Kalindi Vora,
"Medicine, Markets and the Pregnant Body: Indian Commercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame"
(page 4 of 5)
Altruism and the Divine
In the discussion and description of what it is like to be a part of
transnational surrogacy arrangements in this clinic, doctors,
surrogates, and commissioning parents all described their interest and
actions as at least partially if not primarily motivated by altruism. In
the context of clinic staff, this discourse took the form of a general
narrative of the clinic's project of social work: rehabilitating women
who take on surrogacy into more disciplined, self-sufficient and
professionalized workers, and helping childless couples from around the
world build their families. Intended parents also described the
opportunity to help needy women working as surrogates as part of the
benefit of hiring a surrogate in India rather than in their home
countries. In the context of how surrogates describe their
participation, carrying a child for a couple without children is
described in empathetic and spiritual terms as an opportunity to provide
something that is usually the domain of a godly gift.
Many of the surrogate mothers I spoke to, all of whom were Hindu or
Christian, emphasized a feeling that they were doing something great,
often in the religious language of being like a god, or being able to
give a gift to an infertile couple that is a gift usually given only by
god.[11]
Most were usually quick to then include the doctors as part of
this ability to provide, but the emphasis was on their own power to
give. Those who spoke to this topic emphasized that this exalted aspect
of their actions was much more important than the money aspect, and in
fact was their primary motivation. At the same time, when I asked one
former surrogate mother how she would feel if one of her daughters
wanted to be a surrogate when she was older, her reply was immediate and
negative: she explained that the whole reason she herself undertook a
surrogacy was so that her children could become educated and wouldn't
have to do such things, and that she would not want her daughters to
experience that pain. I have to assume that she meant a certain
experience of pain, both physical and emotional, that exists in
surrogacy but not in carrying and birthing one's own child. Her comments
also suggest that despite the narrative of the gift, which mediates the
economic transactions within surrogacy by putting them in the realm of
voluntary exchange and altruism, surrogacy is a type of work that is not
desirable except when economically necessary.
The turn to the divine within these narratives can offer an
alternative explanation of the meaning of surrogacy in a frame that is
not limited to the medical discourse of the body and biogenetic
parenthood. In the context of the clinic, it marks both a woman's
powerful role as a surrogate, and signifies the value of the outcome of
producing a child for a childless couple in non-monetary terms. For the
reader and scholar who does not originate from within the communities
where the women working as surrogates reside, this mode of understanding
and relating surrogacy could suggest a way to approach the significance
of this act in terms beyond those of labor and economics. It could also
provide a way to bridge potential gaps in women's understanding of the
clinical explanation of surrogacy as a reproductive technology, which
the doctors describe again and again to surrogates in a very basic way
as a mode of recruitment. This includes the explanation of how in
vitro fertilization works, where an infant is conceived without
sexual relations, ultimately leading to the birth of a child who "does
not look like you." The discourse of the divine aspects of surrogacy
suggests alternate ways that surrogacy might be imagined and have value
that don't translate to the genetic definition of a biological parent,
and don't necessarily circulate within the economic logic of surrogacy
as technologically-mediated 'women's work' in the global economy.
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