Defining Parents, Making Citizens: Nationality and Citizenship in Transnational Surrogacy

Abstract

Over the past decade, India has attracted would-be parents from around the globe, many seeking to build their families through gestational surrogacy. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, I found that issues of nationality and citizenship for babies born via gestational surrogacy were among the most pressing concerns for commissioning parents. In this article, I consider the ways in which states and institutions define parents and make citizens, as well as how families created through surrogacy in India challenge these processes in new ways. By closely interrogating the ways that families, states, and global and local institutions define parenthood and citizenship within the context of transnational surrogacy, I show that while transnational surrogacy may challenge conventional understandings of kinship and family, it simultaneously renaturalizes state definitions of citizenship and motherhood.

• assisted reproduction
• citizenship
• India
• kinship
• surrogacy

Notes

1. Surrogacy is officially forbidden in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, while Belgium and the Netherlands only prohibit commercial surrogacy. Poland and the Czech Republic currently have no laws regulating surrogacy.

2. Several legal cases illustrate the ways in which foreign parents have encountered problems acquiring citizenship for their children born via surrogacy in India. In 2008, for example, an Indian surrogate mother gave birth to twin sons; the commissioning parents, German couple Jan Balaz and Susan Lohle, initially were able to secure the twins’ German passports, but were later forced to surrender the passports. As the babies were considered neither German nor Indian citizens, the family spent two years in India awaiting the decision of the Gujarat High Court, which eventually conferred Indian citizenship on the babies. (See also India Today 2009; Mahapatra 2008; Points 2009; Roy 2010b, 2011; Times of India 2012.)

3. Other scholars, such as Connell (2007), have endeavored to bring together “social theory from the world periphery,” albeit with a different emphasis from the Comaroffs’. There has also been recent discussion of what Krotz (2005:147) referred to as “new ‘anthropologies of the South.’”

4. On the relationship between nationalism, constructions of blood, and notions of identity, see Robertson (2012) and Liu (2012).

5. One such case involves Kari Ann Volden, a single Norwegian woman who commissioned a surrogate pregnancy in India with eggs from an Indian woman and sperm from a Danish man. The surrogate gave birth to twin boys who were considered ‘stateless’ and unable to leave India for the first 15 months of their lives, as the Norwegian government did not consider Volden their mother (and consequently the boys could not attain Norwegian citizenship) and the Indian government did not consider them Indian. (See Kroløkke 2012, for an extended discussion of this case.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daisy Deomampo

Daisy Deomampo is a medical and cultural anthropologist whose current research focuses on the globalization of assisted reproductive technologies and its implications for gender relations, family formation, and social stratification.