Susan Markens, "Interrogating Narratives About the Global Surrogacy Market"
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At the same time, people's "natural" desire to parent is often recognized as legitimate—thus revealing the cultural salience of the "plight of the infertile" narrative. As a result, in this framing of surrogacy, adoption is often presented as a preferable option, one that doesn't "waste" money and that can "help" rather than exploit. Examples of this narrative story about less exploitative and financially wasteful ways of creating families are illustrated in online reader comments that make the following pleas to infertile women in response to Kuczynki's Times story and the Newsweek cover story, respectfully: "So adopt one. Or even better, more than one. There's so many precious kids out there that need a good home. Women—stop spending all that money on IVF and surrogacy, and spend it helping it others,"[29] and "Has anyone ever heard of adoption? People waste so much money on these procedures ... years and years of wasted money trying to get pregnant themselves. You could spend that money to adopt a baby that will otherwise most likely grow up in a bad situation."[30]

Yet, while the narrative of adoption as a better (i.e. less exploitative) alternative to surrogacy is attuned to issues of class and privilege (and lack there of), I suggest that this frame also negates issues of parenting, class, and privilege by not reflecting on whose/which children are available for adoption. Whether domestically or abroad, poverty is a key factor affecting who relinquishes children for adoption (voluntarily or involuntarily).[31] This surrogacy narrative thus, perhaps inadvertently, also disregards the mothering capabilities of women with fewer resources—this time both in the U.S. and elsewhere. In the end, both supporters and detractors of surrogacy thus elide issues of class in their strategic discourses by reinforcing class-based notions of "good" parenting and deserving motherhood. Ironically then, and as I found in my earlier work, while seemingly at odds with each other, alternative and opposing frames of surrogacy can also end up reinforcing the same dominant cultural ideologies, ideologies which may conflict with feminist goals of expansive notions of reproductive rights, freedoms, and equalities. And this is just one of the many complexities and contradictions that feminist scholars should be attuned to as we analyze the consequences, materially and culturally, of the global reproductive marketplace for what it offers to women of various social locations.

I thank Jonathan Markovitz and Rebecca Young for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Endnotes

1. Baby M was the product of a surrogacy contractual arrangement between William and Elizabeth Stern and Mary Beth Whitehead. Baby M was genetically related to both Mary Beth Whitehead and William Stern (she was inseminated with his sperm which is now known as "traditional surrogacy." Most surrogacy arrangements now involve IVF and are called "gestational surrogacy"). After the baby was born, Mrs. Whitehead decided she wanted to keep the baby and the infamous custody case ensued. A New Jersey trial judge upheld the surrogacy contract in 1987, validating the termination of Mary Beth Whitehead's parental rights and giving custody of Baby M to the Sterns, but a year later, in 1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court invalidated the surrogacy contract. Mary Beth Whitehead's parental rights were restored by the New Jersey Supreme Court decision. However, using the legal standard of "the best interests of the child," permanent custody was assigned to the Sterns while Whitehead was awarded visitation privileges. See In the Matter of Baby M, 109 NJ 396 (1988). [Return to text]

2. For further discussion of media coverage of surrogacy see: Susan Markens, Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). [Return to text]

3. Some academic journals publishing exchanges about the topic in immediate response to the Baby M case include: Gender & Society 1.3 (1987); Law, Medicine and Health Care 16.1-2 (1988); Society 25.3 (1988), Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 13.1 (1990), among many others. [Return to text]

4. See for example: Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein and Shelly Minden, eds., Test-tube Women: What Future Motherhood? ( London: Pandora, 1984); Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Gena Corea, et al., Man-made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Angela Davis, "Outcast Mothers and Surrogates: Racism and Reproductive Politics in the Nineties," in American Feminist Thought at Century's End: A Reader, Linda S. Kaufman, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993); Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (New York: Perigee Books, 1983); and Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York: Norton, 1989). [Return to text]

