Interrogating Narratives About the Global Surrogacy Market

First, as discussed above, much recent attention to surrogacy is concerned about global outsourcing. This is evident in the renewed scholarly attention to the topic, including this very issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online. This is also evident in media coverage of the surrogacy industry in India that emphasizes its growth and expansion. Media framings that present a burgeoning industry in which Western couples are increasingly hiring Indian surrogates include articles that claim: “… reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe”¹ and “… an increasing number of infertile couples from abroad are coming here in search of women … who are willing, in effect, to rent out their womb.”² Yet such media accounts of the expanding global reach of the reproductive industry that focus on India have the effect of rendering invisible the fact that a primary destination for reproductive tourism, specifically surrogacy, remains the U.S.³ Thus analyses of reproductive outsourcing tend to neglect a key component of the global surrogacy market—American surrogates and their bodies. This does not mean that American surrogates are never discussed. In fact, I have found that media coverage of surrogacy is still more likely to report stories on surrogates located in the U.S. than elsewhere. Yet, when surrogacy is discussed in relation to a global reproductive market—the type of sensational media account that often receives a lot of attention, as well as scholarly analysis—American surrogates usually disappear from the discussion.⁴

Second, then, in bringing an analytic focus back to American surrogates is the question of how are they discursively constructed in the media and public discourse? As found in much of the ethnographic literature on surrogacy, a key discursive trope about surrogacy transactions used by its defenders are the largely altruistic reasons that motivate women to become surrogates. For instance, in her Personal Health Column in the New York Times, Jane Brody highlights the “altruistic motives” of surrogates and quotes a surrogate mother profiled in the article who states that “People don’t become gestational carriers as a way of making money.”⁵ The de-emphasis on money is key to presenting surrogates as not poor, in other words as not desperate or needy. This surrogacy narrative is presented in Alex Kuczynki’s widely discussed New York Times Sunday magazine cover story about her battle with infertility and her experience of hiring a surrogate to bear her son. In describing the potential American surrogates she screened she writes, “None were living in poverty. Lawyers and surrogacy advocates will tell you that they don’t accept poor women as surrogates ….”⁶ Similarly, in a cover page story on surrogacy in Newsweek—a focus of which was the supposed large number of surrogates who are married to U.S. servicemen—a surrogate mother explains: “Poor or desperate women wouldn’t qualify [to be surrogates].”⁷ Meanwhile, in her essay Kuczynski recounts that she chose the surrogate she did because she “told me that her motivations were not purely financial …. She wasn’t desperate for the money.” Online reader comments from surrogates also vigorously present the narrative that surrogates are not poor or needy as do these two reader responses to the Newsweek cover story: “… the vast majority of us [surrogates] ARE educated, and NOT poor and NOT on a fixed income;”⁸ and, “I carried twins as a gestational surrogate, and I am college educated, on my way to being an RN, and my husband is a postal worker. We have no money problems.”⁹

Popular cultural representations of surrogate motherhood also reflect this cultural theme about “good” versus “bad” surrogate mothers. For instance, from soap operas to prime time television, favorable and normalizing presentations of surrogacy tend to involve a sister or friend who volunteers to serve as a surrogate for an infertile couple.¹⁰ Meanwhile, in the 2008 Hollywood film Baby Mama the hired surrogate, a working class and down and out woman, is presented as unscrupulous and duplicitous when it is revealed that she is partaking in a money-making scam. Contempt and/or distrust of surrogates from less well-off backgrounds is also visible in the precedent-setting California custody case, Johnson v. Calvert, where the gestational surrogate was described in the press as a “welfare cheat.”¹¹ This unsympathetic and critical take on “unscrupulous” surrogates is also visible in the outrage expressed in response to the Newsweek cover story on American surrogates. While not the entire focus of the article, a main storyline was the supposedly large proportion of American surrogates who are the wives of men in the military. Although concern was expressed that these women became surrogates because their husbands were not being paid enough, a vocal stream of discontent was that military wives became surrogates because their pregnancies were covered by the military health plan. This resulted in a construct of surrogates as manipulators who engage in “fraud” and “abuse,” like “pirates” vividly seen in the following online reader comments: “Taxpayers should be questioning this FRAUD!!!”; “These military wives are profitting at the taxpayers expense”; and “The military wives who do this are PIRATES.”¹²

1. See Gentleman, Amelia. [↩]
2. See Chu, Henry. [↩]
3. See Teman (2010) about the central role of the United States, particularly California, in the global surrogacy market. [↩]
4. For an exception to this see Goodman, 2008. [↩]
5. Jane Brody, “Much Has Changed in Surrogate Pregnancies,” New York Times 21 July 2009. [↩]
6. Alex Kuczynski, “Her Body, My Baby,” New York Times 30 November 2008. [↩]
7. Lorraine Ali and Raina Kelley, “The Curious Lives of Surrogates,” Newsweek 7 April 2008. [↩]
8. Ibid. See Newsweek’s website for online reader comments.  [↩]
9. Ibid. [↩]
10. 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.” [↩]
11. 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. [↩]
12. See Ali and Kelley, 2008. See Newsweek’s website for online reader comments. [↩]