614786

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CSI0010.1177/0011392115614786Current SociologyPande

Article CS

Current Sociology Monograph

Global reproductive
2016, Vol. 64(2) 244­–258
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0011392115614786
commercial surrogacy in India csi.sagepub.com

Amrita Pande
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract
India’s commercial surrogacy market literally produces humans and human relationships
while sustaining global racial reproductive hierarchies. The post-colonial state’s
aggressive anti-natalism echoes the broader global population control agenda framing
the global South’s high fertility rates as a ‘global danger’ to be controlled at whatever
cost, but is at odds with the neoliberal imperative of unrestrained global fertility tourism.
Womb mothers (surrogates) subvert hegemonic discourses by taking control over
their bodies and using their fertile bodies ‘productively’. But in controlling their own
reproduction through decisions about fertility, sterilization and abortion in order to
(re)produce children of higher classes and privileged nations, they ultimately conform to
global neo-eugenic imperatives to reduce the fertility of lower class women in the global
South. Surrogates creatively construct cross-class, -caste, -religion, -race and -nation
kinship ties with the baby and the intended mother, disrupting hegemonic genetic and
patriarchal bases of kinship, but fundamentally reify structural inequality.

Keywords
Biosocialities, fair trade surrogacy, neo-eugenics, reproductive travel, stratified
reproduction, transnational commercial surrogacy

Commercial surrogacy is a multi-billion-dollar industry across the world, with India

being one of the world leaders. Although often couched in dystopic terms, the topic of
surrogacy is not restricted to medical or scientific circles and has been generating feminist,
ethical, legal and social debates for over three decades now. While liberal feminists defend

Corresponding author:
Amrita Pande, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7701,
South Africa.
Email: amrita.pande@uct.ac.za
Pande 245

the practice as a woman’s right to use her body as she chooses, others focus on the multiple
systems of inequality and exploitation that are potentially reinforced by such practices, or
debate on the ethics or morality of this practice. A more recent turn presents an empirically
grounded or ethnographic scholarship on the lived experiences of surrogacy. Until recently,
the predominant focus of this scholarship was surrogacy in Europe and North America –
not surprising, since commercial surrogacy is a very recent phenomenon outside the Euro-
American context. Curiously, the complete absence of any empirical data about surrogacy
in the global South did not prevent feminists from making alarming predictions about the
future of these technologies. For instance, feminist Andrea Dworkin predicted in 1978,
‘While sexual prostitutes sell vagina, rectum and mouth, reproductive prostitutes would sell
other body parts: wombs, ovaries and eggs’ (Corea, 1985), and sociologist Barbara Rothman
in 1988 asked, ‘Can we look forward to baby farms, with white embryos grown in young
and Third world women?’ (Rothman, 1988: 100) over the past decade that I studied commer-
cial surrogacy in India, I came to realize that such abstract theorizing through a Eurocentric
lens was going to be entirely inadequate for analyzing the booming surrogacy industry in
India. At first glance surrogacy in India may well resemble the inhuman baby farms imag-
ined by Rothman but an immersion in the field provided a very different perspective on the
impact of new reproductive technologies on women of the global South as well as a more
complex theorization of the intersections of reproduction, labor and globalization.
Unarguably, surrogacy is a challenge to the presumed sanctity of reproduction and
mothering. But burying surrogacy within the usual debates about morality and mother-
hood limits our understanding of the critical dynamics of surrogacy outside the sphere of
reproduction. Surrogate mothers, or womb mothers, in India navigate much more than
their identity as mothers.1 They grapple with their new identity as participants in an
industry that is morally contentious and constructed as deviant and unnatural in India.
Some of these women are coerced into surrogacy by their family, but many others negotiate
with their families to gain control over their own bodies and their fertility in order
to participate in this industry. As womb mothers, they suddenly find themselves in an
unfamiliar relationship with a hyper-medicalized system of reproduction, a medical system
that has previously been inaccessible to them as lower class women in an anti-natalist
state. Finally, as women hired by commissioning parents and clients from within and
across borders, they navigate relationships that often cross boundaries of race, class and
nationality. A linear emphasis on the reproduction and mothering component of com-
mercial surrogacy discounts these intricacies of surrogacy in the Indian context. Given
this new reality of surrogacy, in all my previous works I have analyzed commercial
surrogacy as a form of labor that challenges the socially constructed dichotomy between
production and reproduction and argued that commercial surrogacy in India is a new
kind of labor emerging with globalization (Pande, 2010, 2014).2 In this article I further
complicate this notion of surrogacy as a labor market by highlighting a fundamental
paradox – wherein a market that literally produces humans and human relationships is
critically dependent on the maintenance of a global racial reproductive hierarchy that
privileges certain relationships while completing denying others. In her study of the race-
based reproductive hierarchy, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts stated,

