Wendy Chavkin,
"Globalized Motherhood: Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Context"
(page 3 of 4)
And the final piece I'd like to interject into this notion of
"Globalized Motherhood" is that, as the women of the highly-developed
world struggle to work very hard and try to have children, and are still
disproportionately responsible for the domestic side of life, they are
importing women from all around the world to take care of these domestic
tasks.
So the third piece I would like to suggest is the global traveling of
women to do nanny work for other women. Both Debora [Spar] and Lori
[Andrews] have talked about many, many of the questions that we have
about all this stuff.
And we could go all day just listing the questions this raises, much
less even ever getting to talk about any of them, but I think the
implications for women, for their health, for their relationship to
themselves in terms of body bits, include things like this: how are you
relating to yourself as a producer of eggs? As a uterus? As a
purchaser of somebody else's eggs or uterus? As a provider of genetic
material? I mean, these are really weird questions that need to be
thought through.
How are you relating to yourself in terms of gender roles? What does
it mean to be so eager to have "your own baby," that you are going to
have a whole bunch of other people's genetic and gestational services?
What does it mean? What are we even talking about?
What does it mean for the babies? A lot of these questions have been
raised—about identity, about commodity, about citizenship. There's
been a lot of pushback from the Korean girls who are adopted here, and
are now back in Korea, angry and looking for their birth mothers.
We have yet to see what's going to happen for these very complicated
heritage children that we're talking about now, with the use of these
technologies. And also, let me just say that in the adoption setting,
some of the sending countries are now very keen to get remittances from
those grown-up children who have been sent to wealthier lands, and are
now able to produce monies.
What does it mean for countries? Lori [Andrews] talked about the
lack of regulation we have in the United States, and contrasted it with
a more regulatory system in the U.K. Nowadays, people travel. They
travel; they use the Internet. And our ability to maintain our own
regulatory schema—whoever "we" are, whatever country "we" are—are
really, really tested. So it becomes, I think, really tough for us to
think about, and really tough to figure out what kinds of policies we
would even like to advocate.
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