Interrogating Narratives About the Global Surrogacy Market

Why so much emphasis on the lack of financial incentives motivating American women who serve as “good” surrogates and what does this discursive framing reveal more broadly about cultural assumptions of mothering in the U.S.? As I argued in my earlier work, this framing of “good surrogates” distances supporters from charges of exploitation revealing a strategic need to disassociate the practice from charges of commodified reproduction and “baby selling.” Yet, this is not the only cultural assumption this strategic framing reveals. I suggest this framing of who is and who isn’t a “good” surrogate also illuminates broader assumptions about poor women in the U.S. That is a discourse about avoiding poor (i.e. “bad”) surrogates reveals underlying cultural assumptions about poor women in general as bad women/mothers and irresponsible reproducers. This narrative frames poor women in the U.S. as both undeserving and untrustworthy (surrogate) mothers. As a result, narrative frames of surrogacy that downplay the fiduciary aspects of the transaction are drawing on and reproducing dominant cultural ideologies of undeserving women/mothers found in discourses from welfare to population control.

Of note, however, is that this discursive construction of “good” versus “bad” American surrogates—that “needy”/poor surrogates are “bad” surrogates—contrasts with surrogacy advocates’ framing of Indian surrogates. For instance, in a Los Angeles Times article on the surrogacy industry in India a local surrogate broker unapologetically “acknowledged that money was the primary reason these women had queued up to be surrogates; without it, the list would be short, if nonexistent.”¹ Yet, despite the economic need driving these women to be surrogates their motives and characters are not denigrated. In her online blog about Indian surrogates Judith Warner also points out this contradiction “… when the women in question are living in abject poverty … [t]hen selling one’s body for money is not degrading but empowering.”² Ironically, then, in the global political economy of mothering, while poor women in the U.S. are constructed as irresponsible and bad (surrogate) mothers, poor women elsewhere aren’t necessarily viewed with the same scorn and distrust—at least when they serve to “empower” themselves by acting as surrogates.³

Are media accounts and discursive narratives that present more critical frames of surrogacy better with regard to class-based assumptions about good parenting and deserving motherhood? Detractors of the practice do often frame their discursive narratives around issues of class, privilege, and reproductive inequality. For instance, there is often much disdain and concern expressed regarding the amount of money spent by the intended parents—the baby-buying aspects of the practice and the possible exploitation of needy women. As bioethicist George Annas succinctly states in a New York Times article, “[Surrogacy] really does treat children like commodities. Like pets.”⁴ Narrative frames about the exploitation of those who are economically desperate are also found in the Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s follow-up to the Kuczynski article in which he pointed out that for many readers the practice “screamed rich woman exploiting poor woman,”⁵ and a Wall Street Journal article’s opening sentence that begins, “Here’s another sign of the tough economic times: some clinics are reporting a surge in the number of women applying to donate eggs or serve as surrogate mothers for infertile couples.”⁶

1. See Chu, Henry. [↩]
2. See Warner, Judith Warner, 2008. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]
4. Stephanie Saul, “Building a Baby, With Few Ground Rules,” New York Times 13 December 2009. [↩]
5. Clark Hoyt, “The Privileged and Their Children,” New York Times, 7 December 2008. [↩]
6. See Melinda Beck, “Ova Time: Women Line Up to Donate Eggs—for Money,” The Wall Street Journal, 9 December 2008. [↩]