Whose baby is it anyway? On rural Indian women and surrogacy arrangements

Medical tourism is the new upper-class endeavor du jour. There is even a blog detailing medical tourism, and it boldly asserts the following:

India has become the top international surrogacy destination for couples and even single men and women who have not been able to have children through natural means. The success of the procedure in India, is greatly attributed to the cutting edge technology adopted by the fertility clinics in India, highly qualified fertility specialists, social acceptance of surrogacy, and low cost of surrogacy, all leading to India’s high success rate in gestational surrogacy.

Well, that's good to know, but what hides behind the shining surface of this phenomenon? Read this article in Marie Claire for a good primer on the issues.

Photo Credit: Stephanie Sinclair, Marie Claire

As Professor Seema M. Mohapatra explained at the 2011 Feminist Legal Theory Conference at the University of Baltimore School of Law's Center on Applied Feminism, there are several dangers in the phenomenon of international gestational surrogacy. We know that surrogacy is a complicated medical procedure, which is is highly dangerous for the surrogate. But Prof. Mohapatra was talking about the dangers of women's subjugation, oppression, and objectification that is attendant to international surrogacy. Due Indian public mores, the women who participate in the surrogacy business there are segregated in closed facilities for the duration of their pregnancies, monitoried closely, receiving only the nutrition provided by the center. Women who participate in surrogacy programs must be mothers (they must have had at least one live birth) --- and this means that the surrogate mothers are removed from their families for over 9 months.

Even more problematically, these women receive payments that allows them to buy a  house and provide for the education for their children in exchange of their services --- an amount so large it would easily cloud any reasonable person's judgment.  Prof. Mohapatra argues that the disparities in global living standards allow for the oppression of poor women in the Global South, because getting $2000 for a woman who is making $20 a month is a coercive amount of money. That is an offer that cannot be refused.

As Prof. Mohapatra states:

[T]hose who serve as surrogates are often those in the poorest, least educated, and lowest classes of Indian society.

Needless to say, rural women of India are the primary participants of this scheme, and thus, the uneven economic development and spatial inequality hits rural Indian women once more. Not only do they suffer from lower per-capita income, higher rates of illiteracy, more distance from health services, than their urban counterparts, but their bodies are increasingly viewed as merely a vessel for a white woman's future child. To add insult to injury, the surrogacy providers in India charge a premium for having a "Caucasian" egg fertilized and implanted in the Indian women's womb -- as if Indian women were not "Caucasian" already.  This systematic devaluation of women's bodies and even their ova is incensing to this feminist blogger.

The abstract of Prof. Mohapatra's paper can be accessed by clicking here.