The right to bear children goes to the heart of what it means to be human. The value we place
on individuals determines whether we see them as entitled to perpetuate themselves in their
246 Current Sociology Monograph 1 64(2)

children. Denying someone the right to bear children deprives her of a basic part of her
humanity. When this denial is based on race, it also functions to preserve a racial hierarchy that
essentially disregards Black humanity. (1997: 305)

With the spread of new technologies to the global South, this racial hierarchy is effectively
globalized to disregard the humanity of women of color in the region.
To understand the booming surrogacy industry in India, we have to situate it within its
rather contradictory reproductive history – the post-colonial state agenda of aggressive
anti-natalism at home coupled with the neoliberal imperative of unrestrained fertility
tourism. This national agenda resonates with a broader global population control program
that frames the high fertility rates of countries in the global South as a ‘global danger’
that needs to be controlled at whatever cost. I argue that at one level, the womb mothers
subvert these hegemonic discourses by taking control over their bodies and using their
fertile bodies ‘productively’. At another level, as they align their own reproduction through
decisions about fertility, sterilization and abortion, in order to (re)produce children of
higher classes and privileged nations, they ultimately conform to this global imperative
of reducing the fertility of lower class women in the global South. Despite these global
structural inequalities, or perhaps because of them, womb mothers creatively construct
kinship ties with the baby and the intended mother. These ties cross boundaries based on
class, caste and religion and sometimes even race and nation. I discuss the poignancy of
these powerful relationships – they disrupt hegemonic genetic bases of kinship ties but
ultimately reify structures of inequality. Finally, I connect the ethnographic findings with
some policy implications.

The ethnographic field: India

Surrogacy is estimated to be a $2 billion market in India with about 3000 clinics currently
offering surrogacy services and 30,000 clinics having the potential to launch surrogacy
practices (Kannan, 2009; Krishnakumar, 2003). Although the United States still remains
the top global destination for commercial surrogacy, India is fast emerging as a key player.
Clients from countries where surrogacy is either illegal or restricted (such as Britain,
Japan, Australia, Taiwan and Kuwait), have for decades hired women in the United
States to bear babies for them. But while the total cost of such transnational packages is
roughly $100,000, in India such packages cost less than one-third of that price. There are
other factors working in favor of India as a destination for such travel – large numbers of
well-qualified and English-speaking doctors with degrees and training from prestigious
medical schools in India and abroad, well-equipped private clinics and hospitals, and a
large overseas client population of Indian origin who often combine cheaper treatment
with a family visit.
What makes the Indian case all the more interesting is that commercial surrogacy is
flourishing with minimum state interference with few laws regulating the procedures, the
contract or the womb mother–client relationship. As a consequence, intended parents are
able to take advantage of the client-friendly policies of private clinics and hospitals,
where doctors are willing to offer options and services that are banned or heavily regulated
in other parts of the world. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) made an
attempt at regulating the industry when it included some references to surrogacy under
Pande 247

the broader National Guidelines for Accreditation, Supervision and Regulation of Assisted
Reproductive Technology (ART) clinics in India in 2005, and in the more recent draft
ART Regulatory Bill in 2010. These guidelines remained non-binding. In 2013, the
Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) suggested some changes to the clauses
in the ART Bill – that the option of surrogacy be restricted to married, infertile couples
of Indian origin. This was a restrictive variant of the 2012 stipulation by the Home
Ministry that gay couples, single men and women and couples from countries where
surrogacy is illegal be prohibited from hiring a commercial surrogate in India. In essence,
the DGHS proposal bans foreigners, homosexuals and people in cohabiting relationships
from having a baby born out of surrogacy in India. Despite these new stipulations, in
practice, clinics continue to offer client-friendly ‘package deals’.
A critical factor drawing international clients to India is that the power dynamics are
explicitly in favor of commissioning parents, making surrogacy in India a convenient
bargain for many clients (Pande, 2014; Saravanan, 2015). For instance, a major attrac-
tion for clients hiring womb mothers at the clinic I studied intensively, and the one that
has caught all the recent media attention, is that it runs several surrogacy hostels where
the women are literally kept under constant surveillance during their pregnancy – their
food, medicines and daily activities can be monitored by the medical staff (Pande, 2010).
While fertility clinics from several Indian cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore,
Ahmedabad and Kolkata have reported cases of surrogacy, this is one of the only clinics
where the doctors, nurses and brokers play an active role in the recruitment and surveil-
lance of commercial surrogates. By 2014, the clinic claimed that it had delivered 1000
babies through surrogacy.

