Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy 9781479843589

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Brown Bodies, White Babies

Intersections Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Genders and Sexualities General Editors: Michael Kimmel and Suzanna Walters Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid Lisa Jean Moore

The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality Suzanna Danuta Walters

The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Lionel Cantú Jr. Edited by Nancy A. Politics of Stigma Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz Jason Whitesel

Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Fight over Sexual Rights Sexuality in Gaysian America Edited by Gilbert Herdt C. Winter Han Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queering the Countryside: New FronQueer Visibility in Rural America tiers in Rural Queer Studies Mary L. Gray Edited by Mary L. Gray, Colin R. Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley between Women Leila J. Rupp

Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work Kim Price-Glynn Sex for Life: From Virginity to Viagra, How Sexuality Changes throughout Our Lives Edited by Laura M. Carpenter and John DeLamater The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America’s Schools Jessie Klein One Marriage under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America Melanie Heath Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity Lorena Garcia

Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities Mimi Schippers

Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy Laura Harrison

Brown Bodies, White Babies The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy Laura Harrison

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UN IVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2016 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ISBN: 978-1-4798-0817-5 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-4798-9486-4 (paperback) For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy

1

1. The Path to Gestational Surrogacy: Naturalizing the New Normal

17

2. “Mommy’s Tummy Was Broken”: Surrogacy Enters the Mainstream

43

3. From Mammies to Mommy Machines: Gender and Racialized Reproductive Labor

89

4. The Woman or the Egg? Comparing Surrogacy and Egg Donation Databases

129

5. “I Am the Baby’s Real Mother”: Reproductive Tourism and the Transnational Construction of Kinship

165

Conclusion: From Embryo to “Pre-Born American”

199

Notes

211

References

247

Index

273

About the Author

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v

Acknowledgments

Work on this book, which addresses issue of pregnancy, fertility, and motherhood, has been closely interwoven with my own path of becoming a mother and developing as an academic. I wrote the initial iteration of this text while pregnant with my daughter Ada, and defended my dissertation when she was only about four months old. Significant edits and revisions to the manuscript took place during my first years as a tenure-track professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, including while I was pregnant with my second daughter, Clara. As these events suggest, my ability to complete this book has been inextricably tied to the support I have received from my family, friends, colleagues, and mentors. I have to begin by thanking my mentor and dear friend Suzanna Walters. Suzanna has been there since the beginning of this project with the greatest of generosity in time, advice, and guidance, and is truly like family. I am also indebted to Dorothy Roberts, Stephanie Sanders, Valerie Grim, and Beate Sissenich for their guidance. I am very grateful to my thoughtful and brilliant graduate student colleagues and work group at Indiana University, particularly Sarah Rowley, Nick Clarkson, and Katie Schweighofer, who read countless drafts, gave incisive feedback, and were generous with their friendship. Thank you especially to Sarah, who has edited tirelessly, provided an encouraging sounding board, and been a constant friend. My colleagues in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato have been a wonderful source of feminist spirit, friendship, and inspiration. Thank you to current and former MSU colleagues Maria Bevacqua, Shannon Miller, and Ana Perez, and particularly to Jocelyn Stitt and Nicole Engel for your extensive feedback on drafts of this manuscript. I also appreciate the work of my graduate assistants who have aided me in editing and revision. Thank you also to New York University Press and my editor, Ilene vii

viii | Acknowledgments

Kalish, for your support of this book and your thoughtful comments throughout the process. Several articles based on this research have been published in edited collections and journals. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Women’s Studies International Forum 47 (A): 145–56 in 2014. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in Genders Journal 58 in 2013, and early iterations of this argument occurred in Andrea O’Reilly’s Twenty-FirstCentury Motherhood: Experience, Identity, Policy, Agency (New York: Columbia University Press) in 2010. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers and editors who provided feedback on those pieces. Finally, I want to thank my partner, Tim, for his patience and unwavering confidence in me, and my daughters for reminding me (or challenging me) to take some breaks. Thank you to my parents for their love and support (and occasional babysitting) so that this work could actually get done!

Introduction Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy

On the 2007 premiere of the Lifetime television series Army Wives, the audience is introduced to a woman with a secret. This woman is Pamela, a former police officer who became a stay-at-home mother after her husband enlisted in the military; army men, she says, do not want their wives to work. In order to meet the financial pressures of a single-income family, Pamela agrees to an unusual form of employment: carrying twins for an infertile couple. Pamela keeps the surrogacy a secret from everyone except her husband, and intends to announce publicly that the babies have died during delivery after she relinquishes the children to their “real” parents. In classic television fashion, Pamela’s body does not cooperate with her plans, and the birth becomes a chaotic and alarming event. Pamela experiences her first contractions at a stuffy military tea party, where her water breaks immediately. Her labor advances dramatically, as signaled to the audience when a concerned bystander takes one look at Pamela lying on the bathroom floor and announces, “You’re gonna deliver!”1 Pamela is then covertly rushed to the hospital by the group that will make up the Army Wives core characters, a cadre of military wives and Roland, the only military husband. Of course, Pamela does not make it to the hospital before the first baby begins to crown, requiring an emergency stop at a closed bar, where her new friends deliver the twins on a pool table. Despite all of the drama leading up to this moment, the true surprise is revealed when the white surrogate gives birth to two African American babies. Pamela explains the situation and is reassured that she is doing the right thing by both providing for her family and giving the gift of life. The episode, entitled “A Tribe Is Born,” ends with one of the women throwing open the curtains of the bar and literally shedding light on the surrogacy as well as the new “tribe” that has gathered to witness it.2 1

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Assisted Reproduction and Family Formation This pilot episode of Army Wives speaks to a number of tensions surrounding how surrogacy is imagined in our culture, as well as the core themes of this book. A major debate regarding assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) among a wide range of scholars, ethicists, and particularly feminists has been whether the troubling implications of these technologies are offset by their potential to transform hegemonic and traditionally restrictive family formations.3 The sociological and anthropological study of reproduction has made abundantly clear that fertility is about more than biology. Our understanding of reproduction has always been informed by social rules and expectations, and these norms influence how individuals go about imagining the possibilities for family formation.4 The technologies that separate conception, pregnancy, and parenthood seem to offer new ways to think about reproduction, and thus much more agency to the individual to create families that may flaunt cultural norms. When motherhood is separated into biological, gestational, and social components, new opportunities for pregnancy and parenthood are created that put the very “nature” of race and kinship into question. That being said, the nuclear family has not disintegrated since the advent of reproductive technologies, and neither have beliefs about the biological basis of racial difference been seriously undermined. What I term “cross-racial gestational surrogacy”—when a surrogate carries a pregnancy for intended parents of a different race—demonstrates how boundaries of likeness and difference are drawn and negotiated. Acts that on the surface seem to be radically nontraditional and even artificial are naturalized, such as a woman of color giving birth to the genetic children of a white couple. Indeed, reproductive technologies, including surrogacy, are primarily used in a manner that reinforces the reproduction of the white, heterosexual, married, middle-class family.5 Surrogacy, particularly cross-racial gestational surrogacy, is not just a scientific but also a cultural phenomenon that serves as a repository for unease and anxiety concerning central organizing principles in our society such as race, gender, and kinship. These constructs evolve in response to social change, including technological and scientific advancement, yet are not determined by biological or scientific “truths”;

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rather, such concepts take form through interaction between scientific and popular discourses. Cross-racial surrogacy reveals how contemporary ideologies of race are tightly interwoven with beliefs about science, biology, genetics, and nature. In the most common instances of cross-racial surrogacy, intended parents rely upon the racialized reproductive labor of women of color, employing scientific narratives about genetic determinism to normalize this cross-racial contact. Meanwhile, they juggle the competing message that twenty-first-century America is “post-racial,” or has moved beyond racial hierarchies and discrimination, with the deeply entrenched belief that races are biologically discrete, natural entities. So what are the potentials of these technologies? To answer that question, we must first understand what surrogacy entails in terms of medical intervention and financial commitment, and then take a look at who uses surrogacy and why. While surrogacy itself is not a reproductive technology, the most common form of commercial or paid surrogacy today (known as gestational surrogacy) relies upon relatively intensive medical interventions. When a surrogate is matched with an intended parent and all appropriate screening, testing, and counseling have taken place, an embryo transfer occurs. In preparation, the intended mother or donor receives a combination of hormonal medications to stimulate egg development, and then medication to trigger ovulation. Eggs are then harvested through transvaginal ultrasound aspiration, evaluated for maturity, and inseminated with the sperm of the intended father or donor. Meanwhile, in order for the embryos to implant successfully, the surrogate takes hormones to synchronize her uterine lining with the donor’s reproductive cycle. Within three to five days after the donor eggs are fertilized in the lab, the selected embryos are implanted into the surrogate’s uterus through a small catheter. Excess healthy embryos are often frozen and stored for later use, should the initial attempt fail or for a future pregnancy. The surrogate continues with the hormonal replacement regime until a negative or positive pregnancy test is confirmed; if the transfer was a success, the surrogate remains on the hormone regime throughout the first trimester.6 According to the Centers for Disease Control, in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments cost roughly $12,400 per cycle, and fail 70 percent of the time, suggesting an intensive investment in both time and finances.7

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This process is referred to as “gestational surrogacy” because the use of IVF means that the surrogate gestates, but is not genetically related to, the fetus. In “traditional surrogacy,” the surrogate is artificially inseminated with the father’s or donor’s sperm, and the process is thus less invasive and less expensive. Today, gestational surrogacy tends to be the preference of both surrogates and intended parents. Gestational surrogacy is much more common than traditional surrogacy in commercial (paid) arrangements because it is less likely that a non–genetically related surrogate will be deemed the legal mother should a custody dispute or other complication arise.8 A typical surrogacy in the United States is facilitated by a for-profit agency, and costs between $75,000 and $100,000. This bill often includes an estimated $20,000 payment to the surrogate, as well as fertility clinic fees, legal fees, egg donation fees, and payments to brokers.9 While reproductive technologies such as IVF or intrauterine insemination (IUI) are commonly represented as mere aides to natural, heterosexual reproduction, the possibilities for family formation that are created by such technologies far exceed the bounds of the traditional nuclear family. This is in part reflected in the variety of reasons that lead people to choose surrogacy. For women, some of the most common are recurrent miscarriage, congenital absence of the uterus, a previous hysterectomy, and medical conditions or medications that make pregnancy too risky, such as cystic fibrosis, severe diabetes, or breast cancer.10 Women in many parts of the world are increasingly delaying childbearing until later in life, in part due to a lack of female- and family-friendly workplace policies. Without downplaying the extreme financial and emotional hardships that often attend reproductive technology use, they allow those who can afford them greater flexibility in forming families outside marriage, or after achieving career milestones. Surrogacy has also created new pathways for reproduction for queer families. Lesbians frequently use vaginal insemination, intrauterine insemination, and in vitro fertilization to achieve pregnancy, and may use surrogacy if neither partner is able to carry a pregnancy.11 Both lesbians and gay men frequently face barriers to adoption, and may be motivated to seek out ARTs by the desire to have a genetically related child. ARTs have the potential to intervene in normative models of family formation, whether by opening doors to parenthood for individuals who have his-

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torically been barred by institutionalized heteronormativity and active discrimination, or by creating kinship formations that are not biologically determined, phallocentric, or racially “pure.” As the title suggests, this project is particularly interested in how race intersects with reproductive technologies—how brown bodies are deployed in the creation of white babies. Through the advent of the reproductive technologies that make gestational surrogacy possible, the maternal body no longer exists as the sole site of reproductive labor. Both egg and sperm can be donated or purchased, and then fertilized in a lab, and even the literal labor of pregnancy operates as an available commodity. The separation between genetics and gestation has opened the door to racial difference, in multiple forms. A gay male couple in Israel, prohibited from using surrogacy in their own country, can purchase eggs from a woman of their own religious and racial background and then hire a woman in Nepal to bear the child. An infertile white woman in Michigan can find an egg donor in Iowa and an African American surrogate in a state “friendlier” to surrogacy, like California. A Hispanic military wife in Texas can bear twins for a Swedish couple who are able to provide eggs and sperm but not a hospitable womb, and who do not live in a country that allows for paid surrogacy. As a result of the advent of gestational surrogacy through in vitro fertilization, the surrogate, no longer a genetic contributor to the child, need not “match” the characteristics or desires of the intended parents, including their race and ethnicity. This means that according to contemporary racial logic, women of color who act as surrogates for white families are sharing a biological connection (the “environment” of the womb and more) with the fetus, while still giving birth to babies who are understood to be white. What does cross-racial surrogacy tell us about the way we understand race as a social, genetic, or biological factor? About racial “transmission” and how it has changed over time? While ARTs have the potential to complicate the socially imposed boundaries that maintain the constructs of race, kinship, and gender, the racialization of surrogacy reveals an ongoing commitment to their maintenance. This project analyzes both the emancipatory potential of ARTs and the changing means by which the challenges they pose are reabsorbed into the hegemonic norm. The aforementioned episode of Army Wives speaks to some of these questions. Because she is carrying twins for a couple of another race,

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Pamela is a cross-racial gestational surrogate. Yet contrary to what the Army Wives episode represents, the person of color in a cross-racial matching is nearly always the surrogate, not the intended parents. Surrogates and intended parents are frequently separated by disparities in class, educational background, and cultural capital, with the intended parents occupying the more privileged position. When the surrogate is a person of color and the intended parents are white, race affords the intended parents another layer of privilege. This reflects a long history in the United States of economically and racially dominant social groups relying on the reproductive labor of women of color as nannies, maids, and caretakers for the elderly. The producers of Army Wives could have several strategic reasons for reversing the racial roles. In this episode of Army Wives, Pamela is prompted to explain her role as a surrogate in order to dismiss the specter of cross-racial sex. Indeed, the birth of nonwhite twins leads the group of women to collectively turn to Roland, the only male and only African American in their ranks, forcing him to deny paternity. Pamela is doubly situated as a nonmother to the children through visual and verbal reference to racial difference, reinforcing her gestational role as purely custodial. She thus does not become a “bad mother” by handing over the children to their genetic (read: real) parents, and remains sympathetic to the audience. The program is able to address race in the pilot episode without explicitly engaging with the issues of power and privilege that simmer just below the surface. While this episode does not use the phrase “intended parents,” it is one that is routinely employed by surrogacy agencies as well as industry and scholarly sources. The term refers to the individuals who commission surrogacy and therefore “intend” to raise the child. This terminology differentiates the gestational role of the surrogate (and the genetic contribution of any donors involved in the process) from the social role of parenting. The concept of “intent” also has legal connotations; a wellknown case of contested surrogacy in the 1990s was decided on the basis of intent, with the court ruling that a commissioning couple’s intent to parent trumped a gestational surrogate’s desire to retain custody of the nongenetic child to whom she gave birth. The precedent of intent set in this case has since been used to settle other surrogacy-related disputes.12 Given that intent has been used in a legal sense to bolster the rights of

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commissioning couples at the expense of surrogates, it is also a phrase that potentially masks the privileges of the former, including race and class differences that may advantage intended parents socially, economically, and legally. The phrase “intended parents” will be used throughout this book, but I will also challenge its potential for benign anonymity by foregrounding intersectional analyses of how multiple identity categories coexist to cumulatively shape the experiences of all parties involved. Cross-racial gestational surrogacy has proliferated in recent decades due to technological advancements in the reproductive technology industry, as well as prevailing popular discourses concerning racial “transmission.” Consumers of reproductive technologies are encouraged by popular scientific discourse to compartmentalize gestation and genetics, believing that the qualities that determine the identity of their future child are locked into the child’s genes. As a result, many intended parents do not hesitate to choose a gestational surrogate of a different race. This genetic essentialism, in which cultural meanings of the gene conflate with the scientific or biological, “reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral complexity, with their genes.”13 The role of the surrogate is minimized when DNA is framed as the sole arbiter of the “true self.”14 Genetic essentialism also raises questions for how our society defines race; as I will demonstrate, race and ethnicity are cast as attributes carried by sperm and egg in the ART industry, thus whiteness can be “commercially reproduced”15 even in cross-racial surrogacy arrangements. When intended parents, surrogates, donors, fertility clinics, and others all play their parts in the fiction that race is reproduced genetically, then these actors and institutions are reinforcing a social “truth” about race rather than a scientific one. In other words, ART use in the United States reifies cultural attitudes about the biological basis for racial difference, while scientific and academic arguments to the contrary largely fail to trickle down into the popular consciousness. Although gestational carriers are employed in less than 1 percent of ART procedures tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),16 the figures are increasing exponentially, with the number of reporting fertility clinics that offer gestational carrier services rising from 69 percent in 200117 to 86 percent in 2011.18 Crossracial gestational surrogacy is also a small but seemingly growing

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phenomenon. In a groundbreaking ethnographic study, the anthropologist Heléna Ragoné calculated that roughly 30 percent of gestational arrangements in the largest surrogacy programs at the time were between surrogates and intended parents of different ethnic and racial backgrounds.19 The exact percentage of surrogacy contracts in the United States today that are cross-racial is unknown, in part because the CDC does not collect racial identifiers from the individual clinics that report ART success rates. When women of color work as surrogates, they are tapping into a history of racialized reproductive labor in the United States in which dominant groups rely upon the reproductive potential of nonwhite women, women whose own reproductive desires have historically been thwarted and even demonized. Yet reproductive technologies are not determined by this history. The intimate interracial contact of cross-racial gestational surrogacy has the potential to blur boundaries of racial “purity.” It also disrupts long-standing hierarchies valuing the types of families that deserve to be reproduced, as in the revelatory moment in Army Wives when a white surrogate gives birth in the service of creating an African American family. This moment also expands upon traditional narratives of what birth means for the woman experiencing labor; it is through surrogacy that Pamela creates her own alternative family formation, made up of a group of army spouses that cross boundaries of race, class, sex, and military rank. Rather than bonding with the babies in the traditional fashion, whereby biology determines maternal nature, Pamela bonds with a group of fictive kin who support her in a way that her “real” family does not. The challenge to traditional maternity that Pamela represents in this episode also raises some of the central questions of this book: what kind of ideological and cultural work is done socially and legally to shore up traditional notions of family, gender, and race in the face of changing reproductive technologies? How are reproductive technologies naturalized so that these hegemonic constructs retain cultural salience? Feminists and other ethicists have raised serious concerns about whether reproductive technologies and surrogacy represent increased agency for the various actors involved, including infertile women, egg donors, and surrogates.20 These concerns include whether or not the relative issues at stake for each of these groups are given equal weight; in other words,

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does the “natural” desire of intended parents to create a biological family overshadow the potential economic and bodily exploitation of egg donors and surrogates? Or from another perspective, do paternalistic and culturally specific concerns about what constitutes exploitative labor in fact limit women’s agency and ability to support their families? While this project does not seek to resolve the ethical and moral implications of surrogacy, I am interested in the tension between the potential for ARTs to destabilize hegemonic ideologies of what it means to be family, a mother, to share “blood” and “likeness,” and the dominant uses of ARTs that tend to reinforce traditional constructs.

Methods and Overview of the Book Surrogacy receives popular and legal attention that is disproportionate to its actual use. Why study surrogacy when it is a statistically infrequent means of family formation in the United States today? Why do the ethical, moral, and political conundrums raised by surrogacy loom so large in the public consciousness? As the sociologist Susan Markens argues, surrogacy can be read as a form of “symbolic politics,” or “debates that reflect underlying social tensions and concerns.”21 Likewise, small-scale or minority phenomena such as cross-racial gestational surrogacy, gay and lesbian parenting, or interracial marriage provide insight into the battle lines that are drawn between hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces, as well as the ways normative ideologies exert and remake themselves in the wake of challenges. In light of this, the actual frequency of gestational surrogacy in the United States is not central to my argument; this project analyzes the discourse surrounding gestational surrogacy, how it is naturalized, and whether this naturalization serves to shore up dominant ideologies of race and kinship. This book contributes to an active field of literature on reproductive technologies while addressing understudied aspects of surrogacy within this scholarship. With notable exceptions, feminist analyses of surrogacy have largely focused on the gendered implications of the practice and minimized the role of race.22 My research takes intersectionality as a crucial starting point, examining the ways identity categories come together to form nexuses of privilege and oppression.23 Fertility clinics, surrogacy agencies, and intended parents often dismiss the role of race

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in gestational surrogacy arrangements as inconsequential, particularly in comparison to the race of egg and sperm donors who will contribute their genetic material. A surrogate is measured instead by markers of appropriate femininity, including the completeness of her own biological family and the perceived authenticity of her altruistic motivations. Yet gender identity is not isolated from socially identified race, and thus the race of the surrogate takes on varying levels of importance in relation to other intersectional constructs. For example, white European and American intended parents may read the race, class, and gender of surrogates in India as signifiers of docility, hyperfertility, and Otherness. These factors then increase the perceived attractiveness of Indian women as ideal reproductive laborers. Intersectionality adds a critical layer of analysis to cross-racial gestational surrogacy. In addition to having a primary focus on gender, much of the relevant scholarship on reproductive technologies has been ethnographic. These works often study the motivations of the actors involved in ARTs and interrogate the ethical issues raised by such practices.24 This book is invested in a different set of questions, primarily concerning the discourse on surrogacy in the United States, and what it tells us about larger ideologies of race, gender, and kinship. Discourse consists of both what is said and what is silenced, and while capable of transmitting and producing power, it can also reveal the mechanisms of power and provide strategies for resistance.25 Discourse is “a social construction of reality, a form of knowledge”; thus my analysis speaks to how the discussions about race, gender, and kinship within surrogacy discourse are not isolated to this small-scale phenomenon, but actually have broader implications for shifting social roles and identities.26 This project involves a multisited, qualitative analysis of sources, requiring an interdisciplinary methodology that treats surrogacy as a site that reveals larger social anxieties concerning race, gender, and kinship. Interdisciplinary, qualitative research allows for themes to emerge after the process of data collection; in this project, this means that the overarching questions about surrogacy led me to certain sites, texts, and sources, rather than limiting these sources to match one methodological approach. As I began to research the development of surrogacy into a transnational, multibillion-dollar industry, it was clear that this business is built upon shifting ideologies of femininity, racial difference,

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and the value of women’s work. Thus, I was drawn to multiple sites of investigation, including the law, mass media, the history of racialized reproductive labor, and the contemporary mediated spaces—the websites and databases—where the services of surrogate and egg donors are advertised. While these sites are multiple, they are not entirely disconnected from one another. They weave together the complicated strands of commerce, representation, policy, and historical precedent with contemporary and rapidly shifting cultural norms about what makes a family. Chapter 1 places reproductive technologies in historical perspective, beginning with the 1978 birth of the first child born through in vitro fertilization, the attendant explosion of infertility services in the United States, and the development of gestational surrogacy. This chapter also considers how the advent of gestational surrogacy complicates the selection of a surrogate, the surrogate population, and the role of race in the reproductive technology industry. Chapter 1 introduces the feminist framework within which this book is situated by contextualizing the varied feminist responses to ARTs in the last several decades. Early feminist writing on ARTs commonly cast these technologies as either oppressive tools of the patriarchy or an unmitigated good. The realities of surrogacy beg for a more complicated framework; the following chapters situate cross-racial surrogacy within specific gendered, racial, historical, and legal contexts. Chapter 2 is based on a qualitative analysis of mainstream media sources that covered surrogacy from 2000 to 2010, including newspapers, magazines, radio, and television news. Multiple—and often competing—narratives of surrogacy coexisted in the popular media. These narratives are significant because it is through the media that most people are introduced to surrogacy. This analysis resulted in the emergence of three primary themes in mainstream media coverage of surrogacy: a “women-helping-women” narrative, the call for regulation, and “the kinship question.” The theme of women helping women is most prevalent; it explains surrogacy primarily through the relationship between women, in which altruism motivates one woman to help another reach the apotheosis of femininity by becoming a mother. Problematically, the common representation of this exchange is as an equal one, whereby the differences between monetary compensation and a child

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are flattened through the leveling effects of altruism. Another theme is the recurrent call for regulation, in which narratives of surrogacy (particularly those warning of the dangers of the practice) have moved away from a focus on the individual “bad” surrogate or manipulative intended parents. Instead, these narratives emphasize the lack of regulation at the state and federal level as the principal villain. In effect, the transfer of babies through surrogacy is not condemned as inherently exploitative to either women or children but is rather cast as a market in need of protective legislation. Finally, media discourse on surrogacy raises the kinship question, which reflects the anxieties raised by ARTs’ challenges to the traditional family. There are multiple strands of this discourse; some focus on the “unnatural,” “brave new world” aspect of ARTs, while others participate in the naturalization of ARTs by framing ART-created families as “just like us.” Chapter 3 examines how discourses of race are influenced by the economic and reproductive imperatives of society at different historical moments. This chapter historicizes how ideologies of race and racial “transmission” were adapted during the era of cross-racial wet nursing in America in response to the labor needs of the white dominant classes. Both cross-racial wet nursing and cross-racial gestational surrogacy are evidence of the hegemonic power of dominant groups to naturalize deeply racialized and gendered practices in ways that economically benefit the interests of these groups. In this chapter I compare historical examples of racialized reproduction to contemporary examples with an analysis of two legal cases involving cross-racial gestational surrogacy: Johnson v. Calvert, the first case in the United States in which a gestational surrogate sought child custody, and the more recent 2009 trial, Marion County Division of Children’s Services v. Melinger. The specifics of these two cases vary dramatically; most notably, the African American surrogate Anna Johnson went to court for custody of the child she bore, while the more recent case focused on the parental fitness of the white intended father. What these trials have in common is that in both instances racial difference between the surrogate and intended parents served the interests of the racially and economically privileged parties. Like cross-racial wet nursing, crossracial gestational surrogacy is part of a complicated history of racialized reproductive labor in the United States.

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In chapter 4, I contextualize the shifting popular and scientific discourses of race since the mid-twentieth century by analyzing databases of egg donors and surrogates created by agencies to connect intended parents with the women who provide these services. From lists put together by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, I selected agencies that provided both egg donation and surrogacy services. This allowed me to contrast how traits like the race and ethnicity of surrogates and egg donors were represented both within and across organizations. This chapter examines the tenacity with which a biological framework for race has persisted, aided by the increased commodification of scientific research. Race, alongside traits such as eye color, intelligence, and personality, is coded as having biological origins. Reproductive technologies demonstrate that despite scientific debates, ARTs and other race-based medicines continue to promote and reflect a popular understanding of distinct biological races. Thus the egg donor and surrogacy databases built by ART clinics reflect often-unspoken assumptions about race and heritability, and demonstrate how scientific and academic assertions of the biological meaninglessness of race largely fail to trickle down into the popular consciousness. Chapter 5 extends my analysis of cross-racial gestational surrogacy to consider the transnational circuits of reproductive labor from the United States to India, particularly what is known as “reproductive tourism.” Broadly speaking, reproductive tourism is a relatively recent term coined to describe the increasing travel across national boundaries by individuals seeking fertility services, including donor eggs and sperm, procedures such as in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy. Reproductive tourism is motivated by a number of factors, such as the varied legal restrictions on ARTs in many European nations, long waiting lists for donors and surrogates, and prohibitively expensive prices that prospective parents can greatly reduce by “shopping around” for services. Through secondary sources, magazine, newspaper, and television coverage, and documentary films, this chapter examines how notions of race and genetic determinism are mapped uneasily onto surrogacy in India. Intended parents benefit from the racial and economic “difference” between themselves and Indian surrogates. These power differentials include the stark reality that surrogates have little recourse should they be

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| Introduction

mistreated. Intended parents are also able to naturalize their claims to kinship with their future children in juxtaposition to the “Otherness” of the surrogate. I conclude this chapter with a reimagining of reproductive tourism as something that happens not only transnationally, but also within national borders. If one takes seriously the social disparities between contracting parties, I ask, does reproductive tourism also exist within the United States? To varying extents, each chapter addresses material that is in some way time-sensitive. New media narratives of surrogacy are constantly being produced, fertility clinics are updating their databases with every new donor and surrogate that they accept, and the purview of reproductive tourism expands continuously as entrepreneurial individuals set their sights on nations whose reproductive resources remain untapped. Most significantly, innovations in reproductive technologies advance at a rate with which it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep pace. However, the arguments and theoretical frameworks that underpin this research remain relevant, largely because this project resonates beyond the specificity of ARTs and draws historicized comparisons that tap into a much longer tradition of cross-racial reproductive labor. I conclude this study by linking the core themes to the increasing hostility to women’s reproductive rights at the local, state, and national level, namely, the recent spate of state amendments concerning fetal personhood. As feminist theory and practice have consistently urged us to recognize, personal or private matters such as ART use can in fact have enormous repercussions for how we think about, politicize, and adjudicate some of the most sacred aspects of our existence. While this book examines a narrow slice of the field of reproductive politics and reproductive justice, many readers will come to this topic with some personal experience or future aspirations regarding pregnancy, fertility, and family building. I was not a mother when I began researching this book, but have given birth to two children during the writing process. The experience of being pregnant while reading, researching, and writing about ideologies of gender, fertility, and motherhood has changed the way I think about my own position within these frameworks. I hope that this book will offer readers a new way of thinking as well, particularly about how our intersecting identities shape our expectations of fertility services, our access to them, and how we view ourselves as a

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15

consumer or (re)producer within this active market. I hope that this book provides readers with the understanding that whether we ever enter the market for fertility services ourselves, surrogacy and the discourse surrounding it are indicative of broader social debates and contestation over gender roles, boundaries of racial difference, and the meaning of kinship.

1

The Path to Gestational Surrogacy Naturalizing the New Normal

Headlines announcing the birth of Louise Brown were both optimistic— “‘Test Tube Baby’ First of Many, Doctors Say”— and discouraging— “Don’t Get Hopes Up, Women Warned.”1 These appeared in the Los Angeles Times just a day apart, on July 27 and 28 of 1978, announcing that England was home to the first baby successfully born through in vitro fertilization. The United States was not far behind; Brown’s birth was followed three years later by that of the first American “test tube baby,” Elizabeth Carr. In vitro fertilization (IVF) involves harvesting a woman’s eggs, fertilizing them in a lab, and then implanting the fertilized embryos into the uterus, thus decoupling procreation from sexual intercourse. This separation between sex and reproduction was disturbing to some; as the term “test tube babies” suggests, at its advent, IVF was viewed by many as cold, unnatural, even monstrous. Less than forty years later, an estimated five million babies have been born using IVF,2 suggesting that the initial stigma surrounding the procedure and the children whom it produces has largely vanished. Indeed, IVF and its corollary, gestational surrogacy, have transformed from a family secret to a celebrity feature story, with actresses like Elizabeth Banks, Mariah Carey, and Nicole Kidman openly sharing their use. Despite the contemporary assimilation of assisted reproductive technologies into the reproductive norm, IVF has had complicated repercussions, and readers of the aforementioned headlines were left with many questions: Would these technologies lead to a leveling of the reproductive playing field for all women, or did Brown’s birth represent false hope of a “cure” for infertility? Were ARTs an aid to natural, heterosexual reproduction that would produce “beautiful, normal” babies, as Brown’s physician described her, or an unnatural technological invasion that would colonize women’s bodies?3 The answer is far more compli17

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cated than these polarized options suggest, despite the fact that extreme characterizations of ARTs largely dominated the popular discourse of the time. Indeed, this moment was framed by many ethicists as “somewhere between a nightmare and unmitigated sin” while simultaneously boosting the hopes of infertile couples who had given up on conceiving a child.4 The advent of IVF marked the initial fragmentation of motherhood into multiple biological and social components, including the potential for a new kind of surrogacy in which the “gestational carrier” is not genetically related to the child she bears. The context in which technologies such as IVF emerged is significant; technologies are not neutral, nor are their uses predetermined.5 Politics and technologies are coproduced, such that the outcome of technological innovation is shaped by the historical and social environment. In addition to mapping this context, this chapter will examine how reproductive technologies and surrogacy have evolved from the first IVF birth, and consider how rapid growth and change impact the type of feminist theorizing that these technologies necessitate. The meanings of these technologies are not set, nor are their implications determined. Rather, the possibilities for kinship have multiplied legally, theoretically, technologically, and commercially, as this chapter will explore.

Infertility, Race, and the Growth of ARTs The birth of Louise Brown was followed by a flurry of media and scientific attention to in vitro fertilization. This interest contributed to the establishment of a burgeoning specialty of endocrinology and infertility medicine, and what are now known as assisted reproductive technologies. ARTs, according to the CDC, consist of “all fertility treatments in which egg and sperm are handled” including IVF, gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT) and zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT).6 Physicians began to use ARTs in the United States in 1981 despite low rates of success, high costs, and the disapproval of groups such as the Catholic Church, which condemned the separation of reproduction from sex.7 As demand for fertility services rose, so too did the realization among doctors and researchers of the money-making potential of the field. In response, the market for infertility procedures expanded from private

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clinics and universities to larger commercial enterprises, infertility diagnoses increased, and popular awareness of the problem spread.8 The number of fertility clinics and specialists grew exponentially in the 1980s and 1990s, aided by a greater understanding of the biology of human reproduction, growth in the field of endocrinology, and the introduction of medication targeting fertility problems.9 The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) reports that from 1985 (the first year that the organization began collecting these data) to the end of 2006, half a million babies were born in the United States as a result of ART procedures. According to the same organization, ARTs have contributed to the conception of about one in every hundred babies born in the United States since 2002.10 The growth in these industries was also influenced by the public perception of infertility, and of whom it affected. The numbers of individuals seeking fertility services increased due to growing awareness of reproductive technologies and improving success rates.11 In addition, a growing cultural panic emerged in the early 1980s as the American public was inundated with reports of a wave of infertility among married couples.12 These fears were not race-neutral; the mainstream media routinely represented the public face of infertility as a white family seeking a miracle baby through IVF.13 While evidence of growing white infertility was lacking, infertility rates among young black women tripled between 1965 and 1982.14 This time period also saw attacks on the reproductive rights of women of color as part of the government’s War on Poverty, including federal funding in the 1970s for the sterilization of women on Medicaid, welfare, food stamps, and public housing.15 The perceived (yet unsubstantiated) “epidemic” of infertility among middle-class white women fit neatly within a parallel rhetoric that warned of the breakdown of the nuclear family due to women’s increased entry into the workforce, rising divorce rates, and a dearth of adoptable babies.16 By this logic, the United States had a low supply of children available for adoption, when the subtext of this rhetoric reads “adoptable” as a euphemism for white, newborn, and nondisabled.17 The lowered numbers of healthy white infants resulted in part from the decriminalization of abortion and increased access to effective contraceptives.18 Yet the feminist theorist Laura Briggs argues that an overemphasis has been placed on the effect of abortion and contraception on

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adoption rates, which dropped dramatically in the 1970s, and that the greatest factor was the ability and willingness of single women to raise children on their own.19 While popular media stories frequently cite the lack of adoptable children as a causal link to the use and development of ARTs, this logic deserves interrogation. In reality, the number of children in foster care, many of whom become available for adoption, doubled between 1982 and 1999. Unsurprisingly, the racial demographic of these children is not reflective of cities or states from which they are drawn. As of 2002, black children made up 42 percent of all children in foster care in the United States, even though this minority group represents only 17 percent of the country’s youth.20 These statistics reflect the differential value placed on children available for adoption since World War II. White infants are cast as a precious resource with a clear value for infertile couples, while older children, disabled children, and children of color are perceived to be a drain on the resources (namely, the tax dollars) of the middle class.21 In this cultural context, racial identity is conflated with desirability, such that “in the American market, a Black baby is indisputably an inferior product.”22 As such, the massive for-profit industries that cater to Americans’ reproductive needs have developed along an axis of what Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp term “stratified reproduction,” or a set of power relations in which certain categories of people are encouraged to reproduce while the needs of others are delegitimized.23 Moreover, the linkages between ARTs, abortion politics, adoption, and race make clear that the rise in ARTs must be understood in relation to changing ideologies of family and of beliefs about “good” or “deserving” mothers. The very definition of infertility, while seemingly neutral, is in actuality a social construct. Infertility is caused by a wide variety of biological, social, and environmental factors including inadequate health care, forced sterilization, hazardous workplace conditions, and environmental pollution, and it is commonly diagnosed using heterosexual parameters that exclude lesbians and single women.24 Accordingly, some scholars differentiate between “medical infertility,” such as blocked fallopian tubes or low sperm count; “structural infertility,” or the absence of a heterosexual partner; and “cultural infertility,” which “refers to the inability to become pregnant because of cost or discrimination or social attitudes.”25 Such distinctions, while rarely recognized, are useful

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21

because they effectively mark the supposedly neutral generic term “infertility” as bearing a race, class, and sexual normativity. Despite this, delayed marriage and the postponement of childbearing have overshadowed other issues as the most alarming cause of infertility in the United States, reflecting a hierarchy of racialized and gendered concerns about reproduction.

The Feminist Response to ARTs The feminist women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s provided an alternative to the dominant message that infertility could be cured only through recourse to institutionalized medicine. The women’s health movement encouraged women to take control of their bodies and their reproduction with books like Our Bodies, Ourselves and the advent of women-owned health centers.26 Feminist health clinics aimed to reduce the gender-based power differential between medical care providers and women seeking services, often by training community health care workers to learn about their own bodies, perform exams, and then train other women.27 Single women and lesbians were empowered to create families outside male-dominated health care settings, and provided with the education and tools for self-insemination. Although sperm banks routinely turned away unmarried women, donors could be found through friends or extended social networks, and gay men often provided sperm for lesbian couples.28 Despite the do-it-yourself embrace of low-tech, women-centered interventions into fertility within the women’s movement, by the 1980s feminists were deeply divided in their response to rapidly evolving ART innovations. Mainstream liberal feminists broadly supported the advancement of reproductive technologies during the mid-1980s and early 1990s, framing ARTs as tools of reproductive freedom representative of women’s choice to control their bodies.29 Feminists questioned whether women should be required to abide by surrogacy contracts, or be given the chance to reconsider the decision to relinquish the child after giving birth. According to liberal feminists, surrogacy contracts must be enforced; to dissolve them would shore up essentialist and conservative ideologies of femininity and deny women reproductive and democratic freedom.30 To claim that surrogates should not be bound by contract

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would mean treading on dangerous territory; it would reify assumptions about women’s instinctive maternal “nature,” inability to make rational decisions, and inherent emotionality.31 As this argument went, successful commercial and altruistic surrogacy arrangements were evidence that a woman’s physical ability to gestate did not determine her social role as a mother. Yet liberal feminists were divided on whether commercial surrogacy (in which the surrogate receives financial compensation) and altruistic or “gift” surrogacy (often arranged between family members or friends) should be handled differently. Some believed that commercial surrogacy contracts should be invalidated because, like consensual slavery, a commercial surrogacy contract “violates the ongoing freedom of the individual,” but that gift surrogacy should be allowed if the surrogate is given the option to reverse her decision after the child is born.32 Others argued that all pregnancies exist under conditions of vulnerability, which are not unique to contract surrogacy.33 While liberal arguments such as these were largely representative of the mainstream feminist position on surrogacy and ARTs during the 1980s, it was (and arguably continues to be) the radical feminist perspective on reproductive technologies that translated into the popular consciousness as the feminist position of the time period. This may be an effect of the mainstream media’s tendency to present debates as hopelessly polarized, or reflect the wider cultural backlash that paints feminism as reactionary and antifamily. As it was, radical and cultural feminist responses to reproductive technologies during the 1970s and 1980s were largely critical. Many cultural feminists claimed that men were alienated from reproduction and therefore desired to locate the power of birth more firmly within the domain of male control.34 Women should celebrate their unique culture and consciousness, the argument went, and embrace natural childbirth and labor while rejecting masculinist technologies. More “technophobic” radical feminist thinkers, such as Andrea Dworkin, Gena Corea, and Barbara Katz Rothman, expanded upon this cultural feminist concern with male appropriation of reproduction.35 In her 1983 book Right-Wing Women, Dworkin situates surrogacy within what she calls the “farming model,” in which individual men use and exploit women for reproduction.36 Dworkin viewed surrogacy as an aid to pa-

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triarchy, arguing that “motherhood is becoming a new branch of female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to the womb for experimentation and for power.”37 Radical feminists feared that reproductive technologies reflected a conspiracy whereby the male “pharmacracy” exercised social dominance through medicalization, seizing control of women’s reproductive power, and ensuring that procreation was just as alienating an experience for women as it was for men.38 The socialist feminist Shulamith Firestone offered an alternative perspective on reproduction before assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization were even a possibility. Firestone’s early second-wave polemic The Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970 prior to the first IVF birth, predicted a future in which both production and reproduction would be radically re-envisioned. This revolution would destroy the class system and the family as cybernation took over responsibility for both work and gestation. In contrast to the later work of anti–reproductive technology feminists, Firestone argued that the technological fruits of science could be liberating for women if used properly.39 Like Firestone, some radical feminists pushed back against what were purported to be women’s natural maternal instincts, arguing that they were actually produced by the manipulations of a patriarchal society. Patriarchal social relations obscured the unappealing realities of maternity (boredom, exhaustion, drudgery) through processes of socialization that led women to believe that their identities were dependent upon achieving motherhood. This argument was particularly radical because it belied traditional social narratives that posited motherhood as the natural apotheosis of a woman’s life, a sign of maturity, and a tragedy if left unfulfilled. They claimed that women turn to reproductive technologies to neutralize the threat of infertility, yet those technologies transform children into commodities and put a price tag on life itself.40 To support their claims, radical feminists cited the sexual division of labor, unequal pay, educational barriers, and limited economic opportunities as evidence of the oppressive conditions that make marriage and motherhood falsely appealing—and infertility particularly threatening.41 This perspective largely posited women as victims of false consciousness and cultural dupes who were unable to recognize that their desires were being manipulated at the expense of their own personal

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development and autonomy.42 These feminists feared that reproductive technologies were contributing to, if not increasing, the stratification of society by class, race, age, and gender in terms of access to technologies and services provided.43 Further, anti-surrogacy feminists argued that the practice commodified women’s labor and children themselves, degrading all parties involved; they warned that surrogacy would create a “breeder class” populated by minority and working-class women who would be relegated to “baby farms.”44 Essentially, anti-surrogacy feminists argued that surrogacy was alienating, underpaid labor based on illegitimate contracts that exploited poor women’s economic condition and reproduced sexual inequality.45 Feminist writing and activism surrounding reproductive technologies continued to take shape after the second wave of the women’s movement. As social attitudes toward ARTs changed and its uses multiplied, so did the tenor of feminist scholarship. Some radical and socialist feminists saw the potential of ARTs to disrupt the traditional, heterosexual family by creating new opportunities for gay parenting.46 Yet another subset of feminist scholars insisted that analyses of ARTs start from the position of women who were using them, which motivated self-reflexive scholarship from academics with firsthand experience of reproductive technologies.47 Feminists of color have also played an important role in shaping feminist perspectives on reproductive technologies, particularly through the reproductive justice movement. This movement began in the 1990s, built by women of color who felt that their concerns were underrepresented by the white-dominated reproductive rights organizations. Coalitions such as SisterSong, cofounded by the black women’s rights activist Loretta Ross, prioritize a set of concerns that are broader than those of the mainstream pro-choice movement. They instead focus on a transnational, human rights framework that centralizes women’s right to make decisions about their bodies and sexualities, including the right to raise children in a healthy environment.48 The reproductive justice movement contextualizes ARTs in relation to eugenic policies in the United States, including the forced sterilization of the working class and minorities and the use of minority populations for reproductive testing and experimentation. As Charis Thompson argues in Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies, these post–second-wave

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writings did not view technologies as monolithic: “they saw in the development of reproductive technologies the potential to articulate new ways of embodying reproduction, some of which would disrupt conventional families and gender stereotypes, and they refused to read ARTs as simply signing and sealing preexisting oppressive social orders.”49 While feminists do not seek consensus on the politics of reproductive technologies, contemporary scholarship continues to reveal productive tensions surrounding questions of autonomy, agency, and the potentials of ARTs. This project aims to further that conversation; ARTs continue to develop in ways that have the opportunity to destabilize the oppressive constructs that feminists have historically critiqued. Yet the way that these technologies are normatively deployed often shores up traditional institutions of family and marriage. Cross-racial surrogacy highlights these tensions, the historical and legal precedents, and the processes of naturalization that normalize this form of reproductive labor.