5. See ZsuZsa Berend, "Surrogate Losses: Understandings of Pregnancy Loss and Assisted Reproduction among Surrogate Mothers," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24.2 (2010): 240-62; Gillian Goslinga-Roy, "Body Boundaries, Fiction of the Female Self: An Ethnographic Perspective on Power, Feminisim, and the Reproductive Technologies," Feminist Studies 26.1 (2000): 113-140; Gillian Goslinga-Roy, "Naturalized Selves and Cyborg Bodies: The Case of Gestational Surrogacy," in Biotechnology, Culture and the Body, Paul Brodwin, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Helena Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, "'Native' Narratives of Connectedness: Surrogate Motherhood and Technology," in Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit, eds (New York: Routledge, 1998); Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, "Examining Surrogacy Discourses Between Feminine Power and Exploitation," in Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). [Return to text]

6. Judith Warner, "Outsourced Wombs," New York Times 3 January 2008; Amelia Gentleman, "India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood," New York Times 10 May 2008; Ellen Goodman, "The Globalization of Baby-making," The Boston Globe 11 April 2008; Krittivas Mukherhee, "Rent-a-womb in India Fuels Surrogate Motherhood Debates," Washington Post 4 February 2008; and Henry Chu, "Wombs For Rent, Cheap," Los Angeles Times 19 April 2009. [Return to text]

7. See Warner, Judith. [Return to text]

8. See Gentleman, Amelia. [Return to text]

9. For recent ethnographic research in India see, for example: Amrita Pande, "Not an 'Angel,' not a 'Whore:' Surrogates as 'Dirty' Workers in India," Indian Journal of Gender Studies 16.2 (2009): 141-73; Amrita Pande, "Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35.4 (2010): 969-92; and Kalindi Vora, "Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Disaggregation of Mothering Work," Anthropology News February 2009. See also Vora's article "Medicine, Markets and the Pregnant Body: Indian Commercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame" in this issue. Similar findings about the salience of economic factors can also be found in Elly Teman's research on Israeli surrogates: Elly Teman, Birthing A Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). [Return to text]

10. See Markens, Susan. [Return to text]

11. See Gentleman, Amelia. [Return to text]

12. See Chu, Henry. [Return to text]

13. See Teman (2010) about the central role of the United States, particularly California, in the global surrogacy market. [Return to text]

14. For an exception to this see Goodman, 2008. [Return to text]

15. Jane Brody, "Much Has Changed in Surrogate Pregnancies," New York Times 21 July 2009. [Return to text]

16. Alex Kuczynski, "Her Body, My Baby," New York Times 30 November 2008. [Return to text]

17. Lorraine Ali and Raina Kelley, "The Curious Lives of Surrogates," Newsweek 7 April 2008. [Return to text]

18. Ibid. See Newsweek's website for online reader comments. [Return to text]

19. Ibid. [Return to text]

20. This altruistic storyline about surrogacy was seen, for example, in the 1990s television shows "Sisters" and "Friends" and more recently in the series "Brothers and Sisters." [Return to text]

21. See Markens (2007) for a more detailed discussion of media coverage of Johnson v. Calvert surrogate custody case. Class based assumptions about good mothering and good parenting were also critiqued during the Baby M trial. See Michelle Harrison, "Social Construction of Mary Beth Whitehead," Gender & Society 3 (1987): 300-11. [Return to text]

22. See Ali and Kelley, 2008. See Newsweek's website for online reader comments. [Return to text]

23. See Chu, Henry. [Return to text]

24. See Warner, Judith Warner, 2008. [Return to text]

25. Susan Markens, "Indian Surrogates, Military Wives, and Infertility Stories: Media Framings of Surrogacy in the 21st Century," presented at American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 8-11 August 2009. [Return to text]

26. Stephanie Saul, "Building a Baby, With Few Ground Rules," New York Times 13 December 2009. [Return to text]

27. Clark Hoyt, "The Privileged and Their Children," New York Times, 7 December 2008. [Return to text]

28. See Melinda Beck, "Ova Time: Women Line Up to Donate Eggs—for Money," The Wall Street Journal, 9 December 2008. [Return to text]

29. Kuczynski 2008. See nytimes.com for online reader comments. [Return to text]

30. Ali and Kelley 2008. See Newsweek's website for online reader comments. [Return to text]

31. Similarly, Dorothy Roberts argues that race, in addition to class, affects judgments about parenting and thus which children end up in the foster care system. See Dorothy Roberts Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, (New York: Basic Books, 2002). [Return to text]

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