Research and respondents

This article is part of a larger research project on commercial surrogacy in India, for which
I conducted fieldwork between 2006 and 2013. My research has included in-depth,
open-format interviews with 52 womb mothers, their husbands and in-laws, 12 intending
parents, three doctors, three surrogacy brokers, three hostel matrons and several nurses. In
addition, I conducted participant observation for 10 months at surrogacy clinics and two
surrogacy hostels. I lived with the womb mothers in the hostel, cooked lunches for them,
prayed with them and even attended computer and English classes with them. I revisited
the hostel and clinic in 2012, visited some former and repeat surrogates and organized
some participatory livelihood generating workshops with them. I am currently involved in
a multimedia docu-drama Made in India: Notes From a Baby Farm based on my research
and workshops with surrogates.3
All the womb mothers in this study were married, with at least one child. Their ages
ranged between 20 and 45 years. Except for two women, all were from neighboring
villages. Fourteen of the women said that they were ‘housewives’, two said they ‘worked
at home’, and the others worked in schools, clinics, farms and stores. Their education
ranged from illiterate to high school level, with the average surrogate having approxi-
mately the beginning of a middle school level of education. The median family income
of the surrogates was about Rs 2500 (US$50) per month. For most of the women, the
money earned through surrogacy was equivalent to almost five years of total family
248 Current Sociology Monograph 1 64(2)

income, especially since many of women had husbands who were either in informal
contract work or unemployed. Thirty of the womb mothers in this study had been hired
by transnational clients.

From reckless reproducers to productive producers

Unlike in Europe and North America, where most women (at least most white women)
historically had to struggle to get access to the most basic birth control methods, in India,
the state forced it on them. This is what Sara Pinto (2008: 18) astutely labels, the ‘irony
of eroded choice’ – the obsessive attention that the state pays to population control, often
at the cost of broader heath services, erodes the very notion of choice or democracy that
ostensibly underlines such policies. The Indian state became the first in the world to initiate
an official population program in 1952. The Indian population program, however, cannot
be discussed as just a nationalist agenda and cannot be understood without reference to
the post-Second World War international population movement dominated by govern-
ments and public and private organizations like the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), the United Nations Population Fund and the World Bank, which
promoted and funded fertility control programs in the global South. The drought and the
subsequent economic crisis of the 1960s increased foreign interference in the population
control program when India was pressured by the World Bank to intensify fertility reduc-
tion efforts along with a move towards economic liberalization (Chatterjee and Riley,
2001: 824). The international pressures for economic liberalization not only resulted in
an aggressive population control program but also meant a further retreat of the state
as a provider of services, including health care services. The state abandoned its earlier
attempts at building a welfare state and accepted the Structural Adjustment program and
policies (SAP). The SAP-mandated health sector reforms included cutbacks, withdrawal
of the public sector and opening up the sector to private investments and international
capital.4 In fact, until now, government expenditure on public health infrastructure contin-
ues to remain as low as 1% of its gross domestic product, lower than the average of 2.8%
of GDP spent by most less developed countries (The Hindu, 2005). Despite cuts in most
areas of public expenditure, the government’s budget for family planning has continued
to increase.
While, unlike China, the Indian state has to maintain a liberal democratic front, in
reality it continues to promote methods like sterilization and long-term hormonal implants
that diminish lower class women’s power to choose. In general, this hegemonic anti-
natalist propaganda portrays the fertile bodies of lower class women in the global South
as recklessly reproductive and to be blamed for their poverty.
The narratives of women reveal this state propaganda. Thirty-eight-year-old Varsha is
a mother of three children and is working as a commercial surrogate for a couple from
north India. She recalls the many visits by the family planning nurse:

I never used any contraceptive just regulated intercourse according to my monthly cycle. But the
didi [woman from the family planning clinic] would stop at our hut on her visits and tell me to
think of getting sterilization. But why do you not get it, she would say. She showed me pictures
of women with one daughter, where the daughter and the mother would be smiling. She
Pande 249

sometimes scolded me and said, ‘That is why your condition is like this. The more babies you
have, the poorer you get, do you not understand that?’ Perhaps she is right. If I had not had my
last child, the first two would be happier. But now the tables have turned. You see, it is my fourth
pregnancy – this surrogate birth – that will make my entire family happy. (emphasis added)

At some levels, commercial surrogacy drives women like Varsha to think of their
bodies as a possible source of value, a value historically denied by the state itself. The
money earned through surrogacy often becomes a source of pride, and an indicator of
their productivity. Dipali is a 24-year-old woman hired by a couple from Cape Town,
South Africa. A divorcee with three children, she has been living with her brother for
over five years. She wants to use the money earned to buy a plot of land and deposit the
rest in a savings account for her children’s education:

When I came here I told Doctor Madam that I am ready for all kinds of treatment – injections,
medicines. I have suffered the pain and the bleeding. I almost got paralysis twice and had to be
hospitalized, because of side effects of some medicines. But I am not complaining about the
pain. I worried, I cried and I complained when my husband used to beat me up in front of my
children. That pain is what you do not want. This kind of pain to the body I am willing to take
– it will not be wasted – it will give me enough money to make me self-sufficient.

