Kalindi Vora,
"Medicine, Markets and the Pregnant Body: Indian Commercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame"
(page 2 of 5)
II. Biogenetic Parenthood and the Work of Surrogacy
Hanging on the wall of the director's office in the small but growing
Manushi clinic is a multi-media work commissioned by the clinic's
director. A line of soft abstract shapes representing the salwar
chemise-clad pregnant bodies and covered heads of six women arcs around
a central and taller abstracted female figure dressed in white. A group
of staff explained to me that the central figure in white represents the
director, Dr. Bhakta, herself. Her arms are outstretched to draw in the
group of women, whose most distinguishing features are their exaggerated
wombs, marked as embossed circles with a centered fetal-imprint pressed
into the plastic material of their bodily forms. According to one staff
member, the piece is meant to portray the director's vision of the
clinic's surrogacy practice as a form of altruism and care for the women
who become commercial surrogates, and the image is a way to signpost
this vision to commissioning parents who visit the clinic. The image
also represents the pregnant body as imagined through the discourse of
the medicalized body, where the uterus is an empty and un-utilized
space. The artistic representation draws attention to the central
importance of the once-empty uterus. Now filled, the womb marks the
service being performed by the surrogates and reflects the primary way
that the clinic encourages both potential and active surrogates to
approach gestational surrogacy as a service.
Reproductive technologies and associated medical discourse were
developed primarily in advanced capitalist countries and have since
traveled to India, and with them come the co-constituting Euro-American
notions of kinship as biogenetically based.[6]
One of the outcomes of
the way that medical discourse about reproductive technologies, through
this linking of kinship and biogenetics, distances actual individualized
bodies from the biology of reproduction, is that it creates a framework
for commissioning parents, doctors, and surrogates to imagine the act of
gestating a child as a paid occupation in which a service (gestation and
childbirth) is exchanged for a fee. The exchange is not limited to these
terms, but the way that medical discourse isolates the reproductive body
and gametes from the social context in which they originated allows for
gestational surrogacy to be conceived of as a form of paid work or
service by participants.
Most of the women who come to the Manushi clinic come from at least
an hour's bus ride away, and generally find out about the opportunity
through friends or family. According to the clinic's guidelines, a
potential surrogate must be married with at least one child and have
permission from her husband to be eligible. Once pregnant, surrogates
are highly encouraged to live in designated housing near the clinic
where they can rest instead of working and providing care to their
families. This arrangement also allows for surveillance by clinic staff.
Their husbands, sometimes accompanied by children, come to visit them in
these hostels during the weekends. Most surrogates hide their
participation from extended family and sometimes even their own children
because of the associated stigma.
The overall surrogacy process at this clinic costs clients roughly
twenty thousand dollars, depending on whether or not they use donor eggs
and how many in vitro fertilization cycles are necessary to
accomplish a pregnancy. The clinic mandates that embryos be created
using either the intended mother's ova or those of a donor, but never
those of the gestational surrogate. Egg donors and surrogates are
selected by the director rather than by the commissioning parents. After
an initial interview, there is usually little contact between surrogate
mothers and intended parents. The relationship between the intended
parents and their surrogate is almost always completely mediated by the
clinic staff. Clients who come to this clinic from abroad to hire
surrogates cite a number of reasons for their decision, including the
desire for a child who shares genetic material with one or both parents,
the comparatively high cost and administrative complexity of domestic
and international adoption, and because, in some cases, the clients'
home countries do not allow surrogacy or only allow it under limited
circumstances such as in non-commercial arrangements. The Manushi clinic
only accepts client couples for surrogacy when they are heterosexual,
and when the woman cannot physically support a pregnancy herself. The
clinic has suspended this first rule in the case of a small number of
male single-parent clients, and it is conceivable that these individuals
might be part of non-heterosexual family formations. The latter rule is
meant to insure that the clinic is only arranging surrogacy when it is
'medically necessary' and to prevent clients from using surrogates to
avoid pregnancy.
Many non-Indian commissioning parents expressed a feeling of
obligation to their surrogates beyond the portion of their fee that was
intended for the surrogate, usually between five and seven thousand
dollars. By giving gifts during pregnancy or additional gift monies
after delivery, these parents both assuage the uncertainty and sometimes
guilt they may feel about potentially exploiting the surrogates, and
allow themselves to feel that they are improving the lives of the
surrogates. While some intended parents write to their surrogates and
send email correspondence and photos of the infant in the first year,
most of the surrogates said they do not hear from their former clients
very frequently. The clients I spoke to tended to express a feeling of
connection to "India" rather than to individual women, some mentioning
that they would inform their children of the circumstances of their
birth or that they hoped to bring the child to India someday to see
where it was born, but not necessarily to visit the clinic or surrogate.
The sense of duty described by clients operates both with and against
the commodity nature of their exchange. While gifts to their surrogates
are not required, they are sometimes described as compensating for the
relatively low fees paid to surrogates. To an extent, commissioning
parents may thus feel a personal obligation to pay their surrogate
something more than the market rate, but for those to whom I spoke who
were still in the middle of the surrogacy process, they imagined that
the stronger association would ultimately be with the homeland of the
surrogate, not the woman herself.
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