Surrogacy: From Traditional to Gestational While feminists debated the implications of reproductive technologies, important shifts were occurring in the fertility market. Prior to the advent of IVF, all surrogacy in the United States was “traditional” surrogacy. A surrogate was inseminated with the sperm of the prospective father or donor, making her the genetic “mother” to the child. After the child was born, the intended mother would then adopt the baby to become the legal mother. In these “traditional” surrogacy arrangements, intended parents are motivated to find surrogates who are more than just physically capable of carrying a pregnancy. In addition to reproductive health and “chemistry” between contracting parties, the surrogate must also possess the traits valued by the intended parents, including those centered around race and ethnicity, education, intelligence, and personality. Although prices varied, some surrogacy brokers were charging couples $20,000 to $45,000 for matches with a traditional surrogate, including a $10,000 payment to the surrogate and $15,000 for the broker and other expenses.50 Despite the high cost of the practice and the controversy surrounding it, a 1987 Gallup poll found that a significant number of Americans were willing to consider surrogacy as a viable option for family formation; indeed, 35 percent of respondents replied

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that they would consider using a surrogate if unable to conceive due to health reasons.51 A very important breakthrough in the field of reproductive technologies occurred in the mid-1980s, when the first successful pregnancies were conceived using donated eggs.52 Before donor eggs became available as a commodity, IVF could resolve infertility only for women who could produce healthy eggs of their own or obtain them from a friend or relative. The development of an egg donation market transformed these cells into consumer goods to be bought and sold, or euphemistically “donated” with remuneration for time and discomfort. This shift had major repercussions for IVF and surrogacy; once a split occurred between the donation of an egg and the use of a womb, both suppliers of eggs and surrogates multiplied. More women were willing to donate eggs if they did not have to carry a pregnancy (as they did in traditional surrogacy), and more women were willing to become surrogates if they were not genetically related to the child whom they would relinquish to the intended parents.53 With the availability of donor egg IVF, intended parents without viable eggs can purchase a donor egg from one woman, fertilize the egg with the sperm of the intended father (or another donor), and have the embryo transferred into the womb of the intended mother or a gestational surrogate. In effect, gestational surrogacy separates women’s reproductive capacities into three elements: genetic (egg donor), gestational (surrogate), and social (intended mother). Gestational surrogacy highlights this disaggregation of the concept of motherhood into a series of biological, genetic, embodied, and social processes. Traditionally, giving birth to a child has served as unquestioned evidence of maternity, with alternative means to social motherhood available primarily through adoption. Surrogacy and ARTs complicate this pattern, distributing motherhood across multiple bodies, spaces, and places: the egg donor, surrogate, and contracting intended parent all have potential claims to biological, gestational, or social motherhood. Is motherhood determined in the lab? By the courts? By intent? Through a contract? Or in the case of gay male intended parents, is motherhood removed altogether? These potentials have multiplied alongside a growing cultural embrace of genetics and DNA as core determinants of our identity, providing a supposedly indelible map of heritable traits ranging from the

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intensity of eye color to the intensity of temper.54 As the discourse of genetic determinism intertwines with the growing demand for reproductive technologies, families are increasingly defined through shared biological substances understood as genes rather than through social affiliations.55 Historically, Americans have adopted metaphors of blood—“blood is thicker than water,” “my own flesh and blood,” “blood will tell”—as codes for racial and familial belonging.56 Today, laypeople substitute genes for blood as they adopt a genetic logic of kinship, eliding scientific theories with social facts.57 It is important to note that the public interpretation of scientific “truth” does not occur in a one-to-one ratio; rather, theories trickle down to nonspecialist audiences at varying rates, partly in relation to how they fit within preexisting ideologies and social hierarchies. For example, scientific theories of maternal-infant bonding have found favor in the courts when invoked by surrogates who can make a genetic claim to motherhood (thus fitting traditional definitions of what it means to be a mother), but are more likely to be dismissed when made by surrogates with “only” a gestational role.58 While reproductive technologies pose a potential challenge to traditional constructs of family and identity, various actors and institutions including legislatures, courts, and clinical “gatekeepers” in the health care system are imbricated in a fluid and at times reflexive process of shoring up these normative constructs. For example, in the rare instances in which surrogates have attempted to break their contracts and seek child custody, their efforts have often been stymied by the refusal of the courts to accept the possibility that a child could have more than one legal mother, or to divorce the “best interests of the child” from the relative economic and social status of the parties involved. Indeed, the married, middle-class heterosexual families that are most encouraged to reproduce through ARTs (whether by the gatekeepers of fertility clinics or the economic exigencies for ART use) do not in fact represent the “normal” or “average” family today. Rather, these families represent a normative fantasy of idealized kinship. In light of this, the kinship formations created through ARTs are not determined by these technologies, even when the tools of science and medicine are indispensable to the process. Families are established through social processes, namely, a culturally specific understanding (and, at times, an active policing) of what it means to be a mother, parent, or kin.

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Gestational surrogacy is an appealing option for parents who want to have a biologically related child in that it allows many intended parents to create embryos that are genetically related to one or both partners. Donor egg IVF means that intended parents who cannot provide eggs or sperm can purchase gametes and hire a gestational surrogate. This eliminates the need to find a traditional surrogate with the desired racial, ethnic, intellectual, or personal qualities that the parents believe are reproduced genetically.59 The availability of gestational surrogacy can also create more options for members of minority groups. While it can be difficult for ethnic and religious minorities to find women from their own communities who are willing to act as traditional surrogates, there are a greater number of women willing to donate eggs.60 In other words, donor egg gestational surrogacy allows intended parents to choose among a much wider range of egg donors than traditional surrogacy, increasing the likelihood that they will find the match that they seek. There are also legal advantages to gestational surrogacy in the United States. Legal precedent demonstrates that a gestational surrogate is unlikely to be awarded custody in the unlikely chance that she contests her contractual obligation to give up the child.61 Intended parents in a gestational surrogacy arrangement have the benefit of both a potential genetic connection to the child and procreative intent to support their claims to custody and to naturalize their social status as parents.62 The seeming advantages of gestational surrogacy are reflected in the statistics of its use: the CDC reports that 95 percent of all attempted surrogacies are gestational rather than traditional.63 If the incentive to choose gestational surrogacy is quite clear for intended parents, what motivates surrogates to choose this route? Many surrogates prefer gestational arrangements based on their own schema of what it means to be a mother. Women who are willing to be gestational but not traditional surrogates may perceive genetic connection as inseparable from motherhood, viewing a traditional surrogate as the mother of the child. A gestational surrogate, according to this logic, is not a mother because the fetus is not genetically “hers.”64 In a study of gestational surrogates in Israel, the anthropologist Elly Teman finds that gestational surrogates are able to distance themselves from the pregnancy by clearly marking the fetus as a genetic stranger made up of the “nature” of the intended parents. The role of the surrogate is to “develop

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an already prepared fetus to viability,” not aid in its formation.65 The surrogate draws a firm boundary in which the subjectivity of the fetus is formed entirely by the biological and genetic material of the intended parents, such that the surrogate views herself more like a babysitter or nanny—traditional female occupations—whose reasonable responsibility is to return the child to the parents when the job is finished. This logic naturalizes gestational surrogacy in a way that would require more intensive ideological negotiations were the fetus the genetic offspring of the surrogate.66 Current estimates put the number of surrogate births since the late 1970s in the tens of thousands.67 Conservative estimates suggest that roughly 1,600 babies a year are born through gestational surrogacy in the United States,68 representing a growth in surrogacy activity; the American Society for Reproductive Medicine reports that live births through gestational surrogacy doubled from 738 in 2004 to 1,593 in 2011.69 Reporters for Newsweek magazine insist that the number of surrogate births is even higher; in 2008 the magazine interviewed just five agencies, which declared four hundred births in 2007.70 Moreover, of the 451 clinics that reported ART success rates to the CDC in 2011, 86 percent offered gestational carriers as a service that the clinic would provide, indicating a consistent and growing demand for surrogacy services.71 The separation of motherhood into multiple components is a prime source of the anxiety that surrogacy generates in the United States. The connection between women’s biological capacity to reproduce and the social role of motherhood maintains and justifies legal, cultural, occupational, and political differences based on gender. If women can give birth without becoming mothers, and become mothers without giving birth, then the social order that is built upon the “natural” reproduction of the heterosexual nuclear family must either shift to encompass such alternative family formations as part of the natural or exclude them as deviant. The alternative, in which new technologies spawn unfamiliar family formations on the margins, would indeed pose a threat to traditional ideologies of gender and kinship. In light of this, social institutions including government, law, and medicine have a vested interest in asserting the right to legislate and adjudicate ARTs because this discourse has multiple potentials: it can shore up a fictive consensus on the definition of the social roles of mother and father or can put them into question.72

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The Surrogate Population There is a common perception in the United States that women who act as surrogates do so out of financial desperation and economic coercion, as evidenced by the media description of surrogates as “wombs for rent,” “breeders,” and “baby machines,” as well as analogies between surrogacy and prostitution. A common critique of surrogacy is that it exploits women by commodifying their bodies and their babies. When broken down by the hour, the compensation paid to surrogates is below the minimum wage in the United States.73 Surprisingly, one can also find this statistic employed by proponents of surrogacy, including surrogates themselves, and not as an argument for increased compensation. Surrogates and their advocates often cite the low level of remuneration as evidence that surrogacy is in fact not driven by economic motivation, and thus unlike other forms of labor that involve “selling” the body, such as prostitution. Rather, they contend, surrogates are motivated by those most womanly of impulses—altruism, sisterhood, and self-sacrifice. While many surrogates will acknowledge that the money they receive is a boon to the family income, most discursively frame surrogacy as an opportunity to give the gift of life and help an infertile couple form a family.74 Media accounts frequently frame surrogacy as such a natural, emotionally rewarding form of labor that it is hardly labor at all; as one article states, “most carriers enjoy being pregnant and are emotionally rewarded by the experience of helping an infertile couple realize their dreams of becoming parents.”75 Another describes the relationship between surrogate and intended mother as “an intimate bond of flesh and bone, forged in science and the ancient yearning for a child”—a quote that harmoniously unites science and nature through maternal desire.76 In the case of surrogacy, the naturalization of the practice through what Ragoné calls “the altruistic idiom”77 serves to mask problematic histories of reproductive labor in the United States. This appeal to altruism aids in the process of naturalizing surrogacy as an appropriately feminine task; without this type of ideological work, surrogacy can be read as a threat to the mythology of motherhood in which maternity and commodification stand in stark opposition. This is not to say that surrogates are disingenuous about their motivations, or that surrogacy does not have the potential to challenge the norms

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of femininity. It instead suggests the existence of a socially approved script through which surrogates can successfully perform femininity while engaging in acts that push at the seemingly intractable dichotomy of love and money that frames what it means to be a good mother in America.78 Despite the reality that motherhood is in many ways highly commodified in the United States (beginning even before the birth of a child with baby registries, birthing classes, nursery decor, and endless advice books), it is simultaneously hailed as priceless and natural, an unconditional bond between a woman and the child to whom she gives birth. Surrogacy puts a literal price on pregnancy and delinks gestation from social motherhood in a way that can be read as potentially liberatory for women. By breaking the perceived unity between pregnancy and motherhood, surrogacy belies biologically deterministic frameworks that rationalize the social and economic inequality of women in relation to men. Those who take a pragmatic approach to ARTs contend that a largely unregulated “baby business” exists in the United States regardless of whether or not one approves of it, and therefore it is more productive to focus on regulation of the industry than to call for its elimination.79 Likewise, there is an undeniable market for reproductive labor, one that relies upon the bodies of low-income women, and increasingly women of color. As with other feminized care-based types of employment (childcare, in-home health care, elder care), the stark economics of service provision are softened by the discourse of affect—caregivers are expected to express an emotional, even loving relationship to their charges that would not be required of, for example, an assembly worker on an auto manufacturing line. The “outsourcing” of affective labor to those outside direct lines of kinship is naturalized through this ideological work. The sociologist Viviana Zelizer refers to this “purchase of intimacy” in a twofold manner: as “the frequent supposition that people use money to buy intimate relations, and second, the grip—the purchase—of intimacy on the forms and meanings of economic transactions.”80 She notes that the intermingling of the economic and the intimate is deeply embedded in social life, yet also productive of anxieties and tensions that require careful rhetorical, moral, and legal boundary creations. While it is a myth that a truly inviolable public/private division ever existed

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between the domestic and the economic in the United States,81 historical shifts in labor patterns and gender and racialized norms have also impacted the growing monetization of “intimate” tasks. As middle-class women re-entered the labor force in large numbers in the 1960s, tasks that were previously considered private, domestic, and intimate (and the “natural” work of wives and mothers)—even the tasks of conception and pregnancy—have become part of the labor market.82 According to Zelizer, the expansion of market forces into intimate spheres of care work and the domestic need not be viewed as a threat; rather, it may enhance or allow for “intimate ties” between people, and that “in all social settings, intimate and impersonal alike, social ties and economic transactions mingle” in what she calls a “connected lives view.”83 The sociologist Joshua Gamson, whose children were born through surrogacy, likewise argues that we need not view the intersection of intimacy and the marketplace as inherently alienating. The gestational surrogate who carried Gamson’s first child was also a close friend, while he and his partner used a surrogacy broker to find their second surrogate. Despite his original assumptions that a known surrogate would provide a more authentic and intimate connection than the contractual nature of brokered surrogacy, Gamson found that this did not hold true in his own experience. Rather, he notes, “In many ways, in the creation of our family, the market indeed pushed against intimacies, replacing connection with commerce; in other ways, it produced intimacies, even as other institutions, such as law and medicine, were hostile or ill-equipped for this kind of family making.”84 Gamson found that he and his partner formed an attachment and connection to their second surrogate, whom they referred to as their “fetus sitter,” despite the lack of relationship-building assistance from the commercial agency that brought the parties together. While surrogacy often involves a contractual, monetary transaction as a means to create social ties, Gamson’s story suggests that this setup does not overdetermine the end result. He concludes that payment, rather than signifying emotional distance or negative market interference, was critical for both the surrogates and intended fathers in that it provided a desired boundary between parental and nonparental relationships. It is important to note, however, that what the sociologists Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper term “clinical labor,” work involving the

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sale of gametes, gestation, or risk through clinical trials and research, is disproportionately provided by women and people of color. These are also groups who have been historically marginalized in the labor market.85 Cross-racial gestational surrogacy in particular is situated within a historical continuum of racialized reproductive labor whereby the economically and racially dominant classes rely upon the embodied and affective labor of women of color. Discomfort with this history may partially explain why representations of surrogates, both fictionalized (as in Army Wives) and in coverage of pop culture celebrities, primarily portray white women as surrogates. Analyzing cross-racial gestational surrogacy may enable us to disentangle the gendered rhetoric of altruism and “women helping women” from the realities of surrogacy, in which economic disparities and racial difference implicitly secure the legal and social claims of intended parents. So what kind of women choose to become surrogates? Research on commercial surrogacy agencies has produced mixed evidence regarding the demographics of surrogates, in part due to a lack of large-scale studies. A review of twenty-seven empirical studies undertaken in 2005 described most surrogates as women who are “in their twenties or thirties, White, Christian, married, and have children of their own” with “family incomes that are most often modest (as opposed to low) and they are from working class backgrounds.”86 According to an article in the New York Times Magazine, most surrogacy agencies and brokers purposely abstain from hiring poor women. They do so to avoid the charges of coercion that taint the industry, as well as for practical reasons: poor women are less likely to meet the common requirements of good overall health, stable relationships, and active health insurance.87 Despite this, other research suggests that the participation requirements listed by surrogacy agencies do not match the actual demographic data of the surrogates they hire.88 While agencies portray their surrogates as financially stable and claim that they screen out women who receive welfare or express economic motivations, “40 percent of surrogates are unemployed, receive financial assistance, or both.”89 These statistics are significant in conjunction with a cultural rhetoric that portrays children as priceless, such that the only acceptable motivation for surrogacy is altruism. Agencies effectively limit a surrogate’s ability to negotiate for a higher wage if she has a strong financial mo-

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tivation to accept an offer, and social mores frown upon what could be viewed as quibbling over the price of a child. As noted by multiple scholars, the social expectation that surrogacy will be framed as altruistic, combined with the fundamental belief that “the biological should not be waged,”90 actually disempowers surrogates to negotiate for better wages.91 The anthropologist Heléna Ragoné’s research suggests that the income of the surrogate should not be analyzed in isolation, but rather alongside the financial and educational disparity between surrogate and intended parent—in other words, it is the gap between disproportionately well-off intended parents and lower-middle-class surrogates that creates a power differential.92 Ragoné’s mid-1990s study found that the average combined income of intended parents was more than $100,000, whereas the average combined income of married surrogates was $38,000. Surrogacy combines the cost of medical procedures such as IVF with payments to lawyers, surrogacy brokers, and the surrogate herself, effectively putting the process out of reach for most low-income families and making it very likely that intended parents will be of a higher socioeconomic status than the women they hire. Despite this, the surrogates in Ragoné’s study stated that they were not motivated by financial gain, but rather likened surrogacy to a parttime job that allowed them to stay at home with their own children and provide them with the chance to “give the gift of life” to an infertile couple.93 Social science research on surrogacy has often been quick to dismiss such altruistic rhetoric as justifications that mask ulterior motives. In “The Social Construction of Surrogacy Research,” Elly Teman finds that scholarly studies of surrogacy are overwhelmingly grounded in a set of normative assumptions, including the ideas that all surrogates will eventually grieve for the child they gave away, and that surrogates are not “normal” women; if surrogates are psychologically “normal,” their choice must be motivated by greed, poverty, abuse, or loss. Such preconceived beliefs color the questions that researchers ask, the measurements that they use, and the theories that they apply. They may also lead to the selective dismissal of evidence that surrogates report high levels of post-birth satisfaction, and that many repeat the process. Teman concludes that “whatever reasons proffered for her decision, the surrogate is deemed incapable of rationally choosing this path because of

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the emotional volatility of the uncontrollable ‘maternal instinct’ that her female biochemistry could give rise to at any stage of the pregnancy or after birth.”94 As Teman’s analysis suggests, both popular and academic representations of surrogacy are frequently tied to ideologies of female nature, “natural” maternal identity, and deviance. The question of motivation is clearly a complicated one, and the level at which it is contested speaks to the discomfort raised by linking children to commodification. This has been termed “commodification anxiety,” or “the concern about placing economic values on activities as a means of removing all associated emotion values.”95 In other words, as a society we are wary of blurring the boundaries between what we perceive as valuable beyond commodification (such as family) and the market, which would strip that valued item of its previously inestimable emotional worth.96 Of course, economic activity and intimate relationships are already deeply intertwined, and often in ways that create and strengthen social ties, rather than weaken them.97 One could argue that commercial surrogacy is a prime example of how commodification may bolster social bonds, in that surrogates are compensated for providing deeply intimate labor that ideally creates family ties. Nonetheless, commodification anxiety exists twofold in surrogacy arrangements: the fear of baby selling, and the fear that women are selling reproductive labor. Ragoné concludes that the compensation for the surrogate exceeds monetary remuneration; surrogacy allows women a type of status and social power that they are rarely able to achieve as mothers and homemakers. At the same time, surrogates are indemnified against repercussions for defying traditional gender roles because they are empowered through pregnancy, the epitome of femininity.98 Of course, the idealization of pregnancy is deeply racialized and classed. The pregnant white body carries a different symbolic value than the pregnant bodies of women of color, whose fertility has been deemed dangerous, excessive, and out of control. Moreover, at different periods in U.S. history, black and Latina women have been overrepresented as paid reproductive/domestic laborers, providing care for the children, the elderly, and the homes of the upper classes. This history naturalizes the placement of women of color in similar roles, impacting the significance of brown bodies carrying white babies in cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements. It is important to consider how

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women of color may be more seamlessly viewed as “natural” yet temporary caretakers for white children, which could impact their rights should a dispute arise. This naturalization could also lessen the commodification anxiety if a woman of color is viewed as discretely “Other” from the fetus—she may be more readily seen as selling a service, rather than selling a baby. A potential counterpoint to this commodification anxiety is the framing of surrogacy as a selfless act that benefits not only the individual but also the nation. In her study of surrogacy in Israel, Teman finds that surrogates conceptualize their pregnancy as a “mission” of national importance, and themselves as heroic “superwomen” with a near-godlike power to create not just children but mothers and families.99 Surrogates value the importance of the “mission” such that the physical discomfort that they experience due to painful and invasive medical procedures or dangerous labor is cast in terms of “meaningful and heroic suffering.”100 The rhetoric of surrogacy as a nation-building mission is also present among the preponderance of American military wives who act as gestational surrogates in the United States. Fertility clinics in California and Texas report that 50 percent of gestational surrogates are military wives.101 As twenty-five-year-old Jennifer Hansen, a gestational surrogate and military wife, states, In the military, we have that mentality of going to extremes, fighting for your country, risking your life. . . . I think that being married to someone in the military embeds those values in you. I feel I’m taking a risk now, in less of a way than he is, but still a risk with my life and body to help someone.102

Teman’s findings, and the quote above, advance the proposition that surrogates envision themselves (and are at least at times envisioned by others) as nation builders, tapping into the pronatalist rhetoric of citizen production as woman’s most patriotic of duties. Yet historically, the reproduction of citizen-subjects has not been a task that all women have been found fit to manage. The “good” mother of the American nation has had a particular raced and classed subjectivity. How do surrogates fit within a model that privileges white middle-class motherhood?

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Intersecting ARTs Feminist activists and scholars writing about surrogacy and the new “artificial reproductive technologies” in the 1970s and 1980s made many predictions about the future uses and consequences of what was emerging before their eyes. Some feared for the reproductive autonomy of marginalized groups of women; others saw the potential to break free from the immanence of the body. What is clear is that these technologies, and their impacts on surrogacy, have evolved in ways that were not predictable, and that are not yet settled either technologically, medically, legally, or ethically. Central to the claims made in this book is the assertion that it is not only traditional notions of family that are disrupted by reproductive technologies, but also specifically American ideologies concerning race. Reproductive technologies present the possibility of blurring rigid boundaries of racial difference, in part because they allow the separation of sex from procreation. In other words, race has historically been understood as a marker of blood and kinship, such that phenotypic indicators of race (hair color and texture, skin tone, and eye shape) are read as signifiers of ancestry and origin. As sperm, eggs, and gestation have become market commodities, these attributes no longer tell the same story; on the contrary, rather than reflecting one’s family history, they may instead reveal what traits society privileges and to what extent they are imagined to be heritable. While some intended parents attempt to match sperm and eggs to the traits that reflect themselves, their partners, or extended family (such as ethnic origin or skin tone), others attempt to enhance their children with favorable characteristics. Bill Handel, director of the Center for Surrogate Parenting, has publicly contended that there is an inverse relationship between the level of intelligence and beauty that intended parents seek in donors and that which they possess; those who are most demanding of excellence, he claims, are not trying to match their own qualities but rather exceed them.103 ARTs allow for class reproduction through the purchase of “genetic human capital,” with egg and sperm donors selected because “they demonstrate the self-appreciating ethics of expensive education as well as the highly invested, healthy bodies that connote a privileged background.”104 Reproductive technologies reinforce social hierarchies that are deeply wedded to hierarchies of race and class, whereby phenotypic

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markers of privilege as well as middle-class values of educational aspiration and upward mobility are explicitly enforced. Alternative deployments of ARTs also appear. For example, interracial couples may choose egg or sperm donors who will match the race of the nonbiological parent, thus selecting for a child of mixed race or ethnicity. Indeed, the intentional creation of mixed-race families is often in the service of replicating the combined racial heritage of the couple, just as same-race couples choose donors who “match” their own ethnic background. Intended parents select for physical traits such as skin tone or hair texture that may (if unreliably) map onto racial categories. While the creation of interracial families does not reflect the majority of ART use, it does run counter to claims that users exclusively select for socially dominant traits. That being said, such uses of ARTs do not blur racial boundaries in the service of radically re-creating our concept of race; rather, they replicate the effects of traditional reproduction through high-tech means. Those who attempt to use ARTs in nontraditional ways may face social censure. Religious institutions, for example, were quick to weigh in when the media picked up the story of a black British woman using a white egg donor; a spokesperson for the Catholic Church stated that the church “would be opposed to such interference with the natural processes.”105 Other examples include a white American woman who procured an embryo from an Indian couple so that her third child would be similar in appearance to the two Indian children whom she had already adopted.106 Institutional gatekeepers have stymied similar attempts, as when an American clinic refused to allow a white German couple to select an Indian egg donor. The intended parents had chosen the donor because they felt that the resulting child would reflect their religious commitment to Buddhism. Although it was unlikely that the Indian donor was actually Buddhist, they felt that the phenotypic markers of Asian heritage would signify their own religious identity. In this instance, the clinic staff enforced the normative belief that it would harm the child to intentionally create a racial mismatch within the family.107 As these examples suggest, ARTs could potentially blur boundaries, as in the latter couple’s denied attempt “to bring their own series of elisions between class, religion, nation, race, biology and desire into practice.”108

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It is far more common, however, for ART users to prize racial “matching” within families, as demonstrated in the rare instances in which fertility clinic errors lead to children of the “wrong” race. Such mistakes involving the transfer of incorrect sperm or embryos have even prompted what are called wrongful birth suits, likening race to a disability.109 In 2014 a white Ohio woman sued a sperm bank for wrongful birth after a clerical error resulted in her being inseminated with the sperm of a black donor, rather than the white donor she had selected. Jennifer Cramblett argued that her biracial child will experience cumulative social hardship for being black and having same-sex parents. Cramblett claimed that she lacks the “cultural competency” to care for a mixed-race child, citing as an example the stress of traveling to black neighborhoods to get her daughter’s hair cut.110 As Savannah Shange points out in an insightful analysis of this case in the Feminist Wire, the sperm bank mix-up denied this mother more than just her “preference” for a white donor: It never occurred to Cramblett that she would have anything other than a baby to whom she could bequeath her whiteness. Slavery and its afterlife, including the Black Codes and Jim Crow, underwrite the value of whiteness as property. No matter how poor, uneducated or otherwise marginalized, the one inalienable asset guaranteed to white folks in the US is their skin privilege.111

Cramblett’s decision to sue demonstrates the centrality of race to familial belonging and “likeness.” The donor Cramblett had intended to select and the donor whose sperm she received were both men unknown to her personally, identified only by number. The difference between the two samples was so invisible as to result in vials that were visually interchangeable. Yet the implications of this difference were so physically, familially, and socially hypervisible to Cramblett and her partner that she reports suffering daily “fears, anxieties, and uncertainties about her . . . future” since the child’s birth.112 This example suggests that the role of ARTs in maintaining the structural authority of racial difference is perhaps even more apparent when it fails to do so than when it succeeds.

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Cross-racial gestational surrogacy complicates the policing of racial difference. On the surface, the existence of cross-racial gestational surrogacy today would seem to suggest that racial difference no longer “matters” in an embodied sense, given that the race of the surrogate is considered irrelevant to that of the future child, despite the intermingling of bodily substances that would have once been considered racial pollutants. Through cross-racial surrogacy, a woman who is socially identified as black can give birth to a child who is socially identified as white—an equation that contradicts historical precedents defining the children of black mothers as black, regardless of the color of their skin. Yet a closer look at cross-racial surrogacy tells us that race has remained central to the logic of kinship, even as the explanation of what race means and beliefs about its means of transmission have changed. Cross-racial gestational surrogacy reinforces an understanding of race as a biological characteristic that is passed through genes, rather than a social inheritance or politically, historically, and culturally contingent identity. If race is determined by the genetic contribution of egg and sperm donor, then the racial identification of the surrogate is immaterial. This rhetoric provides an ideological space for cross-racial gestational surrogacy without radically disrupting race- and class-based hierarchies of reproductive potential. Indeed, the consumers and practitioners of reproductive technologies are deeply invested in what the feminist anthropologist Rayna Rapp calls “geneticization,” or “the extreme reduction of all problematic differences to an individual and genetic basis.”113 Despite proclamations by mainstream scientists that race is a social rather than biological construct, the way that race is deployed in the market for egg donation and surrogacy insinuates a tenacious commitment to the geneticization of race. One effect of geneticization is that people are converted into “gene carriers” who are held individually responsible for managing genetic risk.114 In light of this, an interesting shift has occurred in the fertility industry; while the reproductive needs of people of color were once largely ignored by the fertility business, they are now more actively pursued as consumers of reproductive technologies, ranging from egg donation to genetic screening services. As individuals are held to greater standards of responsibility for producing “healthy” and genetically superior offspring, people of color are increasingly under pressure to avail

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themselves of such services. Indeed, the contemporary medical environment in the United States positions poor women, and particularly poor women of color, as “biological dangers” to themselves and their fetuses.115 As the feminist legal theorist Dorothy Roberts argues, “the expectation of genetic self-regulation may fall especially harshly on black and Latina women, who are stereotypically defined as hyperfertile and lacking the capacity for self-control.”116 Despite this imperative, access to reproductive technologies continues to be stratified by socioeconomic status, with serious implications for racial parity. While the number of people of color using reproductive technologies has grown in recent decades, access to fertility treatment is impacted by factors like marital status, income, and educational level, with limited for options for low-income women and those lacking health insurance.117 According to data collected from the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth, “women who use fertility services are significantly more likely to be married, non-Hispanic white, older, more highly educated, and more affluent than nonusers.”118 Use of any medical help to become pregnant was twice as likely among white women aged twenty-five to forty-four (15 percent) as Hispanic (7.6 percent) or African American (8 percent) women.119 White people also use ARTs at a significantly higher level than people of color—whites make up 85 percent of ART usage, African Americans constitute 4.3 percent of ART users, and Hispanics make up 5.5 percent of ART recipients.120 In addition, legal and cultural barriers that limit the access of queer folks to surrogacy and fertility services persist; this discrimination can even extend to a doctor’s refusal to perform fertility procedures on gay individuals if doing so is contrary to the physician’s religious beliefs. In a study published as recently as 2005, researchers found that 17 percent of fertility clinics would not provide services to lesbian couples, with single men and single women facing even higher rates of discrimination.121 As these disparities demonstrate, the stakes of reproductive technologies exceed the personal desire to ameliorate infertility. For one, surrogacy is growing in popularity at the same time that a significant proportion of American women continue to lack access to affordable, basic health care, including reproductive health services such as routine annual exams and prenatal services.122 Seemingly limitless resources are spent on in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, preimplantation genetic diag-

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nosis, and even sex selection technologies, while reproductive justice lags dramatically for those least able to afford services.123 A 2005 study of ART service providers found that while only 18 percent of ART program directors reported that their clinics required intended parents to meet with a social worker or psychologist, 80 percent required that they meet with a financial coordinator. Moreover, researchers found great variation in whether programs would turn down clients based on their financial status—38 percent of ART programs reported that they were very or extremely likely to turn away a couple on welfare, while 46 percent said they were not at all or slightly likely to turn away welfare recipients. These disparities suggest a lack of uniformity in clinic procedures that could greatly impact the accessibility of such services.124 The political climate is also significant; recent debates over the Affordable Care Act have resulted in a resurgence of the politicization of women’s reproductive health.125 For those invested in reproductive politics, surrogacy is one important consideration among issues as diverse as the uneven power relations that result in hierarchies of reproductive stratification, and contemporary debates including abortion politics, fetal personhood, and prenatal genetic testing.126 It is clear that far more ink has been spilled on the practice of surrogacy than would be expected based upon the incidence of the phenomenon, which is evidence that surrogacy speaks to larger issues of gender, class, and race.127 Assisted reproductive technologies, and surrogacy, have evolved since the birth of the first “test tube baby” in ways that feminist theorists of that time period both feared and could never have imagined. Cross-racial gestational surrogacy in particular complicates the scope of reproductive politics, and thus necessitates a nuanced analysis that centralizes intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The following chapters will further unpack the multiplicity of meanings surrounding cross-racial gestational surrogacy, and continue to complicate binary frameworks of surrogacy as inherently exploitative or agential. As chapter 2 will demonstrate, reproductive politics are also influenced by media and popular culture. Discourses about surrogacy circulate through media both “old” (television, radio, newspapers, magazines) and “new” (blogs, social media, podcasts), shaping the frameworks and moral debates through which the public learns about this practice.

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“Mommy’s Tummy Was Broken” Surrogacy Enters the Mainstream Being a surrogate is like giving an organ transplant to someone, only before you die, and you actually get to see their joy. —Jennifer Cantor, surrogate Kinship is created through love and hospitality, rather than blood connection. Formal adoption is the gift of a child; sperm and egg donation are the gift of a child; surrogacy is the gift of a child. —Liza Mundy, journalist When they [surrogacy arrangements] go bad, it’s so sad. You feel sorry for the baby. Who are the baby’s parents? —Mitzi Heineman, Michigan surrogacy broker

These quotes are each pulled from popular media sources in the years spanning the first decade of the twenty-first century. They reflect complicated beliefs about femininity, motherhood, altruism, and kinship, and raise the question of who is to blame when these potent, ideologyladen elements fail to combine into a successful surrogacy arrangement. In the years following the advent of in vitro fertilization, the growth in the fertility industry and its implications were often framed in polarizing terms by media, activists, and academics. The tendency toward extreme characterizations of ARTs was exacerbated in the 1980s and 1990s, with each decade marked by a story of surrogacy-gone-wrong that captured the imagination of the public and helped shape the discourse on surrogacy in the United States.1 The first, the 1987 case In re Baby M, propelled the practice of surrogacy into the popular consciousness when a traditional surrogate 43

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refused to relinquish her biological child to the intended parents. The New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the parental rights of the surrogate but awarded primary custody to the biological intended father based on the legal standard of the “best interests of the child.” During the trial, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times published a combined 270 articles on surrogacy, up from 41 articles the year prior, propelling what was then a relatively obscure practice into the popular consciousness.2 This remarkable spike in reporting marks the entrance of surrogacy into the national forum, and in a manner that divided feminists, ethicists, legislators, women’s health advocates, and the public on the acceptability of the practice. After the Baby M case, Americans were likely not only to have heard of surrogacy, but also to have taken a personal stance on whether or not it was a legitimate means of family formation.3 The Baby M case was followed by Johnson v. Calvert in 1993, in which Johnson, an African American gestational surrogate, attempted (and failed) to gain custody of the son she bore for white intended parents. This case was significant in that it set legal precedent for custody disputes concerning gestational surrogacy. In addition, although the media and the courts repeatedly dismissed the notion that race played any role in the Johnson v. Calvert trial, feminist scholars questioned whether racist stereotypes of black women could be separated from the judgments made about Johnson’s right to mother.4 According to the sociologist Susan Markens, these cases fell into the trope of surrogacy “horror stories” that “reflected and reinforced anxieties over the future of motherhood and the family in an era of rapidly changing beliefs about women’s roles and the decline of the normative nuclear family.”5 The Baby M case and Johnson v. Calvert served in many ways as sounding boards for cultural unease surrounding race, reproduction, and the family.6 Both proceedings suggested the potential of the law not only to shore up hegemonic ideologies of class, race, and gender but also to produce narratives that could narrow the definition of “mother,” “father,” or “family,” thus reining in the potentially destabilizing effects of ARTs. These cases also demonstrate that ART “horror stories” tell us far more about the cultural, political, and economic context in which they emerge than about the fitness to parent of the individuals in question. This chapter analyzes print media and television news coverage of surrogacy in the United States from 2000 to 2010. With LexisNexis as

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the primary database, supplemented by Internet search engines, I narrowed my search using variations on the query term “surrogacy,” including “gestational surrogate,” “traditional surrogate,” and “gestational carrier.”7 Because law and public policy play such a significant role in how surrogacy is experienced, I chose to limit sources geographically, selecting those that were published within and focused primarily upon surrogacy and surrogates in the United States.8 From this archive, I engaged in feminist media analysis of roughly ninety sources, including newspaper and magazine articles, as well as mainstream television news programs or programs that contain news, like ABC News and The Today Show. I did not include a full overview of fictionalized representations of surrogacy from television or film (although these texts from the same time period could add valuable analysis in further research), but rather limited my sources to what are deemed “news media.” With increased (albeit stratified) access to the Internet, news media content is immediately accessible via tablet, computer, and smartphone, with stories often “shared” via social media platforms in addition to traditional sources.9 As such, news media are integrated into everyday life, and inform users’ sense of social and cultural norms and values. Mainstream news media stake their claim on objectivity, often masking the fact that media transmit dominant ideologies to their readers, whether through the information that they include, or that which they omit.10 As my analysis of these media sources demonstrates, certain themes become salient in ways that correspond to dominant ideologies about gender, reproduction, and family structure. I limited my analysis to sources dating from 2000 to 2010 because this decade does not have its own surrogacy horror story. While surrogacy disputes did occur during this period, none captured the national imagination in the way that the Baby M case or Johnson v. Calvert did. Without such cautionary tales to shape overdetermined tropes of a surrogacy “nightmare,” what discourse on surrogacy was being produced? What happens to the discourse on surrogacy when American culture lacks a consensus on what the practice means, or even a polarized debate over predetermined positions? These questions animate the analysis of media coverage of surrogacy that is undertaken in this chapter. Because I see this decade as a departure from the 1980s and 1990s, I did not seek to replicate themes found in earlier feminist research on surrogacy, but

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rather sought patterns across the various texts. Through feminist media research, patterns concerning the media representation of surrogacy emerge, and the significance of these themes is analyzed.11 I discovered patterns between texts through similarities in descriptive words (for example, describing surrogacy as a gift, as priceless, as an act of love), a focus on certain actors (like the role of intermediary agencies, or the absence of federal regulation), or repeated rhetorical devices (such as the “surprising reveal” that a pregnant woman is actually a surrogate). I then categorized articles and transcripts within each discrete theme, and selected representative examples and, at times, counterexamples. The archive for this chapter is made up of such sources because they are representative of the mainstream popular media discourse on surrogacy. As Patrick Hopkins has explored in relation to the issue of cloning, laypeople learn not only about the science and technology of an event but also the ethical, moral, political, and religious stakes from media sources.12 The media are an important source of public knowledge about health and medical research, and it is often through media that public policy battles are waged.13 As Susan Markens writes, “What is said in the public sphere tells us a lot about what is culturally salient and, more importantly, what is politically feasible and viable.”14 The media can influence what issues become matters of public concern through “the framing of stories, the selective presentation of particular themes, oppositions, associations, ‘templates,’ ‘facts,’ and claims rather than others.”15 In the case of surrogacy, the media influence public opinion through a variety of choices in their reporting: stories may prioritize the rights of the intended parent over the surrogate, or represent surrogates as victims of exploitation. They may focus exclusively on the relatively uncommon cases of custody disputes, or paint all surrogates as selfless miracle workers. This selective framing is of course not unique to this particular coverage, but could arguably have greater influence over matters like surrogacy, in which most people have limited personal experience. Media commonly frame controversial issues through a binary structure, a “dispute between two contrasting perspectives.”16 Williams, Kitzinger, and Henderson note this in relation to media coverage of stem cell research in England, where media presented two neatly packaged perspectives: one insisting that stem cell research was an abuse of embryos, the other that the scientific benefits outweighed the risks. The

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binary nature of the debate was often premised through headlines or opening questions stated by newscasters: is embryonic stem cell research “a miracle cure or Frankenstein science?” “the stuff of dreams or nightmares?”17 The researchers noted that a serious effect of this binary framework was the near-complete marginalization of women’s and feminist perspectives, whether as media sources, journalists, citizens, or even physical beings who produce the eggs that the research requires. Discourses found in media “are never presented ‘raw’—they are mediated through news institutions, values and conventions involving editorial/ journalists’ choices such as which story to cover, whom to interview and how to edit and frame the debate.”18 In an analysis of print media coverage of reproductive technologies between 1986 and 1991, Celeste Condit likewise found that the media response was multivocal, or signified many things. Yet the dominant rhetorical maneuver that emerged from media was one that exposed audiences to the extremes of each position (in this case, ARTs as either a miracle or as pure exploitation) and then presented a third option that served as a seemingly neutral or middle ground. This “accommodationist perspective” is not actually neutral, but rather serves the interests of the press, medical specialists, and infertile middle-class couples, formed “because of the ability of these groups to construct rhetorical accounts that articulated each others’ interests.”19 I mention Condit’s findings not to assume that the same study would be replicated today, but because they reflect the constructedness of media discourse. They also serve as a reminder that dominant narratives in news media become dominant not naturally or inevitably, but as a result of a confluence of social, political, and economic factors. Media narratives are filtered by what the feminist theorist Janell Hobson calls corporate or “Big Media”: “the increasing consolidation of media through media company mergers, in which diverse media are owned by the same corporation,” resulting in “an increasingly homogenized presence of multimedia pushing similar dominant and corporate narratives while squeezing out independent voices and alternative media.”20 This homogenization of media is significant for understanding the discourse surrounding surrogacy in part because, again, most Americans are introduced to surrogate parenting through media accounts of the practice rather than personal experience.

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The Baby M case in particular caused surrogacy to transition from a little-known medical practice to a topic of discussion around the water cooler. This evolution has been aided by highly publicized use of surrogacy by celebrities such as Joan Lunden, Melissa Harris-Perry, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, Kelsey Grammer, James Taylor, Neil Patrick Harris, and Ricky Martin.21 While fictional representations of surrogacy are largely out of the scope of this chapter, surrogates can also be found in film and on television past and present (for example, on the television shows The New Normal, Modern Family, My Name Is Earl, The Good Wife, Six Feet Under, Friends, Brothers and Sisters, Private Practice, Ugly Betty, Glee, Lie to Me, and Army Wives). In effect, while discourse about surrogacy is produced across a wide variety of sites, what the majority of Americans learn about the practice is filtered through media accounts in newspapers, magazines, television, and the web. Several prominent themes emerge from the archive examined in this chapter. The most predominant theme found in print media coverage of surrogacy from 2000 to 2010 is what I call the women-helping-women narrative. The second major theme is the call for regulation, in which the problematic aspects of surrogacy are attributed to the lack of state and federal regulation. The third and perhaps most overarching theme is what I call the “kinship question,” or the question of what surrogacy means for the definition of mother, father, or child, including the challenges posed by queer parenting through ARTs. While these three themes are not equally weighted in media representation, as a whole these narratives about surrogacy contribute to public perceptions of normative families, gender, women’s work, and kinship formation.

