Intimate Strangers. Commercial Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine and the Making of Truth, 2023 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Moral frameworks of commercial surrogacy within the US, India and Russia (Open access)
Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 29:1, 1-17, 2021
In this paper, we draw on three ethnographic studies of surrogacy we carried out separately in different contexts: the western US state of California, the south Indian state of Karnataka, and the western Russian metropolis of St Petersburg. In our interviews with surrogate mothers, intended parents, and surrogacy professionals, we traced the meanings and ideologies through which they understood the clinical labour of surrogacy. We found that in the US, interviewed surrogates, intended parents and professionals understood surrogacy as an exchange of both gifts and commodities, where gift-giving, reciprocity, and relatedness between surrogates and intended parents were the major tropes. In India, differing narratives of surrogacy were offered by its different parties: whilst professionals and intended parents framed it as a win-win exchange with an emphasis on the economic side, the interviewed surrogate mothers talked about surrogacy as creative labour of giving life. In Russia, approaches to surrogacy among the interviewed surrogate mothers, professionals and intended parents overlapped in framing it as work and a businesslike commodity exchange. We suggest these three different ways of ethical reasoning about the clinical labour of surrogacy, including justifications of women's incorporation into this labour, were situated in local moral frameworks. We name them "repro-regional moral frameworks", inspired by earlier work on moral frameworks as well as on reproductive nationalisms and transnational reproduction. Building on these findings, we argue that any international or global regulation of surrogacy, or indeed any moral stance on it, needs to take these local differences into account.
Moral frameworks of commercial surrogacy within the US, India and Russia
Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 2021
In this paper, we draw on three ethnographic studies of surrogacy we carried out separately in different contexts: the western US state of California, the south Indian state of Karnataka, and the western Russian metropolis of St Petersburg. In our interviews with surrogate mothers, intended parents, and surrogacy professionals, we traced the meanings and ideologies through which they understood the clinical labour of surrogacy. We found that in the US, interviewed surrogates, intended parents and professionals understood surrogacy as an exchange of both gifts and commodities, where gift-giving, reciprocity, and relatedness between surrogates and intended parents were the major tropes. In India, differing narratives of surrogacy were offered by its different parties: whilst professionals and intended parents framed it as a winwin exchange with an emphasis on the economic side, the interviewed surrogate mothers talked about surrogacy as creative labour of giving life. In Russia, approaches to surrogacy among the interviewed surrogate mothers, professionals and intended parents overlapped in framing it as work and a businesslike commodity exchange. We suggest these three different ways of ethical reasoning about the clinical labour of surrogacy, including justifications of women's incorporation into this labour, were situated in local moral frameworks. We name them "repro-regional moral frameworks", inspired by earlier work on moral frameworks as well as on reproductive nationalisms and transnational reproduction. Building on these findings, we argue that any international or global regulation of surrogacy, or indeed any moral stance on it, needs to take these local differences into account.
International Commercial Surrogacy: Beyond Feminist Conundrums and the Child as Product
International commercial surrogacy (ICS) is a growing phenomenon in which the dynamics of global economic inequality between women are often reproduced in the effort to produce children. ICS, in which a commissioning parent(s) goes abroad to hire a surrogate mother to carry a child for them, confounds a number of 'feminist' interpretations and evaluations of the practice: while some believe it provides poor women with an opportunity to use their bodies to increase their wealth while providing a service, others see it as outsourcing reproduction through economic exploitation of surrogate mothers. ICS thus raises interesting questions not only about the commodi-fication of bodies – women's and children's – but the naturalisation of the woman– child dyad premised on the notion of motherhood. With new assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as trans-border gestational surrogacy, successful physical reproduction in the form of giving birth to a child is actually a severing link between the surrogate mother who gives birth and the child, who is not genetically linked to the surrogate mother. Surrogacy thus challenges the 'natural' equation of woman/ child with mother/ child, shifting those relations through financial transaction. Moreover, 'the best interests of the child' are often invoked in ICS arrangements to defend political positions that tend to reify the 'natural' genetic family – construed as heteronormative and patriarchal. The best-interest principle of children's rights also highlights the lack of consideration for the actual politics of childhood in surrogacy...
An Introduction to the Problems of Surrogacy and the Demands from Civil Society
Sociological Debates on Gestational Surrogacy, 2021
The images of 40 babies crammed into the Venice Hotel in Kiev, waiting to be picked up by their parents who are stuck in their countries due to the March/April 2020 lockdown, revealed to world public opinion the fallibility of the transnational system of surrogacy. By prolonging the time between leaving the surrogate’s body and delivery to the parents, the lockdown revealed in slow motion the unavoidable aspect of any surrogacy: the passage of a baby from one contractor to another. The Kiev case is used to introduce some of the most discussed controversies that revolve around the diffusion of transnational surrogacy, the limitation of national-based policy making, opposing demands coming from different social movements and challenges that surrogacy poses to society.
Discordant Expectations of Global Intimacy: Desire and Inequality in Commercial Surrogacy
Sociological Research Online, 2021
Gestational surrogacy – carrying someone else’s baby (or babies) to term and giving birth to them – is perhaps one of the most intimate acts a human being can perform for others. However, the proliferation of commercial surrogacy has drawn concern and criticism, with many scholars arguing that it both creates and exacerbates global social and economic inequalities. Commercial surrogacy thus raises both the possibility of global intimate connection and the specter of reproductive exploitation. I therefore explore the various, shifting, and often discordant desires for intimate connection between the intending parent(s), the surrogate mother, and the resulting child(ren) in commercial surrogacy. I then examine how those intimacies intersect with commercial surrogacy’s socioeconomic inequalities. Weighing commercial surrogacy’s driving desires and intimate practices against its commercialization, I end with a reconsideration of the procreative desires and intimate practices that spur current international commercial surrogacy (ICS), urging an emphasis on reproductive justice.
Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology , 2018
Drawing on the concepts of «emotional labour» (Hochschild) and «technologies of the self» (Foucault), this article explores how women align their affective and thus risky bodies in order to become effective surrogate workers in Moscow. I argue that this alignment entails «dis-emotionalising» the pregnancy by strategically essentialising the female body. This essentialisation also serves as an authoritative tool of control and conceals the power disparities at hand.
Review of International Political Economy , 2021
Since the early 2000s transnational surrogacy has emerged as a new capitalist frontier founded on the intensification of the commodification of women’s reproductive labours, bodies and biologies. This has resulted in academic and policy debates on whether to outlaw surrogacy altogether or to ban commercial surrogacy in favour of altruistic forms of surrogacy. Rather than tackling surrogacy in moralising terms of ‘altruistic’ gift-giving versus ‘greedy’ money-making, in this article we draw on feminist political economy literature on social reproduction to propose an integrative reproductive labour perspective that looks at the dialectics of waged and unwaged work involved in the process of (re)producing people. Drawing on empirical research data on commercial surrogacy in Georgia, we analyse how this dialectical relation between exploitation of waged work (surrogate) and appropriation of unwaged work (mother) operates on the workfloor. We explore Maria Mies’ concept of ‘housewifization’ to argue that processes of exploitation are deepened in the Georgian surrogacy industry, partially because surrogates refrain/are refrained from identifying as workers and as such are not afforded labour rights nor considered to produce value.