Abstract
This edited collection is an important effort by the authors to address the complex issues that surround transnational, commercial surrogacy, with particular focus on the relationship between India and the West. With chapters that highlight facets of global reproductive transactions, from technology to human trafficking, the editors lay out a road map of how transnational surrogacy in India has emerged in the past decade and the implications of commercializing reproductive labor for women on all sides of the transactions. Using the now familiar trope of “outsourcing”, the editors suggest that gestational surrogacy is the epitome of women’s work where bodies are reduced to mere reproductive parts and surrogates mere vehicles for the products of labor. The editors and authors repeatedly remind the reader that inequities exist in surrogacy transactions and are heightened given broader sociopolitical and cultural contexts between India and the West. They also suggest that while surrogates are always disadvantaged in these unequal equations, each chapter attempts to place the voices of surrogates at the center and not the periphery of the interactions.
The book consists of 11 chapters plus the introduction. One potential limitation is that the chapters would be too similar in their analyses to be effective but that is not the case. It is a compilation of interdisciplinary perspectives on surrogacy in India but each chapter speaks to the need for legislative and cultural mores to complement rather than contradict one another. The value of Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India lies in the depth of those 11 case studies—all the chapters are grounded in research in India—and analyses of the dialectic between women as surrogates, as customers, and as observers of assisted reproductive transactions and technologies. Perhaps the most intriguing question posed by surrogacy is not only why women as individuals participate in surrogate motherhood, although analysis of that experience is well documented within this volume, but the examination of the global processes and neoliberal policies that foster transnational migration, of adults, of potential children, and of ideologies of reproduction and motherhood.
In the chapter “The Rhetoric of the Womb,” Anindita Majumdar examines the multiple facets to conversations about surrogacy in the mass media. Specifically, Majumdar draws attention to the invisibility of the surrogate and to the heightened visibility and attention paid to the moral character of the intended parents in surrogacy transactions. In this chapter, the metaphor of the womb as symbolic of hope is elucidated but as Majumdar points out, the promise of hope remains most relevant to heterosexual couples. The chapter ends with a reminder that while homosexuality has recently been decriminalized, surrogate use by same-sex Indian or Western partners remains largely shrouded in the media and arguably even deliberately omitted from discourse in newspapers. The praises of medical technology are lauded in the media but as Majumdar reminds us, the reproductive bodies themselves remain invisible and are largely reduced to laboring wombs.
In another chapter by Amrita Pande, the foremost scholar of Indian commercial surrogacy, titled “The Power of Narratives,” there is an interesting and important revisitation of scholarship of kinship and motherhood. Here, Pande explores how commercial surrogacy has long been understood as a commodification and threat to the more traditional constructions of love, marriage, and family in India. Pande uses rich ethnographic data to illustrate how the narratives of IVF clinics rest heavily on culturally meaningful messages and ultimately suggests ways in which anthropological theory about gifting and exchange can help inform contemporary analyses and transnational reproductive transactions or “repro-flows.”
While each chapter makes substantial recognition of the role of technology, much more could have been said about the role of globalization itself. So too is any investigation of those whose lives and personhood are enhanced via surrogacy or who seek assisted reproductive technology really explored in any detail. Those who seek surrogacy outcomes are ironically rendered, with few exceptions, as invisible as the surrogates themselves. Additional voices and recognition of the substantial theoretical milestones that have been covered since the advent of the study of reproduction in feminist and family studies would be a good complement to the rich data presented in this volume. Ironically, too, the discussion of “outsourcing” remains rather limited in this volume in any theoretical sense although the metaphor of the global marketplace appears throughout.
Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life would make a great contribution to courses in sociology, anthropology, gender studies, international policy, reproductive health, and more. While limited in its focus upon India, these chapters and the introduction have great potential to contribute to any course aimed at the ethnography of kinship and the intersections of gender and technology. The editors have sought and begin to achieve a balance between India-specific examples of the search for reproductive “well-being” and the larger, global implications of outsourced surrogacy.