Kalindi Vora,
"Medicine, Markets and the Pregnant Body: Indian Commercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame"
(page 3 of 5)
Through counseling and conversations with doctors, a surrogate is
encouraged to think of her womb as a space she can rent out; the analogy
many surrogates spoke of is that the womb is like a spare room in a
home, where someone else's baby will stay and grow. One of the doctors
at the clinic described the approach of clinic staff this way:
"[We] try to explain to them that what you are doing, you
are doing for someone else, whatever money or gifts they give you. The
emotional attachment is going to be there, but they understand one
thing, even if they are not educated that much, which is that we have to
give the child back to the parents. That's one of the most important
things, and we haven't had any case otherwise."
In discussing the anticipation of parting with the infant upon its
birth, a number of the women working as surrogates explained
independently that since the baby wouldn't look like her, she wouldn't
feel a bond with it. This explanation is used by doctors to guide
surrogates in thinking of the child as not their own. Despite this
coaching and the understanding that the babies are not theirs, women who
had already delivered did say they missed the infants after they left
India and hoped to hear about their development, receive pictures of the
children, and maintain a connection to these families.
The prominent narrative of the distance between a gestational
surrogate and the eventual infant she will deliver as an inevitable
result of the genetic distance between the two is a product of a Western
medical discourse of the body and biogenetics of parenthood. Emily
Martin has observed the ways that the medical gaze, particularly as
administered through visual technologies like ultrasonography, enforces
the Cartesian mind/body dualism and alienates pregnant women from the
process of being pregnant. She has elaborated this as the obstetrician
becoming a "mechanic" and the pregnant woman a
"laborer."[7] The
relationship to and understanding of the womb as a separable body part
from the woman's whole body and from herself as a subject, and hence of
the baby as a guest that is not part of her body, is a product of an
understanding of the body and self which must be naturalized for the
women acting as surrogates, and allows participants to understand
gestation as a form of paid work. At the same time, this does not
exhaust the meaning of how surrogates understand their social relations
and even kinship relations with commissioning parents and the infant
they bear, as Amrita Pande's recent study of surrogates and kinship at a
fertility clinic in Gujarat reveals.[8]
Women who were currently working as surrogates explained the need for
secrecy that many felt resulted from the fact that people in their
communities would not understand that they had not had sexual relations
in order to conceive, and therefore surrogacy would not be accepted as
an altruistic act or as valid employment. At the same time, everyone I
spoke to expressed conviction that carrying another person's child as a
surrogate was not compromising any moral standards around sexuality, a
trend which is supported by Amrita Pande's observations of commercial
surrogacy in India.[9]
This conviction is at least partially the result
of coaching in the process and meaning of conception and childbirth
received through the clinic's explanations of how surrogacy makes a
guest fetus but not a mother. These explanations are based on the
Western medical understanding of the genetic basis of parenthood, though
whether or not the surrogate mothers themselves fully accept their role
within these terms is not clear in their versions of the clinic's
narrative of how surrogacy works, and is challenged by the way that
surrogates explain their role in terms of the divine, discussed below.
In addition to the intervention of Western medical discourses of the
body and biogenetic parenthood, it is the availability of women in India
as surrogates, through both economic necessity and the lack of formal
regulation, that makes transnational Indian surrogacy possible. Barbara
Katz Rothman has argued that in the U.S., discourse about surrogacy
figures the surrogate's womb as property to use as she sees fit, and the
fetus as property belonging to the intended
parent.[10] This discourse
has traveled with the technologies involved in surrogacy, so that the
understanding of procreation and parenthood that surrogate mothers are
taught includes the figuring of the womb as a place to rent out for use
by someone else's infant. The technologies that define and separate the
roles of egg donor, intended mother, and gestational mother, in
combination with the patriarchal discourse of infant-as-property, work
with the commodifying logics of capitalist culture to objectify the work
of gestation and the fetus so that they can participate as commodities
in the transnational surrogacy industry. Even so, it is essential to
note that this is not the primary economy to which women working as
surrogates describe their labor as contributing. While women readily
acknowledge that it is the demands of material circumstances that impel
them to take up this otherwise undesirable work, many women also
described their role of a surrogate in terms of an altruistic, or even
divine, economy.
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