Judith Warner gets this one right: While outsourcing childbirth to poor women in developing countries is not “empowering,” this issue is fraught with ambiguity and there are no easy answers.
“The human body is not lent out, is not rented out, is not sold,” France’s highest court ruled back in 1991, when it outlawed surrogate motherhood. In the United States, lip service has long been paid to the notion that women can’t be instrumentalized as baby-making machines. Indeed, one of the ways that surrogacy survives here is under cover of the fiction that the women who bear other women’s babies do so not for the money – which would be degrading – but because they “love to be pregnant.”
But our rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty, half a world away. Then, selling one’s body for money is not degrading but empowering. And the transaction is not outsourcing of the basest nature – not modern-day wet-nursing taken to the nth degree – but a good deal for everyone concerned. “There’s nothing wrong in this,” Priyanka Sharma, another surrogate, concluded the Marketplace segment. “We give them a baby and they give us much-needed money. It’s good for them and for us.”
If we’re going to do the surrogacy thing — and we already are doing it — then let’s call it what it is: An exchange of money for services. And let’s not pussyfoot around the fact that in a whole lot of service industries, the people providing services are poor, female and brown. Think of housekeepers, fieldworkers, childcare providers, elder-care workers — all of these women use their bodies in the service of others. Many of them are exploited, some are abused, and most are under-paid. But we only go into panic mode when the services provided are sexual.
I’ll be the first to admit that something feels different about work involving sex and reproduction; perhaps it’s because sex and reproduction are so fundamental to the human condition that it seems wrong to pay for them. Perhaps it’s because the people doing the paying are almost universally part of a more privileged class than the person doing the selling. Or perhaps it’s because women have traditionally been cast as the gatekeepers of sex and reproduction, and there are deeply entrenched cultural assumptions about how, when and with whom it’s acceptable to trade sex and reproduction for goods (tangible and not), and women who sell sex and reproduction outside of those bounds violate social propriety in such a way that it offends even feminists like me. I don’t know.
Rich white American women paying poor women of color in developing nations to gestate their children for them seems wrong. I don’t oppose reproductive technologies, but it gets trickier when you’re paying someone in a far less privileged situation to be a human incubator for you. I have to roll my eyes at the way surrogacy is framed in order to fit in with acceptable constructions of femininity — women are surrogate mothers because they love being pregnant, not because they need to make money and pregnancy is a pretty good way to do that. Addressing the poverty issue would require us to actually look at who is getting ahead and at whose expense, and that doesn’t tend to go over so well. Addressing surrogacy as one service industry among many wherein the bodies of poor women of color are used to further the wants of wealthier white people would require us to look at the systematic racisms and inequalities that prop up the entire global economy. And that definitely does not go over so well.
And so instead we get a story about entitled, selfish white women, and brown women who are doing the work we wouldn’t do, but who maybe should consider themselves lucky for getting scraps.