“She’s Truly Just the Oven for Us:” Discourse Dependency in Families of Children Born through a Surrogate

Abstract

Reproductive technologies have created opportunities for individuals to conceive children through surrogacy. Surrogacy reflects biology and traditional reproduction because the genetic material often comes from both parents but also signifies a new way of creating family because of the absence of a pregnant mother and the use of a third party. The goal of the study was to understand how parents of children born through a surrogate use discourse to construct family identity. Parents of children born through surrogates voiced six discursive strategies to construct family identity: discussing, ritualizing, naming, narrating, explaining, and legitimizing.

Keywords:

• Discourse Dependency
• Family Communication
• Family Identity
• Surrogacy

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their invaluable feedback throughout the revision process. We would also like to thank Lisa DeWeert, Jessa Hendricker, Alyssa Hernandez, Allie Metz, Ashley Morrison-Sain, and Mika Richards for their assistance with the project.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. Although gestational carrier may be the more appropriate term because traditional surrogacy implies that the carrier’s egg is inseminated by the father’s sperm, the term “surrogate” tends to be used in everyday talk about the process of another woman carrying a child for the parent(s); thus, we will refer to the carrier as a surrogate in this paper.

2. CRTNET stands for the Communication, Research, and Theory Network, a National Communication Association listserv founded in 1985 and deactivated in 2020.