Women Helping Women When stories of surrogacy are featured in the news media, one theme recurs consistently: that of surrogacy as a means for women to help other women. What Heléna Ragoné calls the “selfless” or “altruistic idiom” crops up in quotes from surrogates, intended parents, fertility service staff, and reporters.22 The altruistic idiom is closely bound to media presentations of infertile couples as desperate,23 having worn out all other available options in their unquestioned and unquenchable

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desire for a child. The desperation of the tragically infertile is matched with the selflessness of the altruistic surrogate, who expresses her heartfelt wish to help a couple form a family “of their own.” This selflessness outweighs other concerns, as the husband of a gestational surrogate told the Washington Post. While he was initially reluctant to endorse his wife’s decision, he came around after doing some research, realizing, “It’s just the ultimate act of selflessness, and I’m happy to be just a little part of it.”24 This call and response can appear scripted, which is unsurprising considering that surrogates and intended parents are of course cognizant of the “appropriate” narratives.25 Indeed, as the cultural theorists John Fiske and Roland Barthes have argued, all representation relies upon “cultural knowledges” such that “each narrative is a rewriting of these already written ‘knowledges’ of the culture and each text makes sense only in so far as it rewrites and re-presents them for us.”26 Surrogacy narratives have developed in the last decades and formed cultural knowledges; as a result, media accounts of surrogacy are encoded and decoded in relation to all representations of “the surrogacy story.” Other scholars have theorized the validity and/or instrumentality of altruism narratives, but such value judgments are outside the scope of this project.27 Instead, I am interested in the cultural weight of altruism narratives, and what kind of work they perform in naturalizing and normalizing surrogacy. If in most surrogacy arrangements the intended parents are wealthier than the surrogate, why are these stories framed as if they occur on a level playing field, merely as one woman helping another? This section considers this question, and unpacks how the theme of women helping women emerges in media accounts of surrogacy. These stories are symptomatic of how altruism becomes a dominant framework for understanding surrogacy, thus contributing to the perception of surrogacy in the popular imagination. I also analyze the counternarrative of the “wrong reasons” for becoming a surrogate that emerges alongside the dominant narrative framework. In 2008 Newsweek magazine ran a cover displaying the torso-only image of a woman clutching her bare and very pregnant stomach with the words “Womb for Rent: The Complex World of Surrogate Mothers” stamped across her body. Depicted in shades of gray, the image strips the surrogate of an individual identity, suggesting that the womb is separable from the subjectivity of the woman it accompanies. This illustra-

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tion also casts surrogacy in an aura of mystery: who are these faceless women and why do they “rent” that most intimate of female spaces?28 In the accompanying article, entitled “The Curious Lives of Surrogates,” the reporters Lorraine Ali and Raina Kelley reveal a shocking statistic: up to 50 percent of women acting as gestational surrogates in Texas and California are married to men serving in the U.S. military.29 Ali and Kelley mark surrogacy as a controversial practice, noting that surrogates “challenge our most basic ideas about motherhood, and call into question what we’ve always thought of as an unbreakable bond between mother and child.”30 Despite what they note as the increasing acceptance of the practice, the journalists argue that “the culture still stereotypes surrogates as either hicks or opportunists whose ethics could use some fine-tuning.”31 Ali and Kelley conclude that little is known about the lives of surrogates and thus set out to interview women who act as gestational carriers. This Newsweek article inspired follow-up stories on surrogacy in various mediums, including newspapers, radio, and television. As the title of the Newsweek article suggests, media coverage of gestational surrogates positions them as “curiosities.” What links these stories is a remarkably similar framing of surrogacy as a unique category of employment marked by altruistic motivations. The Newsweek article acknowledges that surrogates have widely disparate motivations, financial situations, and relationships with the intended parents, yet Ali and Kelley find one common denominator: All were agreed that the grueling treatments, morning sickness, bed rest, C-sections and stretch marks were worth it once they saw their intended parent hold the child, or children . . . for the first time. “Being a surrogate is like giving an organ transplant to someone,” says Jennifer Cantor, “only before you die, and you actually get to see their joy.”32

What unites all surrogates, according to Ali and Kelley, is the common goal of helping another couple to form a family, a goal akin to the lifesaving decision to donate an organ. In the same piece, the surrogate Amber Boersman states, “Some people can be successful in a major career, but I thought I do not want to go through this life meaning nothing, and I want to do something substantial for someone else. I want to make a

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difference,” while the surrogate Gernisha Myers says, “I know I am doing something good for somebody else. I am giving another couple what they could never have on their own—a family.”33 Of the eight surrogates quoted in the Newsweek article, five used altruistic language in direct quotes such as “giving,” “doing something good,” or wanting to “help someone” and “make a difference.” This language casts surrogacy in a beneficial light, with agency on the part of the surrogate who has chosen to come to the aid of a needy family. The article briefly addresses the history of surrogacy custody disputes and conflicts that sometimes arise between parties. Nonetheless, the piece opens and closes with descriptions of a happy and satisfied surrogate, Jennifer Cantor, who concludes that surrogacy “was exactly the experience I imagined it would be.”34 After the Newsweek article was published, National Public Radio (NPR) aired a report on military wives as surrogates that echoed these themes, with the added twist that military wives make particularly reliable surrogates. The host, Mike Pesca, begins the piece by stating, “Military wives are often determined and selfless, and because they are military wives, they usually could use a little extra income. That is a formula that makes them perfect candidates to be surrogate mothers.”35 The phrasing “a little extra income” taps into the long-standing, and now largely anachronistic, view of women’s income as merely supplementary to that of the male breadwinner. While it sidelines the economic motivations for surrogacy in favor of the emotional or personal motivations (determination, selflessness), it also downplays the positive, and potentially essential, contributions that surrogates make to their family’s economy. While Pesca’s comment does frame gestational surrogacy as work, it is work that is motivated by appropriately feminine character traits, particularly selflessness. The women’s fashion magazine Glamour also published an article on military wives who act as commercial surrogates. Like the NPR story, the Glamour article played up the assumption that military wives’ connection to the service leaves them financially insecure, yet also more responsible and diligent. The article cited the director of the Los Angeles Center for Surrogate Parenting, who said, “Military wives make very good surrogates. . . . They’re independent and self-sufficient since their husbands are away from home a lot.” She added, “When military wives have a contract they do everything and anything to abide by it.”36 Both the NPR and

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Glamour pieces gender military wives in interesting ways—as feminine yet steely, selfless but pragmatic. All of these media stories tap into a powerful reservoir of positive sentiment in American culture by linking surrogacy to military service: during a time when America was at war they represented surrogacy as a patriotic act, a way for a military wife to do her own duty to care selflessly for her family and for the nation. In an analysis of the Newsweek article, the scholar Bree Kessler argues that the surrogate’s act of “breaking out of her primary role as a mother to that of a primary (or secondary) earner is sanctioned because it is performed in the name of nationalism.”37 I would add that it is not only nationalism but also altruistic intent that sanctions the surrogates’ actions. A surrogate pregnancy creates future citizens but also creates mothers, fathers, and families.38 Glamour highlighted the financial motivations of military wives to become surrogates, noting that one surrogate’s husband earned only $26,000 a year in the military. The motivations of the surrogates are represented as divided between the poles of reason and emotion: “for her, taking the job was an emotional decision, born of a desire to help an infertile couple start a family. But it also made financial sense.” The author later asks, “What drives these women to take on such an emotionally and physically demanding job? All of the surrogates we spoke to cited the desire to help another couple finally have a family. Then there’s the bottom line. Financial concerns figure into these decisions.”39 The Glamour article plays up the tension between remuneration and altruism, suggesting that the two do not mix easily. The issue of compensation is also central to Mike Pesca’s NPR interviews, yet cautiously approached. Miss Angel, a soon-to-be gestational surrogate and wife to a soldier deployed in Iraq, demurs when Pesca asks her how much she is earning for her services. She replies that it is “not about the financial” for her, but rather, “it’s about helping a family.”40 Pesca also interviews Stephanie Caballero, the founder of Extraordinary Conceptions, an egg donation and surrogacy agency in San Diego. Pesca presses Caballero to elaborate on the monetary aspect of surrogacy, to which she replies that “most women don’t ask about the money first, and if they do, we don’t accept them.”41 Caballero’s comment suggests that the expression of altruistic motivations is not only rewarded, but may be required for would-be surrogates.

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The altruistic motivations of surrogates were also the focus of readers who supported the practice in the letters to the editor section of Newsweek. Two of the four respondents to “The Curious Lives of Surrogates” defended surrogacy, speaking to both altruism and the important role surrogacy plays in creating families. After criticizing the “cold, transactional cover line” of “Wombs for Rent,” one respondent writes, “My two sons were born of women of unwavering strength and tenacity who endured injections, bed rest, many failed cycles and miscarriages. But they didn’t quit, having vowed that we, strangers, would know the joy of parenthood.”42 By describing himself and his partner as “strangers” to the surrogate, the commentator reinforces the surrogate’s benevolence—she is even willing to endure these physical and emotional tolls for someone outside her own kin group or social network. Moreover, the focus on altruistic motivations and the production of families combine to naturalize surrogacy as a way for one woman to help another do something she is not capable of on her own. As Viviana Zelizer notes in The Purchase of Intimacy, while it is not actually unusual for intimacy and economics to mix (as they do in surrogacy arrangements), it may be experienced as unsettling for observers and participants who share in the perception that these two arenas are antithetical to one another.43 This emotional dissonance is mediated by reference to altruism in surrogacy narratives, which also serves as a leveling device between intended mothers and surrogates. This narrative work is exemplified by another highly publicized surrogacy story; in 2005 the Arizona surrogate Teresa Anderson refused payment for her contracted services after learning that she would be giving birth to quintuplets. Anderson, whom the intended parents, Enrique Moreno and Luisa Gonzalez, referred to as “our Mother Teresa,” was implanted with five embryos that developed into five fetuses.44 The intended parents agreed that Anderson should be the one to decide whether to “selectively reduce” the number of fetuses (despite their own reluctance to do so), but Anderson declined. A news reporter asked Anderson what she “gets” out of the experience, to which she replied, “The gift of life, giving them five children, making their lives forever changed and happy.”45 Anderson and the intended parents forged a strong connection during the pregnancy, a bond that reporters use to explain Anderson’s altruistic actions. The intended mother, Gonzalez,

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speaks to this bond in an interview with the Washington Post, stating of Anderson, “I feel she’s part of my family now.”46 In a press release from the hospital where the children were born, Gonzalez also stated that Anderson “has given me my dream; she has given us our family.”47 Anderson is described in the press as a “hero,” her pregnancy a “miracle,” and her actions a “gift.”48 In an interview on the Today Show, the doctor responsible for delivering the quintuplets stated that Anderson and her own family are not well off (she originally looked into surrogacy as a way to earn money),49 so to refuse payment was “one of the greatest gifts of giving. She gave life to these parents and then gave back the money that they are going to need to feed and clothe and raise these babies. I think that’s just what people should be. That’s just wonderful.”50 The belief that Anderson’s actions reflect “what people should do” is compelling precisely because her decision to carry all five fetuses to term and to refuse payment for her services is in many ways hyperbolically altruistic. Based on recommendations by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, Anderson should not have been implanted with five embryos to begin with; the ASRM recommends the implantation of no more than two embryos for women under the age of thirty-five.51 Not only did the doctor far exceed these recommendations, but neither Anderson nor Luisa Gonzalez recollected being warned of the dangers of the potential for multiple births, or the adverse health outcomes that could result for both the surrogate and the children.52 Yet altruism is so closely linked to surrogacy in the popular imagination that Anderson’s decision, while praiseworthy, is cast as the only appropriate course of action. If surrogacy were considered a form of work like any other, Anderson’s refusal to accept payment for an extraordinary task would differentiate her from other laborers. In contrast, Anderson is described as “the quintessential surrogate” on Good Morning America. Because her labor is inseparable from gendered beliefs about altruism, nurturance, and motherhood, Anderson is cast as both the ideal and the outlier— while not every surrogate would do the same, her actions reflect everything that a surrogate should be.53 These examples speak to the salience of the women-helping-women narrative in media coverage of surrogacy.54 The predominance of this narrative implicates both a thematic framing of surrogacy by those covering the stories and the self-representation of the parties involved (sur-

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rogates and intended parents). Ragoné argues that “the selfless idiom allows them [surrogates] to achieve their objectives in a nonthreatening way, in a manner that does not challenge the status quo in which women are said to be care givers and nurturers.”55 While Ragoné’s research advances an argument regarding the use of the altruistic idiom by surrogates, this does not explain the embrace of this narrative by those who cover surrogacy stories in the media. In interviews with surrogates, journalists frequently adopt a vocabulary laden with affective language; for example, the following exchange between the reporter Sandra Hughes and the surrogate Teresa Anderson relies on the emotional resonance of altruism: Hughes: What did they [intended parents Gonzalez and Moreno] tell you that struck a chord in your heart? Anderson: That they hadn’t been able to have a child in ten years. It looked like they had a lot of love to give and I wanted to help.56

The reporter’s language (“struck a chord in your heart”) begins from the assumption that Anderson’s motivations are not purely financial— the language of altruism (“heart,” “love,” “help”) positions Anderson’s actions within the feminine sphere of nurturance in contrast to the supposedly logic-driven motivations of the marketplace. Ragoné and other ethnographers have investigated why surrogates foreground certain motivations while downplaying others; these examples make clear that the media also actively construct the women-helping-women narrative through the framing of surrogacy stories. Ethnographic data indicate that references to altruism or gifting language are common not only in media accounts of surrogacy but also in narratives produced by surrogates and intended parents. Surrogates commonly describe the service that they provide as a gift, which decommodifies the exchange of a child and reinforces the conviction held by many surrogates (and intended parents) that no amount of money is equal compensation for “giving” someone a child or creating a family.57 A gestational surrogate who was featured in the Washington Post echoed this, stating, “To be honest, I wish I could have done it and not taken money for it. It’s like when you give someone a gift, you know they’re going to love it, and you can’t wait to see the look on their faces

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when they open it. That’s the ultimate.”58 Despite the language of gifting and the seeming desire for a more “pure” or nonmonetary altruistic exchange expressed by this surrogate, most are paid for their labor. (Surrogacy advocates draw a crucial distinction between the compensation surrogates receive for the physical labor of pregnancy, which is legal, and payment for the child, which is illegal.) Thus a certain tension emerges in surrogacy discourse between two seemingly distinctive fields: altruism and work. Work, in the United States, has commonly been defined as labor for pay, a definition that has historically devalued women’s contributions to the household economy. Conversely, altruism is motivated by less tangible rewards such as emotional satisfaction or personal growth, and thus precludes financial gain. Yet contract surrogacy exists at the intersection of altruism and work. Surrogates report altruistic motives while receiving payment for their services. Waldby and Cooper explain that clinical labor such as surrogacy is rarely analyzed as a form of work because surrogates are portrayed as altruistically motivated and giving for “the public good,” even when compensation is provided.59 As previously mentioned, many surrogates deal with this tension publicly by refusing to reveal remuneration to reporters and privately by leaving financial arrangements to lawyers and agencies rather than discussing them directly with intended parents. The centrality of this tension between the altruistic and the economic is evidenced by the existence of counternarratives of surrogates who are doing it “for the wrong reasons.” The “wrong reasons” are overwhelmingly cast as financial, particularly when the surrogate will spend the money on herself rather than saving for a child’s college fund, paying a loved one’s medical bills, or other purportedly selfless actions. A binary emerges in which altruism and financial gain are mutually exclusive: “good” surrogates act to create a child for an infertile couple, while “bad” surrogates callously calculate their earnings. “Good” surrogates avoid conflating family with work; “bad” surrogates blur the boundaries of this long-standing division in American society.60 Angela Howard, a military wife and surrogate, exemplifies this tension in an interview with the Los Angeles Times reporter Molly Hennessy-Fisk. Howard describes her own motivations as altruistic, in contrast to other surrogates she knows who plan to use the money for a vacation or in-

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clude a post-birth breast lift in their contractual requirements. Howard disapproves, telling Hennessy-Fisk that surrogacy is about the couple’s hope for a family: “It’s not just dollar signs.”61 Similarly, in an interview with USA Today, the gestational surrogate Jen Betts refuses to reveal how much she was paid for carrying the child of a gay male couple. The money is a plus, Betts acknowledges, but she argues that she could make the same amount working full-time at McDonald’s. She criticizes surrogates who negotiate additional fees into their contracts should they undergo an invasive procedure such as a Cesarean section, and she concludes that “there are some surrogates, unfortunately, who do it for the money.”62 According to Betts’s logic, “doing it for the money” is always bad, and any surrogate who does not wholeheartedly embrace self-sacrifice (for example, by requiring supplemental payment for the additional pain and risk of a C-section) is not in it for the right reasons. Yet economics do undoubtedly play a role in the decision to become a surrogate, as evidenced by a Self magazine article entitled “Would You Risk Your Health for Money?” The number of women considering surrogacy as a form of employment rose due to the major economic recession that took shape in 2009, according to the program director of a surrogacy agency in California. The director acknowledges that agencies are faced with a larger pool of potential surrogates, yet “for the more altruistic woman, the payoff is the child, regardless of the economy. But when women do it just for the money and something unexpected happens—multiples, complications, bed rest—she never feels she is getting enough.”63 Even during an economic meltdown with skyrocketing rates of unemployment and foreclosure, remuneration was still cast as an illegitimate motivation in media accounts. An episode of Good Morning America entitled “Labor of Love: Surrogate Pregnancy” gives authoritative weight to the wrong reasons/right reasons binary. A psychologist consulted by the host of the program expresses the importance of finding an “appropriate person” who is doing it “for the right reasons”—reasons that are apparently so obvious to the viewing audience that she does not explain what they might be.64 The same is true of the wrong reasons: a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal claims that “if surrogates appear as naive victims and the rich their exploiters, in the popular imagination, there’s no shortage of villainous surrogates, who scheme to keep the baby or fake their pregnancies.”65

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The reporter goes on to name only one incidence of such “villainous” behavior; in this narrative, the public allegedly views surrogates as naive victims, yet the simultaneous portrayal of wicked, scheming surrogates warrants little empirical evidence. The public also encounters representations of surrogacy through scripted television and movies. One film in particular manages to incorporate both the “wrong reasons” and the women-helping-women narrative as a means to reach its resolution. The popular 2008 movie Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, reinforces stereotypical views of infertility and surrogacy. Fey’s character, Kate Holbrook, is a wealthy, middle-class white woman who has put pregnancy on hold to pursue a career, and is thus (predictably) unable to have children. After an obstetrician estimates that Kate’s chances of conceiving are infinitesimal, Kate hires a gestational surrogate, Angie Ostrowiski (played by Poehler). From the beginning of the film, Poehler’s character is decisively cast as an inappropriate mother—her ethnic last name, poor hygiene, bad manners, greed, lies, and manipulation all categorize her as “white trash,” a category marked by failed whiteness. After an unsuccessful round of IVF, Angie pretends that she is pregnant with Kate’s child so that she will continue to receive payment. Unbeknownst to either woman, Angie is pregnant with a child of her own, a plot twist that allows her character to be redeemed by the end of the film by renouncing her scheme and becoming a “good mother” (with good motherhood signified by adopting middle-class pregnancy mores such as avoiding caffeinated beverages). Kate miraculously conceives after she meets the “right man,” and thus the threat of reproduction without men (for Kate) and pregnancy without motherhood (for Angie) is neutralized by the reinstatement of the traditional nuclear family. While the film clearly reinforces stereotypes of surrogates as greedy, manipulative, and uneducated, as well as stereotypes of infertile women as the selfish victims of feminism-gone-wrong, it avoids fully embracing the traditional surrogacy horror story. It is Angie’s dim-witted boyfriend who is cast as the mastermind behind the plot to scam Kate, and a pregnant Angie finds herself unable to continue the charade. Despite the betrayal, Kate accompanies Angie to the hospital when she goes into labor, an act of altruism and women helping women that is rewarded when Kate finds out that she too is pregnant, against all odds.66

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Why does this specter of the “wrong reasons” haunt media accounts of surrogacy? How did altruism become the only acceptable motivation for becoming a surrogate, with money as an “added bonus” but never as the primary factor? The women-helping-women narrative has become a staple of media accounts because it naturalizes surrogacy as an appropriately feminine task, decommodifies the child transfer that occurs, and overlooks the massive power imbalance between surrogates and intended parents. The women-helping-women narrative becomes part of what the feminist theorist Judith Butler calls a “regulatory discourse,” which requires that an individual subscribe to a normative narrative arc in order to achieve the goal of bodily autonomy.67 This is not to say that the women-helping-women discourse is a false or inaccurate reflection of surrogates’ motivations; rather, this regulatory discourse tells us more about the narrative of surrogacy that is produced by media accounts of the practice. The right-versus-wrong binary runs parallel to larger ideologies of good and bad motherhood; although a surrogate is not a social mother, the “good” surrogate as represented in media accounts must deliver a specific narrative arc that maps onto the traits of the “good mother,” including sacrifice, altruism, nurturance, and empathy. Thus the discursive theme of the “wrong reasons” is actually a productive tension: cautionary tales of the occasional “bad” surrogate serve to reinforce the normativity of the “good” surrogate, who exemplifies all the qualities of a “good” woman/mother.

The Call for Regulation The second theme that emerges prominently in popular media discourse on surrogacy is the call for regulation. The United States is distinctive in that it has almost no regulatory protection for those who participate in ARTs.68 This lack of regulation, particularly regarding ART research, can be attributed to a variety of cultural, economic, and political factors. These include protectionist policies toward research on women and fetuses, the focus on positive outcomes (i.e., a child) rather than long-term effects of ARTs, and a lack of research funding from the federal government.69 For example, anti-abortion sentiment in the 1980s resulted in cuts to federal funding for infertility research, shifting spending to the private sector.70 Because reproductive medicine is

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treated more like a business than a form of research, new technologies are introduced without extensive investigation into their effectiveness or their safety.71 Moreover, clinics and researchers who produce data on ARTs have little motivation to publish information on the potential harms or low success rates of procedures.72 Calls for regulation routinely present the moral and ethical questions surrounding surrogacy as stemming largely from the haphazard legislation of the issue. Headlines proliferate with titles like “Brave New Babies,” “Making Babies,” “Children on Demand,” “The Stork Market,” “Building a Baby,” and “Buying Babies Bit by Bit.” The rhetoric of “building” or “buying” a baby “on demand” from the market positions ARTs (and children) as uneasy commodities that require a regulatory framework. References to the novel Brave New World imply that new reproductive technologies are propelling society toward Huxley’s dystopian vision in which prenatal genetic engineering assigns children to specific social and occupational castes and so-called natural reproduction is eradicated altogether. Citation of this novel in particular serves as a trope, “a stand alone reference, image, and warning about dehumanization, totalitarianism, and technology-wrought misery,” even when few who recognize the reference may have actually read the text itself.73 One of the most prominent theorists to weigh in on the problem of regulation in the fertility industry is Debora Spar, president of Barnard College and author of The Baby Business. Spar argues that surrogacy is a commercial arrangement that must be regulated and that “rather than banning surrogacy (which would likely serve only to drive the practice abroad or underground) states could regulate it, using traditional channels of authority to control the market or blunt its roughest edges.”74 Spar compares surrogacy to adoption, a practice that faces some overlapping ethical dilemmas such as the potential for the coercion of low-income women and the commodification of children. Despite this, inter-country adoption is regulated via the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention, which Spar argues could be extended to include surrogacy arrangements. Spar contends that surrogacy regulation should be applied at the international level, and should cover all parties involved in the surrogacy process, from intended parents and surrogates to egg and sperm donors. She calls for the establishment of property rights and contractual

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guidelines, as well as safeguards to protect low-income women who will inevitably act as surrogates for wealthier families.75 According to Spar, all the pieces are in place for the regulation of surrogacy, but “what is lacking is what only states can provide: rules to guide transactions, regulation to prevent abuse, and a global framework for cross-border trade.”76 Without uniform federal legislation to regulate the legality and enforcement of surrogacy contracts, massive legal confusion is created at the state level.77 The closest equivalent is the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA), approved in 2002 by the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws, which includes stipulations regarding gestational surrogacy and ARTs.78 The UPA declares that parentage is established when a woman gives birth to a child, or when a genetic link to the child can be proven—thus under the UPA, traditional and gestational surrogacy arrangements result in different parentage outcomes. In traditional surrogacy arrangements, the surrogate and sperm provider (usually the intended father) are the legal parents, whereas in gestational surrogacy arrangements in which husband and wife provide the gametes, both intended father and mother are parents by law.79 The UPA has been enacted by only nine states,80 which have not all incorporated the document verbatim.81 Another measure is the 1992 Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act, which was passed in response to pressure to regulate ARTs and standardize the way that clinics report success rates. The act required the creation of a federal registry of ART success rates; under the current version of the act, all clinics performing ART procedures must report success rates to the CDC. Along with the CDC, the registry is run by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (SART), a branch of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association.82 Despite the passage of this act, no federal requirements exist regarding payment to donors, and ethical decisions are left to professional organizations that have little authority to enforce what regulations they do devise.83 States differ not only on the validity of surrogacy contracts, but also whether contracts are banned, voided, penalized, or regulated. Eight states have passed laws banning, voiding, and/or penalizing surrogacy contracts, while ten states have laws regulating surrogacy, some with restrictions on compensation or type (traditional versus gestational).84

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Michigan maintains the harshest penalties for surrogacy: contracts are unenforceable, and being party to a surrogacy contract is a misdemeanor eligible for up to a year in jail and/or a $10,000 fine. Those who broker such contracts are open to felony charges, a $50,000 fine, and/ or ten years in jail.85 In other states such as Indiana and Kentucky, surrogacy contracts are legally nullified, yet surrogacy agencies in those states actively advertise their services.86 Surrogacy bills have been contentiously debated in state legislatures, with politicians often (although not entirely) divided along political lines (with Democrats supporting, and Republicans in opposition to surrogacy). The Minnesota legislature, for example, passed a bill that set standards for gestational surrogacy contracts in 2008, which was subsequently vetoed by Republican governor Tim Pawlenty. That bill would have allowed intended parents to stipulate in their contracts that surrogates not drink alcohol, smoke, or be exposed to radiation. The state of Washington attempted to pass a bill that would have repealed that state’s prohibition on surrogacy in 2011, but the surrogacy provisions to the bill were defeated. A bill was enacted to allow surrogacy in Louisiana in 2014, but was vetoed by Republican governor Bobby Jindal. The bill would have required post-birth genetic testing and background checks for intended parents, and only allowed married, heterosexual couples to contract with surrogates.87 While the aforementioned bills were attempting to lift prohibitions or regulate surrogacy contracts, a bill was proposed in the state of Kansas that would have made entering into such contracts illegal, punishable by a fine of $10,000 (the bill was withdrawn after public and political opposition surfaced).88 These various approaches to regulating surrogacy suggest that the issue is a political one, in that it taps into ideologies about sexuality and women’s bodily autonomy. States also differ on the nuances of surrogacy arrangements: some allow only women with children of their own to become surrogates, others legislate whether the surrogate can use her own egg (as a traditional surrogate), or have an opportunity post-birth to change her mind and keep the child. Moreover, some states legally require that married surrogates obtain their husbands’ permission to proceed; this anachronistic policy arguably reveals larger social anxieties concerning paternity and the adulterous undertones of surrogate pregnancy.89 The parties involved may be required to undergo psychological and physical testing

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and agree to state-sponsored home visits. In addition, states can mandate that the intended parents are a married couple, that the intended mother is physically unable to have a child of her own, or that one of the intended parents will be biologically related to the prospective child.90 It is becoming increasingly common for states to allow pre- or post-birth orders, particularly to married, heterosexual couples that are genetically related to the child. These orders allow for the name of the intended parents, rather than the surrogate, to appear on the birth certificate, and may negate the need for a post-birth adoption. When parents are not genetically related to the child, however, the process of confirming legal parentage is more complicated, and more likely to change from state to state.91 Such policies and legislation also raise concerns about who these regulations would actually protect—intended parents and their genetic “property,” the health and decision-making power of surrogates, or both. These conflicting guidelines at the state level are problematic because surrogacy often involves interstate travel, with intended parents contracting an agency in one state to hire a surrogate in another. In these situations, surrogacy agencies and intended parents “shop around” for the most amenable legal landscape, such that “agencies operating across state lines . . . utilize the law of the most supportive jurisdiction, and in this way circumvent the federal government’s regulation of interstate commerce.”92 Same-sex couples have faced particular challenges with interstate travel for surrogacy because until very recently, their marriages (and thus recognition of their joint parentage) were not recognized from one state to the next. For this reason, gay parents using ARTs have often been advised to seek post-birth adoption whether they are married or not.93 Crossing state lines for surrogacy is complicated by the fact that many states have no legal provisions for surrogacy at all; when contract disputes arise, the courts are reliant upon existing laws that apply unevenly to surrogacy conflicts, including laws governing paternity, baby selling, adoption, donor insemination, and termination of parental rights, as well as state and federal constitutions.94 In this sense, the United States follows a different trajectory than other developed nations in its response to surrogacy; the practice is banned or restricted in Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.95 Israel stands out as one of the few countries in which surrogacy is legal,

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and contracts are enforced by law.96 While Israel allows surrogacy, the legal restrictions are strict, permitting only heterosexual, married couples to hire a surrogate, and only single or divorced women to act as surrogates.97 France, in contrast, outlawed surrogacy as early as 1991 on the basis that “it violates a woman’s body and improperly undermines the practice of adoption,” in addition to eugenics-based fears expressed by France’s solicitor general that “one could start choosing the mother according to the color of her eyes, her hair, etc. and one could thus plan the human race.”98 Queer folks face additional restrictions and discrimination around the world: the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and France all deny gay couples access to IVF.99 Other scholars and activists who call for the regulation of surrogacy compare the practice to organ donation; both are marketed as acts of altruism, and both involve exchanges across state lines. Surrogacy agencies take advantage of state-by-state variation in regulations in order to attract out-of-state clients to regions with favorable surrogacy laws, such as California, Texas, and Arkansas. Katherine Drabiak and her coauthors claim that “uniform federal standards would prevent harmful jurisdictional-forum shopping by decreasing the possibility for agencies to exploit potential surrogates, parents, and discrepancies in the law for their own financial gain.”100 Writing in the McGeorge Law Review, the legal scholars Weldon Havins and James Dalessio propose such a standard: a Uniform Gestational Surrogacy Contract Act that would validate gestational surrogacy contracts and establish guidelines for their enforceability.101 Courts have also called for legislative action when faced with the difficult task of applying existing case law on adoption and donor insemination to disputed custody arrangements involving reproductive technologies. However, lower courts now routinely make legal distinctions between traditional and gestational surrogates, often treating traditional surrogates as birth mothers under existing adoption law and gestational surrogates as “nonmothers.”102 While ethicists, judges, and legal scholars may demand increased regulation of the fertility industry, organizations that represent the patients and practitioners of reproductive medicine take a different tack. The nonprofit American Society for Reproductive Medicine describes itself as “a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to the advancement of the art, science, and practice of reproductive medicine,” which sup-

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ports “advocacy on behalf of patients, physicians, and affiliated health care providers.” Founded in 1944, the ASRM positions itself as a leader in the fight for reproductive rights with the ability to influence public policy and legislation.103 The ASRM’s Ethics Committee reports on ethical issues arising in the field of reproductive medicine. The committee’s guidelines are nonbinding (members do not have to follow them in order to be certified), tend to be more descriptive than directive, and are made up of professionals in bioethics, law, and reproductive medicine.104 The ASRM describes itself as defending reproductive medicine and is actively involved in either opposing, endorsing, or modifying bills that impact the field in the realms of infertility insurance coverage, autonomy of fertility agencies, and parentage decisions. In 2012 the ASRM came out with professional guidelines for gestational surrogacy, including the requirement that the surrogate is represented by a lawyer familiar with the appropriate contracts, and licensed to practice law in all applicable states or international contexts. The legal theorist Susan Crockin describes these guidelines as “laudatory,” but “neither practical nor practiced in the United States.”105 As the ASRM’s activities suggest, state-level decisions impact surrogates and intended parents even when they do not directly address the legality of the practice itself. In July 2010, for example, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that insurance companies must cover the medical expenses of pregnancy for insured women who act as surrogates. The court decided that insurers cannot deny care based on the means by which a woman becomes pregnant.106 This ruling is significant because insurance coverage can be a major expense for intended parents who have to purchase a plan for their surrogate. Some bills may seem only tangentially related to surrogacy, but are quite influential because they affect one of the multiple medical components required for IVF. In March 2010 a bill reached the Oklahoma state senate that would have made it illegal to compensate egg donors, a move opposed by the ASRM, the Oklahoma State Medical Society, and RESOLVE: the National Fertility Association.107 Other surrogacy-related bills that have been introduced or moved through state legislatures in recent years include an Arizona bill that would prohibit the purchase of eggs; the Florida Assisted Reproductive Technology Act, which would require agencies to conduct criminal background checks and mental health evaluations

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of intended parents, gestational surrogates, and donors; a proposal to establish a Maryland commission to study the “health and social well being” of children born through surrogacy; bills that would extend infertility insurance in Missouri and Maryland; a bill that would increase ART reporting requirements in Michigan; and the Embryo Donation and Adoption Act in Tennessee, which would categorize any child born of a donated embryo as adopted.108 As previously mentioned, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal vetoed a bill in 2014 that had proposed a legislative framework for surrogacy in that state. Despite the bill’s narrow language—it excluded gay couples, only covered surrogacy that was “medically necessary,” and limited compensation—Jindal explained his veto by citing ethical concerns raised by the pro-life community.109 While women’s rights organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and prominent feminists like Betty Friedan and Janice Raymond took an active (if greatly divided) role in the framing of the surrogacy debates at the end of the twentieth century,110 today mainstream feminist organizations are far less vocal on the issue of surrogacy. At the time of analysis, NOW’s website included only four references to surrogacy,111 two of which were links to external articles. One link was to a 2013 Washington Post opinion piece, which cites anti-surrogacy NOW board member Kathy Sloan. Sloan opposes surrogacy, which the article describes as exploitative, based on the perceived reproduction of race- and class-based hierarchies.112 The site also included two blog posts that mention surrogacy: one addressing the concerns of young feminists includes “respective regulation around surrogacy” as a component of reproductive justice, while the other asks whether “surrogate motherhood” is a feminist issue.113 Neither blog entry endorsed or opposed surrogacy or called for a specific feminist policy position on the subject. In contrast to the somewhat tepid response to surrogacy, the NOW website promoted grassroots feminist activism around other issues that fall under the banner of reproductive rights, with pages such as “Stop the Return of the Abortion Ban” and “Hey SCOTUS—Drop Your Zone,” the latter of which prompts readers to e-mail the Supreme Court.114 NARAL Pro-Choice America, a feminist organization dedicated to protecting abortion rights, is even more subdued on the issue of surrogacy. Under the heading “What Is Choice?” the NARAL website listed

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four topics: abortion, birth control, sex education, and healthy pregnancy. The site defines pro-choice as “protecting women’s access to safe, legal abortion. It also means working on ways to help reduce the need for abortion, like improving access to birth control. And it means supporting women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term.”115 This mission statement reflects the defensive position taken by organizations such as NOW and NARAL in response to a contemporary political environment that is extremely hostile to women’s reproductive rights claims. These organizations dedicate their energies to halting the erosion of abortion rights and attacks on contraception, and thus arguably have fewer resources to allocate to activism surrounding reproductive technologies, whether supporting or opposing practices such as surrogacy. Rights organizations that are not specifically feminist, such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, continue to focus on surrogacy. Similar to the HRC, the RESOLVE website offered updates of current legislation described as “pro-family” or “anti-family” and gave visitors an opportunity to become advocates by contacting their legislators.116 There is no question why the HRC and RESOLVE are active supporters of legislation that would protect surrogacy and fertility treatments: the constituents of both groups (gay and lesbian couples and the infertile, respectively) benefit from such lobbying because they use reproductive technologies to form families, whether through donor eggs and sperm, IVF, or gestational carriers. As Miriam Perez points out in an article for the website RH Reality Check, many reproductive rights advocates who work on surrogacy-related issues say little about the ethics of surrogacy itself, instead opting to create “best practices” for surrogacy agreements.117 Perez highlights the organization Women’s Bioethics Project, a Washington State group that does not define itself as feminist, but describes itself as a bridge between scholarship and policy, with the goal of promoting “the thoughtful application of biotechnology to improve the status of women’s lives” while protecting vulnerable populations.118 Reproductive technologies are one of the three key issues listed on the organization’s website, and Perez reports that it has collaborated with a Washington politician on a bill he introduced to the state legislature that would legalize surrogacy in that state. The group neither endorsed nor opposed the bill, but worked with its creators to ensure that it did not discriminate

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based on family type, that it protected informed consent, and that the reproductive decision-making rights of surrogates were maintained.119 The bill, which NOW testified in support of at a House Judiciary Committee debate, failed to pass the Senate.120 Despite limited attention to surrogacy regulation as a feminist issue by women’s rights groups, mainstream media accounts that call for regulation are commonly inspired by an ART-related scandal such as a case of contested surrogacy, a fraudulent agency, or an “unfit” intended parent. This section will explore media coverage of such events, arguing that what unites them is the move away from the traditional surrogacy “horror story” and toward a call for regulation rather than criminalization. In analyzing print media coverage of surrogacy between 1980 and 2002, Markens argues that “media coverage of surrogate parenting, particularly the horror stories that focus on custodial disputes over surrogate-born children, reflected and reinforced anxieties over the future of motherhood and the family.”121 Markens found that early coverage of surrogacy focused on the ways swift medical advancement combined with a lack of regulation to produce surrogacy nightmares.122 I contend that the lack of regulation has emerged as a master narrative in contemporary media accounts of surrogacy, weaving through what Markens found to be the competing frameworks of “baby selling” versus “the plight of the infertile couple.”123

Agency Fraud The 2009 PBS television news investigation “Surrogacy: Wombs for Rent?” reflects a shift in the surrogacy narrative, wherein a fraudulent surrogacy agency is the catalyst for disaster, rather than a “bad” surrogate or desperate mother. This episode of PBS’s NOW series follows Beth and Marcio Madrones, intended parents who sought out a surrogacy agency after Beth underwent a radical hysterectomy at age twenty-seven. It also tells the story of Salina Ramirez, a twenty-five-year-old single mother of two. Both the Madroneses and Ramirez were contracting with a California agency called SurroGenesis; Beth and Marcio Madrones had paid the agency $22,000 to secure a gestational surrogate, and Ramirez was pregnant with the child of a Spanish couple. In the introduction to the segment, the PBS correspondent Maria Hinojosa describes surrogacy

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as a “business” that is “ripe for exploitation and fraud.”124 From this lead-in one might expect a critique of surrogacy as a practice in which wealthy intended parents exploit lower-class surrogates or greedy surrogates manipulate desperate infertile couples. In contrast, the opening scenes refrain from casting surrogates and intended parents into polarized camps or scripted caricatures. True, Beth and Marcio Madrones fit the stereotype of the desperate infertile couple, and Ramirez the stereotype of the low-income surrogate, but the two parties are not pitted against one another. Rather, they share a common third-party enemy: the surrogacy agency that ran off with the intended parents’ money and abruptly left Ramirez, who was four months pregnant, without health insurance.125 The agency e-mailed clients in 2009 to inform them that the tens of thousands of dollars that they had paid up front to the company (up to $90,000 per couple) were gone.126 Beth and Marcio Madrones joined a class action lawsuit against SurroGenesis and its owner, who had disappeared with their money in addition to the $2.5 million of nearly sixty other clients. Faced with the prospect of tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, Ramirez’s doctor recommended that she terminate her pregnancy if the intended parents were not willing or able to pay for a new insurance policy. The couple had already sold their apartment to come up with $50,000 in upfront costs, but promised to find a way to pay her bills. While the owner of SurroGenesis later pled guilty to federal charges of wire fraud,127 she remained at large at the time that this show aired, rendering both the intended parents and surrogate relatively powerless.128 The SurroGenesis scandal was picked up by mainstream publications such as the New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as by local news channels covering the stories of hometown clients scammed by the company. The New York Times quotes Andrew W. Vorzimer, a lawyer who says that “many of them [the intended parents] have lost their savings, and any chance of having a family is completely destroyed. We’ve got couples in the midst of pregnancies with no ability to pay the surrogate, or even make insurance payments, which have gone unpaid.”129 As this quote illustrates, contemporary media accounts that focus on a call for regulation typically cast both surrogates and intended parents as innocent victims of an unregulated industry in which any individual capable of building a website can set up shop as a sur-

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rogacy agent. The Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Zarembo describes signing with an agency as “an act of faith” and quotes a victim of the SurroGenesis scandal who likewise acknowledges that “there’s a huge component of faith that goes into this and people aren’t as rigorous as they would be in any other business transaction.”130 This language speaks to the aforementioned tension surrounding the commodification of children. The article explains, if not justifies, the naïveté of the intended parents by implicitly referencing the unspoken assumption that children are priceless and thus surrogacy is unlike “any other business transaction” in which one would protect against fraud. The same victim describes the SurroGenesis debacle as “leaving blood on both sides” because the surrogates “are often young women, nonaffluent, who don’t have a lot of education or financial resources.”131 This framework, in which intended parents are blinded by their desperation for a child and the altruism of surrogates is abused, moves away from previous representations in which either the surrogate or intended parent was cast in the role of the villain. As Zarembo notes, “The process of paying surrogates has been controversial since its inception—but the initial fears focused more on surrogates themselves, not on the prospect of unreliable or unscrupulous brokers.”132 Zarembo is implicitly referencing the Baby M case, the prototypical horror story in which the intended parents and surrogate fought a bitter legal battle over child custody, and each side accused the other of dishonesty and misconduct. In contrast, both surrogates and intended parents involved in the SurroGenesis debacle are largely portrayed as naive—either too altruistic or too desperate to be sufficiently skeptical of the deceitful middleman. In contemporary discourses, then, the profit-motivated middleman becomes the site of new anxieties about kinship and family. Reporters point to the fact that many states require no qualifications for an individual to open a surrogacy agency. The Washington Post quotes the University of Southern California law professor Alexander Capron as saying that “in most U.S. states until recently, nothing would stop you from opening ‘Sam’s Sperm Bank and Delicatessen.’”133 Likewise, an article in the Dallas Morning News notes that agencies are not licensed by the state and require little more than a phone number, website, and P.O. box in order to start a business matching surrogates with intended parents. The article cites Amy Demma, a lawyer who agrees that

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“anyone can hang a shingle,” as well as the medical ethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan, who calls the fertility industry “an underground economy.”134 The lack of state or federal regulation over the actions of surrogacy agencies is a common theme not only in reports of fraudulent agencies, but also in the coverage of contested surrogacy cases. In cases of surrogacy gone wrong, blame has frequently been attributed to inadequate screening of surrogates and intended parents by agencies. Perhaps the most shocking example of inadequate screening occurred in 1995 with the tragic death of a child born through surrogacy. A twenty-six-yearold single man named James Alan Austin paid $30,000 for an Indiana woman to act as a gestational surrogate. Austin beat the five-week-old child to death with his fists and a plastic coat hanger, prompting debate over who should be allowed to hire the services of a surrogate.135 In response, the legal scholar Lori Andrews argued that the case points up the whole debate about whether surrogacy should come under the adoption model, with intensive screening of the home the child is going to, or the biological reproduction model, under which there’s no screening. Should we license all parents, since they can do a lot more damage than drivers or beauticians or others we license?136

The Austin case, and Andrews’s analysis of it, reflects a lack of social and legal consensus over whether surrogacy should be treated as akin to adoption, and thus deserving of intensive state intervention, or akin to traditional reproduction, and therefore a supposedly private matter. While this private/public dichotomy of reproduction is necessarily a false one (considering that low-income families, queer families, and people of color often face intensive state intervention into all types of family building), it is indicative of how the implications of ARTs have outpaced society’s capacity to adjudicate them.

