We’ve outsourced our jobs, why not outsource our babies too? This option of implanting a fertilized embryo into a surrogate mother from India is becoming an increasingly popular option for couples having trouble with fertility. This article, along with many others plus a Made In India documentary, raises questions about whether or not our moral values will be able to catch up with the rate of our technological advances. Believe it or not, this “medical tourism” industry is booming and increasing at an unbelievable rate, with reproductive outsourcing currently valued at around $450 million. Though this WebMD article is meant to be objective, it leans slightly towards the interpretation of this practice as a leap in progress for feminists. This particular interpretation echoes corporate voices from both Enloe’s Globetrotting Sneakers and Ehrenreich’s Maid to Order/Nickled and Dimed arguing how it benefits working class women by providing them jobs, all the while alleviating higher-class women from things that had traditionally oppressed them – like housework or child labor. It is presented as a win-win situation. However, I’m attempting to critique and present observations from the practice of reproductive outsourcing that contradict the notion that this practice is truly liberating for women at a global scale. Instead, by drawing ideas mainly from Douglas, Enloe, and Ehrenreich, I argue that reproductive outsourcing actually gives us the illusion of feminism, objectifies and commodifies women, and reinforces the hierarchy of women divided along class and racial lines, which defines who actually has access to feminism and who is left behind, carrying someone else’s fetus for nine months.
Though Douglas uses her notion of enlightened sexism to dissect the media, the basis of her idea is how we are presented with the illusion that there is no longer a need to fight for feminism; it’s all said and done. This is exactly what is at play when groups of people accept this practice as a liberating innovation. Those who look forward to benefiting from this practice frame it as philanthropic. Like the corporate voices from Enloe’s piece, I find this argument to be highly ethnocentric, though it could be true as Indian surrogates earn $5,000-7,000 per successful birthing, which is a significant amount of money in India. This philanthropic argument seems like an excuse and a pure after-thought to me. If we were truly interested in philanthropy, we would be focusing on global policies that increase the safety net for these women and their families so it would not be necessary for them to resort to selling their bodies to raise their living standards. The philanthropic argument stands weak against all the benefits foreigners gain. Looking at finances alone, this procedure in India costs 17% of what it would cost in the States and I can’t even imagine the difference in earning a surrogate mother in the U.S. would receive compared to an Indian surrogate mother. Currently, Indian surrogate mothers earn 10% of the American procedural costs using the high estimate of their earnings stated above.
Also, after a bit of sleuthing on the Internet, I found that the majority of these companies are run and owned by men. Douglas talked about the media and how many scripts are male written and directed even though the media object is framed as being feminist and I see this connecting very well with what is occurring here. Even the advertisements and pictures on these medial tourism websites have pictures showing white, male doctors as if they represented the population of reliable medical physicians. So, when the women doing the work of bringing life to the world is earning around $6,000 for a procedure that earns the company $12,000 - $25,000, I wonder about who is actually advantaged in this business relation. Also, as this industry grows, I wonder how these conditions will change for the worse as word gets out about reproductive outsourcing. Conditions might seem acceptable now, but as demand increases, I worry about these numbers changing. If these numbers do change, how invisible will surrogate mothers become, masked behind an illusion of feminism? Sure, the reason to seek another women’s body to host one’s baby due to problems with fertility is the leading reason as to why this industry is booming, but what’s to stop this trend from feeding into other reasons? Specifically, reasons that are essentially cosmetic and aesthetic in nature? We’ve talked about vaginoplasty and have heard about failing “miracle stretch mark creams,” but these growing surgeries are to fix the “side-effects” of pregnancy. Given how vain our culture has become, what if reproductive outsourcing was a way to bypass these “side-effects” along with the pain and burden of carrying a child? These are the types of questions we have to ask given that there are currently no regulations and restrictions on this relatively new practice.
Earlier, I had asserted that that these Indian women are essentially selling their bodies in order to earn their way into a more livable life. A radical connection can be made of this practice to a type of prostitution, though traditional intercourse is bypassed through in vitro fertilization. Also, from the way they decide between surrogate mothers, I couldn’t help but sense the commercialized-farm-like atmosphere where farmers and researchers view their cows and pigs as a number (age, weight, exposure to stressful conditions, strength), as an object. And the advertisements and marketing of these women’s availability to “rent” out their womb is turning these women into commodities. As Marx had predicted, capitalist ventures would turn human relationships into what he calls the “cash nexus value.” Though there are popular stories of how foreigners break caste systems by embracing and crying and expressing feelings of gratitude, it is unpopular to emphasize that many foreigners only see the surrogate mother twice – once for fertilization and once for delivery and pick-up. Furthermore, many clinics house their surrogates in dormitories attached to the clinic where they are to remain for the rest of their pregnancy and some clinics restrict the women from ever touching or seeing the baby in fear of emotional attachment.
