‘We’re just business. we’re not people’: revisiting surrogacy through Amulya Malladi’s, A House for Happy Mothers

ABSTRACT

India is rapidly establishing itself as the world’s baby factory, with couples from both wealthy and impoverished countries flocking there to make specific reproductive decisions through accessible surrogates. These changes in medical technology have reinforced and normalized the concept of ‘wombs for rent’, converting the body of the Third world woman into an active site of reproductive exploitation and providing for the creation of a new kind of eugenics. This article is a critical intervention into surrogacy as an explicit manifestation of stratified reproduction through Amulya Malladi’s A House for Happy Mothers (2016). It also examines the bioeconomic and bioethical assumptions behind exploitative surrogacy practises based on systemic and structural disparities in India and proposes a Reproductive Justice framework to evaluate commercial surrogacy The essay claims that, while surrogacy is often considered to be free of compulsion and violence and classified as ‘subjective free choice’, it is financially driven, posing major questions regarding autonomy. The essay closes by analysing surrogates’ commercialization and dehumanization, as their wombs are viewed as ‘passive incubators’ and ‘prosthetics’, violently distanced from the baby.

KEYWORDS:

• Eugenics
• surrogacy
• ART
• reproductive justice
• third-world women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Surrogacy is a type of assisted reproduction in which intended parents who cannot procreate collaborate with a gestational surrogate who nurtures and care for their child(ren) in their own womb until birth.

2. Surrogacy Bill, 2019, Provisions: Surrogacy can be accessed by only those couples who have not been able to conceive for 5 years and one can become a surrogate just once in a lifetime. The bill prohibits transfer of funds considered to be an inducement except medical or insurance expenses. Other than Commercial Surrogacy the bill prohibits surrogacy for: Foreigners, NRIs and PIOs, Homo-Sexual Couples, Unmarried couples etc. It further says that the bill has got safeguards built in against sex selection of the baby. The bill also covers the following offences to be covered under the said bill of 2019. 1. Undertaking or advertising commercial surrogacy 2. Exploitation of surrogates 3. Abandoning, Exploiting or disowning a surrogate child 4. Selling or importing human embryo or gametes for surrogacy. For the above-mentioned offences there is a penalty provision of imprisonment up to ten years and a fine of up to ten lakhs rupees. See. Srivastava (2021). The Surrogacy Regulation (2019) Bill of India: A Critique. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 22(1), 140-151.

3. Infertility is treated with Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). It encompasses fertility treatments that deal with both a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm. It works by removing eggs from the body of a woman. Embryos are formed by combining the eggs with sperm. The embryos are then implanted into the woman’s body.

4. Medical tourism is a process in which pregnancy is initiated in one location and parturition occurs in another, usually the patient’s home region.

5. The working class is that segment of society that, because it lacks the means of production, is forced to sell its labour power to those who do. The working class, rather than being viewed as a static entity, must be viewed as one pole of the capital-labour contradiction, a relationship that is constantly threatened and recreated through a complex process. Dev Nathan in his article, ‘Structure of Working-Class in India’ (1987), divides working class into four categories: 1) That which earns more than a family wage, i.e. more than the value of labour power; 2) That which earns a wage roughly equal to the family wage and can thus cover the full cost of labour production and reproduction at a reasonable standard; 3) That which is more or less capable of covering the immediate costs of labour power production but must rely on the non-capitalist sector to recoup its losses; 4) The impoverished section, which cannot even meet the immediate cost of labour power production. Furthermore, it was discovered that the pre-capitalist sector’s working-class composition is influenced by: (1) the worker’s caste, tribal, or ethnic origin; and (2) the gender-based division of labour between male and female, as well as the associated patriarchy.

6. Van Ransselear Potter coined the phrase ‘bilocated birth’ in the 1970s-1971 for bioethics as a field. According to Albert R. Johnson, in the book Birth of the Bioethics (2003), bioethics was established as a science to address the limitations of conventional medical ethics, which failed to address the challenges posed by contemporary technology society. Johnson argues that the use of humans in bioscientific studies is immoral, paving the way for a new branch of ethics known as bioethics.

7. Infertility is defined as the inability to conceive after a period of 12 months of unprotected intercourse. It is generally considered to be infertility in women aged 35 and older if they are unable to conceive after 6 months. The ‘fertile days’ are usually five days preceding and following the day an egg is released from the ovary (ovulation). Having sex (intercourse) during this time period increases chance of being pregnant.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Soumya Kashyap

Soumya Kashyap is an Institute fellow (PhD) and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Patna (India). She has presented papers at prestigious international forums such as ‘Contemporary Women’s writing and the Medical Humanities’, organized by School of Advanced Study, London. Her review article has appeared recently in Journal of Literature and Science. For her PhD dissertation, she is working broadly in the field of Medical Humanities. She intends to analyse issues of infertility, maternal health etc. with special reference to Indian Women’s writing. You can reach her at: [email protected]

Priyanka Tripathi

Priyanka Tripathi is an Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna (India). She has published extensively with Indian Literature, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Postcolonial Studies, Economic and Political Weekly amongst others. She is currently working on an ICSSR funded project entitled, ‘Mapping Domestic Violence in the times of Covid-19: A Study from Bihar’. She is also Book Reviews Editor for Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and she works in the area of Gender Studies, South Asian Fiction, GeoHumanities and Graphic Novels. Her email id is [email protected].