Contested Surrogacy The question of regulation becomes particularly significant when traditional notions of kinship cannot be applied to settle a custody dispute. This was the result when a Michigan couple, Amy and Scott Kehoe, decided to pursue surrogacy after repeated failed attempts at pregnancy.

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The Kehoes also purchased donor eggs and sperm, meaning that the resulting child would not be genetically related to the couple or to the surrogate.137 Amy Kehoe selected Shelly Baker, an experienced surrogate who had already given birth to four children of her own and had undergone two successful surrogate pregnancies.138 The parties made a verbal agreement that Baker would act as a gestational surrogate and receive payment for medical expenses. The verbal nature of the agreement was due to the unfriendly legal atmosphere toward surrogacy in Michigan, a state that defines surrogacy as contrary to public policy and renders such contracts unenforceable.139 Baker gave birth to twins, which she placed with the Kehoes in what she would later describe on the daytime television program Dr. Phil as a “puppy dog adoption.” Baker was referring to her sense that the Kehoes were not taking the process seriously and were not prepared to receive two newborns.140 Despite her reservations, Baker did not voice her concerns about the fitness of the intended parents until after Kehoe was named the legal mother of the children in a routine court proceeding to confirm the adoption. During the court appearance, Baker learned that Amy Kehoe had a history of mental illness and a decade-old arrest record for cocaine possession. Nonetheless, Baker gave her assent when asked by the judge whether she felt that the Kehoes were capable parents for the twins. A month later, Baker returned to court requesting full custody, charging that Amy Kehoe’s mental health and criminal past posed a danger to the children. Because Michigan law voids surrogacy contracts and favors the rights of the “birth mother,” Baker was awarded custody of the twins even though she was not their genetic mother or intended parent.141 It would seem in this case that regulation of surrogacy is not the root of the problem. The state of Michigan has one of the toughest antisurrogacy stances in the country, which it enforced by voiding the verbal contract between parties and awarding custody to Shelly Baker. The state of Michigan imposes fines and jail time upon those who enter surrogacy contracts, a position that it has upheld against legal challenges in the Michigan Court of Appeals in 1981 and 1992. In the latter case, the court defined its compelling interests (preventing children from becoming commodities, serving the best interests of the child, and protecting women from exploitation) and added that any arrangement involving

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“conception and relinquishment of parental rights by the surrogate is void.”142 Nonetheless, the Kehoes framed the court’s decision as “legal kidnapping” of “their children” when they spoke out in public appearances.143 The Kehoes had hired an attorney to handle the requirements for adoption, such as home evaluations, letters of recommendation from employers and psychiatrists, and physical evaluations. But, as Dr. Phil’s legal expert Lisa Bloom states in the episode, “I can’t imagine any competent attorney recommending that someone do a surrogacy agreement in Michigan. Michigan very clearly says they are void and have no effect in Michigan, and can even be a crime.”144 Shelly Baker also blames the legal system for her conundrum, arguing on Dr. Phil that laws in Michigan should be changed to require the full disclosure of an intended parent’s background, including a home study, before any surrogate undergoes IVF. Bloom concurs, ending the show by positing the Kehoes’ situation as a cautionary tale to other couples: So many of these problems arose because this was a legally murky area in Michigan, and everybody understood that Michigan didn’t like surrogacy agreements. So they tried to get around it with a verbal agreement. If you’re entering into something that’s legally murky in your state, before you even think about it, before conception, before an agreement, before shaking hands with somebody, you have to consult with an experienced specialist in that area and get good legal advice at the very, very beginning. I think that would have solved a lot of the problems that happened here.145

New York Times coverage of the case also framed it as a cautionary tale, claiming that “surrogacy is largely without regulation, with no authority deciding who may obtain babies through surrogacy or who may serve as a surrogate.”146 Likewise, ABC News coverage of the proceedings described the case as a “surrogate nightmare,” but concluded that both sides had a legitimate argument and that surrogacy is an “unregulated, really difficult legal morass to try to traverse.”147 While public opinion seems to have sided with the Kehoes based upon audience response to the Dr. Phil show and Baker’s own assertion that she has been treated “like a monster,” the case also suggests that a call for regulation is made even in states that have laid out a surrogacy policy. Because the question

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of kinship is so unclear, this claim differs from a clear-cut surrogacy “horror story”; since neither the Kehoes nor Baker had any genetic tie to the child, a binary good mom/bad mom framework did not cohere. Another instance of contested surrogacy covered by news media from 2000 to 2010 included a custody dispute between a gay male couple and the sister of one of the men, who served as a gestational surrogate. Angelia Robinson sued for custody after giving birth to twins in 2006 for her brother, Donald Hollingsworth, and his husband, Sean Hollingsworth. The twins were not genetically related to Robinson, having been created using Sean Hollingsworth’s sperm and donated eggs. Although Robinson had signed a pre-birth agreement to give up all parental and custody rights,148 the state of New Jersey followed its decision in the case of Baby M, and ruled that Robinson and Sean Hollingsworth were the legal parents, giving no parental rights to Donald Hollingsworth.149 The judge noted that New Jersey discourages surrogacy due to the potential negative effects on a child of being separated from his or her “birth mother.”150 Given that the children in this suit were to be raised by two fathers, the judge’s words may also suggest a preference for a two-parent, opposite-sex family formation. Laws that limit the number of legal parents to two may be part of the problem, at least in some states. A California Democrat recently proposed raising the number of legal parents in that state so that additional parents (such as a sperm donor or surrogate) could provide support for and have the right to a relationship with the child. Such legislation could offer legal parenthood to more than just the intended parents in a surrogacy arrangement, which could “formalize commitments to the children, provide access to health insurance and citizenship, or even to provide a contingency against state intervention by the child welfare system.”151 The bill was passed, but vetoed by Democratic governor Jerry Brown. If such legislation existed in New Jersey it is possible that Angelia Robinson’s gestational and familial (although nongenetic) connection to the children could be recognized without taking rights away from the nongenetic intended father, Donald Hollingsworth. This kind of legislation could open the door for ARTs to pose a much more radical challenge to traditional kinship structures that hinge upon the two-parent, nuclear, heterosexual family, which perhaps explains its eventual veto.

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In 2003, the gestational surrogate Danielle Bimber unexpectedly left the hospital with triplets after she said that the intended parents failed to promptly retrieve the newborn babies post-birth. The biological intended father, James Flynn, claimed that he and his fiancée were merely delayed in doing so, and that further delays were caused by both Bimber and the hospital where the children were born. Numerous trials ensued in both Pennsylvania and Ohio, during which at various times the egg donor sued for custody, Bimber and Flynn were named the legal parents, Flynn and the egg donor were named the legal parents, Bimber and her husband were given custody, and Flynn was required to pay child support.152 Following the precedent of a case called Belsito v. Clark, Ohio determines parentage by first establishing a parent’s genetic relationship to the child, and then assessing whether the genetic parents have waived parental rights. This stands in contrast to states like California, Nevada, and New York, which use the intent-based approach. The Ohio Court of Appeals also ruled that Bimber had breached contract and was thus required to repay Flynn the money she had earned from the surrogacy, child support payments, and any legal fees he had incurred.153 Finally, in 2006, after Bimber had been raising the triplets for two and a half years, a Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled that Bimber had no legal standing to custody over the children, and required that she relinquish them to Flynn.154 Issues of class were also raised throughout the trials, wherein the wealthier intended father argued that he was more capable of raising the children and attending to their medical needs than were the working-class Bimbers, who were already raising three children of their own. Media coverage of the case reinforced the class difference between the two, with one article describing the “vastly different means” of Flynn, a college professor, and Bimber, who had dropped out of college, worked minimum-wage jobs, and filed for bankruptcy. The article contrasts Bimber with Flynn, who “said he earned $136,000 a year, lived in an affluent community and has a biological connection to the children.” Flynn is also quoted as saying that he and his fiancée “can do a better job in taking care of them [the children]. We can spend more time with them than other people—than Danielle can do. We can do a better job educating them and do a better job in taking care of their medical needs.”155

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As these cases demonstrate, the technology necessary to create these kinship questions surpasses society’s preparedness to answer them, particularly when class, sexuality, and ability influence questions of parental fitness. The lack of overarching regulation leaves both surrogates and intended parents vulnerable, particularly when they do not reflect the standards of heteronormative, middle-class, white parenting. Increasing attention to the lack of regulation in the surrogacy industry suggests that the legitimacy of surrogacy itself is no longer the primary issue. Instead, as surrogacy (and reproductive technologies more broadly) grows increasingly common, media attention is shifting toward broader questions of its meaning, its impact, and how conflicts will and should be addressed.

The Kinship Question Even when a surrogacy arrangement proceeds flawlessly, the asynchrony between the biological and social components of “mother” and “father” are exposed. This division presents a challenge to the traditional, uncomplicated assumption that the designation of mother is coterminous with the act of giving birth. In this respect, surrogacy is similar to adoption, and in fact genetic parents may be required to adopt the children they commission through surrogacy. Media accounts of surrogacy, as with adoption, express a fascination with origins—who are the child’s biological parents? Who are the legal parents? How many possible combinations of mother/father/egg donor/ sperm donor/surrogate can be breathlessly arranged in order to paint a tangled web of kinship possibilities? Some media accounts take this disunion as a portent of a dystopian future: if parents are willing to “design” a child using donor eggs, donor sperm, and a gestational surrogate, then little stands in the way of a society divided between genetically engineered “haves” and the naturally inferior “have-nots.” This fear is dramatized in the 1997 film Gattaca, in which a new social hierarchy has emerged between “invalids” (individuals born of natural reproduction) and “valids” (genetically engineered to possess superior traits). In this futuristic film, invalids are second-class citizens, barred from prestigious jobs and socially outcast, while valids carefully monitor the population to ensure exclusivity.156

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The scholars Laura Briggs and Jodi Kelber-Kaye argue that Gattaca can “tell stories about how genes and science threaten the ‘pure’ and ‘natural’ family,” which resonates with “U.S. cultural anxieties about genes.”157 These anxieties emerge in news media accounts of surrogacy in which surrogacy is painted with the same brush as reproductive technologies including IVF, prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD), and fetal sex selection, all part of a slippery slope of “dangerous” reproductive technologies. A 2002 article in the Christian Science Monitor begins with a discussion of surrogacy but then warns of “a chilling array of coming reproductive technologies that will allow parents to make complex decisions at the time of conception about their children’s genetics and traits.”158 An article in USA Today likewise argues that “surrogacy could lead to genetic engineering,” and encourages readers to redirect their fears of human cloning to ARTs: “If you want something genuine to fret about, experts suggest considering what already is occurring at the local in vitro fertilization clinic,” namely, the genetic screening of embryos.159 In this discourse, reproductive technologies are interchangeably held up as symbols of technology gone wrong, from IVF, which transformed Nadya Suleman into “Octomom,” to PGD, which would allow parents to select a child’s traits down to his or her eye color. As Lisa Belkin admits in the New York Times, In all those years of writing on the subject I often dismissed the “slippery slope” argument, because I never really believed that anyone would go through the physical and financial strain of IVF or P.G.D. for frivolous reasons. I naively thought that human nature would regulate itself. I am learning that I was wrong.160

I would argue that it is not frivolity that alarms those who warn of a snowball effect in which technology races ahead of regulation, ethical debate, or even common sense. Rather, it is the creation of families, parents, and children that, from Belkin’s perspective, “nature never intended.”161 Reproductive technologies raise the question of what it means to be a parent, pushing the distinction between biological and social parenting such that ARTs are interpreted by some as the harbinger of the dissolution of the nuclear family or, at the least, a new (and troubling) definition of that institution. As Liz Mundy writes in the

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Washington Post, “these technologies are setting in motion a social experiment that will unfold over decades, creating hundreds of thousands of families in which the role of genetic ties will be newly tested—and the meaning of family reevaluated.”162 The aforementioned case of “Octomom” Nadya Suleman led to very public discussions of what constitutes legitimate family formation, and who has the right to use reproductive technologies in the first place. Nadya Suleman catapulted to the nation’s attention in 2009 after giving birth to octuplets, the result of IVF treatments in which her doctor implanted more than the recommended number of fertilized embryos. Suleman was only the second woman in the United States to give birth to octuplets, and the first to whom all eight children survived.163 As details emerged about Suleman’s life, a media frenzy ensued. Reporters “discovered” that Suleman was unemployed, single, of ambiguous racial/ ethnic background, had allegedly undergone plastic surgery to look like celebrity mom Angelina Jolie, and—most shockingly—was already a mother of six, all conceived using assisted reproductive technologies.164 These revelations were cast as scandalous evidence of Suleman’s maternal unfitness. As one critic noted, “rather than being embraced by the media and diaper companies like the McCaughy septuplets and other multiple-birth families before her, the single woman with a sketchy employment history and an anonymous sperm donor was lambasted by the press as morally, and perhaps mentally, bankrupt.”165 Suleman has been described as “crazy,” “self-deluded,” a drain on state finances, and an incapable mother.166 Suleman’s story is worth reflecting upon because she seemingly epitomizes the concerns that animate the “slippery slope” discourse of reproductive technologies. Suleman flouted the unspoken rule that in order for ARTs to be socially acceptable, they must be positioned as an aid to the married, the heterosexual, the tragically infertile, or at the very least, families that can reflect back some aspect of this accepted narrative. Suleman did not conform to the normative model of family formation; her nonmarital status and her technologically enhanced reproductive excess positioned her as undeserving of being “assisted” by reproductive technology. The story of the “Octomom” (a moniker that in itself conjures images of the monstrous and obscene) tapped into fears of the hyperfertile female Other—a threat to the sanctity of the traditional family.

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Indeed, news media accounts of reproductive technologies, and surrogacy in particular, often set up what the historian Stephanie Coontz describes as the myth of an idyllic American family. This mythic family, which existed in some amorphous past, is represented as much more natural, uncomplicated, and pure than the fragmented cyborgian family of today.167 For example, the author of the Christian Science Monitor article asks, “But have we really come to the point where conventional childbearing—Mother Nature’s way—is being upstaged by an artificial process that researchers might approvingly call Mother Nurture?”168 This quote employs the well-known (and highly problematic) binary of nature versus nurture, while also aligning conventional and natural in contrast to the “artificial” process of reproductive technologies. The TV news host Ted Koppel epitomizes this sentiment in an ABC News segment on surrogacy, stating, “Babies—it used to be so basic. But now Dad may be a sperm bank, Mom an egg donor.”169 Not only does this statement pass itself off as a truism, it knowingly elides the social and biological aspects of parenthood (conflating fatherhood with sperm donation) while also referencing an imagined past in which even paternity was always self-evident. Likewise, Lorraine Ali and Raina Kelley claim in Newsweek that “surrogates challenge our most basic ideas about motherhood, and call into question what we’ve always thought of as an unbreakable bond between mother and child” (emphasis mine).170 A nearly identical statement appears in a CBS Sunday Morning piece entitled “Special Delivery,” in which the reporter Kelly Wallace states that “surrogacy remains an act raising questions about our whole notion of motherhood, that unmistakable bond between mother and child” (emphasis mine).171 All of these quotes imply that the advance of reproductive technologies signals the loss of something that was natural, elemental, and effortless, including the instinctual bond between mother and child. Yet, as many feminist scholars have pointed out, the concept of natural reproduction is itself a social construction. If “natural” signifies the absence of technological or medical intervention, then pregnancy in America is unnatural at best; nearly all U.S. births occur in hospitals, where women experience (and often welcome) varying levels of “active management,” including pain medication, inducement, and Cesarean section.172 Women have historically been active agents in the medicalization of pregnancy in the United States. Early

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twentieth-century Progressive reformers campaigned for “twilight sleep” during pregnancy despite the misgivings of medical professionals who feared its effects and resented the intrusion into their sphere of influence.173 What’s more, the concept of a natural bond between mother and child is far from transhistorical. Maternal-infant bonding and attachment theories rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, premised on the notion that the instinctive bond between mother and child forms the basis for all social relations. Proponents of these theories compared the effect on a child of a woman’s full-time employment to that of her death, insisting that “maternal deprivation” includes institutionalization and neglect, as well as the effects of multiple caretakers and separation from the mother.174 Bonding today is framed as both natural and tenuous— the recent push at the state level to require transvaginal ultrasounds as a prerequisite for abortion suggests that a woman’s “natural” maternal instinct can (and in some cases, must) be sparked through technological intervention. Yet as the former examples suggest, motherhood, the natural, and the feminine have traditionally been aligned in opposition to science and technology. Strategies of normalization and naturalization are required in order to create mothers and fathers through science while maintaining hegemonic ideologies of the natural family. As the feminist theorist Charis Thompson argues, “one way to stabilize shifting notions of what is natural and normal around reproduction is to compensate with extremely conservative or stereotypical—parodic—understandings of sex, gender, and kinship.”175 Parents in media accounts of surrogacy discursively locate their children securely within traditional kinship structures. One tactic is to create a birth story that incorporates technological intervention into family formation. Interestingly, these birth stories often take on a conservative aspect, revolving around the failure of the maternal body—mommy’s “belly” or “tummy” is “broken.”176 The surrogacy lawyer Melissa Brisman told her own daughter, “The doctor took a piece of Daddy and took a piece of Mommy and put it inside someone else because my tummy was broken.”177 The actress Joan Lunden, who has two sets of twins through surrogacy, tells the New York Times that she will explain the situation to her brood through the metaphor of baked goods: “It’s almost like we can’t cook the cupcakes in our oven because the oven is broken. We’re going to use the neighbor’s oven.”178

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Lunden’s metaphor distances the surrogate from direct kinship, but suggests a communal tie or bond that is not severed after the “cupcakes” are “baked.” Other narratives emphasize the custodial role of the surrogate as akin to a babysitter or a temporary caregiver. The son of a gestational surrogate explains to the New York Times, “I thought it [the baby] was going to be my brother or sister. It was like, ‘Huh?’ And then she [his mother] explained that my aunt couldn’t carry the baby and my mom is carrying for her. Like the hen keeping the eggs warm in the nest.”179 This “kinship work” is a form of agency; surrogates and parents “claim or disown bonds of ancestry and descent, blood and genes, nation and ethnicity” to legitimize their own family formations.180 These stories are part of a competing discourse in media accounts that naturalize surrogacy by representing families created through surrogacy as “just like everyone else,” often by describing a perfectly ordinary family scene or birth story before revealing that the child was born of a surrogate. Examples include the following: She’s built perfectly for it: six feet tall, fit and slender but broad-hipped. Which is why she found herself two weeks ago in a birthing room in a hospital in Huntsville, swollen with two six-pound boys she had been carrying for eight months. Also in the room was Kerry Smith and his wife, Lisa, running her hands over the little lumps beneath the taut skin of Cantor’s belly. “That’s an elbow,” said Cantor, who knew how the babies were lying in her womb. “Here’s a foot.” Lisa smiled proudly at her husband. She is, after all, the twins’ mother.181 In the early months of Teresa Anderson’s pregnancy last fall, it seemed every other trip to the doctor brought another burst of mind-blowing, life-altering news. First one heartbeat. Then two heartbeats. Then three, and four, and finally the bombshell truth confirmed during her January ultrasound: She was carrying five babies. Five! Anderson had never imagined such a thing could happen. How could anyone take care of so many children? Yet as her body has transformed and the due date draws nearer, one thought has comforted her: They aren’t hers.182 Doug Metcalfe cut the umbilical cord immediately after Jen Betts gave birth to baby Sara. It had been a difficult pregnancy, and everyone was

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relieved that the delivery, though a few weeks early, had gone well. “Then they put her on my tummy, and I cried, which I do with all of them because I can’t help it,” Betts says. “Doug picked her up off my tummy and hugged her. It was incredible.” After a week in intensive care, the baby was discharged from the hospital. Except for photos, Betts hasn’t seen Sara since. . . . Betts, 26, is a gestational surrogate.183 It’s their big night. The race is on. Melissa and Michael Musman from Brooklyn, New York, have rushed to the OSF [Saint Francis Medical Center] in Peoria, Illinois. They’re having their first child. And they barely made it. Only Melissa’s not the one giving birth, Tracy is. She’s a surrogate.184

The “reveal” of the surrogate mother in these passages is meant to surprise the reader, but, I would argue, not necessarily to Other the nontraditional family. Rather, by using firsthand accounts of “real” families, the authors discursively situate surrogacy as “the new normal” (also the title of a short-lived NBC sitcom about a surrogate and two gay dads). In an analysis of media accounts of gay parents, the feminist theorist Suzanna Walters finds a remarkably similar narrative structure, one that “asserts the absolute ordinariness of the family life as a precursor to the introduction of the gay theme.”185 Walters also notes the proliferation of studies meant to prove that children of gay parents are “no worse off ” than those of straight parents. The thought that such children could perhaps be better off in a nontraditional family is never considered. Similar studies of surrogate-born children suggest that these alternative family formations are always analyzed in comparison to the socially accepted normative family.186

Surrogacy and Queer Families The discourse on how surrogacy alters traditional kinship structures has also been shaped by the use of surrogates by gay parents. Gay parents (and particularly gay men) are increasingly taking advantage of surrogacy as part of the “gayby boom” explosion of queer families. Transnational adoption is progressively more difficult for gay intended parents; many countries exclude gay parents from eligibility

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requirements, forcing them to hide their sexuality and adopt singly, rather than as a couple.187 This environment makes surrogacy an appealing option, with a number of surrogacy agencies serving an exclusively gay clientele and surrogates actively choosing gay couples over heterosexual pairs.188 In many ways, the gay dads featured in mainstream media articles about surrogacy exemplify the discursive normalization of nonnormative families because both their queerness and their use of a surrogate require naturalization. For example, in an interview with the first gay couple in America to parent quadruplets, Diane Sawyer states on Primetime Live that “the irony is the two men challenging convention about babies, fertility, and family are, in fact, unexpected champions of traditional values.”189 Sawyer goes on to reveal that the two gay men who had their children through a surrogate are anti-abortion, Republican, and Catholic. The couple, Michael Meehan and Thomas Dysarz, were left in legal limbo after Kentucky courts refused to allow their surrogate to relinquish her parental rights to Meehan. Although Meehan was the biological father, the courts argued that it was unreasonable to claim that one parent (Meehan) could be better than two (Meehan and the surrogate), which seemed to presume that to parent in the plural is reserved for heterosexual couples. Primetime Live spoke to a lawyer from the gay legal rights organization Lambda Defense and Education Fund, who countered that the court-appointed lawyer for the state was really saying that “a 2-parent family made up of two men or two women is, by his definition, simply not in the best interest of the child,” an argument supported by the fact that Kentucky did not allow gay couples to adopt at that time. Despite Meehan and Dysarz’s insistence upon their own traditional values, the courts refused to recognize the kinship structure that they had created.190 Gay, surrogacy-created families like these are often prompted to frame themselves as traditional or “normal” by the media. One gay dad who spoke to USA Today emphasized that he was not making a political statement in deciding to create a family through surrogacy: “We didn’t go into this wanting to be trailblazers. We went into this wanting to be a family.”191 The following exchange was made in a 2010 interview between prospective parents, the gay rights activists Gary Spino and Tony Brown, and the CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien:

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O’Brien: Is it ironic, though, that one of the most activist things you’re doing right now is incredibly traditional? You want to be a family. You want to have a baby. That is very traditional for a bunch of activists, isn’t it? Spino: It is. And we’ve been taught since you’re born, grow up, get married, have a kid. It’s really unfair to then say, you know what? You can’t do that.192

By presenting these two fathers as “traditional,” O’Brien implicitly assumes that gay parenting presents no challenge to heteronormativity. Like the “born that way” discourse of homosexuality embraced by mainstream gay rights organizations and accepted as a truism by progressiveleaning Americans, the idea that gay parenting is “traditional” (and thus tolerable) decidedly circumvents a more radical argument for queer parents’ rights.193 A gay dad explains his decision to use a surrogate by explicitly comparing his family to the idealized, hegemonic norm: “I don’t know if it’s a decision [to have children] that’s any different than a straight couple makes. We had the house, the dog and the white picket fence, and we decided we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.”194 The article also notes that he and his partner have been together for twelve years, further normalizing them as monogamous and stable in contrast to stereotypes of gay men as promiscuous. Another gay intended father describes his relationship with an egg donor in a way that mirrors heteronormative notions of complementarity and romantic love. Scott, the intended father, says he knew that Tabby was “the one” as soon as they met: “‘We just clicked,’ he recalled. ‘I thought, ‘I’d marry that girl.’ She seemed happy and serene,’ traits the Harvard MBA wanted to balance his ‘revved up, Type A personality.’”195 Scott’s comments naturalize his relationship with Tabby as more than a payment for service; his masculine, driven, and ambitious side is stabilized by her feminine calm. Needless to say, not all gay intended fathers employ highly gendered heteronormative discourses to normalize their ART-inspired arrangements, and men who do so are arguably more likely to be interviewed in the pages of the Washington Post or appear on prime-time television. Class is also significant in determining who will use reproductive technologies. A gay single father interviewed by National Public Radio ac-

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knowledges that surrogacy cost him nearly $100,000 before his triplets were born. He also hired a live-in nanny with training as a nurse to care for the children at night, change their diapers, and cook for the family.196 As this story suggests, class, in the form of disposable income, may also play a role in the number of media stories devoted to gay male parents rather than lesbian parents. While gay men are more likely to use surrogacy, and to have the economic resources necessary to do so, lesbians routinely use vaginal insemination and intrauterine insemination (IUI) to conceive. Lesbians have also used IVF to give both partners a biological connection (genetic or gestational) to their future child by creating embryos using the eggs of one partner and donated sperm, and then having the embryos implanted into the other partner.197 Lesbians may also use a surrogate if one or both women are unable to carry a pregnancy to term. Lesbians receive less media attention than gay men in general, and this trend holds true in relation to media coverage of reproductive technologies. The question of kinship is a central theme in media accounts of surrogacy and in media coverage of reproductive technologies writ large. This speaks to the broader argument of this project, that reproductive technologies have the potential to destabilize normative ideologies of kinship, gender, and family, and yet many of these challenges are reincorporated into the hegemonic norm through processes of naturalization. This is exemplified by the birth stories that intended parents construct, the assimilationist rhetoric expressed by and imposed upon gay intended parents, and the multiple news reports that assert the ordinariness of surrogate families. The proliferation of these stories and the anxiety circulating within them suggest that this naturalization is not seamless and that the possibilities for reproductive technologies cannot be contained within one normalizing discourse.

The Absence of Race The near absence of any discussion of race in media coverage of surrogacy was also quite remarkable throughout this sample. For example, the shocking Newsweek article about military wives as surrogates mentions race only briefly, stating that “thanks to reproductive science, Gernisha Myers, who is African-American, is now 18 weeks

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pregnant with the twins of Karin and Lars, a white couple who live in Germany.”198 In this quote, the article attributes the existence of crossracial surrogacy to “science,” which is frequently pitted against “nature” in media accounts of reproductive technologies. Myers’s race is implicitly referenced again when the authors assert that her lack of genetic tie to the child is also what allows her to remain detached from any potential bonding during pregnancy. Emphasizing Myers’s nongenetic role after identifying her racial difference to the couple serves to normalize the pregnancy, banishing the threat of interracial procreation. Yet even this aside about race is unusual within the sample; most articles make no mention of race (of the surrogate, intended parents, or egg donors) whatsoever. The exception to this absence of race in media coverage of surrogacy occurs in articles that explicitly address reproductive tourism, which were largely excluded from this U.S.-based sample. I will discuss reproductive tourism at length in chapter 5, but a great deal of media coverage on transnational surrogacy, particularly the growth of this industry in developing countries, seems to promote a simplified “surrogacy as victim” narrative.199 These narratives are often racialized in that they rely on the stereotype of “Third World” women as disempowered, oppressed, and exploited by their poverty and their nationality. By failing to address race, the majority of media accounts of surrogacy in the United States impose an assumed unmarked white identity upon those who hire surrogates, and those who act as surrogates. The primary difference that is highlighted between surrogates and intended parents is class, not race. Class and race intersect in determining one’s access to and need for fertility services, given that women of color are at higher risk for infertility in the United States than white women. Moreover, the insufficient discussion of race in media coverage bolsters the assumption that a racialized reading of surrogacy is unnecessary or superfluous. Because almost all commercial surrogacy arrangements are gestational, the race of the surrogate is considered to be inconsequential, since she is not contributing her genetic material to the future child. Yet, as chapter 3 will demonstrate, this dismissal of race ignores the history of racialized reproductive labor in the United States, and the ways racial difference can benefit white intended parents. It also suggests an artificial color blindness in an industry that is built upon monetizing and

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geneticizing difference, from intelligence to hair texture. By ignoring race, media coverage of surrogacy reinforces white privilege and the role it plays in reproductive politics. *** Surrogacy narratives in the twenty-first century have largely avoided characterizing either the surrogate or the intended parent as the villain; instead, journalistic accounts of surrogacy focus on the altruism of the surrogate, the process of kinship construction, and the lack of regulation in the ART industry.200 The reasons for this shift are multiple: first, alternative family formations, including gay and lesbian parenting, transnational adoption, interracial marriage, voluntary childlessness, and single-parent families, are increasingly common in the United States. Such family formations exceed the boundaries of the traditional nuclear family in which same-race, married, heterosexual men and women raise children to whom they are both biologically related. As the number of nontraditional families rises in American society, and representations of such families increasingly permeate popular culture, the shock value of surrogacy and other reproductive technologies arguably diminishes. While it was once common for couples to hide the use of even low-tech ARTs such as artificial insemination, today both celebrities and average Americans often openly acknowledge their use of such technologies. Indeed, the public response to reproductive technologies can be traced alongside the changing terminology used to describe fertility services. The very acronym of ART stood for “artificial” reproductive technologies in previous decades, but has now shifted to “assisted” as these procedures have become both naturalized and normalized.201 As the term “test tube babies” suggests, early incarnations of IVF were viewed as artificial, in the sense of being man-made in a laboratory rather than “natural” or God-given. While babies born through ARTs may still be referred to as “miracles” today, the miracle is one that was “assisted” through logical recourse to science and medicine. This naturalization of ARTs has itself been assisted by the reproductive technology industry, which has actively managed the public perception of fertility clinics and the priceless (yet pricey) end result that can never quite be guaranteed. When ARTs are represented as “natural science in the service of the nat-

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ural family,” then the value of these technologies becomes increasingly difficult to critically question.202 The three themes of women helping women, the call for regulation, and the kinship question all contribute to a discourse on surrogacy that frames the issue in the popular imagination. While some cases of contested surrogacy are still cast as traditional surrogacy “horror stories” by vilifying the surrogate or intended parents, many more frame the horror as a result of a lack of federal regulation. This framework is shored up by the women-helping-women narratives in surrogacy discourse that posit surrogacy as a leveling device between women—the exchange of money is mediated by the “gift” of a child and cloaked in affective language of altruism. Yet the kinship question lingers in surrogacy discourse, reflecting anxiety over a perceived disruption of traditional ideologies of what it means to be a mother, a father, and a family. Even when nonnormative kinship patterns are naturalized through normalizing strategies employed by both intended parents and those who tell their stories, legal roadblocks remain in place as a reminder of the hegemonic authority of traditional ideology. In addition to mapping out the popular understanding of surrogacy, all three themes demonstrate the ideological work done to naturalize surrogacy as a legitimate form of family formation, even if it is one that requires increased levels of surveillance and control. Indeed, the desire to regulate the ART industry (and surrogacy’s role within it) can be read as evidence of ART’s incorporation into the social norm and a reflection of biopower, which, according to Foucault, is the “power over life” through which populations are managed, disciplined, and normalized.203 The call to regulate ARTs is, for better or for worse, a reflection of the process of normalization. Questions of power and difference are likewise central to chapter 3, which establishes cross-racial surrogacy within a specific history of cross-racial reproductive labor in the United States. An analysis of that history demonstrates how contemporary cross-racial surrogacy arrangements are naturalized and normalized, despite what are often glaring imbalances of wealth and social capital between the parties involved.

3

From Mammies to Mommy Machines Gender and Racialized Reproductive Labor

The history of racialized reproductive labor in the United States includes both continuities and disruptions. Consumer desire in the realm of ARTs shapes competing discourses about racial difference, and thus inflects epistemologies of race at various historical moments. That being said, the usurpation of raced bodies in the service of reproductive labor has remained relatively stable within the framework of shifting ideologies of maternity, gender, race, and science. Cross-racial gestational surrogacy has a historical counterpart in the practice of cross-racial wet nursing, and a comparison between the two reveals similar ways that knowledge production is influenced by the economic needs of the dominant class. This chapter does not undertake a comprehensive history of the (welldocumented) practice of wet nursing in Europe and the United States. Rather, I analyze how cross-racial wet nursing is symptomatic of the intersectionality of race, science, and reproductive labor, and how dominant social groups benefit at the expense of women of color. In the surrogacy and ART industries, characteristics of gestational surrogates such as race, ethnicity, and class are typically cast as inconsequential to the outcome of the fetus. The caveat lies with the “environment” of the womb. Pregnant women face a litany of behavioral restrictions based on what is often mercurial medical advice about prenatal health, with surrogates uniquely vulnerable to surveillance during pregnancy. For example, a commissioning couple may express concern over hiring a rural or low-income surrogate because they fear that she will not follow urban and middle-class pregnancy mores such as avoiding all caffeine and alcohol, eating organic foods, or exercising. The same couple is less likely to anticipate that their future child will inherit so-called working-class values or traits through exposure to the environment of the womb. Likewise, intended parents may hesitate to 89

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hire a surrogate because she is obese, but not because her red hair indicates a volatile temperament that could influence the disposition of the child-to-be. However, this demarcation between gestation and genetics has not always been clear, only in part because scientific understandings of the gene are relatively recent. Popular and scientific beliefs about the transmission of traits through reproduction are deeply invested in the politics of reproductive labor, especially the practices that are believed to benefit society at a particular historical moment. Moreover, the politics of reproductive labor in the United States have always been racialized. Laws regulating intimate cross-racial contact are a significant measure of how Americans construct categories of race, and the policing of racial boundaries is tied to politics and the economy. Like cross-racial wet nursing, gestational surrogacy is also a racialized and classed practice, particularly when the surrogate is a woman of color and the intended parents are white. Of course, not all racialized ideologies are homogeneous; while this chapter focuses primarily on the reproductive labor of African American women in the United States, chapter 5 will address the reproductive tourism industry—situated as it is within a transnational web of racial politics. The growing trend of cross-racial gestational surrogacy in the United States is a small but significant indicator of the continued reliance of middle- and upper-class women on the reproductive labor of women of color. Like cross-racial gestational surrogacy, cross-racial wet nursing did not need to be “normal” in terms of statistical frequency in order to be normalized and even naturalized. Reproductive labor can encompass a wide range of practices, from pregnancy and nursing to birth and everyday childcare. What makes surrogacy stand out as a form of reproductive labor is in part its bodily specificity. As Iris Marion Young argues, pregnancy blurs binaries between inner and outer, self and other. In the case of surrogacy, this splitting is exacerbated by additional contradictions—mother/not mother, my body/your baby.1 The substances that pass between the pregnant woman and the fetus complicate clear-cut boundaries of self and other and thus require work on the part of all parties involved to clarify these borders. When surrogacy is cross-racial, this ideological work involves the privileging of genetics over gestation to shore up the understanding that the race of the fetus is determined at conception and is not

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influenced by the surrogate. This belief has particular salience in the United States due to the historical policing of racial boundaries through social and legal practices, such as the early twentieth-century “one-drop rule.”2 On the surface, the practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy suggests that the fear of interracial mixing is a relic of a racist past when the color line was strictly enforced, prior to the takeover of “the hegemony of the gene.”3 On the contrary, cross-racial gestational surrogacy shares many similarities with cross-racial wet nursing, a historical form of cross-racial reproductive labor in the United States. Like cross-racial gestational surrogacy, wet nursing blurred the bodily boundaries that invested the color line with cultural authority. Both practices potentially destabilize the rigid barriers of racial difference by legitimizing the intermingling of bodily fluids, and particularly the life-giving properties of the placenta and breast milk. If this is the case, why was cross-racial wet nursing tolerated in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during a period in which the repercussions for other types of intimate cross-racial contact could range from censure to death? Both practices are evidence of the hegemonic power of dominant groups to naturalize deeply racialized and gendered practices in ways that serve their economic, political, and social interests. In the case of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, this naturalization is aided by narratives of maternal-fetal conflict and fetal personhood that have taken on new salience alongside attacks upon women’s reproductive autonomy. This chapter concludes by illustrating how these competing ideologies play out in surrogacy disputes. I analyze two legal cases that demonstrate how racial difference between surrogate and intended parent can be used in seemingly contradictory ways to uphold the parental rights of intended parents.

Cross-Racial Wet Nursing in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries The politics of wet nursing in England and other parts of Europe shifted between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, influencing how wet nursing was taken up in the New World. Aristocratic British women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries commonly circumvented the task of infant feeding—along with other household physical

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labor—by delegating this responsibility to a woman of lower socioeconomic status. In 1700 less than half of all British women breastfed their infants, while the rest were nourished by “dry-feeding” or wet nurses.4 It was not unusual for children to be sent away from their mothers to be breastfed in the country by peasant women, who were considered closer to nature; this practice was symptomatic of the division of women by class.5 Hegemonic ideologies of femininity cast aristocratic women as frail, sickly, and unfit for physical labor (narrowly excepting childbirth), whereas working-class and peasant women were viewed as naturally sturdy and physically robust.6 Nonetheless, aristocratic women were not the only ones to employ wet nurses; working women also did so in order to continue their contributions to the family economy, and families of all classes turned to either wet nurses or dry feeding when mothers fell ill or died.7 Despite the high infant mortality associated with these alternatives to maternal nursing, many upper-class women were faced with pressures to eschew breastfeeding regardless of their personal preference, whether as a signal of family status, a reflection of Victorian beauty standards, or to avoid the contraceptive effects of nursing.8 Despite this, mothers faced condemnation for failing to breastfeed by physicians, social philosophers, and clergymen, even when wet nursing was commonly practiced. This rhetoric is exemplified in a late seventeenth-century publication with the lengthy title The Compleat Mother, or, An Earnest Perswasive to All Mothers (Especially Those of Rank and Quality) to Nurse Their Own Children, by Henry Newcome. In it, the clergyman compares himself to the biblical figure of David as he battles the Goliaths of “custom” and “fashion” that were corrupting the maternal responsibilities of English women. This condemnation of “fashion” in favor of the “natural” (especially as pertaining to women) was also very much a hallmark of Enlightenment thought. Newcome chastised the English aristocracy, asserting that even peasant children were better off than those born into nobility, for the child of the wealthy was likely “turn’d out, exil’d from his Mothers embraces as soon as from her Womb, and assigned to the Care of some Stranger, who hath no other Endearments toward it, than what are owing solely to her Interest.”9 Newcome’s negative appraisal of wet nursing paralleled other Enlightenment-era criticisms of the aristoc-

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racy, which championed individual merit and effort over inherited power and wealth.10 By the mid-eighteenth century, bourgeois British families had largely turned away from the practice of wet nursing. Public opinion and the weight of medical authority in England had shifted; breastfeeding became a symbol of women’s maternal devotion, and the refusal to comply was cast as a sign of personal selfishness associated with an aristocratic lifestyle. In A History of the Breast, Marilyn Yalom contends that this change was in part a reflection of the political ideologies of the time; “physical health offered a metaphor for the health of the state,” and thus what was good for the child (maternal breastfeeding) was good for the nation.11 The practice of sending children to the countryside declined in popularity, and women who continued to use wet nurses for health reasons did so within the home, giving the mother the authority to oversee and manage the process.12 This shift in the geography of wet nursing also impacted the population of employable women, from the “ruddy” and supposedly healthy country nurse to the morally ambiguous urban mother.13

“Some Directions for Chusing a Nurse” Guidebooks on childrearing were common in Europe and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.14 While many took the opportunity to speak out against wet nursing, the physicians, clergymen, and social commentators who wrote such manuals also recognized the importance of advising families on how to choose a nurse should one prove necessary. The careful choice of a wet nurse was significant because of the high stakes involved: the wet nurse initiated intimate bodily contact across class lines, posing a perceived threat to the health, character, and morality of her charge. Anxiety over the fitness of the wet nursing population grew alongside the increased separation of spheres between men and women as well as the attendant pressures of intensive mothering. The relationship between the character of the wet nurse, her milk, and its effects on the child was highly debated. The racial taxonomist Carl Linnaeus warned that wet nursing not only violated the laws of nature, but endangered infants. Linnaeus claimed that lower-class wet

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nurses ate unhealthy foods, drank copious amounts of alcohol, and could potentially infect a child with venereal diseases.15 Both Linnaeus and other scholars, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that children were imbued with the character of the lactating woman through her breast milk, and thus the milk of an immoral woman could forever taint a child.16 Moreover, the anti–wet nursing stance of authors such as Rousseau, Linnaeus, and Cadogan were closely tied to beliefs about the proper role of women in the home as both caring wives and loving mothers.17 As a result, advice and warnings about wet nurses ranged from their character, morality, and psychological health to physical attributes and environmental concerns. In a 1790 essay, Dr. Benjamin Lara rejected the popular advice that redheaded wet nurses should be avoided (their fiery hair was said to reflect an unstable personality) but did not dismiss the importance of the nurse’s temperament.18 Lara insisted that the wet nurse be “strong, healthy, active, and of good disposition. Irritability is hurtful to the milk, and consequently will prejudice the child.”19 The physique of the wet nurse was also important; in an eighteenth-century “nurse’s guide” that took the form of a dialogue between a nurse and a physician, the doctor instructed the nurse on the following: Choose one that is of a middle Size, that is neither of a Poor or lean Habit, nor overloaded with Fat. A very lean Woman may have an impvorish’d Blood, and bad Milk for the same reason; and a gross Fat woman may be subject to Humours, which spoil the milk. See that she is of a Sanguine (that is a fresh) Complexion, and has plump and firm flesh. If she has her monthly Discharges, she is hardly fit for this office; for ‘tis a Sign that she is of an hot Constitution, and therefore amorous, and not subject to the self-denial that’s requir’d of a good Nurse.20

As this example illustrates, the physicality of the body was read as symptomatic of the quality of the milk, and because breast milk was believed to be none other than whitened blood, “bad blood” translated directly to “bad milk.” Lara also tapped into the ancient suspicion of menstruating women, viewing “monthly discharges” as an indicator of hypersexuality and moral lassitude. As these examples suggest, the milk of the wet nurse was thought to transfer her constitution to the child, and thus

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fears about the quality of the nurse were translated into anxieties over the reproduction of the nation. This rhetoric is a historical example of the familiar overdetermination of the female body as a site of contagion, and particularly the marked body of the peasant woman as a potential contaminate of the vulnerable body politic. The historian Rachel Trubowitz argues that the cultural obsession with wet nursing, milk, and blood in England during the seventeenth century was a reflection of the brewing “boundary panic” between the English and Others as that nation engaged in colonization, travel, and foreign trade.21 One way of containing this threat was in the shift toward treating wet nurses less as servants to be managed by mothers and more as medical resources under the authority of doctors.22 In the New World, the reproductive labor of wet nursing was both classed and racialized, altering the discourse concerning the practice and the stakes of the debate.