Unlike the conditions Enloe revealed about locked dormitories in sweatshops, women who live in these dormitories received top-notch medical care. This alone would sound promising if it were not for the reason why these women had to be in their healthiest state. It’s shocking to me that infant mortality rate seems to be low in these facilities profiting from successful births within a country that has an infant mortality rate of 48%. Furthermore, there has been no discussion about medical care for these women after labor or should they encounter complications or side effects from birthing. To medical tourism companies, this is not economically important enough to spark discussions like this. The bodies of surrogates are only important to the extent that these bodies are still commodities. After birth, the business relation ceases and the economic incentive to treat these women well disappear. Thus, looking at the treatment of these women during the job may very well support that this practice is a mutually beneficial relationship and philanthropic, but these observations may be misleading if not criticized and looked at from a different angle.
Using Mink’s definition of feminism as a process of “winning choices for women,” then I agree that this practice is slightly feminist. But, I have to ask: choices for which women? The party who has won the right to choose is not the party of surrogates in India, but the middle-class and upper-class women from foreign countries. When the journalist asked the American customer why she didn’t choose to stay longer or see the surrogate mother more often than for fertilization and pick-up, she said that she was busy because she had a house to renovate. This is a prime example of not only the choice to have a baby but do away with the negative effects of carrying the baby, but also of class privilege. Though this is the way I see it, American women hail it as a practice that actually shrinks class stratifications among women. As one American woman puts it, “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t…Unless we go to India.” But, this practice disproportionately benefits one group of women on the backs, or in this case – uteruses – of another group of women. Looking at it this way, reproductive outsourcing is not a feminist practice. In fact, it pits women against each other by solidifying hierarchies among women. The aforementioned example focuses on the stratification of women based on class, but there is also racial stratification embedded in this practice and Ehrenreich’s Maid to Order helps to analyze it in such a way that reveals these stratifications.
Many in our class were startled by the White child’s response to seeing child of color in the grocery store. “Look, a baby maid!” was the response. This is telling of how we often link different races and ethnicities to specific occupations – and usually in a hierarchical way. In America, Latino women get stereotyped as maid workers and Asian women get stereotyped as salon workers. We start to think, to some degree, like the White child in the supermarket that it is justifiable to link biology to a way of living. Foreign women who seek surrogates from India feel alleviated from the fear of emotional attachment between the surrogate woman and the baby, which became a problem in America made famous by the Supreme Court case Johnson v. Calvert. Vohra, a surrogate woman says what all foreign customers want to hear when asked about emotional attachment to the baby. “It won't even have the same skin color as me, so it won't be hard to think of it as [my client’s]," Vohra insists. But this excuse is unsettling because it assumes that we can’t have feelings of love and emotional attachment because of a barrier based on the color of our skin. There is a way of thinking that expects these women of color to be desensitized to pregnancy, that it is inherently this way. This in itself shows how a certain group of women control the feminist agenda and others do not have access to this.
Sure, there is definitely benefit, monetarily, for everyone involved. This is what happens when a new industry sprouts upward. However, we need to raise questions about what we are doing and all of the implications it has on all groups of people before we establish such a practice as progressive for women. These Indian surrogate women cannot go to the Supreme Court and fight for justice like the women involved in Johnson v. Calpert did. People seek outsourced medical services for the same exact reason we seek outsourced goods. It’s cheaper and the people who pay the price of having it be cheaper are the female laborers risking their life to delivering someone else's blood and flesh to the world. The discussion over how this practice actually helps global feminism by putting money into these women's pockets is a distraction from the real question of how we are actually going to raise safety nets for these women. France, along with many European nations have already ruled commercial surrogacy as illegal. The court's final ruling was based upon the idea that "the human body is not lent out, is not rented out, is not sold." There seems to be a pattern here. Finland as a role model for education, France as a role model for family-friendly policies. What are we the role models of? Having babies that have an invisible tag on their belly buttons, a severed connection from the surrogate mother, that proudly states, "Made in India"?
Other References
http://www.mentorsethicare.com/our_team.html
http://www.mediescapes.com/about.html
http://www.medindia.us/letter.php
http://helloji.wordpress.com/2008/03/12/made-in-india-babies-outsourced/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/world/asia/10surrogate.html?pagewanted=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k_h-Z-Lv2c
http://www.indexmundi.com/india/infant_mortality_rate.html
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