In the women’s narratives, ‘having control’ (over their reproductive lives and bodies)
is about being able to use their bodies for work and using the money productively.
Simultaneously, it is often about negotiating reproductive decisions with their husbands
in order to get involved in surrogacy.
Vidya is a 30-year-old woman hired by a couple from Ontario, Canada. She has
repeatedly been told about sterilization by family planning nurses visiting her village but
has been postponing the operation. She says:

I have two daughters and one son. My husband wanted one more son so we decided not to get
the sterilization done. It must have been God’s wish that I do this [become a surrogate]. If I had
got the operation done, I would have missed this chance to earn money for my children. But
now that I am successfully pregnant [as a surrogate mother], I don’t think I will try for another
son anymore. I know my husband wants a son very badly but I am going to try and convince
him. (Pauses) If I have a baby of my own I will lose the chance to become a surrogate again.
I want to conserve my body and save my next pregnancy for surrogacy. Doctor Madam does not
want surrogates who have more than three babies of their own. (emphasis added)

Vidya has postponed sterilization and resisted the instruction of family planning offi-
cials because her husband wanted another son. Now, in order to become a commercial
surrogate, she is willing to convince her husband to forego that son. Women like Vidya
are ostensibly taking control over their bodies by engaging in surrogacy. But while at one
level these women appear to fulfill feminist ideals, their life stories are not simply heroic
tales of subversions. The decisions they make about their own reproduction conform to
the hegemonic agenda of reducing the fertility of lower class women.
Vidya is not the only one to forego having her own child in order to have a child for
someone else. Parvati is 36 and one of the oldest women at the clinic. Her story reveals
the multitude of bodily interventions involved in the work of surrogacy:
250 Current Sociology Monograph 1 64(2)

When I came here the first time the Doctor said I was too old to donate eggs but I could try for
surrogacy. I underwent treatment – injections, vagina check. During one of these early checkups
they realized that I was pregnant with my own child. We have just one child, and we have
always wanted one more. But at that stage, we needed the money more than a baby and I got
my own baby aborted.

Parvati’s life decisions starkly highlight what feminist anthropologist Shellee Colen
calls ‘stratified reproduction’: power relations by which some categories of people are
empowered to nurture and reproduce while others are disempowered (Colen, 1995).
Surrogacy in India is definitely one of the clearest manifestations of such stratified mother-
hood. But the label ‘stratified motherhood’ seems too benign – this stratification did not
happen by accident but is a consequence of conscious national and global priorities. On
the one hand, state expenditure on public health infrastructure is shrinking and poor
women are being subjected to population control targets. On the other hand, the state
continues to invest in new (reproductive) technologies and incoming reproductive travel
is booming.
Reproductive (medical) travel and commercial surrogacy is yet another paradox of the
post-liberalization era and an explicit instance of a global reproductive hierarchy, or what
I have analyzed as ‘neo-eugenics’ (Pande, 2014). Scholars have previously discussed
what they call the ‘revised eugenics script’ in the policies of the (international) population
movement (Hartmann, 2006). On the one hand, negative eugenics, targeted mainly at
minorities, continues with policies like voluntary or incentivized sterilizations. On the
other hand, positive eugenics has appropriated the language of ‘individual choices’ to
strategically emphasize assisted fertility options for upper class, white couples (Hartmann,
2006). Neo-eugenics, then, becomes the new, subtle form of eugenics whereby the neo-
liberal notion of consumer choice justifies promotion of assisted reproductive services for
the rich and, at the same time, by portraying poor people (often in the global South) as
strains on the world’s economy and environment justifies aggressive anti-natal policies.

Womb mothers, kin ties and biosocialities

The fundamental reason why surrogacy produces such intense moral anxieties is that it
allows for the extension of the market into the ‘private’ sphere of reproduction and mother-
hood. As producers of such an intensely controversial service, womb mothers have a
variety of negotiating strategies – to counter not just the contractual nature of their service,
but also the transient nature of their role as mothers. From recruitment to delivery, nurses
and doctors periodically highlight the womb mothers’ transience and dispensability as
mothers. They are told that their role is only as a vessel, they have no genetic connections
with the baby and it will be taken away from them immediately after delivery. Most are
not allowed to breastfeed the newborn. The doctors argue that these rules ensure that the
womb mothers do not get emotionally attached to the baby and intended parents face no
legal trouble. These disciplinary discourses, however, do not go unchallenged. The women
resist these discourses of disposability by forging kinship ties with the baby.
In ‘classic’ kinship studies, kin relations were frequently grounded in the domain of
nature and genes very often with a patrilineal focus. For instance, this patrilineal focus
can be seen in the notions of ‘seed’ and ‘earth’, where the seed symbolizes the father’s
Pande 251

contribution and the field represents the role of the mother. Women are expected to
behave like earth, as the ‘mere receptacles of male seed and give back the fruit’, prefera-
bly male children. Simultaneously, since in popular understanding as well as in Ayurveda,
the indigenous system of medicine in India, semen is understood as ‘derived from blood,
being the product of the father’s seed, a child inherits the father’s blood and is therefore
placed in his group’ (Kumar, 2006: 289). The mother’s blood thus becomes significant in
nourishing the fetus but not in imparting identity to a child. The women I spoke to, how-
ever, use a very different interpretation of the blood tie. They not only claim that the fetus
is nourished by its (womb) mother’s blood but also emphasize that this blood/substance
tie imparts identity to the child.
Parvati, as mentioned earlier, is 36 and one of the oldest women at the clinic. I meet
her immediately after a fetal reduction surgery in which one of the fetuses had to be
surgically eliminated. She tells me that she was against the surgery:

