What's it like to grow a baby in your body for nine months, feel it start to move and kick, give birth, and watch as the newborn is whisked away to the waiting arms of its...mother?
Media descriptions of commercial surrogacy (1, 2, 3, 4) tend to focus far more on the lives and feelings of the "contracting parents" than on those of the surrogates. Typically the stories discuss the despair associated with infertility, the hopes aroused by the prospect of a genetically related child, the anxieties of "outsourcing" the gestation of the child, and the joys of "taking delivery" of the baby. The surrogates usually figure briefly and say little. This is especially true when they are poor women recruited from rural villages, as is most of the "work force" in what has become a half-billion dollar per year industry in India alone. Many of the clients are from Europe and North America.
Two recent accounts do much better at portraying Indian surrogates as real people and letting them speak about their experiences. In the current issue of The American Prospect, UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild recounts a round of interviews with commercial surrogates and surrogacy brokers in Gujarat, India. Her article, titled "Childbirth at the Global Crossroads," focuses on the concept of "emotional labor," which she introduced in her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Surrogates, she says, have something in common with nannies and nurses. Like them,
surrogates perform "emotional labor" to suppress feelings that could interfere with doing their job....As science and global capitalism gallop forward, they kick up difficult questions about emotional attachment.
The fertility clinic in Gujarat requires surrogates to live in a dormitory, nine to a room, during their entire pregnancies. They must get permission to leave or to see their husbands or children. They often deliver by Caesarean section, perhaps in order to allow the contracting parents to schedule their travels to India.
Dr. Nayna Patel, the clinic director and a pioneer of India's "reproductive tourism" sector, says that contract pregnancy benefits everyone, surrogates included. Indeed, many women who serve as surrogates make as much money for one pregnancy as they can for several years' work. Hochschild acknowledges that her work "has a touch of Mother Teresa" about it. Yet it also seems "coldly efficient." Dr. Patel advises surrogates no to have much contact with the people who will raise the children they have gestated.
Staying detached from the genetic parents, she says, helps surrogate mothers give up their babies and get on with their lives - and maybe with the next surrogacy. This ideal of the de-personalized pregnancy is eerily reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, in which babies are emotionlessly mass-produced in the Central London Hatchery.
Hochschild asks one surrogate about her decision to carry a baby for pay.
"It was my husband's idea," Geeta replies. "He makes pav bhaji [a vegetable dish] during the day and serves food in the evening [at a street-side fast-food shop]. He heard about surrogacy from a customer at his shop, a Muslim like us. The man told my husband, 'It's a good thing to do,' and then I came to madam [Dr. Patel] and offered to try. We can't live on my husband's earnings, and we had no hope of educating our daughters."
Geeta tells Hochschild how she keeps herself "from getting too attached" to the baby she's gestating: "Whenever I start to think about the baby inside me, I turn my attention to my own daughter. Here she is." She bounces the child on her lap. "That way, I manage."
A recent Israeli documentary called Google Baby also focuses on the experience of Indian surrogates. In fact, its trailer offers an excruciatingly up-close look.
The clip opens with a woman lying draped in surgical gowns. The sounds of flesh being sliced are followed by an infant's first cries. The doctor presiding over the procedure asks the woman from whom she's just removed the baby why she is crying, and then immediately takes a cell phone call to make a pitch for another surrogacy arrangement. Moments later, the surrogate weeps as she is given a quick look at the baby. She's permitted a single caress of the baby's face before it is carried off.
According to a reviewer's summary of the film, Google Baby also depicts an Israeli entrepreneur who has taken the globalization of baby-making to new levels; he observes that "outsourcing to India is very trendy right now." His business model: Recruit American women to supply eggs, have the embryos created in the U.S. where all this is legal and little regulated, freeze the embryos and ship them to the surrogacy brokers in India.
Google Baby was screened last month at the Toronto International Film Festival. The description of the film at its website says that director Zippi Brand Frank "doesn't interject her own opinions" about the global surrogacy business. After watching the clip, that claim surprised me.
