Abstract
Wombs in Labor comprises the efforts of Amrita Pande to give an alternative account of commercial surrogacy in India, one that departs from its mostly Western, orientalized version and which does not construct the surrogates as mere victims. This first in-depth analysis based on a detailed ethnography carried out in surrogacy hostels is centred around the concept of labour and its novel forms that arise in the context of globalization. Pande’s feminist approach offers much-needed nuanced insights into the everyday lives of surrogates, challenging long-standing divisions like public/private, production/reproduction, altruism/commercialism and the contestation/reification of the status quo.
Pande joins the discussion revolving around new reproductive technologies and embodied labour, which she defines as ‘a form of labor that involves a rental of one’s body by somebody else, in which the body of the worker is the fundamental and ultimate site, resource, requirement, and (arguably) its product’ (p. 23). It is through this kind of labour that the surrogates undermine what Pande considers to be two paradoxes of surrogacy in India: first, the highly medicalized procedures the surrogates undergo are in stark contrast to the low medicalization of most pregnancies and births. Second, while the Indian state has been promoting an anti-natalist discourse and policy for decades, at the same time it is endorsing surrogacy by providing a relaxed regulatory system that caters mostly to the interests of the intended parents.
The surrogates are seen by Pande as subjected to multiple layers of domination represented by the Indian state, the clinics and their families. At the same time, they are portrayed as employing various kinds of resistance to these oppressive forces, both physical and discursive. This interplay between external pressures and agency motivates Pande to use the concept of labour to underline the exploitative nature of surrogacy in India and to allow the surrogates to be conceptualized not only as reproducers, but also as producers (workers) with rights. However, this production/reproduction dichotomy is employed by Pande only as a means to demonstrate its artificiality and stratifying effect according to gender, class, race and citizenship.
Pande invests considerable effort in depicting the material and discursive practices that actively produce a proper surrogate. The process starts with the recruitment, which functions on a word of mouth or recurrent surrogacy basis, but is mostly done by brokers who identify potential surrogates based on their perceived neediness. The brokers are the ones who start the disciplining of the future surrogates, by framing surrogacy as a godly gift and assuring the women of the legitimacy of their actions. Unlike in other contexts in which the surrogates see themselves as delivering the gift of life, Pande argues, in India they understand surrogacy as a gift they receive from God, one that will allow them to improve their family’s situation. Women are instructed to be indebted not only to the divine, but also to the intended parents, often white, from Western countries, who ‘rescue’ them from poverty, a scenario Pande argues is rarely realized.
Once in the clinic or surrogacy hostels, the surrogates are subjected to a regime that seeks to make them the perfect mother-workers. Pande points to another paradox: while the women are expected to give the children away immediately after delivery without claiming any rights to them, at the same time they are encouraged to show motherly love and care to the fetus. Constant surveillance is imposed on the surrogates through confinement in clinics or hostels, where appropriate behaviour can be supervised and medical care administered in the best interest of the fetus and, implicitly, in the best interests of the intended parents. For approximately nine months, surrogates are separated not only from their families (members of whom sometimes visit with varying regularity), but also from their daily chores. Some surrogates indulge in the good living conditions that are paid for by the intended parents. Most feel pampered by the medical attention they receive. Whereas in Western contexts the medicalization of pregnancy has been conceptualized as disempowering for women, in India access to such care is seen as a privilege. Pande interprets the value the surrogates ascribe to their lives in the hostels as a form of agency through which the women increase their sense of self-worth and dignity. Moreover, in a country where poor women are stigmatized for failing to control their fertility, which is framed in public discourse as wasteful, surrogates redeem their reproductive worthiness by giving birth to the child of others, sometimes even by renouncing having their own children.
The disciplining of surrogates is centrally related to discourses of disposability and stigma. Framing surrogacy as a gift women should be thankful for is a strategy used by clinicians and brokers to instil in the surrogates a feeling that they are dispensable, although in reality the number of intended parents is much larger than that of available surrogates. In addition, the stigma associated with surrogacy is constantly challenged and reified by its comparison with prostitution: taking money for surrogacy is equated in popular discourses with selling one’s body, whereas doing it for a higher purpose (i.e. acting as a selfless, caring mother) is seen as noble. The surrogates themselves reject the stigma through different counter-discourses, by making and talking about plans to lift their families, and especially their children out of poverty. They reject seeing themselves as workers, a perspective which, although it challenges stigmatization, reifies the image of the altruistic mother and reduces their capacity to negotiate their working conditions. At the same time, they often refer to a higher authority – financial desperation, family pressure – that forced them into surrogacy, thus rejecting notions that they have had a choice and not bearing any responsibility for their actions.
For the surrogates, the embodied labour they perform is accompanied by kin labour, defined by Pande as ‘the whole range of labor performed by the surrogates, including gestation, giving birth, maintaining ties with the intended mother after birth, and forming a supportive community with the other surrogates at the clinic and hostel’ (p. 144). In order to counter their image as disposable mother/wombs, surrogates invest considerable effort in creating ties with various parties involved in surrogacy: the baby, the intended mother and the other surrogates. They redefine kinship by rooting it not in biological relatedness, but in the labour performed, the substances exchanged (in the case of the baby), and in the sharing of important events and experiences (with the intended mothers and fellow surrogates).
Pande succeeds in delivering a different image of surrogacy in India by presenting surrogacy hostels not as spaces of oppression, but as opportunities for bonding, self-care and self-appreciation. The image of the surrogates themselves is complex, but while Pande carefully analyses and presents their efforts in controlling their fertility and lives, she also points out their vulnerability. She rejects the idea of de-commercializing surrogacy as unrealistic and instead proposes a fair trade model based on Casey Humbyrd’s argument about claiming more openness and transparency in relation to the payments, the medical procedures and the relationships formed within surrogacy. However, Pande is not clear who should be involved in the contract negotiation; while she seems to argue in favour of direct negotiations between the surrogates and the intended parents as a way to free the first from the pressures of brokers, this is in contradiction to her previous account of surrogates failing to negotiate contracts to their advantage due to their refusal to see themselves as workers.
Although she rejects the neoliberal concepts of consumer choice and wasted fertility, Pande does not explore wider issues pertaining to the neoliberal bioeconomy and India’s role in connection to it. She identifies the state, the family and the clinic as sources of domination, but fails to integrate the logic on which the clinics function into the wider context of the bioeconomy and its forms of outsourced embodied labour (Cooper and Waldby, 2014) which undermine the rights of the surrogates at a systemic level and negates their powers of negotiation. India’s anti-natalist history is also relevant here, as is its ambition to participate in the bioeconomy as a global player. In light of these factors, what Pande sees as a paradox, namely the state’s encouragement of surrogacy despite its anti-natalism, can actually be framed as coherent, as the state not only benefits from having fewer children born into poor communities, but also from sharing the gains from the bioindustry worldwide (Rajan, 2006).
Despite these omissions, Wombs in Labor succeeds in the difficult task of presenting the lives of Indian surrogates in their full complexity, thus pushing the discussion about surrogacy forward. Pande opens up many paths for further theoretical exploration in terms of agency, exploitation, embodied labour and its commercialization, while also offering possible ways of practically tackling the ethical issues involved in commercial surrogacy.