Empowerment and subjugation: Re-conceiving commercial surrogacy as work–labor in India

ABSTRACT

Feminist analysis of surrogacy remains caught between calls for abolition on the one hand, and regulation, on the other. Within this dualistic discourse, the question of recognizing commercial gestational surrogacy as a new form of work–labor remains undermined. This paper brings together the abolition-regulation conceptual framework to examine surrogacy as work–labor. Based on ethnographic research conducted in two surrogacy hotspots in India, it illustrates how women understand and construct meaning from their labor as surrogates. In doing so, the study extends the existing feminist framework, using ethnographic research, to open up a space where the labor of surrogacy can be looked upon as both empowering and subjugating at the same time and in differing ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Surrogacy
• work–labor
• regulation
• empowerment
• ethnography
• India

Acknowledgements

This work is based on the findings of my doctoral research on commercial surrogacy at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. I thank the organizers and participants of the conference on “Reproduction, Demography and Cultural Anxieties in India and China in the twenty-first Century”, held in New Delhi, in February 2020, where an earlier version of this paper was presented. I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the comments and insights provided by Shefali Jha (JNU). I am also very grateful to Paro Mishra (IITD) for her valuable feedback on this paper and to Arvind Pandey (TISS) for his critical inputs. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful interjections. Special acknowledgements are due to the surrogate women who shared their stories and provided critical nuances to this research.

Ethical considerations

The anonymity has been maintained for the respondents and informed consent has been taken while conducting this research.

Notes

1 By the time of data collection, laws on surrogacy had barred single parents, gay couples and foreign clients to outsource surrogate pregnancies in India. Only childless heterosexual couples and citizens of the country were allowed to make use of it. With the current Surrogacy (regulation) Bill 2020, there is a push towards outlawing commercial surrogacy, while allowing only altruistic arrangements within a regulatory framework.

2 Consent of the individual has been ascertained for this research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Khushboo Srivastava

Khushboo SRIVASTAVA currently works as Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy and Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. She received her Ph.D. from Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University where she brought conceptual frameworks drawn from feminist critiques of the Social Contract theory to understand surrogacy as a form of feminized labor and its changing legal contexts. Through her ethnographic research with sex workers, surrogate women and domestic workers, she has delved into issues of waged employment in vagrant forms of labor, quest for agency, and efficacy of laws. Before TISS, she worked as Research Scientist at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.