Experimental Sociality and Gestational Surrogacy in the Indian ART Clinic

Abstract

This article marks experimental modes of sociality in a transnational Indian assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinic as a contact zone between elite doctors, gestational surrogates, and transnational commissioning parents. It examines efforts within one ART clinic to separate social relationships from reproductive bodies in its surrogacy arrangements as well as novel social formations occurring both because of and despite these efforts. Draft regulative legislation in India marks a shift in the distribution of risk among actors in the clinic that parallels a shift in medical practice away from a technique of caring for the body to producing bodies as instruments of contracted service. The clinic provides an opportunity to observe forms of sociality that emerge as experiments with modernities, with different relationships to the body and the social meaning of medicalized biological reproduction, and with understanding the role of the market and altruism in the practice of gestational surrogacy.

Keywords:

• Assisted reproductive technologies
• Indian gestational surrogacy
• medical tourism
• reproductive labor

Notes

1. Assisted reproductive technologies, which aid in conception and pregnancy, include practices such as hormonal inducement of ovulation, the harvesting of human ova for IVF, and embryo transfer to the uterus along with hormones that aid in embryo implantation in the uterus and hence successful pregnancy.

2. I use the terms ‘commissioning parents’ to refer to the individuals or couples who initiate the surrogacy process, in part to remain consistent with the language of draft ART legislation in India. The terms ‘intended parents’ and ‘gestational surrogate’ or ‘gestational carrier’ are most often used in literature on ARTs and surrogacy in the Anglo-American academy. In the clinic, everyone referred to the women who carried pregnancies to term under contract to commissioning parents simply as ‘surrogates’.

3. This term derives from Michel Foucault's lectures and publications where it is used to refer to techniques of government and citizen-subject that make a society governable in a given historical period.

4. All identifying information of people, places, and institutions has been changed to protect identities while preserving a sense of the atmosphere or climate of informality in the clinic.

5. Although exclusively local donors were used at this clinic, one of the two commissioning couples I met that were using donated eggs was unaware of this fact. See Vora (2009).

6. See Vora (2009, 2011) for elaboration.

7. In this case, a commissioning father from Japan was prevented from returning with an infant born to a surrogate in India because of legal complications concerning custody and citizenship between India and Japan. The intended parents divorced after entering a surrogacy arrangement through an Indian clinic, utilizing the intended father's sperm and donated eggs. The couple divorced before the delivery, and when the commissioning father attempted to return to Japan with the infant, a law in India preventing single men from adopting female children was invoked.

8. Bharadwaj (2003, 2006) has written extensively on the social contexts of ARTs in India, including discussion of the cultural, media, and political stakes involved for different populations of Indians in engaging with reproductive technologies.

9. Sundar Rajan (2007) has written about a parallel situation in the context of clinical trials run by US-based pharmaceutical companies in India, where the context of risk includes the situation that participants who have positive outcomes have no guarantee of access to the drugs developed as a result of their trial (78).