Intimate strangers: commercial surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine and the making of truth

Surrogacy has been a central focus in the study of reproduction. Around the globe, only some countries allow surrogacy, either in altruistic mode (most noticeably the United Kingdom and Canada) or commercially (as in some states in the United States, Mexico, India, Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, and more), yet with different legal regulations depending on the local jurisdiction and sociocultural context. Intimate Strangers: Commercial Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine and the Making of Truth is an ethnographic study which examines some of the diverse moral discourses around surrogacy which have appeared and raised debates and tensions within these countries and beyond.

While there is significant attention on the commercialised surrogacy industry in Russia and Ukraine, it is difficult for foreign scholars to conduct in-person fieldwork in these two countries due to the confidential nature of the industry and the language barriers. Veronika Siegl, an anthropologist, dedicated herself to researching the surrogacy industry in Russia and Ukraine by conducting multi-site fieldwork and interviews from 2014 to 2017. In the introductory chapter, the author reflects on her researcher positionality as a woman, a social science researcher, and a foreigner, who had been seen as an “intruder” and an unwelcome guest in most of the fertility clinics she approached. Siegl delineates the difficulties she encountered while trying tentatively to enter the field and talk to potential interlocutors. From here, as readers, we get the first glimpse of the hidden surrogacy industry in Russia and Ukraine in terms of what Siegl calls the “protective care” that institutional gatekeepers employed to protect this industry that has been functioning away from the public gaze. The ethical controversies around surrogacy facilitated the creation, by people involved in the industry, of “truth claims” that legitimate and justify their deeds and purposes.

Intimate Strangers delves into the heated debates around the morality of surrogacy and the pursuit of motherhood/parenthood. Siegl does not leap to any conclusion but carefully examines the tensions between two parties who were either for surrogacy or against surrogacy. She observes a contested “truth-making process” going on within the surrogacy industry. From here, Siegl explores how various actors constructed truth to justify their beliefs in supporting or opposing surrogacy. She asks “What are these truths and why are they necessary? In what ‘understandings’ are they grounded, and do these vary across different cultural contexts and social positionalities?” (p.3).¹ Rather than taking a route that simply looks at the economic perspectives of the surrogacy industry, Siegl notices the implicit and often neglected emotions that were circulated and mobilised by individuals in the reproductive arena. Siegl takes her participants’ “vulnerabilities, anxieties, and desires upon entering the field of surrogacy as a starting point to examine how specific words, metaphors, arguments, narratives, and logics are turned into truths” (p.3). Following the affective approach, Siegl manages to tease out the emotional aspects that were hidden in the process of making the truth of commercialised and marketised surrogacy in two countries: Russia and Ukraine.

In the first two chapters, the author gives readers a comprehensive understanding of the pronatalist population policies in Russia and Ukraine to underline the intertwined dynamics of gender, parenthood, and family values. The second part (Chapters 3–5) of the book guides the readers into the field of surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine, based on the rich first-hand ethnographic data collected by the author. The “choreography” of surrogacy,² depicted by Siegl, was carefully arranged by the commercially oriented agents in fertility clinics and was embodied and practised by the women who decided to become surrogates. As termed by Siegl, the “technologies of alignment” (p. 139)¹ are a form of “emotional labour”³ that surrogate workers operate as an internal control to fulfil the expectations of the commissioning parents, agencies and their own to be able to detach from the children they carried for nine months. The last two chapters compose the third part of this book, which brings together the threads to argue how these multiple parties – intended parents, agents, practitioners, and surrogates – choreographed the “moral truth” of surrogacy in the social, cultural, political, and legal context in Russia and Ukraine. Through multiple actors’ “truth making”, the intentional downplay of financial transactions and the emphasis on altruistic features reflected the ambiguity of commercialised surrogacy, and how actors consciously created responding narratives to justify the nature of both reproductive labour and emotional connectedness. Siegl concludes that models of both “gendered altruism” and “gendered empowerment” coexisted in Russia and Ukraine. She takes a further step to conceptualise them as a “middle ground” that allowed for the presence of moral framings of both business transactions and gift-giving.

Intimate Strangers captures the controversial yet flexible industry in which the experiences of the surrogacy labourers are, partially, intimate and embodied; partially, also prone to be distanced intentionally. Siegl investigates the moral economy of surrogacy facilitated by the “ethical labour” and affective forces and candidly depicts the intertwined yet exchangeable values (ethical, affective, and economic) in the practices of the embodied work and emotional work of surrogate workers. Intimate Strangers portrays the national and transnational surrogacy industry in Russia and Ukraine by presenting the multiple mobilities of the ethical values and commercialised bodies/body parts as well as of the people between these two countries and beyond. Citizens from Russia and Ukraine travelled for various purposes. For example, Ukrainians often immigrate to Russia for a better life, a better-paid job, and sometimes become surrogate labourers in Russian agencies. Similarly, intended parents travel from Russia to Ukraine to conceive children at a lower price compared to their home countries. During the trans/national journeys, people dreamed of becoming parents, sought potential solutions to the social pressure of being parents, and dissolved the social stigma of infertility.

There has been a rich literature on the “repro-hubs” across the globe, for example, the United States, India, and Thailand. Compared to the recently emerging repro-hub of Russia and Ukraine that is portrayed in this book, the well-developed surrogacy industry has been documented in rich literature, including ethnographies, on the ethical aspects of commercial surrogacy in the United States,⁴ as well as in India, where surrogates’ roles as reproductive labour and their suffering from a poor-conditioned working environment and potential exploitation have been discussed.⁵ Siegl pointed out that Russia (and Ukraine) should be considered carefully as surrogacy destinations, in both the local sociocultural context and in the global reproductive scale, with regard to costs sitting in the middle between the United States and Asian locales such as India and Thailand, and the moral framework swinging between business-like and altruistic discourses.⁶ While the world as well as the field have been changing rapidly, this ethnography also documented in the Afterword of this book the unexpected re-constellation of the global “repro-landscape”⁷ after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Intimate Strangers is an ethnography tendered with rigour as well as sensitivity, that readers would not only enjoy reading but that also engages with the life experiences of surrogates, the start-up stories of facilitators, and the reproductive requests and dreams of prospective parents suffering from various kinds of infertility. Veronika Siegl's ethnographic work contributes to the literature on surrogacy and cross-border reproductive care not only for her insightful observations on the inter/national surrogacy activities in Russia and Ukraine, as well as her dedicated and lengthy fieldwork, but also for the potentiality of opening up future research to understand the ongoing re-constellation of the “repro-landscape”. This important ethnography also provokes further thoughts on the commercialisation and marketisation of body parts, intimate labour, and the relationships between these “intimate strangers” who were once so closely connected, yet so far away.

Provenance statement

This article was not commissioned and went through an internal review.

Acknowledgements

I thank Professor Sarah Franklin and Dr Marcin Smietana for supervising my PhD project on Taiwanese gay fathers and their transnational reproductive journeys. I am grateful to the Cambridge Trust and the Ministry of Education Taiwan for supporting my research. My thanks also go to my dearest LGBTQ+ friends, who provide me with ideas for my research, as well as my partner, who enriches my academic and queer lives.