective content. Most important, membership in a “significant same” group carries moral obligations and responsibilities.” Surrogates refer to shared goals, affection, and home life in their persuasive efforts and explanations and, as we have seen, also in their dismissal of other relatives’ opposition when they assert the importance of living life according to their own values that are shared by husbands and children.

Separation rituals also played a role in solidifying or displaying the boundaries between the families and gave the surrogate’s children an active role. Nitzan began the separation ritual before she went to the hospital; she and her children made a goodbye party for the baby:

We wrote her letters, we drew her pictures, we wished her our wishes, we filled balloons, we ate candy and had a goodbye party. Each one of us said something to her, like “Go on out, it’s enough now, mommy is fat already so you can come out,” or “you can go out now, your parents are waiting for you and will give you a cake.”

The separation ritual sometimes included a gift for the baby from the surrogate’s children. For others it included visiting the baby in the hospital to say goodbye. Raz relayed:

The children came to visit me in the hospital and they went up to visit the baby because they really wanted to see him. They bought him a present and a big balloon. They went to him and saw him and gave him the gift and that is where the circle closed. A week later I don’t think my little one even remembered it at all.

Whenever possible, SMO surrogates also ritualize closure after birth:

I wanted them [her kids] to see the twins with their parents at the hospital or as soon after as possible, so they would know that the babies are safe and sound and being taken care of. That worked out pretty well. Now they are old pros (at 4 and 5 years) since this is the second journey. They know where this baby is going and they don’t find it confusing at all. I still want them to see him safe and sound with the parents though. I think it provides great closure for us all.

Such closures reemphasize the boundaries of the two homes following the temporary “hosting” of the surrogate baby. The IPs “reclaim” and provide for “their baby” in their home, while the surrogate goes home to her own family.

However, IPs’ cooperation is necessary to draw the family boundaries in satisfying ways and achieve closure. Some surrogates live too far to get their kids to meet the IPs, but others fail to receive a response from the IPs about such meetings:

“From the very start. . .I have asked that we all get together for dinner so that my IPs can meet my 2 kids but more so that my kids can actually put a face to the names while we are preparing them for the baby not staying with us and they always have something else to do so I stopped asking.”

While surrogates often find it is easier to say to their kids that they are helping friends to become a family, maintaining this storyline is not always possible.

Conclusion

Our findings illuminate several important points about nuclear family belonging in the context of surrogacy. First, while critics worry about the commodification of motherhood and the disruption or redefinitions of family life, we found that surrogates in both Israel and the United States make surrogacy into a collaborative and educational nuclear-family project that reinforces the moral centrality of family life. Second, while critics are concerned about the surrogates’ children being traumatized by surrogacy, our findings show that children come to understand surrogacy as a family project to help others to create their family. Surrogates successfully articulate that shared time, place, affection, and everyday practices make a family. Third, our findings illuminate the essential role of metaphors, rituals, and photos in aiding surrogates to negotiate surrogacy with family members.

We argue that kinning is not a useful concept to explain surrogates’ boundary-making efforts. Adoptive and intended parents’ kin-making projects aim to create relatedness between the child and the rest of the family. Surrogates, however, are not incorporating new family members; accordingly, in their “family project,” they employ conventional explanations about familial belonging to defend the status quo. In the light of our data, we see surrogates’ persuasive actions as reflective of the “sanctity” of the nuclear family and the centrality of the couple relationship, and also indicative of how family life is imagined in the larger socio-political context. Not surprisingly, it is in this latter context that we found some differences in surrogates’ explanations, with US surrogates leaning more heavily on individualized notions of helping while Israeli surrogates more often reference civic duty.

In line with the comparative context of this paper, it appears that surrogates’ articulations of surrogacy as a family project in the United States and Israel may have implications for our understanding of surrogates’ experiences in similar sociocultural contexts, such as the United Kingdom, where open surrogacy relationships are the norm (see Jadva & Imrie, 2014). However, the family project framework may not be applicable to contexts where there is little or no contact between the parties and in which surrogates are stigmatized. Ethnographic work on surrogacy in India (Pande 2014; Rudrappa 2015) and in Russia (Khvorostyanov & Yeshua-Katz, 2020) has shown that rather than a family project, surrogacy often becomes a family secret that carries the risk of the surrogate “humiliating” her husband and of being cast as a “bad mother” who “gives away her children.”

Far from the secrecy and stigma of those contexts, we found that among US and Israeli surrogates, an understanding of intentionality, that is, IPs’ desire to have children and surrogates’ desire to help them, was closely aligned with understandings of love and care, and thus not antithetical to more conventional meanings of family solidarity. Thus, we see surrogates’ explanations and boundary work as confirming prevalent cultural meanings about Western family life rather than a threat to it. We suggest that the end of the surrogacy “family project” is an occasion calling for a higher “degree of intensity in the need for family displays” (Finch, 2007, p. 72), for “doing” and for affirmatively displaying the separation of the surrogate’s and the IPs’ nuclear family ritually, metaphorically, and visually.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their important comments and the surrogates who shared their stories with us.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Elly Teman

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