Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families

Making a Family

Making a family doesn’t, on the surface, sound complicated. But for those couples suffering from infertility, whether medical infertility or “social infertility,” as in when gay or lesbian couples or single individuals want to reproduce and require some kind of outside physiological involvement in order to do so, there are an increasing number of technologies, both new and old, that come into play. Many of these technologies can be interpreted using Colen’s framework of stratified reproduction.

Take, for example, surrogacy. In late 2008, a New York Times article on surrogacy caused a great deal of fervor on the mommy blogs. In the accompanying images to “Her Body, My Baby,” the white reporter Alex Kuczynski is pictured with her baby and her “baby nurse,” a woman of color, conspicuously in the background. ¹ The surrogate, also white, is shown barefoot, sitting on her porch. Hundreds of enraged letters to the editor followed. Joanne McCarthy, for example, wrote, “What decision maker is responsible for showing the surrogate barefoot? This one picture belies all the careful respect the article seems to afford her choice. She is the hillbilly who needs to ‘rent her womb’—the barefoot-and-pregnant stereotype.” ² Public editor Clark Hoyt responded to readers the week after Kuczynski’s piece appeared, noting that Kuczynski “came off to many readers as a rich woman in a rarefied world of servants and multiple homes, able to enjoy skiing, whitewater rafting and the Super Bowl while her surrogate was pregnant.” He added, “the article focused almost totally on the wealthy Kuczynski and her feelings without giving a voice to Cathy Hilling, the substitute teacher who bore her son. The article glossed over their class and economic differences, but the accompanying photographs seemed to emphasize them.” ³

The irate New York Times readers perceived this to be a case of elitism, of stratified reproduction. This response is partly grounded in its cost. Surrogacy is not an option for those without significant means; one recent estimate indicated that legal and medical expenses can run between $80,000 and $120,000. ⁴ At the same time, surrogates repeatedly state, in a context where commercial surrogacy is prohibited, that they do not do it for the money but rather, as Cathy Hilling, Kuczynski’s surrogate, remarked, the “‘incredible high’ of knowing ‘you can make someone’s dream come true.'” ⁵ Anthropologist Helena Ragoné found that surrogates’ apparently altruistic actions were best explained—almost paradoxically—by their desire to both transcend the limitations of their domestic roles as wives, mothers and homemakers, while at the same time very powerfully attesting to the importance of those roles. ⁶ If Ragoné’s argument is convincing, then being a surrogate is empowering for working-class women. Describing it as altruistic, as Cathy Hilling did, lets them sidestep any questions about the autonomy and personal power (as well as money) that they can get from being a surrogate.

So perhaps surrogacy is more complicated than the label “stratified reproduction” might suggest. But let’s take one more example, commercial surrogacy in the transnational sphere, with India as a controversial case study. Media reports indicate that the cost of surrogacy in India is one-third its cost in the U.S. or U.K., including airfare. Yet global income disparities mean that the actual value of the amount paid to a surrogate might be much more in India than in the contracting parents’ home nation. Where commercial surrogacy is allowed and surrogates are no longer in the position of having to frame their work as altruistic, and where observers don’t have to pretend that the money paid to the surrogate is not a significant aid to her household, then surrogates don’t have to be interpreted as ’empowered.’ Instead, they can be viewed as the recipients of benevolence.

A doctor at an Indian fertility clinic, interviewed in connection with her work on behalf of the reproductive project of a gay Israeli couple, told a New York Times reporter, “Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop. This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.” ⁷ In other words, the doctor is arguing that employing Indian women as surrogates is a method of helping them (much like humanitarian aid, development assistance, tourism, or many other practices of complicated ethical makeup) rather than exploitation.

These depictions of U.S. surrogates as ’empowered’ and Indian surrogates as the recipients of ‘benevolence’ draw on fears of what the shadowy alternative might be. If the underside of ‘charity case’ is ‘exploited,’ it is reasonable that both those who extend a humanitarian hand and those who can be characterized as exploiting prefer the former descriptor. Similarly, empowered surrogates win out every time over their own shadow selves, mercenary women (gold-diggers with wombs), in a narrative contest. (Yet it also won’t do to draw the distinction between empowered and charity recipient too starkly; these strategies can and do overlap in both settings.)

Articles in the popular press about Indian surrogacy often barely conceal their skepticism of such claims and their scorn for those who choose to reproduce via this ethically murky path. For example, the BBC reported on one surrogate mother who “says her employers told her to eat certain kinds of food only. She was also ordered not to travel by auto-rickshaws.” ⁸ Here, restrictions on the surrogate’s behavior that would clearly not be acceptable in a U.S. or U.K. context of ostensible reproductive choice and freedom are used to imply the controlling and perhaps exploitative nature of the relationship. The New York Times reporter paraphrased the Indian doctor as noting that, “The surrogate mother does not know that she is working for foreigners … and has not been told that the future parents are both men. Gay sex is illegal in India.” Here, the reporter suggests that withholding information about sexuality and nationality that may affect the surrogate’s choices in the Indian context is problematic and, perhaps, exploitative—despite the doctor’s and the future fathers’ claims to the contrary. ⁹

These examples of surrogacy clearly illustrate what Colen described as stratified reproduction: one person “outsources” the work of gestation to another person who is willing to give over her body to the first person’s reproductive project for nine months or more. In other words, one aspect of reproductive labor—gestation—is being transferred to someone who is “lower down” on the global hierarchy, whether in terms of social class (as in the Kuczynski case) or national power (as in the Indian example).

New reproductive technologies are particularly illuminating through their sheer science-fiction-like appeal, but there are also the “old reproductive technologies,” such as adoption. If technology is not simply bells and whistles but also knowledge, tools, and strategies, then adoption is a kind of technology used to facilitate reproduction. In adoption—whether domestic or international, private or from foster care, open or closed—one person gives birth, and another person is granted legal responsibility for that child. As in surrogacy, an aspect of one person’s reproductive project is achieved through the labor of another.

1. Alex Kuczynski, “Her Body, My Baby,” The New York Times Magazine 28 November 2008.[↑]
2. Joanne McCarthy, “Letter to the Editor,” The New York Times Magazine 14 December 2008. Slate contributor Nina Shen Rastogi also highlighted the barefoot-and-pregnant trope in her critical commentary: Nina Shen Rastogi, “She Rented a Woman’s Womb and Then Was Rude to the Landlady,” The XX Factor 1 December 2008.[↑]
3. Clark Hoyt, “The Privileged and Their Children,” The New York Times Week in Review 7 December 2008.[↑]
4. Stephanie Saul, “Building a Baby, With Few Ground Rules,” The New York Times 12 December 2009.[↑]
5. Hoyt, 2008.[↑]
6. Helena Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).[↑]
7. Amelia Gentleman, “India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood,” The New York Times 10 March 2008.[↑]
8. Shilpa Kannan, “Regulators Eye India’s Surrogacy Sector,” BBC News 18 March 2009. See also: Kalindi Vora, “Indian Transnational Surrogacy and the Commodification of Vital Energy,” Subjectivity 28: 266-278. For an in-depth discussion, see Kalindi Vora’s piece in this issue.[↑]
9. The reporter may also be drawing on imagined liberal readers’ reactions against the legislation of sexuality to add a layer of racialized judgment. I thank Rebecca Young for this point.[↑]