Wet Nursing in the Americas While the practice of wet nursing was transplanted to the New World by English colonizers, white women in America were strongly urged to breastfeed their own children by authorities ranging from Puritan religious leaders to medical doctors.23 The debates surrounding maternal breastfeeding were about more than infant health—they also served as an emblem of the emerging democratic values of the New World and an Enlightenment-era rejection of the social system of British aristocracy.24 When families did turn to the services of a wet nurse, their options were largely limited by the available female labor pool. Early settlers turned to Native American women as wet nurses, but as the institution of slavery spread during the colonial period, enslaved women also breastfed in place of mothers who were recovering after childbirth, to supplement the milk of a woman who was ill, or when a woman died in labor.25 Historians conclude that roughly 20 percent of slave-owning families used black wet nurses, although the statistics on cross-racial wet nursing have been debated due to inconsistencies in the historical record.26 Evidence for the use of black wet nurses can be found in newspaper advertisements, such as the following 1776 ad in the Georgia Gazette: “Wanted by the Month: A HEALTHY CAREFUL NEGROE WENCH for a WET NURSE. One without a child will be most agreeable, or with a child

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not above six months old.”27 An 1804 ad in the Virginia Argus similarly demonstrates the use of black wet nurses: “Wanted to hire or purchase a wet nurse without a child of her own.”28 The first announcement points to concerns with the health and “quality” of the wet nurse, while the second indicates that slave owners were willing to purchase an enslaved woman specifically for the purpose of wet nursing. Both suggest that if white slave owners were concerned about the potential threat of “contamination” posed by black wet nurses, these concerns were overcome by necessity. The historian Sally McMillen argues that while cross-racial wet nursing may not have been the norm in the South, there is little evidence to suggest that the practice offended the “racial sensibilities” of white people as a whole.29 This is supported by evidence in the letters of a mid-nineteenth-century North Carolina woman, who wrote that her baby’s good health was attributable to the “fine, healthy, careful Negro woman” who nursed her. Likewise, after the (unexplained) “loss” of an enslaved wet nurse, another Appalachian slave owner joked to his brother that “as she [the wet nurse] has always been a necessary institution in your Domestic affairs, I see no other channel for you in the future, than to ‘shut up shop’ and discontinue the business” of having children.30 While anecdotal, these reports suggest that crossracial wet nursing was normalized, even naturalized, despite its status as a minority phenomenon, similar to cross-racial surrogacy today. In the economic and political context of the antebellum South, reliance on the labor of enslaved people in the service of white reproduction was incorporated into the natural order of domestic affairs. This in many ways parallels the techniques of naturalization and normalization that emerge in response to assisted reproductive technologies in the contemporary United States. The feminist theorist Charis Thompson contends that naturalization “encompasses the ways in which scientific, biological, or ‘natural’ idioms normalize and control the physically or socially deviant, pathological, or dangerous.”31 In the case of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, the scientific and biological discourse of genetic essentialism can be deployed by intended parents to naturalize the racial identity of the fetus as determined by genetics, not gestation.32 Likewise, in cross-racial wet nursing, popular and scientific theories of heredity were strategically embraced or rejected in order to normalize the potentially socially destabilizing cross-racial contact between nurse and child.

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While some slave owners undoubtedly feared the love and intimacy forged between nurses and their white charges, the makeup and origin of breast milk also held rich historical and cultural symbolism. As Michel Foucault notes in The History of Sexuality, the meaning of blood shifted in the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie continued to fear “bad blood” in the form of heredity even as the power of aristocratic “blue blood” waned. This fear, Foucault contends, spawned an entire literature concerning health, hygiene, and the raising of children such that from the eighteenth century on, the bourgeoisie “converted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality.”33 Indeed, “ideas about vigor, well-being, and appropriate sexual morality and behavior were intertwined with notions of purity of blood and racial difference.”34 The theory that breast milk was none other than whitened blood strengthened the arguments made by doctors that women should breastfeed their own children—if breast milk was indeed the mother’s own blood, then what better source of nourishment for a child than that life-giving source?35 In this respect, breast milk was compared favorably to semen as a vital source of life.36 Yet breast milk could also be a source of danger: childhood experts in the nineteenth century warned that through wet nursing, lower-class blood entered the body of the upper-class child. The elision between blood and milk that is found in medical texts is of particular relevance to cross-racial wet nursing in America because “African blood” translated into enslavement. Children born with African blood were born into slavery, even those whose fathers were white slave owners. This practice had an established history in the United States; in 1662 the Virginia Assembly held that children were determined to be enslaved or free by the “condition of the mother.” This doctrine indicated that inconsistencies in the logic of blood would be tolerated in order to shore up the dominant hierarchy of race and gender.37 Considering this history, if breast milk was viewed by many as none other than whitened blood, what did this mean for white children nursed by black slaves? It is to this question of “lactational heredity” that I will turn shortly.38 While white Southerners may have normalized the use of black wet nurses, Northern and foreign travelers to the South in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries routinely exaggerated reports of black “mammies” serving as wet nurses, as they considered cross-racial nurs-

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ing to be a remarkable oddity.39 Such visitors questioned how the milk of a black wet nurse would affect the burgeoning characteristics of the infant. The clergyman Jonathon Boucher, a recent arrival from England at the turn of the nineteenth century, expressed horror at the practice in his correspondence home, declaring, “I cannot be reconcil’d to have’g my bairns nurs’d by a Negro Wench. Seriously, that is a monstrous Fault I find with ye people here, & surely it is the source of many Disadvantages to their Children.”40 To this traveler, cross-racial wet nursing raised the specter of the racial contamination of white purity. According to Janet Golden in A Social History of Wet Nursing, “Some believed that children literally drank up their wet nurses’ moral and physical imperfections and that their ‘temper and disposition’ were ‘molded in great measure by the state of the wet nurse’s mind.’”41 Beliefs about the dangers of wet nursing were not limited to Europe; antebellum American physicians also studied the effects of environment and heredity on the milk produced by wet nurses, proposing theories with “complex, fluid, and overlapping notions of heredity, constitution, and environment.”42 These theories were quite flexible—and deeply gendered. Because “heredity” was expanded to encompass conception, gestation, and nursing, a person’s negative characteristics well into adulthood could be attributed to wet nursing, while positive traits were deemed the result of good breeding and good blood. In addition, traits were not believed to be inherited equally from both parents; men were thought to pass on the capacity for analysis and reasoning, while women imbued character and emotion, and thus the wet nurse would primarily influence the disposition but not the intelligence of the child.43 Even temporary states could infect breast milk and harm the child. Women in the nineteenth century were warned against breastfeeding when ill, nervous, “overexcited,” or “deranged.”44 This view aligned with the philosophy of mind/body dualism that associated irrationality, excess, and permeability with femininity and corporeality. Physicians sought to control the blurry boundary between the dangerously porous bodies of women and the vulnerable infant through science, reason, and rationality—all “masculine” characteristics of the mind. By the mid-nineteenth century, increasing immigration and urbanization in the North meant that the pool of available wet nurses in this region largely consisted of Irish and German immigrants (and later in

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the century, women from southern and eastern Europe). In the North, the urban immigrants who served as wet nurses were viewed as a threat to the health of infants and to the home. These recent immigrants were not considered fully white, and in urban areas many had become mothers out of wedlock, thus raising anxieties about cross-race and crossclass contact.45 Theories of “lactational heredity” were commensurate with the xenophobic politics of the urban North, including the belief that foreigners were polluting America’s superior native stock.46 Eugenicists and nativists opposed cross-racial wet nursing just as they opposed miscegenation, stemming from the racist fear of the contamination of “pure” white bloodlines.47 Yet very different views of racial heredity took root in the South than the North. According to Golden, “Cross-race wet nursing led Southerners to evolve a fixed and ultimately modern notion of heredity—that parents endowed their offspring with certain physical traits at the time of conception,” in contrast to the coexisting ideology of heredity as “a dynamic force, influencing development from the time of conception through weaning.”48 The view held by many in the South is comparable to the contemporary popular understanding of genetics—namely, that a wide range of traits and characteristics, including race, are determined at the time of conception by the genetic contribution of the mother and father. This language of genetics was not, of course, the way scientists would have explained racial difference at the time. Rather, race was primarily understood using the pre-evolutionary theories of monogeny and polygeny. Monogeny was the leading Euro-American theory of race in the eighteenth century, based on the belief that humans of all races were part of the same species. Racial difference was thought to result from environmental conditions that led to the degeneration of certain racial groups, with whites reflecting the slightest level of degeneration, and blacks the greatest; this theory aligned with the Christian origin story in which all humans were the offspring of Adam and Eve.49 Polygeny, known as the “American” school of anthropology, began to develop in the early nineteenth century but reached its peak in the 1840s and 1850s.50 Polygenists asserted that each race was in fact an entirely different species with distinct origins, both biologically and geographically.51 American scientists were eager to demonstrate their independence from the yoke of European intellectual thought, and the theory of polygeny was important

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to this project of differentiation.52 Moreover, the scientific embrace of polygeny in America cannot be understood separately from the context of slavery.53 While many polygenists were Northerners who did not support the institution of slavery, the polygenist view of heredity and race shored up political and economic justifications for slavery. In regard to black women’s reproductive labor, polygeny was commensurate with the assumption that enslaved people were both naturally maternal (hence an appropriate mammy or wet nurse) and hypersexual (thus necessitating careful supervision by whites).54 As April Cherry argues in “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture,” Although Black women could never be righteous mothers to their own children, they could be used to mother others, as long as those mothering relationships were constrained or supervised by Whites. Under this conception of Black womanhood, Black women could be called on to care for the children of “real” women as servants, wet nurses, and the like.55

On a larger scale this hereditary view of race suggested that the enslavement of blacks was legitimate because the inferiority of the “darker races” was inborn and reproducible.56 Despite this, many Southern slaveholders were resistant to fully endorse polygeny’s divergence from the Christian origin story, and as a result this theory never took hold as a dominant narrative of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. Defenders of slavery did not need to rely on polygeny alone as a scientific justification for the enslavement of black people; indeed, a subset of monogenists also argued that the degeneration of African races legitimized their enslavement.57 This alleged inferiority was mapped onto the bodies of African women from the point of first contact in order to justify their labor, both “productive” (in homes and fields) and “reproductive” (as mammies and wet nurses). Jennifer Morgan examines both types of work in Laboring Women, and contends that “Europeans had a tradition of identifying Others through the monstrous physiognomy or sexual behavior of women,” with writings that repeatedly referenced “longbreasted” women with unmatched fecundity such that “the shape of her body marked her deviant sexuality and both shape and sexuality evidenced her savagery.”58 As a result, travelers to Africa and the colo-

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nies expected to encounter the deviant female sexuality of African and enslaved women, marked by sagging breasts, hyperfertility, and painless childbirth. This continued reference in literature, letters, and art to African women’s sexuality and physical difference was central to the growing need for enslaved people, and the knowledge that Africans would serve this need. Morgan contends that “African women’s Africanness became contingent on the linkage between sexuality and a savagery that fitted them for both productive and reproductive labor.”59 This ideology marked black women as both hypermaternal and hypersexual, two constructs that were traditionally considered binary opposites. The fetishization of the breast marks a particularly loaded point of intersection between sexuality and savagery, the maternal and the monstrous. If the breasts of African women served as an icon of their fitness for enslaved labor, then this iconicity would seem to distinctly justify and naturalize their role as wet nurses for physically delicate and morally elevated white women. Cross-racial wet nursing is a telling indication of the value of black women’s reproductive labor because laws regulating intimate crossracial contact speak to the ways Americans have constructed categories of race.60 Although cross-racial wet nursing was not adjudicated by law, the difference in how cross-racial wet nursing and heredity were understood within various political and economic systems in the country (i.e., slavery versus an urban market economy) suggests that the meaning of race—and even the interpretation of science—was inseparable from the political and economic interests of the dominant class. Members of the white dominant class in the New World were deeply invested in legislating interracial contact in order to differentiate themselves from enslaved people and other people of color: “enslavement on the basis of racial heredity forced a social and juridical identity upon men and women of African descent that also defined the parameters of slavery in American colonies.”61 While white elites used the law to ensure that the children of slaves would be born into slavery, or to punish acts of miscegenation between white women and African men, cross-racial wet nursing was condoned in the geographical and political context in which it provided the greatest benefit to the dominant group. White populations in the South and North were in certain ways “doing” race differently, and

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interpreting—as well as producing—the knowledge necessary to justify their reproductive labor practices. Nancy Stepan and Sander Gilman argue that when racial science and political life were congruent, the tenets of racial science went “virtually uncontested” by the mainstream scientific establishment.62 This argument points to the interaction between scientific epistemology and hegemonic social norms. The variation in social acceptance of the theory of lactational heredity in the United States at a specific historical moment supports the hypothesis that when racial science and political power were incongruent, the same racial science was not passively accepted. It seems quite remarkable that two such contradictory views could take root and enjoy scientific support simultaneously. What this suggests is that popular views of race do not merely parrot or passively integrate scientific findings; instead, views on race are produced interactively within networks of power that include economic, political, sexual, and gendered dimensions. Although the practice of cross-racial wet nursing sharply decreased after the abolition of slavery in 1865, the reproductive labor of women of color as domestic workers for white families remained consistent. After emancipation, many black women worked outside the home as domestic servants, laundresses, or sharecroppers in labor-intensive jobs that limited time spent with their own children in their own homes.63 Black families were reliant on the agricultural labor of women in the rural South; in 1870 more than four out of ten married women were employed, mainly in agriculture, while over 98 percent of their white counterparts listed their occupation as “keeping house” on the census.64 In 1910 more than 50 percent of all black women were engaged in paid labor, and one-third were domestic workers. Over half of black women worked as domestic servants by 1920, and three out of five were so employed by 1930. While this number decreased after World War II as a result of changing employment opportunities for women, in 1960 onethird of working black women held jobs in “traditional occupations.”65 As April Cherry argues, “the nature of the work that Black women were expected to perform did not change after slavery. African American women have continued to perform affective labor under the constant supervision of White people, including the rearing of White children as mammies, nannies, and daycare providers.”66

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The image of women of color as natural caretakers for white children continues to have a deep impact on the American psyche. It is important to note that the romanticization of black women as mammies emerged post-Reconstruction, produced by white Americans in part to retroactively justify slavery as a system in which kindly masters provided benign protection to devoted slaves.67 That this nostalgic reverence for the mammy did not materialize until it was politically and socially expedient is further evidence that ideologies of race and gender prove malleable in the service of maintaining hegemonic norms. In Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders notes that the image of the mammy is one in which the black caregiver not only embraced her white charges wholeheartedly, but in fact loved these children more than her own. Wallace-Sanders contends that “her [the mammy’s] behavior and maternal status are inextricably linked when her biological (black) children function only to reaffirm her attachment to her surrogate (white) children.”68 This perception that black women are natural caretakers for white children and even prefer them to their own continues to serve a function in American society despite the academic and political deconstruction of this racist and deeply gendered stereotype. Representations of black womanhood in the United States are overdetermined by stereotypical images of black motherhood; in addition to the mammy, the figures of the matriarch, jezebel, and welfare queen continue to frame public perceptions of black women.69 Moreover, the supposed wellspring of love and nurturance that is attributed to black women in relation to white children has been expanded to encompass a larger segment of women of color. After 1965, the passage of more liberal immigration laws led to an increase in immigration by women from Latin America and the Caribbean, and as social movements paved the way for greater employment opportunities for African Americans, immigrant women filled the gap in domestic service.70 This “feminization of migration” has contributed to the surplus of “Third World” women serving as domestic workers for wealthy Western families.71 As Arlie Hochschild argues, “Marx’s iconic male, stationary industrial worker has been replaced by a new icon: the female, mobile service worker,” and surrogacy is an extension of this shift.72 As a form of what Cooper and Waldby term “clinical labor,” reproductive services are contracted out along lines that are stratified by gender, race, and class.73

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Cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements involving women of color and white intended parents in the United States are entrenched in the history of racialized reproductive labor, and like cross-racial wet nursing, the scientific and political justifications of cross-racial surrogacy prove malleable to benefit the reproductive desires of the dominant white majority.74

Constructing Race in the Courtroom The influence of race in reproductive labor today is highly negotiated. Couples pick and choose what elements of identity they interpret as heritable, embracing those aspects of dominant scientific thought that are congruent with their own reproductive “choreography” and downplaying those that are not.75 During the era of cross-racial wet nursing, multiple ideologies of racial “transmission” coexisted in the same time and place. The determining factor in whether a population would embrace or reject these theories was not based purely on the scientific evidence provided, nor was the evidence itself politically and socially neutral. These competing ideologies were able to coexist because different segments of the population were invested in the racial politics of reproductive labor in markedly disparate ways, and could perhaps shift their commitment to racial ideologies depending upon context. I contend that this phenomenon, what Charis Thompson calls “strategic naturalization,” is also evident in contemporary legal negotiations over kinship in gestational surrogacy arrangements.76 Thompson discusses strategic naturalization in terms of how ART users (including both surrogates and intended parents) negotiate the relationship between the natural and the cultural. This term also applies to the strategic deployment of scientific theories in the arena of reproductive technologies, such as the impact of gestation, genetics, and bonding. The legal cases that I analyze suggest that the courts have a vested interest in maintaining hegemonic ideologies of race, gender, and family, and that they have exercised their authority to protect these interests. Two legal cases, Johnson v. Calvert and Marion County Division of Children’s Services v. Melinger, demonstrate how coexisting and competing ideologies of maternal-fetal relations, gender, and race are strategically naturalized in order to shore up dominant beliefs about race and kinship that are put into question by ARTs.

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Johnson v. Calvert To review, in a gestational surrogacy arrangement the surrogate shares no genetic connection to the prospective child; she is implanted with a fertilized embryo made from sperm and egg of the prospective parents or donors. Nonetheless, in the case of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, the implantation of the embryo initiates a form of intimate cross-racial contact; just as the hormones of the wet nurse produced milk to nourish her charge, the developing fetus is reliant upon the placenta of the pregnant woman to sustain life. Cells also cross the placenta during pregnancy in a process known as “microchimerism,” traveling both from the fetus to the pregnant woman and vice versa. These cells have been found to migrate into the tissues and organs of the pregnant woman, including her bone marrow, skin, liver, blood,77 and even brain.78 Without assessing the implications of these more recent scientific findings, it is clear that the relationship between surrogate and fetus is biological, even though a genetic connection is not shared. A careful balance is orchestrated in the field of reproductive technologies between the increased acceptability of interracial contact through gestational surrogacy and the existing impediments to racial mixing at the level of gametes. In the shorthand of the ART industry, race is frequently mapped onto gametes, gametes represent genetics, and genetics are coded for kinship; as this suggests, in cross-racial gestational surrogacy the significance of racial difference is more than skin deep. This import is revealed in what is perhaps the second-most widely known case of contested surrogacy after that of In re Baby M in 1988—Johnson v. Calvert in 1993. The Johnson v. Calvert case has proved compelling to feminists for a number of reasons: as an indication of the public policy response to surrogacy as a “social problem” in the United States, as a symptom of the contemporary struggles to define kinship, and as an extension of the exploitation of black women’s bodies during slavery, amid others.79 While my analysis is indebted to these significant contributions, it will focus on the way that coexisting and competing scientific narratives of genetics and maternal-fetal subjectivity take precedence over one another depending upon their capacity to shore up (or occasionally challenge) dominant, hegemonic ideologies of race, kinship, and gender. Johnson v. Calvert demonstrates this through the selective

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privileging of genetics over gestation, despite popular and scientific attention to the impact of “bonding” and the uterine environment. The events leading up to the Johnson v. Calvert trial(s) began with a contract signed between a married “white” couple, Mark and Crispina Calvert, and an African American woman named Anna Johnson.80 Johnson agreed to act as a surrogate for a sum of $10,000 plus a life insurance policy. The embryo Johnson carried was created using the gametes of both Calverts. Thus, Johnson was not genetically related to the prospective child. The relationship between Johnson and the intended parents rapidly deteriorated; Johnson felt that the Calverts were not supportive during her difficult pregnancy, while the Calverts accused her of hiding a history of miscarriage and stillbirth. Johnson sent the couple a letter prior to the birth of the child stating that if they did not immediately pay her in full she would consider the contract void and would not relinquish parental rights.81 As a result, both parties filed suit to declare legal parentage of the fetus.82 The significance of this lawsuit exceeded the interests of the two parties; it was also the first time a gestational surrogate had filed for custody. The case would thus set legal precedent and alter the surrogacy landscape of California, and the nation.83 The case was heard at three levels of the court system in California: superior or trial court, appellate court, and the California Supreme Court. In a dizzying legal quandary, both Crispina Calvert and Anna Johnson claimed legal motherhood of the child under the same statute: California’s Uniform Parentage Act (UPA). The UPA was initially intended to protect “illegitimate” children by determining paternity regardless of marital status, but also states that the woman who gives birth to a child is that child’s natural mother.84 Johnson claimed that this wording established her as the legal mother, while DNA tests incontrovertibly confirmed that Calvert was the genetic contributor of the egg, and thus the “biological” mother. The trial court ruled that the Calverts were the “genetic, biological, and natural father and mother,” that the contract was legal, and that Johnson had no parental rights.85 As I will discuss further, this slippage between biological and genetic worked to position only one potential mother (Crispina Calvert) as having a “biological” connection to the child despite the deeply embodied relationship between the pregnant woman (Johnson) and the fetus.

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The appellate court, however, employed an unusual reading of the UPA to determine whether Anna Johnson or Crispina Calvert was the “natural” mother. While the UPA states that the woman who gives birth to a child is that child’s legal mother, the appellate court interpreted the act to reinforce genetics over gestation, confirming the conclusions of the trial court. The California Supreme Court, in contrast, held that while the UPA recognizes both genetics and gestation as potential determinants of maternity, when both are at issue (Calvert as the genetic mother and Johnson as the gestational mother), then she who intended to raise the child is the legal mother. Because Johnson had not intended to parent when she entered the contractual agreement with the Calverts, she had no legal claim to motherhood.86 Moreover, the court ruled that gestational surrogacy is not counter to public policy and that termination of the parental rights of the surrogate is not unconstitutional.87 These rulings would provide precedent for future surrogacy-related court decisions and mark California as a surrogacy-friendly state. Efforts by the Calverts’ legal representation to position Johnson as outside the natural, biological nuclear family also served to erode Johnson’s claim to motherhood. The courts refused to legitimize the potential of reproductive technologies to complicate kinship, specifically the fractioning of motherhood into multiple genetic, gestational, and social components. Superior court judge Richard Parslow was firm in his assertion that the child could not have two legal mothers, a situation that he described as “ripe for crazy making.”88 Using rhetoric that situated Johnson as a nonmother, Parslow drew analogies between Johnson’s role as a surrogate and other, more familiar adult-child relationships. Parslow argued that Johnson was like a wet nurse or a foster parent, a “genetic and hereditary stranger” who “provided care and nurturing during the time the natural mother couldn’t care for him.”89 As the legal theorist Deborah Grayson argues, this framing not only delegitimized Johnson’s maternal claims, but also firmly resituated her within the “appropriate” relationship between a black woman and a white child. Grayson argues that when the judge compares Johnson to a wet nurse, “in addition to having demeaning racial undertones, by employing the available language of servitude the phrase also works to resituate Johnson in her place as a laboring black body. In so doing, the history of con-

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flating African American women’s reproductive labor with their labor as workers is recalled.”90 It is significant that Parslow compared Johnson to a wet nurse because of the historical connotation of wet nurses as economically underprivileged, morally suspect, “mercenary hirelings.”91 Historically, wet nurses were viewed as a potential threat to the stability of the “legitimate” nuclear family; for Parslow, Johnson perhaps materialized as a contemporary successor to this destabilizing figure. This language does situate Johnson within the history of black women’s reproductive labor in the United States. However, Parslow is not as much conflating reproductive labor with other types of work as actually differentiating between maternal labor (what a mother does for her child) and “work.” If Johnson is like a wet nurse, then the labor that she engages in is paid labor, separated from the unpaid, affective labor of mothering. Parslow’s statement assumes that the compensation Johnson received as a surrogate places her squarely in the service economy, categorically excluding the possibility of emotional connection or authentic maternal investment. This thinking taps into feminist debates over surrogacy that stemmed from the Baby M case, in which feminists disagreed on whether reproductive labor was a unique type of work, one that could not be legislated along the same lines as other contractual wage-based forms of employment. By parsing out the two types of labor and situating Johnson’s labor as nonmaternal (indeed, Parslow refers to Johnson as “a host in a sense”), the judge circumvents the threat posed by blurring these boundaries.92 The “likeness” of the child to his genetic parents, the Calverts, was also posited as a commonsense marker of legitimate kinship in the discourse surrounding the trial. It is important to note that despite Johnson’s self-identified mixed-race heritage, the media and the courts read Johnson as simply “black,” while the Calverts were routinely identified as a “white” couple, disregarding Crispina Calvert’s Filipina heritage. The race of the participants was simplified in a way that upheld the privileges afforded to whiteness; according to the ethnographer Khiara Bridges, this racial “flexibility” is central to the persistence of race as “an organizing principle of U.S. society,” such that “race has had to be flexible enough to be manipulated in multiple and frequently contradictory ways, as required by the exigencies of the day.”93 This racial simplification was bolstered in another respect: as a dark-skinned woman,

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Johnson was marked as visually Other to the “white” baby, disrupting the normative picture of a traditional nuclear family. DNA, invisible to the naked eye, was mapped onto the visible and naturalized as a marker of biological kinship through reference to phenotype. This correlation between physical likeness and familial bond implicitly delegitimized Johnson’s claim to motherhood. The media picked up on the question of “likeness,” quoting Crispina Calvert as saying that the baby “looks just like us,” while her husband described the trial as “our blackest nightmare.”94 When Crispina Calvert referenced “likeness” as shorthand for her shared genetic connection to the child, the unspoken assertion was that baby Christopher was not like Johnson, and that Johnson’s skin color was evidence that the child did not belong to (or with) her. As Grayson argues, Crispina Calvert’s statement was not only one of belonging, but also of exclusion: “Christopher’s likeness serves not only as a (meta)physical and conceptual link indicating rights to parentage but also because likeness operates as a sign for blood—for the closed, racialized membership of family and race.”95 In the United States, race has historically been attributed through the rule of hypodescent, meaning that an individual of mixed-race heritage is ascribed the racial status of the less privileged group. Following this logic, to declare Johnson the legal mother of baby Christopher would have made the boy black.96 Finding the Calverts to be the legal parents of the child not only shored up traditional definitions of family, but also maintained socially constructed boundaries of race by refusing to imagine a context in which a black woman could be the mother to a white child.97 In this instance, the raced body of the surrogate can be read as a text that marks her liminality both socially and legally; whether knowingly or not, white intended parents benefit from the racial “difference” inherent to cross-racial surrogacy arrangements. The law has the potential not only to shore up hegemonic ideologies of class, race, and gender but also to produce narratives that can narrow the definition of “mother,” “father,” or “family,” thus reining in the potentially destabilizing effects of ARTs. While these factors eroded Johnson’s claim to motherhood, she also tapped into psychological theories of prenatal maternal-infant bonding to legitimize her claims. While these theories enjoyed extensive scientific and popular currency at the time of Johnson’s trial, her claims to have

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bonded with the child were largely met with skepticism. Johnson was accused of harboring ulterior motives for seeking custody, including greed and attention; Mark Calvert raised these concerns in the press, saying that “the only bonding Anna Johnson has is with your television cameras.”98 Johnson’s claim to motherhood as based on the physical labor of pregnancy and birth, which has traditionally been overdetermined as “natural” and “essential” to womanhood, was denaturalized. From the perspective of the Calverts, their future child was already an individual at the time that the embryo was implanted in Johnson’s womb, a product of their uniquely combined genetic inheritance. This assumption points to a significant complexity raised by the case; in gestational surrogacy arrangements, maternal bonding theories compete with other interrelated ideologies of fetal subjectivity, including fetal personhood and genetic essentialism. Genetic essentialism, in which cultural meanings of the gene conflate with the scientific or biological, “reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral complexity, with their genes.”99 The concept of the gene has taken on such weighty symbolism in contemporary culture that its value has eclipsed the gestational, standing in as a metaphor for identity, selfhood, and familial relationships.100 The selective dismissal of bonding in favor of genetic essentialism demonstrates that while competing and often incompatible ideologies coexist in the reproductive arena, the authoritative weight attributed to them is determined by their relationship to the dominant social order.101 Johnson claimed that she had unexpectedly begun to bond with the fetus during her pregnancy, culminating in her inability to abide by the contract that she had signed and surrender the child to his genetic parents.102 Her lawyers attempted to shift the focus from genetics to gestation by pointing to the effects that a birth mother has on the fetus, including the size and shape of the child’s brain, arguing that “Baby Boy Johnson is not the same baby that would have emerged from any other birth mother’s womb.”103 The contention that the gestational period can have life-altering effects on a child is deeply gendered. As Rayna Rapp argues, on the surface the discourse of genetics has an “egalitarian nature” in that both the mother and father contribute equally, yet this “is held in tension with a second popular, pervasive, and nonegalitarian idea, the highly gendered notion of maternal responsibility.”104 Men are

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perceived to be responsible for providing the genetic material, but their behavior during pregnancy does not affect the development of the fetus; women are held responsible for “quality control.”105 This focus on gestational environment can become a point of contention in surrogacy arrangements, with conflicting interpretations of risk and safety between intended parents and gestational carriers. While the discourse of genetic determinism suggests that the future of the fetus is largely predetermined by the contributions of the intended parents, warnings about gestational environment point to the potential dangers of the womb. The focus on the supposedly risky behaviors of pregnant women, when taken to extremes, has led to interventions such as courtordered Cesarean sections and prison terms for prenatal drug use. However, the implications of gestational environment do not end at these common “external” factors such as drugs and alcohol. Recent publications also (controversially) contend that severe psychological stress during pregnancy correlates with lifelong problems for children, including welfare dependency, schizophrenia, and generational poverty.106 The field of epigenetics also demonstrates that “epigenetic processes operate in pregnancies such that they impact hereditary traits without changing the genetic code” such that surrogates “are establishing a biological connection with the fetus they are gestating, a connection that appears to last for decades.”107 Even seemingly innocuous pregnancy cravings for salty snacks can have supposedly dire consequences for a child’s health. A recent article in the New York Times that begins with the definitivesounding headline “Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb” cites research that the consumption of junk food during pregnancy (examples include Cheetos, Nutella, and Froot Loops) results in children’s desensitization to fatty and sweet foods. A researcher quoted in the article likens this type of desensitization to “the analogy of someone who is addicted to drugs,” needing more and more of the offending substance to get their fix.108 In a social milieu in which the management of weight is routinely referred to as a “war on obesity,” the bodies of pregnant women are being placed on the front lines. This focus on gestational environment has the potential to reconfigure spatially the danger to the fetus from external environmental factors (largely outside a woman’s control) to the interior of the body, the uterine environment. As a reflection of this shift, the site of intervention

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moves from social-structural factors to individuals, particularly women. An inherent maternal-fetal conflict is assumed when the womb is posited as a vector of risk, in which the safety of the fetus is threatened, not by poverty, pollution, or institutional racism, but by the mother.109 Indeed, the fate of the fetus can be (and is) extrapolated to reflect the fate of society when conditions such as cancer, obesity, and mental illness are linked to gestation. As Bernice Hausman argues in Viral Mothers, “Pregnant and lactating women become the focus of attention within risk societies because fetuses and infants are seen as the innocent victims of modernity’s side effects. They become exemplars of humanity in its most pristine form, and women’s bodies are the vehicles for their contamination.”110 The discourse of pregnant women as vectors of risk is particularly significant for surrogacy research because surrogates are engaged in paid reproductive labor. Because surrogates are compensated, they are arguably more likely to encounter surveillance during pregnancy than most women, and they often sign contracts regarding their prenatal behavior. Johnson’s lawyers attempted to tap into the less sinister aspect of gestational environment by contending that her unique contributions to the baby in utero constituted a claim to kinship that could rival, or at least parallel, genetics. Given that one of the first studies to contribute to the field of so-called fetal origins was published in 1989 (positing a link between low birth weight and adult heart disease), in addition to the research cited by Johnson’s legal team, this concept would not have been entirely foreign to the court.111 Again, the assertion that Johnson made a significant contribution to the development of the fetus was paired with the argument that she had bonded with the fetus in the later stages of pregnancy, a contention that had also found popular and scientific support. The idea that a woman could bond with a fetus prior to its birth was not merely a popular sentiment celebrating “maternal nature,” but was grounded in scientific studies that alleged medical evidence of this connection. Both abortion and infertility discourses of the 1980s presumed that maternal nature was present at the core of all women, and was “activated” by gestation.112 These theories contributed to studies on the effects of ultrasound on maternal bonding. It was not until the 1970s that the term “bonding” was first adopted in the United States, and in its initial application “referred quite exclusively

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to the relationship between a mother and her infant.”113 Theories of maternal-infant bonding were first published in the United States beginning in 1972 with an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research therein claimed that mothers who are allowed sixteen hours of postnatal skin-to-skin contact with their baby develop better mothering skills, and have infants who score higher on developmental tests. The theory was built on the belief that a sensitive period exists after birth in which a woman’s body produces hormones that affect her ability to bond with the infant. Babies who are separated from their mothers during this sensitive period will allegedly fail to bond, leading to developmental delays during infancy, emotional problems during childhood, and even juvenile delinquency and criminal behavior later in life.114 The aforementioned definition of bonding stemmed largely from scientific research led by pediatricians. However, the evidence from which much research on ultrasound and bonding is based is limited to two questionable sources. These texts, dating from 1982 and 1983, consist of a study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology and a letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The letter, authored by two doctors, suggests that viewing an ultrasound might initiate bonding in pregnant women and thus decrease the likelihood that she will terminate the pregnancy. This hypothesis was derived from the doctors’ observation of two women who underwent ultrasound during the first trimester, viewed the image of the fetus, and subsequently chose not to abort. Despite the limited evidence and lack of peer review, the letter has been cited in many later articles as a “study” providing proof of maternal bonding via ultrasound,115 or what Rosalind Petchesky calls the “visual bonding theory.”116 Petchesky argues that given our visually oriented culture, pictorial representations of the fetus are a powerful means by which anti-abortion forces propagate the discourse of fetal personhood.117 Visual bonding theories suggest that women are dependent upon medical and technological intervention in order to form emotional attachments with the fetus during pregnancy, and that while is it natural for women to bond, in the contemporary culture of legalized abortion, women can no longer be entrusted with this task.118 Bonding theories were well known at the time of Johnson’s trial, and not only in academic settings. The New York Times, for example,

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published numerous articles on bonding during the years surrounding the trial, including topics such as the importance of scent in maternalinfant bonding, the complications of bonding for imprisoned mothers, and an opinion piece stating that “from the moment a pregnant woman thinks of herself as a mother, she begins bonding with her unborn child.”119 The ubiquity of this discourse provided Johnson with a medical and social justification for her actions, one that could potentially counter the Calverts’ genetic ties to the child. While gestational surrogacy is a nontraditional route to motherhood, Johnson was tapping into a sacred narrative, that of pregnancy as a transformative journey that reveals the maternal nature at the heart of all women.120 Indeed, the courts did not dismiss the significance of Johnson’s role in producing baby Christopher. Judge Parslow described Johnson’s contribution to the development of the child as “substantial,” and the California Court of Appeals stated, While the woman is pregnant, she shares most of her major bodily functions with the child. For some time after birth the child retains and uses the woman’s life-preserving tissue, cells, blood, nutrients and antibodies. The woman protects and nourishes the child during pregnancy, and, for good or ill, can permanently affect the child by what she ingests. The contribution to the child’s development by the woman who gave it birth is indeed . . . profound.121

If Johnson’s contribution was “substantial” and “profound,” then why were her claims to have bonded with the fetus dismissed? When asked about Johnson’s bond with the child, a lawyer for the Calverts argued that Johnson was trying to “steal” the Calverts’ baby, and asked sarcastically, “What miraculous epoxy was used to create a bond?”122 It is important to note that the Calverts’ legal team did not only dismiss the possibility of Johnson having bonded with the fetus, but also provided an alternative explanation for why the baby belonged with the Calverts: the importance of genes in determining identity. It was this discourse of genetics that would capture the imagination of the courts and the media, seemingly at the expense of alternative frameworks. Both narratives held political, scientific, and cultural currency at the time of the trial, and they commonly coexist in discourses of maternity (women

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visually bond with their own “flesh and blood”). Genetic essentialism trumped gestation in Johnson’s case not only because of the visual signifiers of racial difference, but also because the discourse of genetic essentialism shores up hegemonic definitions of kinship that are inseparable from race. The ultimate decision by the California Supreme Court was that both women had legitimate claims to motherhood, but that intent would determine final custody. In shifting the narrative from gestation versus genetics to an intent-based approach, the California judicial system created a precedent that could favor “intended parents” (as this appellation suggests) over even traditional surrogates or egg donors who would have a genetic claim to custody.123 Nonetheless, the previous courts had both privileged genetics: the trial court had declared the Calverts the “genetic, biological, and natural” parents (emphasis added) and the trial court judge even used genetics to position the Calverts’ parental rights as more secure than those asserted by the intended parents in the Baby M case (a case of traditional surrogacy), because “in this case [Johnson v. Calvert] we have a family unit, all biologically related.”124 Parslow emphasized the seemingly deterministic nature of genetics, noting that “all sorts of things develop out of your genes,” from identity, immune system, and intelligence to “how you walk, talk, and everything else,” and added that Johnson and the child were “genetic strangers.”125 The appellate court likewise concluded that genetics influence both the physiological components of the body and identity, stating that “it is now thought that genes influence tastes, preferences, personality styles, manners of speech, and mannerisms.”126 It follows that the judges’ deterministic view of genetics also influenced the conclusion that motherhood was biological, not social. Although Johnson did not dispute that she was not the genetic mother of the child, a blood test proving this was interpreted as conclusive evidence of (non)maternity, such that the lab report flatly excluded Anna as “not the mother” of the baby boy. . . . In light of Anna’s stipulation that Crispina is genetically related to the child and because of the blood tests excluding Anna from being the natural mother, there is no reason not to uphold the trial court’s determination that Crispina is the natural mother. She is the only other candidate!127

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Both the trial and appeals courts made repeated reference to the importance of protecting the stand-alone family unit from infringement. This was often framed in terms of an unwavering understanding of motherhood as singular. As the preceding quote suggests, the courts insisted that a child could not have two mothers. Judge Parslow also stated clearly, “It’s not my intention (for the child) to be raised by two mothers. I find the three natural parents’ contention is really not in the best interests of the child,” in part because it would be “confusing” for an infant, “having two people, two mothers feeding, holding, caring for the child.”128 This argument ignores the proliferation of nontraditional families in the United States, including the growing number of queer families in which two women co-parent, or the tradition in many African American communities of what Patricia Hill Collins calls “motherwork,” where “mothering is conceptualized as a form of cultural work that incorporates the mothering relationships of non-blood relations as well.”129 This oversight is productive for the courts as part of a larger project to circumscribe the definition of family in order to maintain the hegemonic norm of the white, heterosexual, middle-class nuclear family.130 Moreover, the California Supreme Court reinforced an “either/or” framework of motherhood by arguing that any parental rights “given” to Anna Johnson would necessarily be taken away from the Calverts. The court imagined that adding more kin would subtract from both the legal rights and exclusive relationship between child and genetic parents, such that “any parental rights Anna might successfully assert could come only at Crispina’s expense” and would “detract from or impair the parental bond enjoyed by Mark and Crispina.”131 The latter statement is of particular interest because it posits bonding as a “natural” and important aspect of parental-child relationships. The implicit assertion that the Calverts would bond with their genetic offspring in a way that Johnson could not also furthers claims made by the lower courts that passing on your own genes can create a “profound psychological bond” and that bonding is the natural purview only of married, heterosexual couples.132 The appellate court even goes so far as to entirely dismiss an opinion by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) cited by Johnson’s lawyers, which had found that the genetic link between intended parent and child held less weight than that between surrogate

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and fetus. The court disregarded this claim, contending that the ACOG’s interpretation of the Uniform Parentage Act “does not depend on what a group of doctors, however distinguished and learned in their field, think the law ought to be.”133 This quote is significant because it demonstrates the way scientific “evidence” was selectively weighed by the courts: the same court took “evidence at trial” to demonstrate genetic determinism, while dismissing the significance of the gestational relationship even when proposed by the leading professional organization in obstetrics. In Johnson v. Calvert, shoring up the boundaries of the traditional family also meant reconstituting the color line by ensuring that a black woman could not be recognized as the mother of a white child. Yet in order to reinforce the social categories of kinship and racial difference, the courts turned to science. The supposed biological imperative of the Calverts to raise their own genetic offspring trumped a far more ancient biological marker of kinship, the acts of gestation and childbirth. Moreover, Johnson’s appeal to “maternal nature” in the form of an essential bond formed in utero was framed as unnatural for having attached itself to the genetic “property” of an Other. Cross-racial gestational surrogacy has the potential to destabilize categories of kinship and race by creating the possibility of alternative frameworks; as institutional gatekeepers, these particular courts responded by producing “tradition.” This is not to suggest that the technological advancement of ARTs has a predetermined outcome that will unswervingly enforce hegemonic norms. Because ARTs challenge hegemony in unprecedented ways, courts, legislatures, hospitals, the ART industry, and other institutions do not merely re-create and reproduce, but rather are forming definitions anew while using overlapping discourses of science—often in contradictory ways. Marilyn Strathern argues that the “new actors” of reproductive technologies, including surrogates, intended parents, donors, and medical professionals, “contribute to a field of what might indeed be called new facts.”134 The agency of ART users will influence the production of knowledge concerning these technologies and therefore will also impact the shifting discourse of race and kinship. While this suggests that the scientific ideologies that inform ARTs are necessarily malleable, they are not infinitely so. In Johnson v. Cal-

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vert, genetic “likeness” was used to foreclose possibilities of alternative kinship formations, and the scientific authority of genetic determinism overshadowed gestation and other social claims to motherhood. In the more recent case of cross-racial gestational surrogacy discussed below, a white intended parent introduced the element of race confusion in a way that bolstered his own claims to legal parentage.

