Interrogating Narratives About the Global Surrogacy Market

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,” ¹ 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.” ²

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). ³ 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.

1. Kuczynski 2008. See nytimes.com for online reader comments.[↑]
2. Ali and Kelley 2008. See Newsweek’s website for online reader comments.[↑]
3. 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).[↑]