Gestational surrogacy in India: New dynamics of reproductive labour

Abstract

When mainstream theories around globalization and outsourcing analyse the increased mobility of goods, labour, technology and capital across borders or reflect upon the changing dynamics of nation states and neoliberal policies, gender and reproduction are seldom a focus. In this chapter, I invert the frame to analyse how global processes affect and get affected by the most intimate of relations- those around gender and reproduction-by unpacking the case of gestational commercial surrogacy in India. What can we learn about labour markets, nation states, globalization, gender and reproduction from studying the encounter between them within this remarkable new form of outsourcing? Prior to the booming market in commercial surrogacy in India, surrogacy was theorized wholly in Euro-American contexts. With globalization and the spread of new reproductive technologies, this market has started spreading to almost all countries in the global south. India, which liberalized its economy in the 1990s, has emerged as a key player and, at the time of writing, ranks ahead of the USA/United States of America as the world’s largest supplier of gestational surrogates. The challenge now is to invert the existing theoretical paradigm around surrogacy and innovate a frame that fits new empirical contexts in the global south. Instead of discussing surrogacy in abstraction as a moral dilemma, in this chapter, I analyse it as an empirical reality and a new form of reproductive labour market emerging with globalization. Finally, I highlight a fundamentally paradoxical characteristic of commercial surrogacy, which resonates with other forms of reproductive labour such as domestic work and sex work. On the one hand, commercial surrogacy becomes a powerful challenge to the age-old dichotomy constructed between production and reproduction. Women’s reproductive capacities are valued and monetized outside of the so-called private sphere. As surrogates, women use their bodies, wombs and sometimes breasts, as instruments of labour. But just as commercial surrogacy subverts these gendered dichotomies, it simultaneously reifies them. When reproducing bodies of women become the only source, requirement and product of a labour market and fertility becomes the only asset women can use to earn wages, women essentially get reduced to their reproductive capacities, ultimately reifying their historically constructed role in the gender division of labour.