The Adoption of Infants H In 2005 an African American surrogate from South Carolina named Zaria Nkoya Huffman gave birth to twin girls, nine weeks premature, at Marion County Hospital near Indianapolis, Indiana.135 The twins were routinely visited in the neonatal intensive care unit by fifty-eightyear-old Stephen Melinger, the man listed as “father” on their birth certificate.136 Melinger, a single man from New Jersey, had arranged the surrogacy through Surrogate Mothers, Inc. of Monrovia, Indiana.137 New Jersey was the site of the infamous “Baby M” surrogacy case, and is thus considered “unfriendly” to surrogacy; that state allows for only noncommercial surrogacy arrangements (in which the surrogate is uncompensated), whereas surrogacy contracts in Indiana are neither illegal nor enforceable by law.138 While Melinger had a temporary residence in Indianapolis, he planned on returning to his home in New Jersey with the twins once they were well enough to travel. Melinger’s original adoption of the girls in 2006 went unchallenged based on his assertion that he was the biological father, and that the adoption was undisputed by the biological mother, who was alternatively listed as Ms. Huffman and as a twenty-three-year-old white egg donor.139 The twins received extended care at the hospital, where Melinger’s unusual behavior and demeanor quickly raised concerns among hospital staff. Employees contacted the Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) after Melinger accidentally entered the neonatal intensive care unit with a pet dove in his pocket.140 Melinger claimed that he left the dove in the office area of the hospital and thus did not endanger the fragile children, but hospital staff reported that he had also visited the girls with bird feces on his clothing.141 Melinger’s lawyer and surrogacy agency founder Steven Litz admitted to the Indianapolis Star that Melinger was in the wrong, but downplayed the significance of his mis-

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take: “Did he make some silly decisions? Of course he did. He is a parttime magician, and the bird is a pet,” Litz told the paper.142 Hospital staff also critiqued Melinger’s plan to transport the premature infants without assistance on the lengthy car trip from Indiana to New Jersey. Aware of the rising concerns, Litz filed a motion in court describing the twins as “hard to place” due to their “biracial” status.143 Indiana allows “hard to place” children, including siblings and those of mixed race, to be eligible for adoption by out-of-state residents.144 Further investigations by the state disclosed major inconsistencies in the adoption court records. The investigation revealed that Melinger had obtained both sperm and eggs from white donors, meaning that he was not the genetic father, Huffman was not the genetic mother, and the twins would not be considered “biracial” by contemporary genetic logic. This information raised questions about the legitimacy of the adoption, and also about the overall veracity of statements made by Melinger and the Monrovia surrogacy agency representing him. Litz argued that his agency was involved merely in “hooking everybody up,” but was not responsible for changes made to the agreement after the signing of the contract.145 Litz also claimed that he was unaware that Melinger was not the biological father until midway through the pregnancy. The trial court voided the initial adoption but later reinstated it, a decision that was affirmed by the Indiana Court of Appeals. The case was then sent on to the Indiana Supreme Court at the behest of DCS; in 2009 the court concluded that the adoption must be repeated in New Jersey, but awarded preliminary custody to Melinger. The case raised several compelling issues regarding questions of race and kinship in cross-racial gestational surrogacy. Concerns were raised about Melinger’s nontraditional decision to father, and the twins’ race became central to the intelligibility of their kinship status in the courts and the press. The negotiation of gender and race in cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements speaks to how society determines who is legible as a parent, how kinship is defined, and what role social institutions play in policing challenges to these hegemonic norms. Moreover, Melinger’s legal team attempted to negotiate the logic of racial heritability in order to ensure his claim to the twin girls; the cross-racial component of the surrogacy arrangement was seized upon in order to benefit the white intended parent.

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As previously mentioned, Stephen Melinger was fifty-eight years old and single when he arranged the surrogacy contract in Indiana. His age, combined with his marital status (his sexuality remained unclear), could have made it difficult for him to follow traditional avenues for adoption: as one Indiana adoption agent stated, few young women would choose to give their child to a man “older than their grandfather.”146 During the trial initiated by the DCS investigation, witnesses from Marion County, where the twins were born, “opined the adoption should not be granted because Melinger was too old and did not know how to comfortably interact with premature babies,” according to the Indiana Court of Appeals.147 While this statement does not clearly indict Melinger based on his sex, subsequent statements made by witnesses make clear that the combination of his age, gender, and marital status warranted careful observation. A state investigator from the program Children in Need of Services described Melinger as a “gentle person,” “earnest and well intentioned,” but found him to be “hesitant and unsure” around the twins and concluded that he lacked “real natural instincts.”148 A DCS caseworker concurred, suggesting that Melinger undergo a “bonding assessment” to evaluate his relationship with the twins, despite the fact that at the time the assessment was called for he had been separated from the girls for eight months.149 In the minds of the witnesses, Melinger’s insufficient “natural instincts” were exacerbated by the absence of a female partner. When interviewed by investigators, Melinger’s employer and other individuals in his social network raised concerns about the lack of female “influences and mentors” for the girls. Intended parents in surrogacy arrangements are typically framed as desperate infertile couples, taking any measures necessary to achieve the socially laudable goal of having a child, and single men fit uneasily within this normative framework. Even during an era when women are becoming mothers into their sixties through in vitro fertilization, the specter of a single, older man going to such lengths exceeds the bounds of normative family formation.150 Unfortunately, the state of Indiana has a precedent for concern over single fathers who use surrogacy; in 1995, a twenty-six-year-old single man named James Austin beat to death the infant child he had obtained through a traditional surrogacy contract arranged in Indianapolis. Austin was convicted of third-degree murder and was sentenced to up to

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twenty years in prison. The traditional surrogate sued Austin and the agency involved for failure to adequately screen the intended father. A relative of Austin’s and witness in the case stated that “society, by permitting an untrained, single young man to buy a day-old baby is partly to blame for this crime.”151 Of course, a far greater percentage of children are victims of assault and domestic violence in traditional households than in families created through surrogacy, yet this case arguably cast a pall on Melinger’s adoption proceedings. In the end, the Indiana Court of Appeals did not accept the judgments of witnesses that Melinger was too old or lacking in the skills necessary to become a father, and in later hearings in New Jersey, many of Melinger’s associates spoke favorably of his parenting abilities. Nonetheless, the gender and age components of this case reveal how gestational surrogacy and other permutations of ARTs are opening up avenues for alternative family formations to individuals who might face insurmountable obstacles to more traditional means such as adoption. Just as the courts in Johnson v. Calvert had a vested interest in curtailing the possibility of one child with multiple legal mothers, the Indiana courts were challenged to consider whether sex serves as a legal handicap for a white, middle-class man. Gestational surrogacy brings to the foreground the assumptions about sex and gender that undergird the institutionalization of kinship. In cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements in which the intended parents are white and the surrogate is a woman of color, the race of the surrogate is an implicit advantage to the intended parents. The surrogate’s race visualizes and concretizes the “difference” between surrogate and fetus that is crucial to maintaining hegemonic kinship structures, and that can reinforce the primacy of genetic “belonging” when custody is contested. As Kalindi Vora explains, a “genetics-based model of parentage . . . creates a connection between the intended parents and the fetus, and a distance between the surrogate and guest-fetus.”152 This distance is made to seem greater when the surrogate is racially “Other” to the fetus. In cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements, race serves the purposes of kinship; through racial difference, kinship boundaries are maintained. According to the anthropologist Jonathan Marks, “race—in any guise—is a theory of kinship. It tells you who you are and what you are.”153 Kinship “provides the basic social orientation,”

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but it is potentially destabilized and/or threatened by technologically driven forms of assisted reproduction.154 This is particularly true when reproductive technologies create the possibility for intimate cross-racial contact, as in cross-racial gestational surrogacy; this “threat” then necessitates boundary policing, which operates through the discursive privileging of genetic determinism over environment. The Melinger case in some ways turns this logic on its ear; here, a white intended parent seems to be defying narratives of genetic essentialism by insisting that the children born to a black surrogate are biracial, even after admitting to the courts that the surrogacy was gestational. Was Melinger radically challenging the social order by rejecting the geneticization of race? Can this be read as definitive evidence for the argument that ARTs can be used to unsettle rigid racial classifications? Without foreclosing the possibility that ARTs are capable of the latter, the Melinger case does not provide compelling evidence of the emancipatory potentials of these technologies. Contradictory revelations were made about the race of the twins throughout the proceedings, which were significant because they could aid in the determination of whether Melinger, as a nonresident and adoptive (nonbiological) father, fit the legal criteria to adopt the girls. As noted above, the original adoption petition listed the twins as “white females” and claimed that, due to concerns about the quality of Melinger’s sperm, the African American surrogate was inseminated with both the sperm of Melinger and an anonymous sperm donor. A subsequent adoption summary submitted by Melinger’s lawyer identified the genetic “mother” of the twins as a twenty-three-year-old white woman, and said that the twins did not fit the legal guidelines defining children as “hard to place.” After it was clear that Melinger’s adoption proceedings would be investigated, Litz submitted an amendment to the order declaring that the girls were hard to place because the surrogate “was African American and that the children were therefore biracial.”155 One could read this flip-flopping on the issue of the girls’ race as an outright deception motivated by the expediency of having the children labeled “hard to place.” Indeed, this seems to be how the issue was interpreted in media coverage of the case, discussed below. However, Melinger’s lawyer had already acknowledged in the adoption summary, approved by the court on April 29, 2009, that the egg donor was a white woman.

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The statement that the surrogate was African American and therefore the children were biracial was submitted several days later, on May 4.156 By acknowledging that the egg donor was white, but proceeding to argue that the twins were biracial because the surrogate was black, Melinger’s lawyer implied that race is not entirely determined by genetic inheritance, but can rather be influenced by the environment of the womb. While it is impossible to ascertain the motivations of Melinger or his lawyer, I am more interested in the fact that this strategy was attempted and the way it was received. Whether Melinger and his attorney were purposefully misrepresenting the race of the twins or attempting to define race in nongenetic terms, determining the race of the children was undeniably a central project of the media (and to a lesser extent, the courts). One way that observers addressed the question of the girls’ race was by “reading” their phenotype. Because Melinger’s narrative concerning the twins’ origin changed repeatedly, reporters frequently described the physical appearance of the twins as shorthand for their presumed race. By doing so, the media shored up the common public perception that skin color is synonymous with race. At least three articles from the Indianapolis Star, a newspaper that covered the case extensively, described the girls in terms of their hair and/or eye color, repeatedly referencing them as “blonde haired and blue-eyed.”157 The descriptor “blonde haired and blue-eyed” is shorthand for whiteness in American culture. When combined, these traits are meant to represent a singularly white standard of appearance, and in the context of this trial, to stand in mutual exclusivity to blackness. This is reflected in a quote from the article “New Jersey Man Isn’t Biological Father,” in which the reporter matter-of-factly remarks that “the surrogate mother is black. Melinger is white. The babies are white with blonde hair.”158 The blonde hair of the babies is evidence of the racial descriptor “white,” connecting them in this equation to Melinger and distancing them from the “blackness” of the surrogate. The same article explains that “the twins do not look biracial, according to those who have seen them.”159 The reporter conflates color and race when assuming that the way the twins look can conclusively determine that they are not “biracial,” a term that could encompass a wide variety of racial variation, skin tones, hair type, and other racial markers. The legal scholar Angela P. Harris notes that due to the “seemingly natural, unmediated quality” of skin color, it “seems to just be there, a

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natural fact.”160 The coverage of the twins’ race also intimates that the elision between skin color and race is not only natural but biological. Visual cues can reveal what Melinger was attempting to hide: the “truth” of the girls’ origins, which was inseparable from the “truth” of their race. Again, the question of race serves to answer the question of kinship: one cannot identify the biological mother and father of the twins by looking at the children, but according to this logic one can “know” race through visual markers. If one could visually identify that the twins were white (e.g., have blonde hair and blue eyes), then, as this argument goes, Huffman could not have been the egg donor. The mutual exclusivity of whiteness and blackness in the discourse surrounding the case can also be found in coverage by the New York Times. In “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules,” the reporter Stephanie Saul uses the Melinger case as an example of the lack of regulation in the surrogacy industry. Regarding the issue of race, Saul conclusively asserts, “it was not true that the girls were biracial. The surrogate mother was African American, but the babies she had carried grew from eggs from a white donor. The twins were white.”161 Saul’s statement, while following the accepted logic of genetics and the ART industry, also reifies the assumption that a black woman cannot be the biological mother of white children, that these categories are both commonsense and incommensurate. According to this argument, race is both biological (the babies “grew from the eggs of a white donor”) and also a reflection of kinship (Huffman cannot be the biological mother because the babies are white). To return to the questions introduced earlier, were Melinger and his lawyer making a radical claim that the twins were mixed-race because they were gestated by a black woman? If so, this would push back against the overdetermination of genes as the sole influence on race and identity, while still positing race as something biological, to be transmitted through gestation in addition to genetics. Charis Thompson makes the argument that surrogate mothers can be interpellated as biological mothers, even in gestational surrogacy: The embryo grows in and out of the substance of another woman’s body; the fetus is fed by and takes form from the gestational woman’s blood, oxygen, and placenta. It is not unreasonable to accord the gestational

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mother a biological claim to motherhood. Indeed, some have suggested that shared substance is a much more intimate biological connection than shared genetics and is more uniquely characteristic of motherhood, as genes are shared between many different kinds of relations.162

Melinger’s claim could be read as a revision to Thompson’s argument, suggesting that what is shared between the fetus and surrogate during the period of gestation is significant enough to affect race as either a biological or social identity category (or both). Anna Johnson made a similar claim in Johnson v. Calvert when she attempted to employ the Indian Child Welfare Act to stop the Calverts from taking legal custody of baby Christopher. Johnson argued that because she had Native American ancestry, so did Christopher, making him ineligible for adoption by a white family. Her lawyer claimed that “Indian blood created this baby; . . . no one can force her to give it up,” whereas Cherokee and Choctaw officials claimed that tribal recognition is based on “blood, ancestry” and “isn’t created just by being in the womb for nine months.” A tribal attorney stated, “I’d think that if the egg and sperm are from non-Indians, the baby’s blood would be non-Indian too.”163 In that case, the Calverts’ legal team and Native American officials thoroughly racialized both genetics and blood, but made a firm distinction between Johnson’s “Indian blood” and the “non-Indian” sperm and eggs of the Calverts.164 Like Johnson, Melinger employed what appears to be a counterhegemonic discourse of race and ARTs, providing an example of how ARTs refigure traditional ideologies of race and kinship. Yet Melinger’s argument need not be read in this light. Rather, the Melinger case is an example of how intended parents can employ the racial difference of cross-racial gestational surrogacy to make an argument for the legitimacy of their own parental rights. This does not necessarily have to come at the expense of the surrogate, as it did in Johnson v. Calvert, nor is it bound to be successful—indeed, this particular strategy failed in Melinger’s case. Regardless, the race of the surrogate functioned as the catalyst for Melinger’s claim to custody when his own lack of genetic ties was revealed. The surrogate’s Otherness in a white-dominated society was cast as a disadvantage to the children, marking them as “hard to place” through adoption.

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Racial difference made a difference in how the kinship claims in both Johnson v. Calvert and the Melinger case were legitimated socially and legally. The Calverts were able to tap into the cultural memory of women of color as caretakers (and not mothers) to white children, while Melinger attempted to mark the twins with the race of the surrogate in order to bolster his own kinship claims. In both instances, the white intended parents deployed racial difference, whether successfully or not. What Melinger failed to take into account were the limitations of the malleability of race in public discourse. If the media, judicial system, and other social institutions were unable to pin down the race of the girls, they would become unintelligible. Because negotiations of gender and race speak to the legibility of the family, Melinger was not allowed to be vague or coy about the racial origins of the twins. By making the argument that the twins were biracial, Melinger implicitly challenged the conflation of race and genes; by soundly rejecting this argument, the courts and the media shored up hegemonic narratives of family, race, and belonging. *** Throughout this chapter, cross-racial wet nursing and cross-racial gestational surrogacy have been framed as part of the same history of racialized reproductive labor. The middle- and upper-class reliance on the reproductive labor of women of color has remained a relative constant despite shifting ideologies of race, maternity, gender, and maternal-fetal subjectivity. These ideologies are often influenced by science, but scientific theories are not uncritically adopted by the general public; rather, communities negotiate their understanding of these concepts based on their own geographical, historical, and economic locations. By analyzing practices such as cross-racial wet nursing and cross-racial gestational surrogacy, one can extrapolate the ways discourses concerning race, gender, and kinship are influenced by the economic and reproductive imperatives of a given society. Both practices also reveal how racialized and gendered norms are naturalized in ways that shore up hegemonic ideologies of race and gender. The cases of Johnson v. Calvert and Stephen Melinger’s adoption of “Infants H” reveal that despite claims made by those in the ART industry, the racial “difference” in cross-racial gestational surrogacy is sig-

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nificant. The use of a woman of color who is visually “Other” to the child accentuates the likeness between the child and intended parents and the difference between child and surrogate (or in the Melinger case, attempts to appropriate that difference). Just as racial logic proved flexible in neutralizing the intimate interracial contact of cross-racial wet nursing, so does the construction of surrogates as “genetic strangers” naturalize this contemporary practice.

4

The Woman or the Egg? Comparing Surrogacy and Egg Donation Databases

“Smart, confident, and gorgeous . . . a real 10!” This attention-grabbing headline can be found in a database of potential egg donors, positioned above a picture of a blonde, fair-skinned young woman, along with her height (5’9”), eye color (green), and hair color. In this database, profiles of youthful, talented, and beautiful women compete for the attention of prospective parents searching for the genetic contributor to an imagined child. Should they choose “smart, confident, and gorgeous,” or “responsible, intelligent, ethical, and good-hearted”? Do they select the “blonde, Jewish firefighter in Israel” to carry on a religious and cultural heritage? Will any of these traits surface in their future child through genetic inheritance? These are a few of the questions faced by intended parents who seek an egg donor through a commercial agency. Traits ranging from racial identity to creativity and compassion are coded as heritable in the contemporary United States. Yet there is a contradiction between how race is commodified in the market for reproductive services and the last several decades of scientific research proving that race has no biological basis. Despite this scientific evidence, Americans remain obsessed with genetics, as demonstrated in the deployment of race in the reproductive technology industry. At times, racial difference is made quite explicit in the ART industry, such as when intended parents select an egg donor with a racial background that “matches” their own. At other times, especially when intended parents are choosing a gestational surrogate, racial difference is dismissed as inconsequential to ART outcomes. This chapter analyzes databases of egg donors and surrogates compiled by agencies that connect intended parents with reproductive service providers. Profiles of egg donors showcase each woman’s physical characteristics, personality traits, and individual talents, while surro129

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gacy databases largely focus on the practical questions of reproductive history, lifestyle (such as tobacco and alcohol use), and remuneration. I contend that this difference reflects an understanding of reproduction that privileges the power of genetics over gestation. Moreover, the deployment of race in these databases is inconsistent, as is the fragmented discourse on race in America more generally. The popular American obsession with geneticization is stoked by revolutionary technological and pharmaceutical advancements, as evidenced in the deployment of race in the reproductive technology industry. The ways racial difference is selectively foregrounded or dismissed in the field of ARTs is an example of the ideological work done by intended parents and the ART industry to shore up traditional notions of race and family. Scientific discourses on race and genomics are multivalent arenas of knowledge production. Following the contributions of feminist science studies, I view scientific practice as situated, embodied, and culturally contingent.1 Scientific assertions of the biological meaninglessness of race largely fail to trickle down into the popular consciousness, and this failure is abetted by the continued use of race as a meaningful category of analysis in science and medicine, particularly reproductive medicine. The United States has a long and entrenched history of the scientific belief that race refers to measurable physiological differences. Scientific racism of the nineteenth century was based on the idea that the body can be read as a text that is coded with racial meanings; accordingly, scientists measured various parts of the body, including facial angles, cranial capacity, genitalia, brain mass, and skin color.2 These measurements were then used to predict traits such as intelligence, morality, sexual behavior, and criminality, and they were adopted to justify the mistreatment of populations considered deviant.3 Scientific discourses on race influenced popular sentiment, as Siobhan Somerville argues in Queering the Color Line: Although most of the population may not have had direct knowledge of the texts produced by sexologists and the earlier “experts” of scientific racism (comparative anatomists), their theories and conclusions increasingly assumed enormous cultural power to organize and pathologize those marked as sexually deviant or racially “other.”4

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Moreover, scientific studies that allegedly confirmed the physical, mental, and moral inferiority of black, indigenous, and immigrant groups justified eugenic policies and fueled the rhetoric of “race suicide,” or the fear that the future of white supremacy was threatened by the prolific procreation of inferior groups.5 This history has had a lasting impact on contemporary racial beliefs. Two parallel hegemonic discourses on race coexist in the United States, and the various actors involved with ARTs engage with these discourses in different ways—sometimes subtly, sometimes radically. One is a scientific discourse in which the definition of race and its appropriate use in research are central matters of professional and ethical debate among various, competing constituents of the scientific community. In the second, more popular discourse, the power of phenotypic (physiological) visual markers as indicators of biological racial difference, and eventually genetic distinction, has remained relatively stable. These two discourses overlap—most transparently, in mainstream media coverage of research in the fields of genetics, biology, and other “hard” sciences. A recent headline from the popular scientific journal Science, for example, reads “Personal Genomics: The Touchy Subject of ‘Race,’” while a 2003 edition of Scientific American led with the cover article “Does Race Exist?”6 Likewise, in the last decade the New York Times has published articles such as “Research Center to Study Health-Race Link,” “Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease,” and “Is Race Real?”7 This type of science coverage introduces Americans to new research, scientific theories, and developments on race, even when framed in what can be highly problematic ways.8 Popular discourse influences scientific discourse through more opaque channels. As feminist theorists have argued for decades, science is a social process, and all knowledge claims are socially situated. In other words, the questions that scientists ask and the subjects they choose are products of their specific geographical and historical positions.9 In addition, research on race and genetics in the United States increasingly emerges from the corporate sector, and thus researchers are motivated to create products that are marketable to the mainstream population.10 Popular discourse inflects scientific discourse in a twofold manner: first, doctors and scientists are not immune to the organizing principles of their own societies, including race; second, the

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various industries that fund research do so with profit-driven agendas, which motivate research design. Thus different actors (scientists, doctors, industry personnel, and consumers) tap in to the discourse on race in specific ways, and a consensus on the meaning of race can never be assumed. It is also important to note that not all scientists who study genetics or use racial categories in their research are conversant with academic arguments about race. Doctors and technicians who perform ART procedures consist of another category of specialists; while their work might serve to racialize disembodied gametes (for example, by color-labeling a sperm vial based on the donor’s race), medical professionals themselves do not share a consensus on the biological meaning of race. In contrast, the founder of a company that matches intended parents with egg donors and surrogates may have a vested interest in crafting race as a depoliticized set of traits that a consumer can select among endless others. When traits such as hair texture and complexion are catalogued as if they are separable from raced bodies and social identities, phenotype is decontextualized from its position as a marker of racial hierarchy and thus sanitized as a value-free consumer choice. In my analysis of race and surrogacy, I follow Jenny Reardon in employing a “co-productionist” model, which asserts that “scientific knowledge and social order are produced simultaneously—or, in a word, co-produced.”11 What Reardon calls “technoscientific phenomena,” such as the concept of geneticization, for example, require “the simultaneous production of scientific ideas and practices and other social practices—such as the norms of ethical research and credible systems of governance—that support them.”12 As Reardon and others argue, race is neither a pure social construction nor a reflection of scientific “truth.” Race is a concept that has social and political meaning, and thus its use in scientific research is never neutral.13 Moreover, while I primarily analyze the hegemonic discourses surrounding racial meaning in the last half century, this is not to deny the existence of other competing discourses. The construction of race should not be understood as a singular event, but rather as “ongoing processes of contestation and accumulation.”14 This chapter will examine the intersection between popular and scientific discourses on race and how they are represented in the rhetoric and practice of reproductive technologies.

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Shifting Discourses of Race After the atrocities revealed during World War II, academics and scientists sought alternatives to biological frameworks for understanding human difference, and to differentiate between a postwar, antiracist deployment of race as a category in research from the typological concept of race attributed to Nazi ideology.15 Political and social changes included the rejection of Nazism, support for decolonization, and an ensuing impetus to present an America in solidarity against the Cold War Soviet enemy, undivided by race.16 These changes incorporated moves toward the inclusion of underrepresented minorities into the mainstream of scientific knowledge production.17 In the words of Nancy Stepan, “the political valence of race changed, for political reasons.”18 Many accounts mark the end of race as a mainstream scientific concept with the release of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statement in 1950. UNESCO is an organization established by the United Nations in 1945 with a mission to “contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, in sociology and anthropology.”19 Tasked with writing a declaration defining and assessing scientific views on race, a UNESCO committee of anthropologists and sociologists created a document that was reviewed by an international group of scientists. The statement concluded that “for all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth,” and that the term “race” should be replaced in common usage by “ethnic group.”20 These conclusions were bolstered in 1972, when the geneticist Richard Lewontin announced the discovery of more “within-group” than “between-group” variation in the human gene pool, meaning that more genetic variation can be found within groups of individuals who identify as white, for example, than between groups who identify as white and those who identify as African American. Many narratives concerning the role of race in science end here, suggesting that by the 1980s, mainstream academics had accepted that human difference was primarily cultural, and research connecting race to biology was largely marginalized.21 This account of the UNESCO statement and its effects is tempered by other scholars, such as the feminist science scholar Jenny Reardon,

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who contends that the UNESCO statement is often misread as an argument that race is a scientifically meaningless term. In contrast, Reardon argues that the UNESCO statement circumscribed the use of race, condemning its use for the purpose of valuing certain races over others or asserting the purity of racial origins.22 The UNESCO statement was not universally embraced by researchers, though “the notion that science as a whole had somehow rejected the ‘race’ concept left little space to acknowledge the differences in perspective that existed within and across the different disciplines and territories of science.”23 Physical anthropologists and geneticists resisted the limitations on the use of race in research set forth by UNESCO, arguing instead that science is and should be conceptually distinct from society, and thus the scientific use of race is irrelevant to its more fluid and flexible social meaning. A scientific consensus regarding race was not reached in the aftermath of World War II, nor did all practitioners agree that racial typologies did not belong in science.24 Meanwhile, the question of racial difference was at the forefront of American politics as civil rights leaders demanded the desegregation of public schools, leading to the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the African American plaintiff, determining that segregation caused “significant psychological harm to African American children” and violated the Fourteenth Amendment.25 In making this decision the courts used evidence from research in the field of psychology, including Kenneth Clark’s famous doll test in which the self-image of African American children was measured through their response to questions about dark- and light-skinned dolls. The inclusion of this study in the case is significant because it suggests that scientific research is considered a valid form of evidence to justify the demand for civil rights and legal protection of American citizens.26 What the struggle over segregation makes clear is that race is deeply imbued with meaning as a social category in the United States. Although scientific contestations over racial meaning can at times seem to have little impact on how race is used popularly and politically, public policy makers employ scientific discourse to inform their decisions. While mainstream scientific assertions of the biological meaninglessness of race certainly did not obviate the social unrest concerning desegregation, scientific arguments authorized one of the most important civil rights victories of the century.

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In the late 1980s the Human Genome Project (HGP) (a thirteen-year endeavor sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy) again raised the link between race and genes. The goals of the HGP included identifying all of the genes in human DNA, determining the sequences, and storing them in databanks.27 By the year 2000 the HGP had completed a rough draft of the genome, followed by an announcement discounting any genetic basis for racial categories.28 From the data collected, the HGP was able to determine that 99.9 percent of the human genetic sequence is identical, and of the .01 percent that differs between individuals, only 3–10 percent is related to geographic ancestry.29 The findings were heralded by some as a final nail in the coffin of biologically based racism. The election of Barack Obama as the first African American president in 2008 also became a source of debate over whether the United States is moving into a “postracial” age. Signs seemed to be pointing toward a massive and monumental shift in scientific and popular thinking about race, yet further investigation suggests a far less linear trajectory.

The Commodification of Race In the introduction to Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, editors Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson argue that what they call “post-genomic science” has revitalized, rather than undermined, the use of racial categories to stand in for biological difference.30 The end of the twentieth century witnessed an increase in scientific research exploring a biological basis for race despite the findings of the Human Genome Project and others.31 The 99.9 percent genetic similarity between humans was perhaps the most-touted statistic from the HGP because it was meant to display the commonalities of all humankind, yet Lee contends that science has since seen a “turn towards difference” that challenges this figure.32 In the last several years, population geneticists have published research arguing that “the genome holds the key to medically and forensically significant biological differences among human racial and ethnic populations.”33 In other words, population geneticists claim that the differences between races, however minute, are pertinent for scientific research because they can reveal such important information as the etiology of diseases and indicate the most effective type of treatments.34

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Prominent geneticists argue that traditional racial categories such as African, Asian, and Caucasian will continue to serve as proxies for genetic variations until individual genotyping makes these placeholders irrelevant. While many geneticists would assert that they are by no means endorsing the origins of these traditional categories, they find overlap between statistically derived populations, gene frequencies, and commonly held racial groupings.35 By studying these differences, they contend, medical researchers can innovate race-based therapies that will impact racial health disparities, including rates of hypertension among African Americans.36 Supporters of race-based medicine hold that this research provides a positive counterbalance to the marginalization of the unique health issues faced by people of color in the United States.37 Lee interprets this data differently, arguing that the turn toward difference is in fact a stubborn refusal to accept the disarticulation of race from genes.38 By focusing on genetic differences between racially identified groups and then targeting those groups for medical treatment, researchers racialize genetics and reify outdated notions of race. Other critics suggest that race-based medicine may in fact intensify health disparities among different racial groups by encouraging doctors to differentiate and categorize individuals based on their perceived biological differences, a practice that is a key component of racism.39 Race-specific medical practices raise the issue of how the politics of race intersect with the demands of a market economy. For example, the effects of the most well-known race-specific drug, Bidil, were determined to be limited when it was first introduced to the market as a means to reduce heart failure in high-risk patients. In analyzing the data, researchers discovered that African American patients in the study were faring better than the white patients on the same medication. The company designed a new study including only African American patients and found that the combination of Bidil plus standard therapies reduced deaths by 43 percent in comparison to standard therapies alone. Based on these results, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Bidil for use by African Americans, making it the first race-specific drug with such authorization.40 Critics raised multiple concerns: first, participants in the study self-identified as African American, sidestepping the question of how race is defined; second, the study did not include other racial groups, and thus did not definitively show that the drug is more success-

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ful for African Americans than others.41 By marketing Bidil specifically to African Americans, its makers created a niche market of consumers, a move that has obvious profit motivations. Most clinical trials of drugs are tested on largely white populations, yet these medications are not specifically marketed to whites. If this standard does not apply to clinical trials that are performed on predominately (or entirely) African American populations, then “the FDA is implying that African-Americans are somehow less representative of humanity than whites are.”42 This raises the question of how racial categories are defined. Legal and social practices become embedded into the “commonsense” meaning of race in medical research.43 For example, since 2001, any research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is required to report the race of participants using the five racial categories approved for the U.S. census by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This is problematic because as these categorizations become universal, “it thus becomes almost ‘natural’ to use these same variables in the subsequent analysis and framing of the research, even though there is nothing particularly ‘natural’ about the census categories.”44 The use of these racial categories in the census has been a matter of public debate, with particular frustration expressed by self-identified multiracial or biracial individuals forced to select only one racial group. Opponents of this practice argue that it harkens back to the days of the “one-drop rule,” in which individuals with any African ancestry were legally categorized as black in order to reify the mutual exclusivity of racial categories.45 Moreover, the statistics on race and ethnicity collected by the census carry significant weight; their uses include evaluating inequalities in employment, housing, health care, and education.46 In 1994 an OMB committee recommended that rather than creating a “multiracial” option in the census, individuals who identify as such should be allowed to check multiple boxes to represent their racial heritage.47 This option garnered additional attention in the 2010 census when President Barack Obama chose to mark only one box despite his multiracial background, a sign, according to the political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry, that Obama “embraced blackness, with all its disprivilege, tumultuous history and disquieting symbolism.”48 The significance that Harris-Perry attaches to Obama’s decision demonstrates the weight of racial categorizations, and the import of how they are institutionalized and codified.

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The newly popular field of recreational genetics (also known as direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing) provides another example of how race is commercialized.49 In one iteration, websites such as Ancestry.com allow individuals to revolutionize their efforts to construct a family tree by comparing a sample of their DNA to samples submitted by other users. If the DNA matches, the users have the option to anonymously contact one another and share information about their family ancestry.50 Of course, this service is not without a fee (in this case, around $99),51 which for many consumers is a small price to pay for the sense that they uncovered hidden “truths” about their lineage or identity. More commonly, recreational genetics are used to explore one’s racial ancestry, with the goal of pinpointing the ties between average Americans and the country, county, or even tribe of origin. Recreational genetics even found their way onto the Oprah Winfrey Show, a significant feat considering Winfrey’s capacity to publicize and popularize a vast array of products during her twenty-five-season reign as the queen of daytime television. Winfrey took part in Professor Henry Louis Gates’s PBS documentary African American Lives, in which Winfrey and others traced their ancestry through DNA, an experience that Winfrey described as “a path of self-discovery.”52 This interest expressed by Winfrey, a prominent African American celebrity figure, reflects the allure of these technologies to black Americans. African Americans are a group who may have limited access to tracing their own family lineage due to the history of the slave trade, among other reasons.53 Gates has publicly tested the DNA of other celebrities, including the actress Eva Longoria, who prior to testing identified as Mexican American. Yet after test results “revealed” that she is actually 70 percent European, Longoria admitted, “To know that I have a majority Spanish blood is a little . . . you know, I’ve been so proud of being Mexican—Mexican from Mexico. To know that’s not really who I am.”54 This statement speaks to the concerns of some scientists regarding direct-to-consumer genetics— not only can this information upset an individual’s sense of identity and community, there is no clear link between one’s DNA and the contemporary social categories of race and ethnicity. Critics argue that genetic testing may be misleading because results can be open to interpretation or error, and they access only a fraction of the genetic contribution from each individual’s many ancestors.55 Con-

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sumers may receive entirely different results from different companies, leaving them with the sense that they are being told only what they want to hear.56 In essence, the potential for recreational genetics is multiple: while DNA testing can highlight the shared ancestry of individuals of different races, and thus demonstrate the constructedness of rigid categorizations of difference, it can also reify a connection between race and genes and a belief in racial purity. As the sociologist Alondra Nelson argues, such genetic ancestry testing is an example of the “social life of DNA,” or the potentially problematic ways biomedical or forensic discourses travel into “private” arenas of family and kinship, as well as political debates about social justice and the meaning of community.57 As the examples of race-based medicine and recreational genetics suggest, it is a mistake to assume that biological theories of race are no longer active in the sciences. This myth of consensus may actually downplay the commodification of race and the tendency for racial science to reemerge58 and to be communicated to a broader audience, including a wide range of consumers. Despite sporadic bursts of popular media attention to the argument that human biodiversity is not explained by race, the “hegemony of racial thinking” is deeply entrenched in American culture.59 Through the operations of hegemony, potential challenges to the dominant racial order are encompassed in ways that shore up the norm.

Race in ARTs The preceding research suggests that race is no longer posited as biological in mainstream academic scientific discourse, even while racial categories continue to be used in scientific research and commercial markets. The question that remains is, to what extent do these theories of race translate to the ART industry, in which race is packaged alongside other physiological and mental traits as a purchasable commodity? What is clear is that the academic and scientific debates concerning race and genetics have not deterred cross-racial gestational surrogacy, even though these debates might complicate the fantasy of inviolable racial difference.60 Rather, the practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy seemingly rejects the significance of racial boundaries at the level of gestation at the same time that it affirms the significance of genetic relatedness, which is thoroughly racialized in the ART industry.

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Consumers of reproductive technologies are deeply invested in racial categories when choosing egg and sperm donors and when negotiating complicated webs of kinship. The family formations made possible by reproductive technologies have eclipsed what most Americans consider to be a traditional kinship structure: two heterosexual parents who equally contribute to the genetic material of a biologically related child.61 Donor eggs, sperm, IVF, and surrogacy all mean that a woman can gestate a child, share bodily substances with it, and give birth without any genetic relation to the child. In Making Parents, Charis Thompson argues that “as a result of donor-egg in vitro fertilization and gestational surrogacy, the overlapping biological idioms of shared bodily substance and genes come apart.”62 While maternal genetic material is determined by the woman who provides the egg, the woman who gestates the fetus nourishes and sustains it. Accordingly, Thompson argues, it is not unreasonable to attribute biological motherhood to both women.63 Despite Thompson’s claim, this may not be how most prospective parents conceptualize gestational surrogacy—or the relationship between surrogate and fetus. When prospective parents choose an egg donor or a surrogate, the genes of that person are often coded for ethnicity as if genes have the ability to pass on the social construct of race. Social categories such as race are built in to genes, even when they would not otherwise make sense.64 It does not mean anything medically to say that an embryo is “black” or “white,” but in a cultural context in which skin color is so thoroughly coded for biological race, these constructs have social meaning for prospective parents. Similarly, in an ethnology of ART use in Israel, the anthropologist Susan Kahn found that religious identity and even marital status are attributed to eggs that are donated for use by Jewish women. Intended parents privileged donor eggs that they considered to be “genetically” Jewish (those harvested from a Jewish donor) and eggs that came from single women, thus dodging religious prohibitions against adultery.65 Again, the idea that a religious identity cannot be transferred through genetic material is incidental—ideology produces the elision between the social and the biological, which is then translated into medical “fact” through practice. This process creates a feedback system in which the cultural bypasses the scientific (intended parents choose donors who

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share their religious/ethnic identity based on the belief that these traits are genetic). Commercially motivated practices (egg donation and surrogacy) construct a façade of authoritative “evidence” (donor banks organized by race and religion, for example) to support the socially constructed fantasy. The racialization of genes is a component of kinship construction, which is a highly negotiated process in fertility clinics. Patients choose which aspects of kinship they will foreground, and which they will minimize (stressing the importance of genetic kinship and downplaying the significance of gestation, for example) in order to legitimize the status of the intended parents as “real parents.”66 Thus prospective parents often choose egg and sperm donors based on what they consider genetic likeness and/or markers of socially dominant characteristics, but they choose surrogates using different standards, including the number of successful pregnancies the surrogate has had, her age and physical health, and her mental health history.67 Prospective parents using ARTs are able to negotiate what they consider to be genetic, natural, or shared in reproduction, but genes are “perceived to have the power to explain who one is, what one will become, how one is connected to others, and what might happen to one in the future.”68 Both the consumers and practitioners of reproductive technologies are deeply invested in “geneticization,” or “the extreme reduction of all problematic differences to an individual and genetic basis.”69 Geneticization is so thoroughly enmeshed in contemporary understandings of pregnancy that almost all differences, whether problematic or positive, are attributed to genes and thus viewed through a “prism of heritability.”70 In what Silja Samerski calls “the popular scientific imagination,” genes are held accountable for a vast array of individual attributes, including physical features as well as more amorphous qualities such as personal likes and dislikes, or drug and alcohol use.71 These qualities then adhere to gametes that can be bought and sold on the free market, such that eggs or sperm are perceived to be white, black, Jewish, even healthy or sick based on the medical history of the donor.72 Participants in the reproductive technology market correlate traditional racial categories with genetic difference; some scholars argue that the contemporary obsession with geneticization suggests a return to Lamarckism, the eighteenth-century theory that organisms transfer acquired characteris-

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tics to their offspring.73 Despite scientific contestations over the meaning of race, or rabbinic debates regarding the “Jewishness” of donor eggs, in practice individuals negotiate the meaning of concepts such as race, genes, or religion to correspond with their reproductive goals. The reproductive technology industry is undeniably in the business of commodifying race through the market for sperm and eggs. As genetic determinism takes on the status of scientific “fact,” despite claims by scientists to the contrary, “genomic fetishes” are marketed to American consumers.74 In mainstream scientific discourse, race is not understood to be a biological phenomenon but rather a complex historical, social, political, and scientific construct. In sharp contrast, companies that profit from the sale of sperm or eggs seamlessly transfer the selfidentification of the donor to the disembodied gamete. Some clinics literalize this elision by color-coding sperm vials—white for Caucasian, black for African American, and yellow for Asian.75 As Matthew Schmidt and Lisa Jean Moore argue in “Constructing a ‘Good Catch,’ Picking a Winner,” this practice reifies intergroup racial differences and downplays intragroup variation—it institutionalizes concrete boundaries between black, white, and Asian, while ignoring the diversity that exists within categories such as African American. The disembodied and racialized sperm then stands in for the future, raced embodiment of a child. Schmidt and Moore argue that sperm banks thus “market the chance to rematerialize, reconstitute, and reproduce the body of the donor.”76 The remainder of this chapter examines how this process operates among a different array of body parts/embodiments, namely, egg donation and surrogacy. I explore how the race of egg donors and the race of surrogates are differentially framed in terms of their significance to the intended parents and the genetic makeup of the future child, and how this meshes with the contemporary scientific and popular discourses on race already established. To this end, I analyze the websites of select agencies that offer both egg donation and surrogacy services. When Heléna Ragoné published her seminal ethnographic research on surrogacy in 1994, she stated that there were eight “established commercial surrogate mother programs” as well as “a number of individuals who arrange surrogacy contracts on a free-lance or occasional basis”; today, surrogacy in the United States is a multimillion-dollar industry.77 California leads the country in the

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sheer number of surrogacy agencies. This state alone produces more surrogate-born babies than the next two leading nations, Israel and the United Kingdom, combined.78 Because surrogacy is largely unregulated, the surrogacy industry is multifaceted—one can find a gestational carrier by advertising in local newspapers, the online service forum Craigslist, independently operated websites, or through matching processes at well-established surrogacy brokers that are affiliated with hospitals or clinics. In addition, agencies are also created by former surrogates based on their personal experience—recall the USC law professor who said, “In most U.S. states until recently, nothing would stop you from opening ‘Sam’s Sperm Bank and Delicatessen.’”79 While most coverage of surrogacy in the United States focuses on the role of agencies and brokers, estimates suggest that the numbers of independent surrogacy arrangements are growing due to the proliferation of Internet sites where surrogates and intended parents can meet and contract without going through an intermediary.80 Without federal requirements for licensing or direct governmental oversight, there are no comprehensive records on the number of surrogacy agencies in a given state or their reputability. In response to these factors, I have limited my analysis of egg donation and surrogacy agencies in two ways. First, I have narrowed the list of agencies to those affiliated with the ASRM, the reproductive medicine advocacy group, and RESOLVE. As a professional organization, the ASRM collaborates with regulatory bodies such as the American Medical Association and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (SART) to create ethics reports and lab standards, and to enforce the 1992 Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act. RESOLVE describes itself as “a non-profit organization with the only established, nationwide network mandated to promote reproductive health and to ensure equal access to all family building options for men and women experiencing infertility or other reproductive disorders.”81 Founded in 1974, the organization operates on both the local and national levels. RESOLVE is active in public policy, lobbying, and research, while also maintaining local chapters that provide support and information to individuals experiencing infertility.82 The ASRM has been a supporter of RESOLVE in the latter’s campaign to lobby both insurance companies and legislators on the importance of providing mandatory insurance coverage for infertility services.83 Currently, thirteen states require that

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insurance company plans cover infertility treatment.84 While the federal government requires that fertility agencies abide by laws against fraud and malpractice and report success rates for ARTs to the CDC, fertility centers are otherwise unfettered in the ways that they advertise, attract clients, or compete. In effect, “the fertility centers themselves set the rules that guide their conduct, working under the auspices of the ASRM.”85 I analyze egg donation and surrogacy agencies that are affiliated with the ASRM and RESOLVE because as a professional agency and patient advocacy group respectively, these two organizations are well established and trusted by patients and practitioners. The RESOLVE website contains a page listing “third party reproduction service providers” that are professional members of the organization. The ASRM’s website includes a list of egg donor agencies that have signed an agreement with SART to abide by the rules set by the ASRM’s Ethics and Practice Committee guidelines (guidelines include financial compensation of egg donors, limits on repeated egg donation cycles, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA). I compared these two lists, and selected only the agencies that were named on both sites. Inclusion on the RESOLVE and/or the ASRM website does not guarantee agency quality; while RESOLVE explicitly warns consumers that it does not screen or endorse providers on its list, the ASRM notes that the agencies that it mentions pay SART a registration fee to be listed and that SART has reviewed the contents of the websites. Despite these differences, the listed sites gain some measure of legitimacy and valuable “foot traffic” by being linked to the ASRM or RESOLVE websites. From this list, I selected commercial agencies that offer both egg donation and surrogacy matching services; I limited my analysis in this way in order to contrast how certain traits such as race and ethnicity are deployed in profiles of egg donors and surrogates both within and between agencies. Of the thirty agencies that met these criteria and had active websites, I specifically discuss content from the websites of thirteen agencies, which have been given pseudonyms of Agencies A to M. My analysis of the content on these websites is qualitative: I looked at profiles of surrogates and donors, when accessible, to compare physical descriptions, including the categorization of race, ethnicity, ancestry, and

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phenotype. I also compared the background information gathered about surrogates and donors such as hobbies, education, and career aspiration in order to analyze in what instances these traits were cast as heritable. I further evaluated websites holistically, including visual imagery and the language used to describe intended parents, surrogates, and donors, as well as a sampling of the applications that intended parents, egg donors, and surrogates filled out as the first step in the matching process. Four themes emerged as particularly salient in this analysis of agency websites: the deployment of the terms “race” and “ethnicity,” the inclusion of what are considered phenotypic markers of race in donor profiles, the question of heritable traits, and the differences between profiles of surrogates and egg donors.

