Jessaca Leinaweaver,
"Adoption and the Politics of Modern Families"
(page 2 of 5)
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.[4] 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."[5]
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."[6]
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.[7]
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.'"[8]
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.[9] 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."[10] 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."[11]
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.[12]
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.
Page: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5
Next page
|