Doctor Madam told us that the babies wouldn’t get enough space to move around and grow, so
we should get the surgery. But both Nandini didi [the genetic mother] and I wanted to keep all
three babies. I told Doctor Madam that I’ll keep one and didi can keep two. After all it’s my
blood even if its their genes. And who knows whether at my age I’ll be able to have more
babies. (emphasis added)

Parvati, thus, uses her interpretation of the blood tie to make claims on the baby/fetus.
Raveena makes a similar claim. But, in addition to the substantial ties of blood, Raveena
also emphasizes the labor of gestation and giving birth. Her ‘sweat’ ties with the baby
become another basis for making claims on the baby. Raveena is carrying a baby for a
couple residing in California. I bump into Raveena right after her second ultrasound and
she says:

Anne [the genetic mother] wanted a girl but I told her even before the ultrasound, coming from
me it will be a boy. My first two children were also boys. This one will be too. And see I was
right, it is a boy! After all they just gave the eggs, but the blood, all the sweat, all the effort is
mine. Of course it’s going after me. (emphasis added)

This sweat (paseena) and the blood (khoon) tie between surrogate and fetus is often
advocated by womb mothers as stronger than a connection based solely on genes. Sharda
is one of the few women who also breastfed the baby that she delivered. This, she feels,
intensifies her ties with the baby:

I am not sure how I feel about giving the baby away to her [the genetic mother]. I know it’s
not her fault that she could not raise her own baby [in her womb] or breastfeed him. She has
kidney problems. But she does not seem to have any emotional ties or affection for him either.
Did you see when the baby started crying, she kept talking to you without paying him any
attention? She keeps forgetting to change his nappies. Would you ever do that if you were a
real mother? When he cries I want to start crying as well. It’s hard for me not to be attached.
I have felt him growing and moving inside me. I have gone through stomach-aches, back
aches and over five months of loss of appetite! I have taken nearly 200 injections in my first
month here. All this has not been easy.
252 Current Sociology Monograph 1 64(2)

According to Sharda, her substantial ties with the baby (blood and breast milk) as well
as the labor and effort she has put into gestation make her relationship with the baby
stronger than that of the genetic mother. The relationship between the two mothers – the
womb mother and the genetic or intended mother – is not merely competitive. Much like
the kin ties forged with the baby, the ties with the intended mother allow womb mothers
to cope with the emotional isolation and also challenge the medical construction of their
relationships as merely contractual and easily disposable. Divya, formerly a commercial
surrogate, emphasizes the continued effort made by Karen, the genetic mother from the
US, to maintain a relationship even after delivery:

Karen came in on the eighth month and for two months she stayed with me. We lived together
like a family. My husband got her passport fixed from the American Consulate. We have been
in constant touch even after they left. See, she brought me these earrings this time. (She shows
me her diamond and white gold earrings.)

Deepa, another former surrogate, also believes her relationship with her client from
Japan is based on mutual respect and reciprocity. Deepa reminisces about the intended
mother, Jessy:

Jessy came to visit me during the godh bharai ritual [baby shower organized by the hostel
matron for all surrogates], showered me with gifts and gifted Rs 1500 (US$30) for my children.
It’s been three years and today she [the baby born out of surrogacy] would have been three years
old. I [emailed] Jessy in the morning on computer and they sent me pictures. You know, they
paid me Rs 1.5 laks (US$3000) extra out of happiness and gifted me a laptop when they came to
take the baby. Now I can email them using that laptop and they send me pictures by email.

But such stories of relationships sustained beyond the contract period are rare. Most
clients, apprehensive that the commercial surrogate will change her mind about giving
the baby away, prefer to sever all ties with her. In 2008, Tejal was hired as a surrogate by
a non-resident Indian couple settled in the US. When I meet Tejal again in 2011, she
recalls the delivery day rather bitterly:

There was a lot of problems with the delivery and I had to have 15–20 bottles of IV in just two
days. Ultimately I got a scissor [Caesarian section]. I was unconscious when the couple came
and took away the baby. They didn’t even show it to my husband. The baby would have been
three years today. But I don’t even know what he looks like. I used to think they would invite
us to America. I used to think of her as a sister – all of it went to waste. Forget an invitation,
they did not even call to see if we are dead or alive. They just finished their business, picked up
the baby and left.