Building a Baby: Egg Donation and Surrogacy According to Charis Thompson, the importance attributed to skin tone in donor egg infertility treatment makes clear that “the idea of biological race is both dead by consensus and very much alive.”86 Thompson’s statement neatly sums up the tension between assertions of a “post-racial” age and the continued racialization of gametes in the ART industry. This section builds on Thompson’s research on skin tone, exploring how egg donor profiles geneticize personal characteristics, including race and ethnicity, and adds to this literature by analyzing the differences between egg donor and surrogacy databases. The deployment of race in these databases aligns with the fragmented discourse on race in America, in which academic assertions of the biological meaninglessness of race, the practical use of race as a commodified identifying trait in genetic and medical research, and continued popular investment in race as a meaningful social category coexist.87 Because reproductive technologies commodify race, they make explicit what is often assumed concerning the transference of traits through the genetic material encoded in eggs and sperm. Race is biologized and cast as heritable through egg donation differently than it is through surrogacy. This comparison speaks to the popular meaning of race and how it is transmitted. This negotiation of racial difference is particularly important for understanding the current and future role of women of color in the reproductive technology industry. The privileging of genetics over gestation in determining

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racial identity is an extension of the logic that has historically justified the reproductive labor of women of color in the United States. Intended parents typically view the profiles of potential egg donors through online databases. Similar to what other researchers have found regarding sperm banks, egg donor profiles generally provide three different types of information—phenotypic characteristics (such as race, ethnicity, skin tone, and eye color), biological characteristics (blood type, reproductive history, family health history), and social characteristics (including personality, hobbies, and occupation).88 Describing donors through these categories serves to segment the market, but it also ranks differences between donors according to socially desirable characteristics.89 Egg donation agencies do not make any guarantees about how the characteristics of donors will manifest in a future child; intended parents are left to make their own assumptions based on their access to narratives about genetics and heredity. Nonetheless, egg donation and surrogacy agencies do make claims to scientific and medical authority through the materials available on their websites, frequently in ways that naturalize the geneticization of traits such as intelligence, beauty, and ethnicity. Agency A, for example, states that “we aim to fill our database with Egg Donors that possess health, beauty, grace, and intelligence,” alongside photographs of conventionally attractive donors, while noting that “there is no guarantee that the egg donor you choose will provide you with the outcome you desire and in fact you could have an adverse outcome.” Despite these qualifications, the following paragraph cites a study hypothesizing that “intelligence genes” are found on the X chromosome, and thus intelligence in boys may come from the egg, and not the sperm. Girls, as this argument goes, inherit intelligence from both the egg and the sperm because they receive an X chromosome from both sources. This statement is followed by the caveat that “Of course, there is never any guarantee of any level of intelligence regardless of the quality of the egg, sperm or the intelligence of either or both donators of the egg or sperm. Please talk to a geneticist if you have any questions since we are not genetic experts.” The inclusion of this allegedly scientific data on the website serves several purposes: it geneticizes intelligence and highlights the significance of choosing a quality egg donor while implicitly contradicting the multiple caveats about unpredictable outcomes.

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A competing website, for agency K, more explicitly links its donors and “quality genes,” stating that its goal is to “identify responsible Egg Donors with those ideal genetic characteristics desired by our clients.” Agencies also use scientific authority to differentiate their “product” from that available through other websites. Agency M’s website states that the donor profiles and other digital media available to intended parents mean that “our clients have the power to choose based on genetic affinity, rather than an industry-dictated paradigm,” and that “our donors are highly intelligent, creative and charismatic; attributes that will not only meet, but surely exceed, your expectations for finding your child’s genetic contributor.” Agency M also requires that donors complete what is known as a GAMA IQ test, which compiles four subtests—matching shapes and colors, sequences of designs moving through space, spatial analogies, and the construction of spatial designs—to generate a total score. This score is then translated into an ability classification ranging from “well below average” to “very superior.”90 The web page includes this rank alongside the donor’s picture, age, height, blood type, and location on the main page of its egg donor database. The compilation of this information implies that measures such as IQ are valid indicators of donor intelligence and that intelligence is a genetic (and thus heritable) trait.91 The donors themselves also echo narratives of genetic determinism. In a testimonial for Agency J, a former donor states, “I am discovering that each recipient has a story that comes from the heart. That is exactly why this is a science and every procedure is special to me, more than I could have ever imagined it to be while at the start of my journey.” Likewise, a donor at Agency E expressly asserts in her profile that she is donating her eggs in order to pass on her genes; with no intention of having children of her own, this donor views her genetic makeup as an asset to be shared for the social good. These quotes by donors indicate that they too are invested in the rhetoric of science and genetics as it undergirds the practice of egg donation and surrogacy. Medicalizing the donation process confers scientific authority upon a practice that is largely unregulated and thus vulnerable to charges of exploitation and misconduct. Moreover, by engaging with scientific discourses, these agencies frame their services as highly personal (dedicated to helping each intended parent or couple

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form a family) while also having the medical, technological, and legal knowledge necessary to aid intended parents in navigating the potential pitfalls of ARTs.

What Is on the Market, the Donor or the Egg? While the ASRM recommends that compensation of more than $5,000 for an egg donor “requires justification” and that more than $10,000 is “not appropriate,” compliance with this recommendation is voluntary. That being said, 85 percent of clinics that offer ARTs and are Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) member clinics have adopted these guidelines. Some egg donors have resisted the caps and even filed a class action lawsuit against the ASRM, arguing that the market should decide the going rate for eggs, and that the clinics are violating federal antitrust regulations against price fixing. The ASRM has responded that the limits are in place because women are being compensated for their time, not for their actual eggs; to pay for eggs themselves, the organization argues, would devalue and commodify human life. They also contend that the limits protect women from exploitation or undue pressure to “donate.”92 Compensation varies between agencies, and even donors within the same agency receive different levels of remuneration based on their own level of altruism, past donor experience, and the value placed upon their characteristics.93 Education level, height, weight, and perceived intelligence can also impact donor fees. One agency famously put out an advertisement in Ivy League campus newspapers in 1999 offering $50,000 for a donor with an SAT score of 1400, a height of at least 5’10,” and no family history of medical problems.94 The agency still references this ad on its website, but notes that it complies with ASRM guidelines and offers “many intelligent, talented and attractive egg donors who ask for very reasonable compensation.” Doing so positions the agency as simultaneously exclusive and affordable in order to appeal to a wide range of consumers. Intended parents will arguably be attracted to databases that are marketed as including the highest-quality eggs, even if they end up choosing a more reasonably priced donor. The breadth with which egg donor profiles assess the personality of a donor varies greatly from agency to agency, yet the vast majority at-

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tempt to give intended parents some window into the character of the woman. This picture may, however, be influenced by the “guidance” of egg donation agency staff. The sociologist Rene Almeling, who interviewed donation program staff as well as donors themselves, found that the women are encouraged to create appropriately feminine profiles through “gendered coaching strategies,” focusing on altruistic motivations rather than financial ones, for example.95 As other scholars have noted, recipients of gamete donation are encouraged to “rematerialize” donors through the information provided about their appearance, lifestyle, and medical history.96 While it is the eggs of the donor that will be purchased by intended parents, it is the donor as a whole who is represented through extensive personal histories. The elision between egg and donor is significant because it gives the impression of a genetic “package” available for purchase, which biologizes and commodifies a wide range of complex traits and identities, including race and ethnicity. On Agency A’s website, egg donors are asked to check the boxes that apply to them so that intended parents can search by keyword to view donors who match these characteristics. The boxes include artist, athlete, dancer, animal lover, reader, and traveler, which are listed alongside geographical areas, nationalities, and religions like Scandinavian, Middle Eastern, Jewish, and Western European. The confluence of categories about ancestry with those concerning personal likes and dislikes implies that all of these characteristics are heritable, and equally so. The donor profiles available on some databases are even more extensive. While many profiles include a self-description of the donor’s character and personality, her hobbies and interests, and why she wants to donate an egg, others offer long lists of “favorites” (book, movie, food) as well as philosophical questions such as how one handles adversity or the importance of spirituality. Agency B, which has extensive donor profiles, also includes a section titled “Just for Fun” that includes questions about whether the donor sings in the shower, whether she is a good cook, and what kind of animal she would like to be and why.97 The tenor of these questions is reminiscent of dating websites, which match singles based on supposedly “scientific” measures of compatibility. Agency C, for example, formats its donor profiles in the style of a traditional dating website or personal ad, with each donor’s basic statistics (prior donation, height, eye color, and hair color) listed next to her

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picture, and captioned with headlines such as “God’s gift to you,” “Jewish Blonde in Canada,” “Professional, Athletic, and Gorgeous,” and “Striking Israeli Loves to Keep Active.” This format is what Lisa Jean Moore and Matthew Schmidt refer to as a “discourse template,” or a way to organize novel information in a manner that an audience can understand and quickly interpret. In a study of sperm banks, Moore and Schmidt found that sperm donor profiles were organized through formats with which users were already familiar because they “create comfort zones and mitigate the strangeness of the new market.”98 Viewing donors by picture and caption is remarkably similar to shopping online at retail sites like Amazon; it allows intended parents to quickly peruse the offerings of a database before delving more deeply into the specifics of each donor. There is also a certain heteronormativity to the layout of donor databases (both sperm and egg) in that the process of judging individuals based on their proximity to a mythic ideal oddly mimics the “old-fashioned” method of partner selection and heterosexual reproduction. The twist, of course, is that heterosexual sex is made obsolete through the very disaggregation of reproductive components that such databases allow. Although I did not gather specific data on sexuality, overall there is a remarkable lack of attention to the sexual orientation of egg donors. This could be read as an example of extreme heteronormativity, but it is complicated by several factors: first, the surge in popular media attention to the so-called gay gene in recent years would presumably influence those intended parents who aim to select carefully the genetic profile of their future child. Second, there is a growing niche market of gay parents in the ART industry who are also invested in the idea of a gay gene or have other motivations for choosing a gay donor. Even a well-established egg donation and surrogacy agency that specifically markets itself to gay parents does not give any indications of donor sexuality in its sample egg donor profile offered online. While a full analysis of this omission in egg donor databases is outside the scope of this project, it would be a valuable avenue for future research. While agencies do not always explicitly use the personal-ad template, they nonetheless organize profiles in a manner that allows users to sort and quickly rank large amounts of data (sometimes hundreds of donor profiles). This system implies that it is the influence of genetics—the contribution of the egg donor—more than environment that determines

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social characteristics. This perspective is reflected in a quote by Liz Mundy, the author of numerous publications on ARTs, in a 2006 article in the Washington Post. The use of ARTs, Mundy argues, is becoming widespread at precisely the moment when we’ve become ultra aware of how genes run the show in the unfolding of a human being: controlling everything from physical attributes such as height and hair color to a predisposition for certain illnesses to a tendency toward shyness or a taste for fine wine.99

For intended parents choosing an egg or sperm donor, this narrative suggests that parenting begins with the selection of genetic materials—a selection that will dominate their child’s future.

Race and Ethnicity Race is one of the characteristics universally noted in donor profiles, although agencies differ in how they represent this factor. While some agencies draw from the categories used in the U.S. census, racial categories are not standardized, and many omit the term “race” altogether in favor of “ethnicity.”100 Agency D’s database allows intended parents to narrow their search criteria by selecting race and ethnicity from separate drop-down menus. The first menu lists Asian, Black, Caucasian, East Indian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Native American as possible options for race, while the ethnicity menu consist of seventy-five categories, from nationalities (Canadian, Brazilian, Zairian), to the aforementioned races, to what some would term “ethnic cultures” such as Creole and Jewish. While this database differentiates between race and ethnicity (although through a counterintuitive strategy of classification), many sites in this study rely upon donor self-identification rather than a menu of racial/ethnic options. As a result, race, ethnicity, nationality, and ancestry are frequently conflated; the donor’s self-identification reflects her personal understanding of ethnicity or race, creating variation both within and between databases. Many donors who identify as Caucasian, for example, describe their ethnicity through reference to ancestral country of origin; on Agency E’s website, one donor who describes her

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skin complexion as “very fair” lists under ethnic origin the descriptors Italian, English, Irish, and Caucasian. In contrast, within the same database a donor who describes her complexion as “medium” lists African American as her sole ethnic origin. The question of how to identify one’s race is not always self-evident or dependent solely on one’s own understanding of ethnicity or ancestry, as the sociologist Janet Shim discovered. In interviews, Shim’s informants argued that it was the external social perception of their race (others identifying them as black or Hispanic) that created pressure to categorize themselves according to the race that others ascribed to them. Shim concludes that the comments of her informants “underscore how race becomes consequential through the social significance that is invested in it and imposed by others, rather than being a self selected attribute by an individual presumably free to choose.”101 These findings are significant for my study because egg donor and surrogate databases often rely on donor self-identification; Shim’s research suggests that selfidentification is an “ascribed characteristic,” always in response to the racializing social gaze.102 While Caucasian is used as a broad racial category in donor databases, it does seem that generic whiteness is being called into question through these profiles. Because intended parents are using donor profiles to create “affinity ties” between themselves and their future children, the normative fiction of a monolithic white identity is cast aside in favor of the specificity of ancestral heritage.103 This desire to trace the donor’s “roots” for likeness with intended parents is suggestive of recreational genetics. Both imply an investment in genetic determinism, undergirded by the belief that there is something consequential to learn from ancestry. Moreover, these affinity ties are about more than straightforward physical or racial “matching”; the likeness that intended parents seek concerns “an imagined future connection forged through shared ancestry, hobbies, and other more cultural attributes.”104 Agency C’s website succinctly captures this motivation, stating that it “works closely with our Loving Couples and Loving Mothers to achieve their goals by matching them with desirable egg donors based upon a variety of considerations: ethnicity, coloring, height, athleticism, intelligence, artistic ability, etc.” Agency F promotes what it calls “ethnicspecific oocyte donation” as one of its three main services. The focus on

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ethnic specificity is reflected in this agency’s egg donor database, where donors break down their ethnic background by percentages. The database also categorizes donors by race, restricting the options to Caucasian, African American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Multi-racial, or Other. In this database, it is primarily African American donors who list only one ethnicity, whereas Caucasian and other nonwhite donors catalog heritage or ancestry.105 The idea that an individual’s race or ancestry can be distributed into discrete percentages reinforces the myth of racial purity; as Dorothy Roberts argues in Fatal Invention, “we can only imagine someone to be a quarter European if we have a concept of someone who is 100 percent European.”106 Listing donor ethnicity in such specific terms reifies race as a biological reality that will be reproduced through donor eggs. It is common for agencies to list not only the ethnicity of the donor, but also that of her mother, father, and both maternal and paternal grandparents; this tracing of lineage encourages intended parents to seek out similarities between themselves and various aspects of the donor’s history, thus actively constructing kinship. As Thompson points out, there are multiple tropes concerning genetics that are accessible to intended parents. Those using donor eggs might embrace the idea that “genes code for racial distinctions, group inclusion and exclusion, and ethnic purity,” while intended parents using their own gametes can access the coexisting trope, “that genes function as the thing that provides the definitive mark of individuality.”107 The former is evidenced in Agency F’s egg donor database, which is notable for its detailed coverage of each donor’s physical characteristics, medical and reproductive history, donor “risk factors,” and a section titled “genetic history.” The genetic history section includes a series of questions about ancestry, each correlated with a follow-up question about genetic disease. For example, a question that asks whether donors are of black or “Mexican/Latin American” ancestry is followed by whether the donor has been tested as a carrier for sickle cell disease. If donors respond in the affirmative to having Mediterranean, Latin American, Chinese, or Southeast Asian ancestors, they are asked whether they have been tested as a carrier of thalassemia, a blood disorder found to occur most commonly in people of these lines of descent. Finally, if a donor responds that she is of white ancestry, she is asked whether she

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has been tested as a carrier of cystic fibrosis. This series of questions reifies races as discrete categories by linking disease to ancestry, despite findings that even disorders closely associated with racial groups in public consciousness such as sickle cell anemia are not in actuality “race-bound.”108 Moreover, the inclusion of questions about ancestry in a section titled “genetic history” shores up the assumption that there is a biological basis for race. Genes are indeed “multivocal symbols” whose meanings are negotiated by the needs of intended parents, but also by donors and surrogates.109

Phenotypic Markers of Race Egg donor profiles also address race and ethnicity through descriptions of physical attributes—complexion, hair texture, or eye color—also known as phenotype. “Phenotype” refers to “visible physical traits”; until scientific advancements of the 1960s, geneticists believed that these physical characteristics corresponded to genetic properties such that “the phenotype was held to be the realization of the genotype in the observable world.”110 With the developments of molecular biology, the belief in a one-to-one correlation between phenotype and genotype made way for the theory that visible physical differences hid vast similarities between groups at the molecular level. This recalculation corresponded with a political context in which mainstream antiracist forces argued that the best way to fight racism was by downplaying racial difference and promoting an ideology of “color blindness.”111 As critics of this concept have thoroughly demonstrated, the idea of “color blindness” as a panacea for racism ignores not only the reality of living in a white supremacist culture, but also the differential value placed upon light skin tone within various racial and ethnic groups; even members of the same group can be differentially racialized.112 The feminist theorist Ruth Frankenberg defines color blindness as a way of thinking about race based on not “seeing,” or not recognizing, racial differences. Frankenberg argues that many white people use color blindness (or what she calls color evasion) as a shield, a way to be “polite” about race. Color evasiveness does not signify a complete lack of attention to difference, but rather a selective engagement: “while certain kinds of difference or differentiation can be seen and discussed with abandon, others are

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evaded if at all possible.”113 Color blindness or color evasion ignores the significance attributed to skin color in our culture. Skin color is a form of symbolic capital; it has been evidenced to impact employment opportunities, perceptions of attractiveness, and even judgments regarding criminality.114 As Thompson notes, the inclusion of skin tone in egg donor profiles suggests a belief that the skin tone of the donor (noting, of course, that the eggs themselves have no “skin” and thus no “tone”) has the potential to be transmitted to the imagined child.115 Despite the cultural significance attributed to skin tone, little consensus emerges across various egg donor databases as to how this trait should be categorized. The proliferation of online donor databases nearly guarantees that intended parents will “shop around” on the Internet, comparing the perceived quality of donors from site to site. Agencies are clearly aware of this potential; some market the selectivity with which they choose egg donors, while others promote the large number of donors in their database or a specific niche (all college-educated donors, or LGBT-friendly services). Many intended parents do seek out and pay a premium price for the normatively ideal white, thin, college-educated egg donor. Yet what the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts terms the “racial supply and demand system” also means that egg donors who are racial minorities may receive higher compensation than the average white donor because fewer women of color are represented in most egg donor databases.116 Intended parents might view the selection of race, ethnicity, and skin tone in a donor as an expression of their reproductive agency,117 but the diversity with which databases describe various racialized phenotypic differences complicates efforts to systematically compare donor offerings.118 The database for Agency G, for example, limits the description of donor skin tones to fair, medium, or olive, while Agency E’s database includes fair, medium, slight olive, medium olive, moderate olive, dark olive, and dark. The skin tone options listed by Agency H include pink and white in addition to the relatively common fair, medium, dark, and olive. Agency I, which specializes in the reproductive tourism industry of India, does not offer an online donor profile but instead states that it “matches the Intended Parent(s) with the egg donor who most closely physically resembles her in ethnicity, height, body build, skin type, eye color and hair color and texture.” What this policy ignores is

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that “matching” is not always the ultimate goal—some intended parents select donor gametes based on qualities that they consider favorable or more socially privileged than their own.119 These are all very disparate means of categorizing skin tone; it is even possible that the complexion of one donor could be categorized entirely differently by each of these databases. Natural hair color, hair texture or body (thick, fine), hair type (wavy, curly, straight), and skin characteristics (freckles, moles, ability to tan) are also included in many of the databases, which combine with skin tone and self-described race and ethnicity to further racialize the egg and geneticize physical traits. It is worth noting that the design of online databases allows intended parents to select for race without explicitly acknowledging the politics of geneticizing racial belonging. White intended parents who select white donors are also electing to give their children racial privilege. It is unlikely that intended parents are consciously seeking out white privilege rather than selecting for a sense of “likeness.” Nonetheless, the extreme racialization of gametes, down to donor skin tone and hair texture, complicates the notion of white privilege as something that is not chosen, but granted at birth. The selection of race in egg donation belies the aforementioned discourse of color blindness and instead suggests a form of what Frankenberg calls “power evasion.” Power evasion involves a selective attention to differences that are deemed positive, but an avoidance of those deemed negative, such as inequality, racism, and power imbalance.120 In the case of ART use, this appears as the minute geneticization of racial difference in selecting an egg donor, without any context for what these racialized traits and markers mean in a larger social context. Visualizing techniques verify the description of phenotype in the donor profiles; many databases offer multiple pictures of the donor as an infant, a child, and an adult. Donors who have children of their own often include them in online albums as evidence of what their genes are likely to produce, as well as proof of the donor’s fertility. Intended parents can compare the descriptions of donors to their pictures as a way to verify the information that the donors present, and also to imagine how these characteristics could take form in their own potential children. As Rosalind Petchesky argues in “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture,” photographic images have the capacity “to assume two distinct

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meanings, often simultaneously: an empirical (informational) and a mythical (or magical) meaning.”121 Visual images of egg donors serve both purposes for intended parents, confirming (or conflicting with) the detailed physical descriptions elicited in lengthy donor profiles, and also offering up the potential blueprint of a future child. What these arrangements mask is that the perception of skin tone is not homogeneous across racial and ethnic lines, nor is its meaning. A woman who identifies as white might list her skin tone as “medium” because she tans easily in the summer—a trait that is currently celebrated in white beauty culture. For example, a donor in Agency D’s database lists her race as Caucasian and categorizes her skin type as “tan, not burn in the sun.” A woman who identifies as African American, in contrast, might have a vastly different perception of “medium” skin tone, influenced in part by a culture that privileges light-skinned women of color in television, movies, and magazines. Indeed, the interpretation or “reading” of skin tone (even one’s own) does not occur in a cultural vacuum; it is influenced by a variety of “ethnoracial marking systems” such as hair and fashion style, eye color, gender, language, and age.122 According to a study by Celeste M. Condit et al., laypeople are likely to identify race by a person’s physical appearance, with skin color as a primary, but not sufficient, evidence of racial belonging. The researchers conclude that “lay people tend to believe that race is identified by appearance and that genes are responsible for appearance; therefore they believe that race has a genetic basis.”123 This research supports the emphasis placed on phenotypic markers of race in egg donor profiles. If phenotype is viewed as largely genetic, and the most significant marker of racial difference, then intended parents will use multiple metrics (pictures, donors’ statistics such as height and weight, and self-identified ethnicity, race, and skin tone) to measure a donor’s racial makeup.

Surrogacy Databases Prior to this analysis, I hypothesized that most websites would offer online databases through which intended parents could peruse the profiles of both donors and surrogates. At the least, I expected that those agencies with online egg donation databases would also have online surrogacy databases. This hypothesis was proven false within the given

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sample of agencies. Only seven of the thirty agency websites included profiles of surrogates, and of those, I was granted permission to view four databases.124 There are multiple reasons that it is less common for agencies to have surrogacy databases than egg donor databases: first, because many agencies have fewer surrogates than egg donors, they often match intended parents with surrogates on a case-by-case level; and second, the criteria for selecting a surrogate do not fit the aforementioned discourse templates of personal ads. Agencies match intended parents with surrogates based on factors such as location, whether the surrogate is willing to “reduce” (selectively abort) multiple or unhealthy fetuses, and whether the surrogate is willing to work with certain groups such as gay couples or singles. Moreover, the contrast between criteria for choosing a surrogate and criteria for choosing an egg donor reflects the fetishization of genetics and the compartmentalization of gestation. It is important to note that not all intended parents who contract with a gestational surrogate are also purchasing donor eggs and sperm. Indeed, one reason that many intended parents consider gestational surrogacy a preferable alternative to adoption is that at least one of the parents will be genetically related to the future child. The ethnographer Elly Teman found that in Israel, gestation is believed to have no influence on the future child, and that the womb is “denuded of personal traits,” whereas the egg is vested with a woman’s feminine identity and genetic inheritance.125 Teman contrasts this to the United States, citing Ragoné’s classic research on women who served as both traditional and gestational surrogates to argue that Americans have a more flexible approach to the division of eggs and wombs. While I agree with Teman that intended parents in the United States place significance on the “environment” of the womb (with particular attention to alcohol and drug use), I view this as an extension of the current social and political climate in the United States that interpolates all pregnant women as potential threats to fetuses/children. Many surrogacy contracts, for example, require that surrogates agree not to drink coffee or alcohol, avoid most medications, and even limit travel to some destinations.126 Gestation is compartmentalized such that the surrogate is viewed as capable of affecting the safety of the womb (in largely negative ways), but, as in Israel, she is incapable of altering the individual “nature” that is predetermined by genetics. Intended parents in the United States might worry that their surrogate will

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harm “their” fetus by smoking cigarettes during her pregnancy, but not that her bad temper or freckles will later materialize in their child-to-be. Where surrogacy databases do exist in this sample, they differ quite markedly from the egg donor databases created by the same programs. The search page for Agency K’s database asks visitors to select whether they are seeking an egg donor or a surrogate. Intended parents are then prompted to narrow their search by identification number, race, or location, but to select hair color, eye color, and minimum/maximum height only if they are searching for an egg donor, not a surrogate. Likewise, the database for Agency H asks surrogates to fill out questions about race and ethnicity, height and weight, and education, but it does not require the detailed description of physical characteristics asked of egg donors. This trend also shows up in the sample profiles of surrogates and egg donors offered by Agency F. While both egg donors and surrogates list race and “ethnic history” along with some other physical characteristics, only donors list complexion and hair type. These examples indicate that intended parents may find the race of their surrogate relevant, but not because they believe that her physical characteristics will manifest in their child. Rather, race (like gender) is a primary organizing principle in American society, and is thus a central identity category by which we “know” one another. Without being aware of the race of a surrogate, intended parents may feel that they are missing a piece of information that is crucial to their presumed knowledge of the candidate. Alternatively, while cross-racial surrogacy is a growing phenomenon, there are undoubtedly intended parents who would not be willing to use a surrogate of a different race, as well as those who remain hesitant to intermingle raced bodies at the intimate level of pregnancy. The same can be said for surrogates: Agency L’s surrogacy application asks women whether they would be willing to serve as a surrogate for a family of a different race, religion, or ethnic background, suggesting that some surrogates would refuse to do so. Even in Teman’s ethnography, in which intended parents firmly state that the race of the surrogate has no implications for their future child, Teman finds that parents need to reaffirm this knowledge after the child is born. One of the ways that individuals validate their new identity as parents, she contends, is by confirming their own resemblance to the child: “This preoccupation with the resemblance of the child to the intended parents seems to voice

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a retrospective fear that the baby could have mistakenly been the genetic offspring of the surrogate or that the surrogate could somehow have ‘shaped’ or affected the baby while it was in her womb.”127 The feminist ethnographer Gillian Goslinga-Roy likewise discovered that the firm bodily boundary between surrogate and fetus is challenged by racial difference. The ability to maintain an “ontological distinction” between self and other potentially dissolves when the fetus is racially marked as African American (for example), and the surrogate white. Goslinga-Roy notes that “genetic unrelatedness and assisted reproduction practices thus ‘naturally safeguarded’ her [the surrogate’s] sexual, bodily, and personal integrity, but only as long as the child in her was (coded) white.”128 These findings suggest that despite attempts to naturalize the role of the surrogate as purely custodial, cross-racial surrogacy may entail certain racialized “risks” for those who bear white privilege that they are unable to dismiss entirely. In addition to race and ethnicity, profiles of surrogates generally have less information about educational history, hobbies, and special skills than do egg donor profiles. In the sample profiles on Agency F’s website, both egg donors and surrogates are asked to list their education (both past and future plans), hobbies, and employment history, but only egg donors are asked about their special achievements and best subjects in school. Likewise, surrogates detail their medical history, but are not asked to report on their extended family health history and special achievements of family members.129 In an interesting reversal, surrogates are prompted to describe their diet, which in this profile includes the amount of water they drink as well as their vegetable and lean meat intake, while this question is not repeated for donors. Questions about diet, lifestyle, and exercise routine are common in surrogacy applications, and they are often followed by specific inquiries into tobacco, drug, and alcohol use. Again, this implies that the surrogate has the potential to affect the fetus through the environment of the womb. Many feminist scholars have drawn connections between representations of the womb as an environment and the erasure of the woman as the primary agent (and patient) in a pregnancy. As Lauren Berlant argues, “the maternal body has been redefined as a disaster movie waiting to happen, or a technical ‘environment’ that makes the fetus vulnerable to toxic invasions via the mother’s mouth, veins or vagina.”130 I

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agree with Berlant’s assessment of the effects of visualizing technologies such as ultrasound on the maternal-fetal relationship, but would add that in the case of surrogacy the stakes are slightly different. While surrogates are vulnerable to the policing of their bodies and behavior, the management of their pregnancies by third-party sources is typically a prerequisite to entering this highly mediated pregnancy experience. Surrogates are primed to define themselves as vessels, delineating their own subjectivity from that of the fetus. This perspective is reflected in how agency websites set up the databases and search functions for surrogates. In this sample, the format of surrogacy databases indicated function or practicality as opposed to the dating site–like layout for egg donors. For example, the search function for Agency A’s database divides surrogates into groups such as West Coast/East Coast surrogates, surrogates with insurance, repeat surrogates, “value” surrogates (those willing to charge $20,000 or less), and “flexible” surrogates (those open to “reduction or termination for medical or personal reasons”). Agency D also lists practical questions like willingness to reduce or terminate, openness to working with gay or single intended parents, and fees. The more in-depth questions for surrogates are generally related to the level of support they have from their families (many programs require that the surrogate provide the written consent of her husband or partner), their birth experiences, lifestyle, career focus, and motivation for becoming a surrogate. An additional theme that emerged in this sample was the divergent visual representations of donors and surrogates. Egg donor profiles generally contain more than one picture of the donor. If multiple photographs are posted, it is common to include one of the donor in formal clothing (at a prom or wedding), as a child, and with any of her own children. When surrogates are visually represented, they are nearly always depicted with their families. These include pregnancy pictures and photos of the donor with her children or partner. It is far less common to see pictures of egg donors in the frame with others; in fact, many of the pictures that donors post are clearly cropped to remove friends, relatives, or partners from the images. Why is it important to represent surrogates with their partners and children, or in the late stages of pregnancy? Both egg donors and surrogates are being appropriately gendered through these visualization

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techniques, but in different ways. Egg donors are valued for their youth, fertility, beauty, and accomplishments; pictures of donors prove their femininity and physical attractiveness and often attest to signal moments of accomplishment such as graduation, prom, or wedding day. It is not unusual for egg donor pictures to mimic the “head shots” used by models and actresses (and indeed, a significant number of egg donors list these occupations in their profiles). In a study of egg and sperm donor programs, the sociologist Rene Almeling identified two gendered stereotypes that agencies expect of egg donors: donors could present as either attractive and well-educated individuals or caring mothers of their own children. Agencies use these “gendered coaching strategies” to ensure that donors will choose pictures and write profiles that enhance these qualities, particularly through reference to altruistic motivations.131 Surrogates are also valued for their altruism, fertility, and physical health, but photographs of surrogates provide a different type of “evidence” than do photographs of egg donors. Pictures of surrogates in late pregnancy demonstrate their ability to successfully carry a pregnancy to term, and they represent a cultural marker of heightened (and nonsexualized) femininity. Surrogacy poses a potential threat to traditional notions of femininity by detaching pregnancy from motherhood; these images rehabilitate surrogates, emphasizing that surrogates are mothers themselves who are motivated to give the gift of life to another family. Agency A’s website is an example of this. In lieu of a database, Agency A offers a web album slideshow of surrogates in their program to the tune of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” The slideshow streams pictures of the surrogates on their wedding day, pictures of their bare and pregnant stomachs, ultrasound images of fetuses, and photographs of the women with their children and families. Images such as these represent the completeness of the surrogate’s own family as well as evidence of her fertility. This is important because surrogates are almost universally required to have children of their own. Such policies are based on the belief that surrogates with children are less likely to go back on their contractual agreement to relinquish the child at birth. Because motherhood is cast as a sign of maturity and a marker of true womanhood in American culture, pictures of the surrogate pregnant or with her family reinforce these gendered values. Images of the surrogate as a good mother support

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her claims of altruism because motherhood and self-sacrifice are seen as a necessary pair. Thus, visual images of surrogates as good, altruistic, and self-sacrificing mothers shore up the narrative of women helping women that naturalizes the surrogacy process. In sum, agencies are less likely to “materialize” surrogates than egg donors, and when they do, it is clear that the qualities valued in surrogates are not identical to those valued in egg donors. The race and ethnicity of surrogates are not entirely inconsequential, yet the lack of detailed attention to phenotype suggests that race has a different meaning when associated with surrogates than with egg donors. While donor eggs are imbued with the qualities and proclivities of the individual woman, the influence of the surrogate is limited to the sphere of “nurture” rather than “nature.” *** The practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy implies that racial difference does not “matter” (to borrow from Judith Butler)132 at the level of gestation, but that social categories of race are thoroughly encoded in popular understandings of genetics. This has major implications for contemporary racial politics. While academics rightly argue that race is a social construction, it is one that undeniably and forcefully shapes the lives of individuals. ARTs reveal the flexibility of racial discourse; the malleability of race serves the interests of economically and racially dominant groups such that the reproductive labor of women of color as surrogates is naturalized and normalized by the geneticization of race. Not only does this discourse of race downplay the significance of the intimate interracial contact of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, it also commodifies race through the sale of human gametes. In turn, the discourse reifies racial categories as discrete and biological. That being said, to interpret the racialization of gametes as a straightforward extension of the politics of eugenics forecloses the potential for ART users to deploy these technologies in ways that subvert racial hierarchies. As Roberts argues, positioning the reproductive interests of white women and women of color as purely oppositional ignores both the increased use of ARTs by people of color and their shared relationship to the political and market forces that privatize responsibility for public health.133 While analyses of ARTs must attend to the potential to

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reinforce racial stratification, they must also acknowledge the diverse, agential, and at times counterhegemonic strategies that individuals employ to construct families by choice. Racial discourse in the United States is not determined solely by scientific or academic contributions; rather, popular beliefs about racial difference are entrenched within social, economic, and political ideologies that often “speak back” to claims about the biological meaninglessness of race. The reproductive technology industry is a prime location to reveal these inconsistencies because it straddles both the market and medicine, both technology and consumption. As the overlap between medicine and the market grows, these sites will continue to serve as fertile grounds for measuring shifting ideologies of race, gender, and kinship.

5

“I Am the Baby’s Real Mother” Reproductive Tourism and the Transnational Construction of Kinship

On April 25, 2015, Nepal was rocked by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which killed over eight thousand people and displaced thousands more. The death toll rose as weeks went by, and powerful aftershocks left citizens fearful to return indoors.1 As disaster relief organizations struggled to reach remote areas of the country, and aid groups scrambled to respond, a select number of newborn babies and their caretakers were plucked from the wreckage and flown to safety in Israel. Left behind were the women who had given birth—the surrogate mothers. Twentysix babies had been born to surrogates in Kathmandu in the weeks preceding the earthquake, most commissioned by same-sex couples from Israel, who are banned from using surrogates in their own country. Some intended parents were also in Nepal at the time of the quake, waiting to fulfill the bureaucratic requirements to bring their children home. Within a few days of the disaster, the Israeli government had evacuated the children and intended parents to Israel, but left the surrogates behind in a devastated landscape, which for most of the women was not their home.2 Most, if not all, of the surrogates were from India, and had traveled to Nepal because new Indian regulations have banned same-sex couples from obtaining a surrogate in that country. About a hundred pregnant surrogates remained in Nepal, carrying babies for Israeli citizens;3 one Israeli intended father said he worried that the stress his surrogate was enduring would not be good for the pregnancy.4 Shortly after the evacuation, the Israeli attorney general promised to transport those surrogates in the advanced stages of pregnancy to Israel, and the interior minister vowed to remove immigration barriers for the others.5 It is unclear, however, whether travel to Israel would be preferred by all of the surrogates, 165

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most of whom were likely tied to Nepal and India through children and families of their own. Some intended parents had never met the woman carrying their child; the news network CNN connected one Indian surrogate in Nepal with the intended father in Israel, using a translator to allow them to speak for the first time. The surrogate told reporters that she was pleased that the intended father was concerned for her and the baby, yet she missed her own nine-year-old daughter. Since she was a single mother, her best option to financially support her daughter was to leave her with family in India, travel to Nepal, and give birth to what would be an Israeli child.6 The evacuation of babies, but not surrogates; the concern for the effects of stress on the fetus, but no mention of the woman; a surrogate separated from her own child in order to have a baby for someone else— the aftermath of Nepal’s earthquake reflects many of the concerns raised by what is known as reproductive tourism. Reproductive tourism— international travel for fertility and reproductive services—is an increasingly common phenomenon. Also termed “fertility outsourcing,” “rent-a-womb,” or “procreation vacations,” reproductive tourism encompasses a range of practices that occur globally, including egg donation, in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and commercial surrogacy. While many service providers and customers build a pseudophilanthropic discourse around the practice that focuses on the theme of “women helping women,” I argue that these processes naturalize and justify an economic arrangement that is fraught with inequality. Reproductive tourism is often a deeply racialized endeavor that relies on class disparities between those who provide reproductive services and those who consume them in order to create a family built around genetic ties. Cross-racial gestational surrogacy is an illuminating example of this inequality in a transnational context. I focus on India, the worldwide leader in surrogacy provision,7 to analyze the discursive and cultural construction of this specific form of reproductive tourism in which the surrogate has no genetic relationship to the fetus that she carries. This chapter utilizes sources including feminist ethnographic scholarship, popular print media coverage of surrogacy, documentary film, and television talk shows to connect socially constructed notions of race and genetic determinism that travel alongside the reproductive tourist with the more seemingly benign discursive theme of “women helping women.”

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As discussed in previous chapters, the role of the surrogate is minimized when DNA is framed as the sole arbiter of the “true self.”8 The logic of genetic essentialism, in which cultural meanings of the gene conflate with the scientific or biological, “reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral complexity, with their genes.”9 According to Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, this logic makes (comparatively) low-cost gestational surrogacy in India particularly appealing for U.S. clients, “because the surrogate makes no genetic contribution, hence her ethnicity leaves no trace on the child.”10 In cross-racial surrogacy arrangements, whiteness can be “commercially reproduced” at an appealing price.11 Analyzing the racialization of surrogacy, particularly when racial difference correlates with massive disparities in economic privilege, reveals how ideologies of race and kinship travel alongside the reproductive tourist. It also marks the strategies used to naturalize and justify an economic arrangement that is fraught with inequality.

