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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the ways in which egg donors, surrogate mothers, and intended parents in India imagine and unimagine their relationship with children born through third-party reproduction. Third-party reproduction is inseparable from plural parenthood and the question of who the ‘real’ parents are. In a legal and medical context, gestational surrogacy in India treats surrogates as not ‘real’ mothers, in favour of the ‘natural’ relationship between the intended mother and child. Here, the ‘genetic tie’ may ignore gestation in giving predominance to ‘genes’, but this logic is inverted in the case of egg donation, in which it is not uncommon for people to regard egg donors as ‘real’ mothers. Who is regarded as a ‘real’ parent, and who is not, is deeply embedded in the social process of creating kinship, shared notions of bodily substances, corporeal reality, and social recognition of ‘one’s own child’. The elements of gestation, genetic relations, and nurturing compete and coexist in the practice of third-party reproduction. This paper explores the multiple aspects of ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ kinship and its entanglement in making ‘a child of one’s own’ in third-party reproduction in India.
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Notes
1 In gestational surrogacy, the child is not genetically related to the surrogate mother as the embryo is created through IVF (in vitro fertilization), using the eggs and sperm of intended parents or donors, and transferred to the surrogate mother.
2 It does not mean that Indian egg donors are lacking the ‘scientific’ knowledge or culturally unique. Monica Konrad also describes how her informants from UK stress ova carry no particularly privileged status as bio-genetic properties (Citation2005).
3 I conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 women who provide their eggs or engaged surrogacy, 6 intended parents (all are Indian), and 6 medical practitioners of IVF clinics in Mumbai, Minapur and Singhabaad.
4 Minapur is a district headquarter city with a population of 500,000 and Singhabaad is a neighbouring city with a population of 450,000, of which the number of Muslim is slightly dominant.
5 The Adoption Regulations (2017), notified by the Ministry of Women and Child Development provides that adoption agencies shall counsel prospective adoptive parents to share the fact of adoption with the child, when the child grows up (section 29-(3)-(vi)) and facilitate root searches for adoptees whenever they are contacted (section 44-(2)). While some parents may not have informed their children of the fact of adoption, agencies are officially required to encourage disclosure.
6 All names used in this paper are pseudonyms.
7 The only exception, though it is not the caste itself, is in some cases where the patients wish to use sperm from their relatives, especially family members of the husband instead of using anonymous donor sperm. A female doctor in Minapur said to me, ‘Sometimes there are patients from Rajasthan or Gujarat who want to use the husband’s brother’s sperm. It is very patriarchal community, isn’t it? I wonder what they’re going to do in the future if they have children like that.’ Rajasthani and Gujarati here are associated with specific images of particular groups such as Marwari or other business communities for Maharashtrian and not all people from both states. It shows that these practices are seen as conservative behaviour of particular social groups by the doctor.
8 It is also difficult to find adoptive parents when a child’s skin is noticeably darker in the case of adoption (from an interview at an orphanage home in Minapur, September 2011).
9 The matching here refers primarily to not providing Muslim donor gametes for Hindu patients or using Muslim gametes only for Muslim patients.
10 Many residential societies newly built by urban development projects in cities have become ghettoized, leading to a homogenization of the class and caste of residents (Chatterjee and Parthasarathy Citation2017). This lack of daily communication with Muslims has led to typified representations of ‘the other’ for many Hindus.
11 See Franklin (Citation1999) for a discussion of how the embryo emerged as a ‘kinship yet to be’ entity with a new embryonic personhood in the process of enacting HFA(Human Fertilisation and Embryology)Act during 1980s in UK.
12 A survey of 594 childless couples in fertility clinics in Delhi by Banerjee and Singla found that 19.9% of the women and 44.1% of the men were in favour of using donated eggs compared to 19.5% of the women and 15.2% of the men in favour of donated sperm, indicating a difference in the acceptance of donated gametes by gender. Incidentally, for donor embryos, male acceptance is higher than in the case of donor sperm, with 15.7% of females and 23.7% of males (Banerjee and Singla Citation2018).
13 This is not the case for everyone, of course; in my interviews with IVF patients at Minapur’s clinic, some told me that they did not want to go for any treatments involving a third party. Mr and Mrs Kolhe (husband 32 years old, wife 24 years old), who have been married for four years, had their eggs retrieved for their first IVF trial when I met them at the clinic in 2019. The husband says that they want only their genetically connected children, so third-party reproduction or adoption is not an option for them. He also affirmed that he would rather be childless than use donated gametes, whether it was either egg or sperm. But it should be noted that he supplemented his option with the words ‘at least now’. It is common for childless couples to seek out a variety of treatments and practices at length beyond their initial expectations as their history of infertility grows (Matsuo Citation2013).
14 Aurasa is a word to indicate ‘real child’ or ‘legitimate child’ in Marathi, but it is mainly used in laws and newspapers and not appropriate in this context.
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Mizuho Matsuo
Mizuho Matsuo is an Associate Professor of National Museum of Ethnology, Japan. She is the author of Anthropology of Gender and Reproduction: Living as childless in rural India (in Japanese), published by Showado in 2013 and Cultural theory of Surrogacy in India (in Japanese) by Fukyosya, in 2013.