Munni has a similar tale of the relationships going to ‘waste’. Munni delivered a baby
for an Indian couple settled in the US in 2007. Like Tejal, Munni is bewildered by the
change in her clients’ behavior immediately after the delivery:

My party was from America but they used to come here [the city where the clinic is situated]
often to visit their parents. They would call me every day from America and come visit me
Pande 253

almost every month. They even allowed me to breastfeed the baby. They always said that when
the baby grows up they would tell her about me – about her second mother in India. It’s been
over a year now; she would have been one year old last week. There have been no phone calls,
nothing. I don’t know what has gone wrong.

Munni seems surprised by the sudden severing of ties. Her relationship with her
clients was unusually friendly while she was carrying their baby. But once she completed
her contract, her reproduction became, in some sense, a classic example of alienated
labor. Her clients honored the capitalist contract; they paid her and appropriated the
surplus value of her labor – the baby.

From biosocialities to regulations

So where do we go from here? One possibility is to decide that commercial surrogacy
is inherently immoral and undesirable and impose a formal ban. This is what many
countries across the world have decided and implemented in national law. Restrictive
laws, however, have not stopped people from demanding and acquiring genetic babies.
With globalization, most clients bypass their national laws by crossing borders to make
use of these technologies. I believe that banning surrogacy in India will just push it
underground, and would reduce the rights of surrogates even more. Imposing a blanket
ban on surrogacy in India will as likely just shift it to another country in the global
South. We see instances of that with the 2013 stipulations restricting surrogacy in India
to married heterosexual couples pushing cases of ‘gay surrogacy’ to Thailand, and more
recently to Nepal. The second option could be to advocate for a ban on commercial
surrogacy, i.e. surrogacy for pay. There are several countries, like the UK, Canada and
South Africa, which do not allow surrogacy for pay but permit altruistic surrogacy –
surrogacy arrangements in which the surrogate is not paid for her services, and is moti-
vated mainly by a desire to help an infertile couple. But all countries that have national
laws that only allow women to be unpaid surrogates, end up pushing people to other
countries to find women to be surrogates with pay. Not too many women, it seems, are
willing to be pregnant for selfless reasons. Essentially, restrictive national laws export
the morally contentious industry to some other country.
Instead of restrictive national laws, I advocate a carefully thought out law that regulates
the industry and protects the rights of the women workers – the surrogates themselves
(Pande, 2014). But I also as strongly believe that a global and complex issue like surrogacy
cannot be resolved or regulated within national borders. A global issue like surrogacy needs
a global dialogue. Medical practitioner Casey Humbyrd (2009) proposes a move towards
such an international dialogue and regulation in her guide to ‘fair trade practices’ in inter-
national surrogacy. Humbyrd provides a provocative argument in favor of ‘applying Fair
Trade principles to international surrogacy’ in order to ensure that the benefits of surrogacy
‘are justly shared between the participating parties’ and that it is beneficial to those who are
the ‘weakest in the supply chain’ – the surrogates. Although Humbyrd fails to address how
this regulatory and compensation framework can be implemented, it might be constructive
to evaluate and extend some of her policy insights. For instance, Humbyrd briefly mentions
that a ‘fair price in the regional or local context’ is ‘one that has been agreed through
254 Current Sociology Monograph 1 64(2)

