Interrogating Narratives About the Global Surrogacy Market
In 1985 Margaret Atwood published her award-winning book, The
Handmaid's Tale. In this dystopian future, elite couples who are
unable to conceive due to high rates of infertility enslave fertile
women to serve as their reproductive concubines. In 1986, the following
year, the world was introduced to the practice of surrogate motherhood
through the infamous Baby M custody
case.[1] Between 1986 and 1988,
when the case of Baby M was argued first at the trial court level, and
then reviewed by the New Jersey Supreme court, the case received much
attention by the media. For instance, in 1987 alone the New York
Times published 131 articles on surrogate motherhood, often more
than one appearing on the same day.[2]
Following this media attention
the topic received much scholarly attention from social scientists and
political and legal theorists.[3]
Although there were multiple
perspectives on the topic at the time, including diverse feminist
positions, a dominant initial feminist view expressed concerns about the
exploitation of women. These feminist criticisms of surrogacy ranged
from a concern with the commodification of women's bodies and parallels
between surrogacy and prostitution that would result in "reproductive
brothels," to the increased possibility of using poor women, women of
color and Third World women's bodies to service the reproductive desires
of white elite women.[4]
Subsequent ethnographic research in the U.S.
has found that surrogates are not 'dupes' but are agents, using their
bodies to simultaneously reinscribe and challenge traditional notions of
motherhood/family. Furthermore, surrogate narratives speak of a desire
to 'help a family' as the primary motivation in becoming a surrogate,
downplaying economic factors as secondary or
irrelevant.[5]
Fast forward two and half decades from the hoopla of the Baby M case
and surrogacy is once again in the news. Oprah Winfrey devoted an
entire show to issues of assisted reproduction, subtitled "Wombs for
Rent." CBS News ran a segment titled "Outsourced 'Wombs-For-Rent' in
India." Headlines from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times read
"Outsourced Wombs," "India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood"
"Outsourcing Childbirth," "The Globalization of Baby-Making," "Rent-a
womb in India fuels surrogate motherhood debate," and "Wombs for Rent,
Cheap."[6]
Pictures that accompanied these articles depict rows of
Indian women sitting docilely in a clinic wearing pink and blue gowns
with matching head covers and masks that cover their entire faces except
their eyes,[7]
or women in saris standing, their faces not shown, but
their naked and protruding pregnant bellies prominently
displayed.[8]
The feminist dystopia—of reproductive inequality and
exploitation—imagined by Atwood and feared by many feminists since the Baby M trial
has seemingly come to fruition at the dawn of the 21st century. And
once again, feminist scholars are paying attention to the topic of
surrogate motherhood, and the broader issue of reproductive outsourcing
between bodies and across continents. Emerging ethnographic research on
Indian surrogates has found some similarities with U.S. based
research—from the agency of the surrogates to the specialness they feel
in helping a couple create a family. However, and not surprisingly,
Indian surrogates, unlike most of their American counterparts, do
clearly acknowledge the monetary aspects of the situation to explain and
justify their decision to become surrogates.[9]
As someone who has already published research on American cultural
politics of surrogate motherhood that existed around the time of the
Baby M case, I too have been drawn back to the topic with the recent
media attention given to surrogacy and reproductive tourism. I am
currently working on a research project comparing the media and cultural
discourses used to frame the issue of surrogate motherhood in the late
1980s and early 1990s to those that are deployed in current media
accounts of and public debates about the topic. For this new study, I
am analyzing all articles that pertain to surrogacy from 1980 through
2009 that appeared in The New York Times, The Washington
Post and Newsweek, as well as stories appearing in other
major news venues in the last several years. Additionally, due to the
changes in media brought on by the Internet, I have also collected over
a thousand online reader responses to three prominent stories that
appeared in 2008.
Despite the growth and changes in the surrogacy industry in the last
twenty-five years, I have actually found that there is a great deal of
continuity in the debates about the merits and problems with surrogacy.
In particular, I find that two main competing discursive frames about
surrogacy continue to focus either on concerns about commodified
reproduction or defenses of reproductive freedom. In my earlier work I
identified "baby selling" and "the plight of infertile couples" as the
two main competing frames in debates over surrogacy in the 1980s and I
argued that both these frames tend to reinforce cultural notions of a
public-private divide.[10]
Drawing on preliminary data and
illustrative examples from my current project, the following are some
further observations I've made about the frames used to construct
narratives about surrogacy and the additional cultural assumptions they
seem to share. My goal is not to evaluate whether surrogacy is "good"
or "bad." The issues I raise are also not meant to be an exhaustive
list of the multitude of dimensions by which the global reproductive
market can be analyzed. Instead I hope to point out a few overlooked
topics and assumptions in current accounts of and debates about the
surrogacy industry.
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