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Abstract
Since the early 2000s transnational surrogacy has emerged as a new capitalist frontier founded on the intensification of the commodification of women’s reproductive labours, bodies and biologies. This has resulted in academic and policy debates on whether to outlaw surrogacy altogether or to ban commercial surrogacy in favour of altruistic forms of surrogacy. Rather than tackling surrogacy in moralising terms of ‘altruistic’ gift-giving versus ‘greedy’ money-making, in this article we draw on feminist political economy literature on social reproduction to propose an integrative reproductive labour perspective that looks at the dialectics of waged and unwaged work involved in the process of (re)producing people. Drawing on empirical research data on commercial surrogacy in Georgia, we analyse how this dialectical relation between exploitation of waged work (surrogate) and appropriation of unwaged work (mother) operates on the workfloor. We explore Maria Mies’ concept of ‘housewifization’ to argue that processes of exploitation are deepened in the Georgian surrogacy industry, partially because surrogates refrain/are refrained from identifying as workers and as such are not afforded labour rights nor considered to produce value.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our research participants and the anonymous reviewers for their generous time and input in contributing to this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Surrogacy was criminalised in Cambodia in 2016. However, the combination of high demand from China, where more than 70,000 commissioning parents are looking for cheap fertility services abroad, and the ‘cheapness’ of surrogacy services in Cambodia - (in)directly produced by the country’s (ongoing) histories of war, poverty and structural under/de-development - will most likely keep the Cambodian surrogacy industry operating (Keeton-Olson & Yon, Citation2018; World Bank, Citation2018).
2 In 2013 this Israeli surrogacy broker was selected in the project "Überpreneur - 36 People You Must Meet” as one of the most influential global entrepreneurs. See: Andrews, Peter and Fiona Wood. Citation2013. Uberpreneurs: How to Create Innovative Global Businesses and Transform Human Societies. Palgrave Macmillan.
4 Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy in the World, Paragraph 115 of its resolution of 17 December 2015. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document//P-8-2016-005909_EN.html http://europeanpost.co/the-european-parliament-condemned-all-forms-of-surrogacy/
5 Starza-Allen, Antony. Council of Europe rejects surrogacy guidelines. Bionews 17 October Citation2016
.https://www.bionews.org.uk/page_95737 (last entry 02/05/2019).
6 The line between altruistic and commercial surrogacy is not always clear-cut. In Greece, for instance, only altruistic surrogacy is permitted by law. However, this does not prevent the commissioning parents from giving the surrogate an exceptional financial or material gift after she has delivered the surrogacy baby. This is the reason why in the UK surrogacy laws are currently being revised in an attempt to establish clear categories of acceptable reimbursements for surrogates to clarify what are legitimate ‘altruistic’ expenses (Willows, Citation2019).
8 In so far as we use the Marxist feminist insights of Silvia Federici and Maria Mies to develop the argument in this paper that surrogacy should be understood as a form of reproductive labour under capitalism and should not be criminalised as an inherently immoral practice, it should be noted that Federici (Citation2020) and Mies (Citation1987) have both written critically against commerical surrogacy.
9 It is possible to extend this argument further with Marxist feminist understandings of sex as work, and the historical development of the nuclear family, marriage and the discplining of women’s sexuality. In Origins and Development of Sexual Work in the US and Britain (Citation1975) Federici writes, “an essential premise for the transformation of the female factory-worker-prostitute – in both cases paid worker – into an unpaid mother-wife ready-to-sacrifice her own interest and desire for the wellbeing of her family – was the ‘purification’ of the maternal role from any erotic element.
10 Pande’s (Citation2009, Citation2014) research suggested that many Indian surrogates justify their work and resist social stigma by differentiating it from sex work, i.e. “at least I am not a prostitute”.
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Notes on contributors
Sigrid Vertommen
Dr. Sigrid Vertommen is working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University. Sigrid’s work grapples with the feminist political economy of global fertility chains, with an empirical focus on the fertility chain between Israel/Palestine, Ukraine and Georgia.
Camille Barbagallo
Dr. Camille Barbagallo is a postdoctoral researcher at the CERIC Leeds Business School. Engaging specifically with Marxist feminist theories of social reproduction, she examines the specific ways that gender and race are implicated in processes of reproductive labour and how the governing political rationality of neoliberalism seeks to extend an ethic of the market into all aspects of life, while at the same, depending on significant amounts of non-marketised and unwaged reproductive labour.