dialogue and participation’. She goes on to add that there is a need for ‘transparency and
accountability … of financial transactions between surrogacy brokers, prospective parents
and surrogate mothers’. I have previously extended Humbyrd’s insights to propose an
international model of surrogacy founded on openness and transparency on three fronts: in
the structure of payments, in the medical process and in the relationships forged within
surrogacy (Pande, 2014).
Let me expand a little on the third, final and I believe, most critical front – transparency
in relationships forged through surrogacy. American anthropologist Paul Rabinow coined
the term biosociality to capture the ‘new’ kinds of identities, social grouping and
social interactions made possible by developments within genetics (Rabinow, 1996).
Since then scholars have extended the concept to explore emerging bonds of community
grounded in new biotechnologies – from genome projects to IVF (Gibbon and Novas,
2008). For the analytics of biosociality to be relevant for surrogacy we need to pay closer
attention to the relationships emerging in and through these markets, relationships that
are often abruptly terminated in our pursuit of anonymity and privacy. In the name of
preserving the privacy of individuals involved in the supply chain, the providers of
essential, emotional and bodily services are made nameless, faceless, anonymous and
disposable, and buyers can conveniently forget that what is being produced is not just a
baby but also relationships. What if, for once, we abandon our single-minded pursuit of
privacy and instead advocate for open acknowledgment of these relationships – an
appreciation of the complex and demanding nature of labor provided by each individual
surrogate? What if we make visible the gestational, emotional work, bodily labor done
by the surrogates in (re)producing humans (Hochschild, 2009)?
An exclusive dependence on national and international policy-makers to initiate a
meaningful dialogue on reproductive labor, visibility and recognition would be naive.
Is there another space for dialogue, collective consciousness and collective action? Given
the obvious gendered nature of this industry, an appealing aspiration is to envision solidarity
among the women involved in surrogacy, whether the womb mothers or the intended
mothers. Over the years, the need to recognize diversity, situatedness and multiplicity of
experiences has been pushing feminists away from the concept of ‘global sisterhood’
towards the notion of ‘transnational feminisms’. While the concept of global sisterhood
allegedly glosses over the differences between women, ‘transnational feminisms’ may
have the potential to forge solidarity across the globe, between women of different posi-
tioning and interests. In the seminal book Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing
Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) argues that that for
transnational feminisms to be possible, the politics of solidarity has to be based on
‘mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for rela-
tionships among diverse communities’ (Mohanty, 2003: 7). Sociologist Jyotsna Agnihotri
Gupta (2011: 31) applies this notion to new reproductive technologies to ask: ‘Can the
need of infertile women for donor eggs or surrogacy services and the financial need of
women that drives them to offer the same, thus creating a relationship of mutual depend-
ency, be a basis for mutual solidarity?’ To make the leap from global sisterhood to trans-
national feminisms, the difficult task of envisioning a politics of solidarity cannot be left
to the two sets of women involved in surrogacy – the womb mothers and the intended
mothers. Placing surrogacy and womb work within the continuum of reproductive labor,
Pande 255

with sex work, care work and other intimate forms of labor, may well be the first step
towards imagining a broader community of women with common interests. A long due
recognition of mutual dependencies, between sellers of reproductive labor and buyers of
the same, is critical for an effective politics of solidarity.
Placing surrogacy within a broader continuum of reproductive labor, however, reveals
its fundamentally paradoxical characteristic. A characteristic, which resonates well with
other, gendered forms of labor like domestic work and sex work. On the one hand, com-
mercial surrogacy becomes a powerful challenge to the age-old dichotomy constructed
between production and reproduction. Women’s reproductive capacities are valued and
monetized outside of the so-called private sphere. As commercial surrogates, women use
their bodies, wombs and sometimes breasts, as instruments of labor. But just as com-
mercial surrogacy subverts these gendered dichotomies, it simultaneously reifies them.
When reproductive bodies of women become the only source, requirement and product
of a labor market, and fertility becomes the only asset women can use to earn wages,
women essentially get reduced to their reproductive capacities, ultimately reifying their
historically constructed role in the gender division of labor. The second paradox is more
specific to the Indian context, where a labor market in assisted conception is booming in
a country with a historically aggressive anti-natalist agenda. The fertility of lower class
women in India has previously been constructed as not just undesirable at individual
levels but a social danger. With surrogacy this fertility gets temporarily revalued as lower
class women become reproducers for clients who are relatively more privileged. In this
article I have argued that this is not simply a glaring example of stratified reproduction
but a product of conscious state policies and a neoliberal eugenic imperative. The stratified
reproduction in India, surrogacy being one of its manifestations, is a result of conscious
state priorities and an inevitable consequence of the present global division of both
productive and reproductive labor.

Funding
This research received funding from the Social Science Research Council and the Research Office
of University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Notes
1. The origin of the term ‘surrogacy’ and its social and political implications have been widely
discussed by feminists (Rothman, 1989; Snowdon, 1994). Critics have argued that the termi-
nology ‘surrogate’ suggests that the womb mother is somehow less than the genetic or social
mother. The respondents in this study refer to one another as ‘surrogate mothers’, and when
I explained what the term ‘surrogate’ meant in English, most agreed that the description was
fitting. In this article, however, I have chosen the term womb mothers over surrogates to avoid
disparaging the work done by the women and as an attempt to recognize and label the rela-
tionships forged by the women with the fetus and the baby. There are two types of surrogacy:
the first, called traditional surrogacy, involves the surrogate being artificially inseminated
with the intended father’s sperm. The second, termed gestational surrogacy, is done through
in vitro fertilization, in which the egg of the intended mother or of an anonymous donor is
fertilized in a petri dish with the sperm of the intended father or of a donor and the embryo
is transferred to the surrogate’s uterus. All the cases in this study are gestational surrogacies;
that is, the surrogate has no genetic connection with the baby.
256 Current Sociology Monograph 1 64(2)

