Susan Markens,
"Interrogating Narratives About the Global Surrogacy Market"
(page 2 of 4)
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"[11]
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."[12]
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.[13]
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.[14]
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."[15]
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 ...."[16]
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]."[17]
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;"[18]
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."[19]
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.[20]
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."[21] 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."[22]
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