2. While it is not surprising that markets in reproductive labor are more troubling than other
labor markets, I am disturbed by the implicit reification of gender-based dichotomies – private/
public, nature/social, reproduction/production and non-market/market – in many arguments
against surrogacy. These rigid and gendered distinctions have been long identified as the basis
of the asymmetrical and patriarchal division of labor where the concept of labor is reserved
for men’s productive work while women’s share in production and reproduction becomes a
function of their biology and nature. Ironically, in such a conceptualization, the act of giving
birth or ‘labor’ is implicitly assumed to be not labor or work but rather an activity of nature.
In her pioneering work on the sexual division of labor, Maria Mies (1986) contends that to
challenge the asymmetrical division of labor it is critical that women’s activity in bearing and
rearing children be understood as a conscious social activity: that it be understood as work.
By conceiving of commercial surrogacy (giving birth for pay) as ‘labor’, in my book Wombs
in Labor (2014) I challenged these gendered dichotomies by analyzing the social and historical
context under which these dichotomies are undone.
3. For details on the making of this docu-drama and the process by which I reworked my academic
research into a creative interactive performance, see Pande and Bjerg (2014).
4. For a systematic analysis of the transitions in the Indian state’s health care priorities and policies
since the 1950s, see Qadeer (2010).

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Author biography
Amrita Pande, author of Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India
(Columbia University Press, 2014) is a senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at University
of Cape Town. Her research focuses on the intersection of globalization and reproductive labor.
Her work has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender and Society,
Critical Social Policy, International Migration Review, Qualitative Sociology, Feminist Studies,
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Anthropologica, PhiloSOPHIA, Reproductive BioMedicine and
in numerous edited volumes. She has written for national newspapers across the world and has
appeared in Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed on the BBC, Sarah Carey’s Newstalk on Irish radio,
DR2 Deadline (Danish National television) and Otherwise SAfM, South Africa to discuss her work
on surrogacy. She is also an educator-performer touring the world with a multi-media theatre pro-
duction, Made in India: Notes from a Baby Farm based on her ethnographic work on surrogacy.

Résumé
Le commerce en Inde voit le marché de la gestation pour autrui produire littéralement
des humains et des relations humaines tout en soutenant les hiérarchies reproductives
et raciales dans le monde. L’agressivité derrière l’antinatalisme de l’état postcolonial fait
écho au programme de contrôle d’une population mondiale beaucoup plus vaste
258 Current Sociology Monograph 1 64(2)

dénonçant les taux de fertilité élevés du Sud comme « mondialement dangereux » et

devant être contrôler à n’importe quel prix. Cependant, ce programme se trouve, par
la même occasion, en situation de conflit avec l’impératif néolibéral de restreindre le
tourisme de la fertilité dans le monde. Les mères porteuses (mères de substitution)
dénoncent les discours hégémoniques en prenant le contrôle de leurs corps et en uti-
lisant leurs corps fertiles « de manière productive ». Cependant, en contrôlant leurs
propres reproductions et en prenant des décisions sur leur fertilité, leur stérilisation et
leur avortement dans le but de re(produire) des enfants de classes sociales élevées et
de nations privilégiées, elles finissent par se conformer aux impératifs néo-eugéniques
mondiaux de réduire la fertilité des femmes de classes inférieures issues du Sud. De
manière créative, les mères porteuses créent des liens de sang entre les classes, les
castes, les religions, les races et les nations des bébés et de leurs mères receveuses,
perturbant ainsi la génétique hégémonique et les bases du lien patriarcal, mais renfor-
çant fondamentalement les inégalités structurelles.

Mots-clés
Maternité substituée transnationale, reproduction stratifiée, neo-eugénisme, tajectoire
reproductive, bio-sociabilité, maternité substituée

Resumen
El mercado de vientres de alquiler de la India produce, literalmente, humanos y rela-
ciones entre estos, mientras sostiene a nivel mundial a las jerarquías raciales reproduc-
tivas. El antinatalismo del estado poscolonial se hace eco de la agenda de control de la
amplia población mundial que denomina a las tasas altas de fertilidad del hemisferio sur
como un «peligro mundial» que debe ser controlado a cualquier costo. Pero esta agenda
conflige con el imperativo neoliberal del desenfrenado turismo reproductivo mundial.
Las madres gestantes (subrogadas) subvierten los discursos hegemónicos al tomar el
control sobre sus cuerpos fértiles para usarlos de manera «productiva». Pero en el
control de su propia reproducción a través de la toma de decisiones sobre fertilidad,
esterilización y aborto para (re)producir niños de clases más altas y de naciones privile-
giadas, se conforman, en última instancia, con los imperativos neoeugenésicos mundi-
ales de reducir la fertilidad de las mujeres de clases bajas en el hemisferio sur. Las
subrogadas, de manera creativa, crean lazos de parentezco con el bebé y la madre
prevista, que trascienden sus respectivas clases, castas, religiones, razas y naciones, y
trastocan las bases hegemónicas patriarcales de genes y parentezco, pero fundamental-
mente fortalecen la desigualdad estructural.

Palabras clave
Maternidad subrogada transnacional, reproducción estratificada, neo-eugenesia, trayec-
tos reproductivos, bio-sociabilidad, maternidad sustituta de comercio justo