ARTs in a Global Context Some countries that are now magnets for reproductive services were already popular destinations for a broader base of medical tourism such as heart, cosmetic, and joint-replacement surgery, as well as sex reassignment surgery.12 India, for example, attracts a high volume of medical tourists because of its advanced medical technologies, low costs, popular tourist destinations, and highly skilled and trained Englishspeaking doctors.13 As in the United States, where intended parents often “shop around” for the most favorable pricing and regulatory environment, international consumers also seek out countries that are conducive to their reproductive goals. Scholars of reproductive tourism have identified four key motivations for seeking what they call “crossborder reproductive care”: religious and legal prohibitions; resource issues, which include long waiting times, cost, and access to treatment facilities; quality concerns in relation to success rates and safety; and personal reasons such as privacy concerns or cultural norms.14 Some countries prohibit specific types of treatment (PGD, for example, is banned in Italy), while others restrict LGBT people from accessing IVF (these countries include France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and the

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Netherlands), and others do not allow compensated surrogacy, thus greatly restricting the practice (as in the United Kingdom).15 Some theorists speculate that the restrictions placed on ARTs by individual nations do little but further stratify access to such treatments; those who can afford to travel will seek services outside their home countries.16 For example, after Britain’s Human Fertility and Embryology Authority banned anonymous egg and sperm donation in the United Kingdom, the supply of gametes quickly shrank, and the number of British citizens traveling abroad for these products increased significantly.17 Until recently, India was similar to the United States in that the state did not place limitations on parents seeking gestational surrogacy. Surrogacy was legalized in India in 2002, and is expected to add an annual $2.3 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product from 2012 on.18 The Indian government even sponsored its own ART industry growth through advertising and policy. In 2004 the state announced that “treatment of foreign patients is legally an export and deemed eligible for all fiscal incentives extended to export earnings.”19 The result has been a booming sector; the Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, an Indian women’s organization, estimates that about three thousand clinics in India offer surrogacy services.20 As in the United States, India’s surrogacy industry follows a commercial, for-profit model. This stands in contrast to other nations such as Israel, in which surrogacy is heavily regulated and controlled by the state.21 While estimates range and costs fluctuate due to the variety of necessary procedures and choice of clinic, surrogacy costs in India are roughly $35,000–$45,000, as compared to $80,000–$150,000 in the United States.22 The surrogacy industry in India changed in 2013, when legislation banned gay men, single people, and those married for less than two years from engaging in surrogacy contracts.23 As a result, many gay clients have taken their business to Nepal, where surrogacy is not restricted. Indian agencies have followed, exporting Indian surrogates to Nepal for the duration of their pregnancies.24 Reports vary on how much of the money that clients pay in India goes to the surrogates themselves. Dr. Nayna Patel, the owner of the most well-known surrogacy clinic in India, contends that the women she employs are paid $6,500 per pregnancy.25 Because of the significantly lower prices associated with surrogacy in India, agencies are able to offer deals and packages that are extremely attractive to intended

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parents. The agency Proactive Family Solutions, for example, offers a “surrogacy guarantee” that promises a full refund to couples whose surrogate has not become pregnant or given birth within twenty-seven months.26 As the journalist Henry Chu writes in the Los Angeles Times, some see surrogacy in India as “a logical outgrowth of India’s fast-paced economic growth and liberalization of the last 15 years, a perfect meeting of supply and demand in a globalized marketplace.”27 Others are critical of what they perceive as abuse of the desperately poor. A bill meant to regulate surrogacy in India has spent years making its way through government ministries and departments, yet what is now titled the Assisted Reproductive Technology Regulation Bill, 2013, continues to be modified by the Indian government. The bill aims to outline the roles of all parties involved in surrogacy, provide clear definitions of parentage, and designate responsibility to appropriate government agencies.28 Existing drafts of the ART Regulation Bill would also implement some limitations on the potential pool of surrogates, the medical procedures that they undergo, and also the demographics of intended parents, such as barring gay couples and single people from using surrogacy services.29 The original drafting of the bill did not include participation by women’s groups or public health activists and has been critiqued by these sources, which contend that the bill will protect and benefit the industry at the expense of Indian women.30 As one health activist claims, “It [the bill] is like saying we know you are exploited but here is a law that will ensure that you will be exploited less.”31 Women’s rights activists with Sama hold that the legislation is particularly lax in its attention to the multitudes of third-party contractors that play a vital role in surrogacy arrangements, including legal firms, clinics, tourist agencies, and managers of surrogacy hostels.32 Other critics similarly contend that rather than regulating the ART industry, the bill promotes it as part of a neoliberal shift in development policy, protecting medical tourism rather than the rights and health of women involved in surrogacy.33

The Surrogate Laborers While the benefits to surrogacy in India for intended parents may be clear, why do Indian women become surrogates, given the legislative ambiguities and lack of legal recourse? In a study in Anand, India, by the

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anthropologist Amrita Pande, surrogates ranged in age from twenty-five to forty-five, with educational levels from illiterate to high school– educated, and a median household income of $60 a month. Many of the women were the sole earners in their households, with husbands who were unemployed or underemployed. Participating in surrogacy made a vast contribution to the household economy; Pande found that the amount of money the woman earned in one surrogate pregnancy was roughly equivalent to five years of total family income. While many critics of Indian surrogacy assume that the women who participate do so because they are financially destitute, the sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa’s fieldwork demonstrates that surrogacy agencies do not seek out desperately poor women. Rather, recruiters find working-class women to be more suitable candidates because they are more likely to have permanent housing, good hygiene, and access to clean water and regular meals.34 The demographics in other ethnographic research studies have found women who are mostly housewives, or if employed, worked in factories, domestic work, or the garment industry.35 Thus, gestational surrogacy is often an extension of the feminized labor in which women are already engaged.36 Surrogacy may also reflect an appealing employment alternative to other labor options. A study of surrogates in Bangalore, India, found that potential surrogates in this region were most productively recruited from garment manufacturing, where low pay and repressive working conditions are the norm.37 Many women saw surrogacy or egg donation as a way to escape garment manufacturing, at least temporarily, and achieve some means of economic stability.38 Unlike in the United States, it is not uncommon for surrogates in India to spend all or part of their pregnancies in a closely regulated surrogacy hostel (although these requirements vary by agency or clinic) until the birth.39 Surrogates receive higher pay if they agree to live in the hostels for all nine months of their pregnancy, and since 2005, most have done so when the option is made available.40 Indian surrogates almost always deliver babies via Cesarean section, regardless of whether they have had a previous vaginal birth. C-sections are typically scheduled between the thirty-sixth and thirty-eighth week of pregnancy so that the doctor can time the birth, and international intended parents can attend.41 Dr. Nayna Patel, the operator of Akanksha Infertility Clinic in Anand, India, and a frequently cited source in the news media, notes

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that the high levels of surveillance in surrogacy hostels are an incentive for foreigners to choose surrogacy in India over other countries like the United States. In India, she argues, intended parents can guarantee that their surrogate will not drink, smoke, or engage in other “vices” during pregnancy.42 Patel’s clinic controls the “vice” of sexuality by banning surrogates from leaving their quarters without permission, and allowing the women to visit their families only in crowded rooms; this surveillance ensures the surrogate’s chastity throughout the pregnancy, thus eliminating the risk of sexually transmitted infection.43 Other clinics frame maternity homes or agency-provided housing as a benefit to the surrogate, a place where she will be spared household labor and childcare in order to rest throughout her pregnancy. Even then, some surrogates express feelings of isolation and boredom due to the limited mobility and close surveillance imposed by staff that is responsible for ensuring that surrogates do not harm the developing pregnancy.44 Others missed their families, but relished the time spent in the dormitories as a unique respite from serving the needs of their husband and children, and as an opportunity to create significant bonds with the other women in the hostel.45 Indian surrogates are explicitly trained to distance themselves from the fetuses that they carry, but they are also expected to perform the affective labor of “loving” the fetus at the same time. One clinic employee instructs surrogates that the child is “not your baby” but that “you will take care of it even more, love it even more than you love your own, because it is someone else’s.”46 This expectation is reminiscent of the nostalgia for the mammy figure in the United States, a woman who was idealized as selflessly devoted to her charges, yet always aware of her place in the family hierarchy. It is a contradictory demand that is also placed on women who serve as nannies and other child caretakers in the United States, a disproportionate number of whom are “Third World” women of color. Nannies and surrogates are among the ranks of what Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parrenas term “intimate laborers,” engaged in what the authors describe as low-status “women’s work” involving psychic and bodily intimacy. Intimate labor, according to these authors, is stigmatized because of its association with the body and supposedly unclean bodily functions (such as feeding, bathing, or providing sexual services to others). As

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a result, intimate labor is overwhelmingly performed by economically disadvantaged women and women of color. Moreover, intimate labors “rely on the maintenance of precise social relations between employers and employees or customers and providers.”47 Surrogates in India are performing intimate labor in very institutional settings, with little or no connection with the couples commissioning their labor. As Vivian Zelizer notes in The Purchase of Intimacy, intimate care is often sentimentalized because of its associations with altruism and personal commitment, yet paid care explicitly intermingles economic transactions with emotional labor in a way that is often viewed as a threat to social norms.48 Surrogacy in India has all the hallmarks of intimate labor— embodied intimacy, the “messiness” of birth, the class and often racial “Otherness” of the surrogate—resulting in conflicting demands between the expectations of nurturing and caring about the fetus during pregnancy and immediate affective disengagement after the birth.

Beyond the Exploitation/Empowerment Dichotomy Mainstream media often frame contentious social issues (like abortion rights or marriage equality) in dichotomous terms, or at least as consisting of two sides that equally merit debate. Surrogacy in India is no exception, and is often represented in the media as a two-sided issue: either a powerful symbol of the economic exploitation of Third World women or an opportunity for their political, social, familial, and economic empowerment. A 2007 article in the women’s magazine Marie Claire, for example, asks of reproductive tourism in India, “Another example of third world exploitation? Globalization gone mad? Or is it a mutually beneficial relationship?”49 This quote explicitly situates exploitation and equal gain as the only available framework for understanding reproductive tourism. Less common is the suggestion that surrogacy could be exploitative while simultaneously providing benefits to Indian women that alternative labor options currently do not. Reflecting this complexity, an Indian surrogate recovering from a Cesarean section told Reuters, “I was happy to do it but it was not really out of choice because we needed the money.”50 A wide variety of sources including governments, bioethicists, policy makers, and academics have conceptualized a clean split between commodities that can

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be bought and sold, and gifts that are given freely. Within this dichotomy, the market for commodities (particularly if that commodity is a human tissue such as blood, organs, or reproductive material) may involve exploitation and dehumanization of laborers and producers, whereas the gift economy consists of altruism and efforts to improve the social good.51 The previous quote complicates this dichotomy—the surrogate acknowledges the personal fulfillment she receives for “giving” an infertile couple a child, while seamlessly integrating her very limited agency to “choose” whether or not to give it. A prospective Indian surrogate interviewed by the New York Times frames surrogacy as a way to cash in on the resources that are already available to her: “It’s good money. Risks? What risks? Any fool can have a baby, it takes a smart woman to get paid for it.”52 Rather than viewing her reproductive capacity as a burden or a biologically determined risk factor for exploitation, this surrogate embraces her reproductive potential as a resource not to be squandered solely by traditional motherhood. This radical, market-driven reconceptualization of pregnancy can be read as an expression of bodily autonomy and agency, blurring the simple dichotomy of exploitation versus opportunity. Recent academic scholarship also complicates this framework. The feminist philosopher Amrita Banerjee urges readers to reject the schema of liberalism versus exploitation often found in ethics-centered and Western-focused discourse on surrogacy. Banerjee is critical of the language of choice because it ignores women’s sociopolitical context. At the same time, the exploitation framework contributes to perceptions of “Third World” women as powerless and victimized: “such discursive ethnocentrism might fuel a certain paternalistic attitude toward ‘Third World’ women and further reify what [Chandra] Mohanty terms as ‘Third World difference.’”53 Mohanty notes that when feminist analyses assume a homogeneous oppression of all women, the image of an “average Third World woman” (who is “sexually constrained,” uneducated, and victimized) is produced and implicitly contrasted with the individualistic and empowered Western woman.54 In the case of reproductive tourism, the exploitation framework posits Indian women as universally devoid of agency and thus at the mercy of economically advantaged Western women who can afford to pay for the fertility of others—what Banerjee calls a “powerful/powerless dichotomy.”55

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Rather than accepting a clear-cut dichotomy between powerful and powerless, we should employ a more productive understanding of power as flowing inescapably and unevenly between intended parents and surrogates. For example, intended parents who procure surrogacy services are economically privileged in relation to the women they hire, but they are also reproductively disadvantaged, in the sense that they are reliant upon the surrogate to produce what they are physically incapable of.56 Surrogates are cognizant of this; in Pande’s study, surrogates note that while intended parents contribute the genetic material, it is through the “blood and sweat” of the surrogate that the child comes into being. This understanding not only evinces agency by formulating forbidden kinship ties with the fetus but also acknowledges the limits of the intended parents’ power.57 The interdependence between surrogate and intended parents can imply that the playing field between parties is relatively level: surrogates need money and intended parents need a child, thus they can engage in an equal exchange of goods (although, of course, children are described as a gift, a miracle, and a blessing rather than a commodity). This equivalence is false, and making it ignores the material and structural chasm between the subject positions of intended parent and surrogate. Nonetheless, when a woman’s labor is a matter of survival for herself and her family, surrogacy may be a more appealing choice than the other options available. A surrogate in Anand, India, told a reporter for Marie Claire that “this is not exploitation. Crushing glass for 15 hours a day is exploitation.”58 For this woman, surrogacy offers a chance to provide a measure of economic security for her own daughters, and she therefore selects from the available labor options that which can aid her in achieving this goal. Yet acting as a surrogate has a limited global effect on a woman’s social position. As Banerjee writes, “the little financial benefit the surrogates get is neither sufficient to change their class/economic status in any real sense, nor capable of addressing larger structures of inequalities within the Indian context such as caste and gender hierarchies.”59 Again, there is no unequivocal dichotomy between work that empowers women and work that exploits them, even when the labor is intimately embodied. Though surrogates have some agency, they are not universally empowered by taking on this form of labor.60

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Negotiating Kinship and Race While nearly all surrogacy contracts in India are gestational, as opposed to traditional, research suggests that the majority of surrogacy agreements are not cross-racial—many surrogates are hired by middle- and upper-class Indians, including those who have moved abroad and returned for medical services.61 Nonetheless, both research and anecdotal evidence suggest that reproductive tourism by foreigners is on the rise in India. In the 2011 surrogacy documentary Made in India, a fertility clinic director states that while foreigners once made up 5–10 percent of their clientele, these numbers have risen to 15–20 percent. The director attributes this growth to the shorter waiting times for IVF and surrogacy in India compared to other nations, as well as increased media coverage in recent years.62 As the reproductive tourism industry expands, cross-racial surrogacy is also likely to increase in frequency. This is significant because the rights of intended parents are potentially strengthened in cases in which the surrogacy is cross-racial. White intended parents in India gain an unspoken benefit when the surrogate is visually marked as Other to the future child, and is thus less likely to be considered a potential “mother” should a custody dispute arise. That being said, white intended parents who travel to India are increasingly coming home with babies of mixed racial and religious ancestry. While most intended parents use sperm from the intended father, eggs may come from the intended mother, a racially matched egg donor, or an Indian woman. While white intended parents do use Indian egg donors, there remains a strong preference for eggs from light-skinned donors, and a global market to provide them. When intended parents are nonresident Indians, caste may also come into play in the selection of an egg donor. These intended parents are willing to hire a lower-caste surrogate, but pursue “caste-matching” via the egg donor, suggesting an investment in the belief that caste is genetic and heritable.63 This section will explore how notions of genetic determinism are both adopted and challenged by various actors involved in surrogacy in India, how racial “difference” is played out strategically in the discourse surrounding Indian surrogacy, and the ways intended parents and the media naturalize surrogacy in India.

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As previous chapters have demonstrated, scientific ideologies of race and kinship are highly negotiable, and “commonsense” knowledge about both can vary widely in different contexts. Medical models of kinship are explained to surrogates by the staff of fertility clinics, with emphasis placed on the assertion that the surrogate has no claim to the child because it is not genetically “hers.”64 Indeed, a selling point of surrogacy in India for many intended parents is that the surrogates are presumably in a weak position to make claims to motherhood due to their poverty, their race and nationality, and the consequent power differential between surrogate and intended parent. In the 2009 documentary Google Baby, a staff member at a surrogacy center in India interviews a potential surrogate and her family, who report that they are considering this form of employment in order to purchase a new home. The staff member informs them that the clinic will not be held responsible if the surrogate dies as a result of the pregnancy, stressing to the family that the surrogate has no rights over the child and must give it away immediately upon birth.65 It is telling that clinic staff emphasize this aspect of surrogacy, because most of what surrogates understand about the pregnancy is communicated to them orally. Some of the women are illiterate, and contracts are written in English, which few of the women can read. In one surrogate’s words, “I think the legal contract says that we will have to give up the child immediately after delivery—we won’t even look at it. Black or white, normal or deformed, we have to give it away.”66 Surrogates have reported that they fear asking questions of the doctors or lawyers regarding contracts or payments lest they be fired; these authority figures also reference the other women prepared to take a surrogate’s place should she object.67 In reality, there are far more intended parents waiting to be matched with a surrogate than there are women available to carry these pregnancies, yet surrogates are taught to view themselves as disposable laborers.68 A doctor at a clinic in India adds that “for the surrogates it’s mostly the character of the womb that we are interested in. We make sure the surrogates know that they are not genetically related to the baby, they are just the wombs.”69 This quote aligns with Cooper and Waldby’s analysis of how reproductive technologies disaggregate reproductive biology into separable and rearrangeable parts and processes, such that “the uterus is

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technically and legally isolated as a component that can be contractually ordered, detached from the selfhood of the surrogate and repositioned in a production chain at the behest of the clinic and commissioning couple.”70 In this case, the doctor superimposes a single body part (the womb) over the personhood of the surrogate as a whole being, effectively eliding her subjectivity. Despite this, Pande found that the surrogates in her study challenged narratives of genetic and familial belonging. The surrogates that Pande interviewed repeatedly referenced their own contributions to the pregnancy, at times contrasting the level of effort that they were putting into the pregnancies to that of the intended mother, who contributed “only an egg.” The surrogates, according to this narrative, were investing their own “blood” and “sweat” into the pregnancy, and were thus justified in making kinship claims to the future child. While the blood supply of the fetus is separate from that of the surrogate during pregnancy, surrogates constructed a perceived connection between their own blood and that of the fetus. When one surrogate was told that she would have to “reduce” her pregnancy from triplets to twins, she insisted that she would keep the third baby if the intended parents did not want it because it was her blood, even if not her genes. Likewise, a gestational surrogate in Rudrappa’s study argued that the baby she carried was “part of her” because the child had grown in her womb, saying, “The egg is not mine. That is true. But I have borne that baby in my womb for nine months. If something were to happen to my daughter, then that child I have given up is the only child I have left. I want her in my life.”71 This quote not only demonstrates the surrogate’s longing for the child she relinquished, but also marks a significant kinship claim. Other surrogates that Rudrappa interviewed likewise imagine the relinquished babies in relation to their other children, as potential siblings who have been lost or taken away from their place in the surrogate’s family. These “everyday forms of kinship,” as Pande calls them, speak back to notions of genetic determinism and also biomedical models of maternal-fetal relationality.72 In an article in the American Prospect, a surrogate named Leela in Mumbai, India, goes one step further, declaring herself to be the authentic mother of a baby she delivered, more so than the Indian intended mother: “I am the baby’s real mother. I carried him. I felt him

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kick. I prayed for him. At seven months I held a celebration for him. I saw his legs and hands on the sonogram. I suffered the pain of birth.” Leela was allowed to maintain contact with the intended parents and child after her delivery, and expressed disappointment after seeing the child that he was “long and fair,” unlike her.73 These comments replace a genetic model of kinship claiming with an experiential model. For Leela, what she concretely felt, saw, enacted, and suffered trumps an abstract genetic tie. At first glance, it seems that Leela is declaring herself the social mother, insisting that motherhood is determined by one’s actions rather than one’s genes. A closer reading suggests otherwise; when Leela expresses surprise and disappointment that the child does not look like her, she implies that her contribution to the pregnancy was not only affective, but also biological. Leela dissolves the boundary between gestation and genetic relatedness to conclude that gestation is a sufficient condition of kinship.74 Surrogates are not necessarily wrong to imagine a deeper biological connection between themselves and the fetus than that which is posited by discourses that focus exclusively on genetics. While blood does not circulate between the pregnant woman and fetus, the placenta is built from both maternal and fetal blood cells that can migrate between the two, lingering in various organs of the body and potentially impacting a variety of future conditions for the child, such as cancer risk and immune disorders. As mentioned in previous chapters, avenues of research including the burgeoning field of epigenetics have the potential to challenge the contemporary treatment of gestational surrogates as “merely” vessels, and are worthy of further research.75 However, this biological connection is often downplayed because it is not genetic. In the ART industry, genetics are privileged over gestation, and thus the role of the surrogate is cast as that of an incubator who will not affect the appearance, intelligence, or personality of the child. This strict compartmentalization assures intended parents that their choice of surrogate will not impact the quality of their carefully selected genetic material, thus legitimizing cross-racial, cross-class, transnational surrogacy arrangements in ways that benefit the consumers of reproductive technologies. Leela challenges this dominant discourse by situating gestation as just as “real” as genetics and imagining that the child might look like her.

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It is not only surrogates who engage in this slippage; the documentary Made in India provides an interesting example of how intended parents may do so as well, even those who are deeply invested in the genetic tie between themselves and their children. This film follows intended parents Lisa and Brian Switzer as they travel to India after seven years of diagnosed infertility. The Switzers make arrangements for the necessary medical procedures and surrogacy contracts through the agency Planet Hospital in the United States, a self-described “third party facilitator” that connects clients to a fertility clinic in Mumbai. The Switzers are represented throughout the film as culturally insensitive (Brian jokes that he expects people in India to break out into choreographed song and dance routines) but also deserving of sympathy as the film’s chosen representatives of the tragically infertile. Lisa Switzer repeatedly frames her family through references to the “larger-than-life” stereotypes associated with their home state of Texas—she and her husband are outsized and outspoken in comparison to the people of India. Lisa elaborates on this running comparison after the birth of her twins, conceived using her own eggs and her husband’s sperm, but carried by an Indian surrogate. Despite the fact that she had only met their surrogate, Aasia, briefly in the hospital, Lisa concludes that the quiet demeanor of the twins must be attributable to the surrogate, because it could not have come from herself or her husband. This statement implies that qualities inherent to Aasia were passed on to the children through gestation, an assumption that flies in the face of genetic determinism, contradicting the assumption that the surrogate is “merely” a womb. Lisa Switzer does not know Aasia at all; in fact, Aasia speaks frequently and directly to the camera throughout the documentary, revealing an outgoing personality, and even abandoning the veil she initially wore to hide her identity. Rather than an accurate portrayal of Aasia the individual, Lisa is tapping into a mythical stereotype of the submissive, deferential Asian woman. Later in the film, Aasia approaches Lisa for help when the surrogacy agency pays her only a fraction of what she was promised, and far less than the Switzers were told that she would receive. Although Lisa had repeatedly referenced the priceless gift that Aasia was giving her, she backtracks when asked for more money, telling the filmmakers that she didn’t have an extra $2,000 to hand out to “just anyone who’s asking.”76

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Lisa had previously slipped between a genetic and gestational model of kinship, suggesting that Aasia’s gestational contribution was enough to affect the demeanor of the Switzers’ biological children. Yet when Lisa’s own interests are challenged, her position of privilege as the white, middle-class, American, biological parent allows her to discount Aasia’s claim, referring to her as “just anyone” and returning firmly to a genetic model of familial belonging. Aasia is forced to haggle over the worth of her reproductive services; while she has suggested that the Switzers personally reimburse her one amount, the agency recommended that the Switzers pay half of that, and Lisa is willing to contribute even less. This situation recalls a scene earlier in the film in which Lisa was shown shopping for a sari in an Indian street market. A vendor informs Lisa that in India, it is expected that the customer will debate the price of an item when making a purchase. When shopping for a souvenir or paying for a surrogate’s services, Lisa has the power to either negotiate the price or walk away from the bargaining table altogether. This “choice” reflects the power imbalance between surrogates and intended parents: while Aasia is not entirely powerless (she can request more money from Lisa, and does receive some small form of reimbursement), the Switzers can choose whether or not to engage in this dialogue at all. The imbalance demonstrates yet again that the exchange of money for a baby is not clear-cut. While the Switzers walk away with a baby (in fact, two of them), Aasia is left with less money than she was promised. As a form of racialized reproductive labor, cross-racial gestational surrogacy benefits intended parents for whom the inseparability of race and nationality is a powerful form of privilege. Race, nationality, and socioeconomic status are compounded when reproductive tourism occurs in India; in addition to Lisa’s racial and economic privileges, her passport allows her to leave India with the babies regardless of the outcome for Aasia. Indeed, the Switzers are encouraged by American embassy officials to leave the country immediately after sorting out a dispute over the children’s birth certificates, while Aasia is forced to remain in the hospital until the issue is resolved. As these examples demonstrate, genetic essentialism and biological determinism are the norm in the Indian clinics where surrogacy is practiced, and genetic connection is also paramount in the broader Indian society, where patrilineage and son preference create intense pressure

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on families to produce biologically related children.77 Yet these models do not go unchallenged by the surrogates themselves. Surrogates may express agency by negotiating their own understandings of kinship and relatedness with the medical models to which they are introduced at the clinics, at times creating hybrid meanings that do not fit neatly within traditional or technological narratives. Intended parents may even engage in this slippage, imagining that the child has inherited the traits that they associate with India or Asian women. Nonetheless, intended parents also have the authority to set the boundaries between themselves and the surrogates and to cut off relationships that potentially threaten the supposed sanctity of the biological family.78

Deploying the “Other” One way intended parents construct boundaries is by situating the surrogate as “Other” to themselves and their families, while emphasizing the “likeness” between parents and child. Again, racial difference is an implicit benefit for intended parents who contract cross-racial surrogacy arrangements. When a woman of color gives birth to a white child, she is visually identifiable as “Other” to the baby, weakening her potential maternal claims and naturalizing the authenticity of the relationship between child and intended parents. The raced body of the surrogate can be read as a text that marks her liminality both socially and legally; when a surrogate’s skin color reflects the lack of genetic tie between herself and the child, this serves as “evidence” of the authentic connection between the child and its biological parent(s). The Indian surrogate body is also a site of consumption for white intended parents. The rhetoric of tourism as a form of cultural consumption is well documented in feminist theory and tourism studies,79 which analyze white tourists’ consumption of foreign lands literally (such as the food and the natural resources), visually, and often sexually. People and places, in addition to goods and services, become signifiers of Otherness to be acquired through tourism.80 This is exemplified on the website for Planet Hospital, a medical tourism agency that prides itself on its “concierge service” approach to international travel. The agency’s website highlights the beaches and tourist attractions available across India, and promises that for those seeking IVF and/or surrogacy, India

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is “the best possible environment at the best possible cost.”81 Clinics that advertise reproductive tourism packages often highlight the opportunity for intended parents to experience an exotic vacation as an added perk, similar to the popularity of destination weddings in which American couples travel to tropical locales to be married. The Planet Hospital website also quotes Mark Twain as saying, “India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grandmother of tradition. The most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.”82 The use of this quote situates India as traditional and timeless, yet wise. Describing India as a “birthplace,” as well as a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother also conveys femininity and fertility, both “treasures” that are highly prized by those seeking the services of reproductive tourism. Tourists are primed to view Indian citizens and India as a nation as objects of consumption; the body of the surrogate becomes a commodity at the same time that it also produces a commodity (a child).83 This aligns with the broader commodification of race and ethnicity in consumer culture in the United States. The feminist theorist bell hooks contends that an effect of the commodification of race is that “the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other.”84 The dominant group projects onto the Other what hooks refers to as a sense of bounty or plenty, a “field of dreams.”85 When the body being Othered is one that has been specifically selected for its fertility, as in cross-racial gestational surrogacy, these projections are taken to hyperbolic extremes. This section will explore how Otherness is consumed and commodified through cross-racial gestational surrogacy in India, using evidence from interviews with intended parents in documentaries, television, and print media in which these individuals give voice to their strategies for negotiating racial difference. Intended parents Other the nation of India and Indian women’s bodies as exotic, excessive, and fundamentally different in order to naturalize kinship narratives that normalize this means of family formation. Moreover, these processes of naturalization are made invisible in media discourse by virtue of their

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framing. As I will demonstrate, surrogates are routinely spoken for by intended parents, medical professionals, and reporters, largely eliminating the potential for alternative discourse. The topic of surrogacy in India was introduced to a wide audience in 2007, when an episode devoted to the issue aired on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey’s daytime talk show, which ran for twenty-five seasons from 1986 to 2011, served as a source of expert opinion as well as a moral authority for millions of viewers across the nation. As such, the special entitled “Lisa Ling Investigates: Wombs for Rent” can be read as both a barometer of popular opinion and a source of knowledge production capable of shaping the public response to the ethical and moral legitimacy of hiring a foreign surrogate. This episode was part of a series of programs led by the correspondent Lisa Ling, which addressed “hard news” stories such as bride burning, life in prison, gangs, polygamy, and the 2007 Virginia Tech University shootings. The inclusion of “wombs for rent” in this lineup indicates its place as a social problem worthy of middle-class interest, sympathy, and debate. Ling follows an American couple, Jennifer West and her husband, Kendall, who traveled to India to become patients of the aforementioned Dr. Nayna Patel. The Wests explain their decision to hire an Indian surrogate as a last-ditch effort to form a genetically related family after spending $25,000–$35,000 over a period of three years on infertility treatments in the United States. Surrogacy in India cost the Wests roughly $12,000, compared to the $80,000 or more that they could have spent in the United States. Yet the narrative produced by this program speaks to more than the potential savings to be had by outsourcing reproductive labor; it also reifies racial difference through euphemistic devices that posit India as the excessive, fertile maternal body in contrast to the deserving but barren Western woman—a comparison that naturalizes the child’s place with his or her white, American parents. The unruly nature of India is referenced repeatedly in Ling’s interviews and travels with Jennifer West, both through the conversation between the women and the carefully edited visual representations of the country. Like the Switzers, Jennifer and her husband are framed as entirely out of place in India, suggesting that their fetus is also a temporary foreigner in an exotic land (the country as well as the body of the surrogate) waiting to be rescued by its “real” parents. Ling asks West to

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describe her initial reaction when arriving in India, resulting in the following dialogue between West, Ling, and Winfrey: West: You know, the culture shock at first is just so much that the first few days were really hard for me. You know, I broke down crying, like, the first day, I just saw so much and I couldn’t take it all in and I was afraid. Ling: I mean, look, just by the way, I mean, cows in the street. West: Yeah. Ling: Goats everywhere. It’s just chaos. Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you would be doing this? West: No. I definitely had a lot of those moments where you just kind of step out of yourself and look at your surroundings and think, how did I get here? Winfrey: So like being in another—literally another world. West: Completely.86

The comments made by Ling and Winfrey can be read as both sympathizing with West and prompting her to express a certain narrative about her own relationship to India. This dialogue portrays India as chaotic, poverty-stricken, boundary-less, and excessive. Visual images of India reinforce this perspective, focusing on slums, beggars, and animals in the street. These scenes not only depict an environment that is the antithesis of the suburban America of the Oprah viewer, but also give a sense of desperation and a lack of control. India is clearly marked as “Other” to the Wests, Ling, Winfrey, and the viewer, yet its “Otherness,” its excess, is also indicative of the ripeness and fertility that such wildness can produce at the behest of the infertile Americans. In interviews with intended parents contracting surrogacy in India, the anthropologist Daisy Deomampo found that the intended parents she interviewed became very attached to the Indian “origin story” of their children, regardless of whether the child was conceived using Indian gametes. Parents returned from India with emblems of the country, including Indian-inspired clothing, home décor, even names for their children, “flattening out” the specificity of India and its historical and political contexts. Deomampo argues that parents “conflated the geographic space of India—and the attendant orientalist discourses that

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construct ‘Indian-ness’ as exotically opposite to Western sensibilities— with the embodiment of the child’s identity through its gestation by an Indian surrogate mother in India.”87 One American couple who used an Indian surrogate told the Wall Street Journal that they gave their child the middle name Xennon, meaning “from a foreign or faraway land.”88 Such practices and discourses simultaneously Other Indian women’s bodies while incorporating romanticized and potentially colonizing notions of Indian identity or origins for surrogate-born children. The idea that reproductive tourists can tap in to the natural resource of India’s fertility is also raised in the film Made in India. In one scene, Lisa Switzer expresses concern that bureaucratic holdups could prevent her from having access to a surrogate during the fertile period of her menstrual cycle. She is reassured by an agency broker, who insists that India’s massive population ensures a plentiful pool of surrogates. India’s birth rate or “fertility surplus” has been deemed a demographic problem,89 yet the agent’s comment implies that the purported “excessive” population, bodies, and fertility of India are always an available commodity for the foreign tourist. In fact, critics of the commercial ART industry have noted that an estimated 8 to 10 percent of Indian women suffer from infertility,90 and most surrogate mothers have been permanently sterilized.91 The vast majority of this infertility is secondary (experienced after the birth of one or more children), much of which could be addressed with low-tech solutions like adequate nutrition and disease treatment/prevention, basic prenatal and postnatal care, and access to primary care.92 Rather than addressing the health care needs of Indian citizens, foreign economic pressure and state intervention have aimed at limiting the fertility of the poor93 at the same time that the image of fertile Indian surrogates is used to draw in reproductive tourists.94 Critics note the tragic irony that India, with its excessively high rate of maternal mortality, is focused on providing fertility resources for a foreign clientele.95 In the aforementioned Oprah episode, race is primarily discussed in euphemistic terms: the physical “difference” cited between the Wests and their surrogate, Sangita, is not that of race but of size. In a tone of amazement and feigned trepidation, Ling announces that Sangita is 4’6” while Kendall West, the father of the fetus, is 6’5”. Ling says, “Can we say C-section right about now?” To which Winfrey responds, “Wow.

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Wow. Wow. What was that like?” Ling adds, “You asked Kendall what he was thinking when he saw Sangita. Can you imagine what she was thinking when she saw this big [unintelligible] man?” to which Winfrey replies, “She was thinking C, C, C-section.” Although this dialogue is supposedly in reference to the size of the baby, it implicitly sexualizes the relationship between Kendall West and Sangita, suggesting that the two bodies are so different they would not fit together sexually without harming the tiny Indian woman. Distancing Sangita from any possible potential sexual partnership with West also distances her from the role of natural mother to his unborn child. Moreover, using size to stand in for race suggests that a white baby does not naturally “fit” inside an Indian woman.96 This exchange is also reminiscent of the aforementioned dialogue in Made in India in which Lisa Switzer references the size of herself and her husband as a natural by-product of their “Americanness”; the difference in size stands in for a discussion of racial difference, with the large, robust American depicting wealth, health, and white Western dominance. In the context of this episode, in which Winfrey, Ling, and the Wests repeatedly downplay and explicitly deny the specter of class- and race-based exploitation, size is a safer measure of difference than skin tone or nationality. It is important to note that the size difference of Indian surrogates comes up in ethnographic accounts as well, with American couples expressing concerns that a physically small Indian woman would not be able to carry a healthy pregnancy to term.97 Size becomes a form of difference that intended parents can potentially manage; selecting a larger surrogate is one way to ostensibly control the environment of the womb. The only direct comment about race in the Oprah episode is made by Winfrey, herself a woman of color. Winfrey states, “I think it’s so fascinating that, first of all, this little bitty Indian woman is going to have this gigantic . . . completely Caucasian child.” A doctor in the documentary Google Baby likewise marvels at the racial purity of the baby he is delivering for a white couple, stating, “The baby is white. Totally European. British. Look at the color and features. This is [intended parent’s name]. Totally [intended parent’s name].”98 The doctor’s comments reinforce the popular idea that race, ethnicity, even national identity are expressed through genes and written on the body. By commenting on the child’s likeness to his or her intended parents, the doctor solidifies the parents’

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kinship claims, which are implicitly put into question by the circumstances of the birth. This is what the medical anthropologist Gay Becker and colleagues call “resemblance talk,” or comments about a child’s resemblance to family members in a way that confirms the legitimacy of the relationship.99 While Becker’s research did not include couples using a surrogate, I would mark the comments made by Winfrey and the doctor as resemblance talk, serving to affirm the legitimacy of the intended parents through reference to racial likeness and difference. Interviews with intended parents and surrogates by the news media also commonly reference the racial difference between the parties, often as an explanation for why Indian surrogates are allegedly able to avoid bonding with the fetuses that they carry. In an interview with a reporter, a British intended mother named Susan Morrison insisted that her surrogate would not have wanted to keep the twins she carried because she was economically incapable of supporting them, “and in any case they were going to be white kids, and it would have looked a bit funny.”100 To say that it would look “funny” of course could have multiple meanings; it reinforces the exclusiveness of racial groups by suggesting that a woman of color could not “pass” as the mother of white children, but also that the surrogate would be suspected of having an affair with a white man. Again, by raising (and dismissing) the specter of sexualization, the intended mother neutralizes the possibility that her baby could belong with another family. The intended mother speaks for the surrogate, situating her own values about what it takes to raise a child (financial resources) and racial difference in a way that naturalizes her own role as the legitimate mother. The complexity of narratives about racial difference is demonstrated in a Good Morning America segment entitled “Outsourcing Surrogate Mothers.” The host of the segment seems to have difficulty fathoming the concept of reproductive tourism, describing it as “hard to believe, but we can now add surrogate mothers to the ranks of American jobs going overseas.” The shot is framed by a caption that reads, “Rent a Womb? Extreme Measure to Get Pregnant,” alongside a graphic of an Indian woman with the words “For Hire” stamped on her stomach. After introducing the infertile intended parents, the host announces that “having this Indian woman give birth to their child is a strange concept, but the couples who come here [to India] are colorblind. They just want

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a baby.”101 Dubbing the intended parents “color-blind” entirely separates “color” from class, ignoring the fact that it is their nationality, ethnicity, and associated economic status that make Indian women an appealing alternative to American surrogates at a fraction of the cost. Surrogates also make reference to race, using racial difference to explain their relationship to the fetus. Najima Vohra, a surrogate, tells a Marie Claire reporter that she is not concerned about relinquishing the baby: “It won’t even have the same skin color as me, so it won’t be hard to think of it as Jessica’s [the intended mother].”102 When asked about her potential bond with the child, another surrogate with the pseudonym Geeta tells the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in an article for the American Prospect that the intended parents are “from far away. I don’t know where,” and “they’re Caucasian, so the baby will come out white.”103 In this quote, both geographical distance and racial difference separate Geeta from the twins. While some surrogates may construct kinship connections based on “blood and sweat,”104 others employ strategies to differentiate their own identities from that of the fetus, a practice of surrogates that ethnographers have found in other contexts as well.105 Despite the assurances made by surrogacy agency staff that surrogates will not attach or bond during pregnancy, this too varies with women’s experiences of gestation. When Lisa Ling asks a group of surrogates whether it will be difficult to give up the baby, one responds, “Definitely. And the end of it when we give the baby away it is their choice to remember us or not. But we will be remembering the child to the end of our life.”106 While differences of race, class, or nationality do not guarantee a woman’s reaction to the experience of surrogate pregnancy, or prevent her from forming an attachment with the fetus, difference does symbolically naturalize the transaction between surrogate and intended parent. Discourses of genetic essentialism and determinism suggest that the surrogate is giving back to the intended parents what was already theirs (their own genetic material) rather than contributing to the formation of a child through gestation.

Women Helping Women While focusing on the “Otherness” of the surrogate to the family unit is one way that cross-racial surrogacy in India is naturalized, another

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taps into the theme of “women helping women.” The women-helpingwomen narrative is one in which surrogacy is framed as the ultimate leveling device between women, regardless of their socioeconomic status, race, nationality, or sexuality. According to this logic, surrogacy involves an equal exchange between women whereby intended parents (in this case, mothers) receive the priceless gift of a child and surrogates are financially compensated for their time, as well as psychically and emotionally compensated by the knowledge that they have altruistically fulfilled a woman’s natural desire to be a mother. Any differences between the women are overshadowed by the mutual benefit that only they can provide to one another. The ideological work done through this discursive framing of surrogacy decommodifies the exchange of a child for money and appropriately genders both the surrogate (as the selfless, altruistic giver of life) and the intended mother (who obtains the social rewards of motherhood). One might imagine that the women-helping-women narrative would falter in the context of cross-racial gestational surrogacy in India, where the economic disparity between intended parents and surrogates is far more glaring. How can two women who often have minimal contact throughout the pregnancy, do not even speak the same language, and come from radically disparate backgrounds possibly fit into a framework of equal partnership? Ethnographic fieldwork in India has found that the rhetoric of the surrogate as altruistic gift-giver differs markedly from common narratives in the United States, yet the discourse of altruism continues to surface in unexpected ways.107 Rather than framing themselves as the independent givers of the gift, surrogates in India discuss the gift of the child through reference to God: surrogates are grateful to God for the opportunity to support their families,108 or the surrogate is making possible what typically can be provided only by God.109 Nonetheless, “much like their global counterparts, surrogates at the Indian clinic negotiate the anomaly of surrogacy by emphasizing their altruistic motivations” such as providing an education for children and economic support for their families.110 Intended parents, on the other hand, note that the sacrifices made by the surrogate are paralleled by the motivations of the contracting party to improve the lives of poor Indian families. As one mother in a study by Amrita Pande noted, “she [the surrogate] is, after all, doing a lot for us. But we are doing a lot for

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her as well. My husband is buying Mansi’s man a motorcycle, on top of all the cash, of course.”111 This framework emerges in the aforementioned Oprah episode, expressed by the intended mother Jennifer West and encouraged by Winfrey and Ling. Ling asks West to respond to critics who might view surrogacy in India as an example of the wealthy exploiting the poor, to which West forcefully replies, What I would say to these people is, who are you to judge? You have not walked in my shoes as someone who cannot have a child, and you don’t know how that feels. And you have not walked in her shoes and you don’t know how it feels not to be able to pay for your children to go to school, to not be able to afford a decent place to live and take care of your family and to provide for your family. You don’t know how that feels. And we were able to come together, she and I, and give each other a life that neither of us could achieve on our own. And I just don’t—I just don’t see what’s wrong with that. I don’t.112

West makes this speech while sitting next to Sangita, whose face is entirely covered by a shawl in order to protect her identity. The visual effect is quite striking: West speaks for the surrogate, in a language that Sangita likely does not understand, while Sangita is literally and figuratively invisible. The camera then cuts from this prerecorded interview to the talk show set where West sits with Winfrey. Winfrey concurs with West, saying, “Wow, yeah. I thought you made your point. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that?” She adds, “And—you know, these women around the world—women around the world are helping other women. I just think that’s beautiful. I think that’s a beautiful thing.”113 West’s impassioned speech suggests that Sangita is not alone in laboring to produce the Wests’ child—Jennifer West’s words are meant to evoke a certain type of emotional response from a sympathetic audience that can recognize her affective labor. West justifies her assertion that she is deserving of a baby by citing her emotional pain, a pain that is undeniably significant and real. Motherhood is posited as the ultimate symbol of womanhood and source of fulfillment for American women, making infertility an often unbearable burden for those who long to

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conceive. Yet this passage, and the program as a whole, is not just arguing that West labored in some way to produce a child, but arguing that her labor and struggles are equivalent in value to Sangita’s, and that the exchange of money and a baby are also equivalent exchanges. When West urges viewers to step into each woman’s shoes, she implies that while they tread different paths, they share a common connection as women or a shared essence of female experience that unites them in struggle. Yet many indicators suggest that the experiences of Jennifer West and Sangita are not at all equivalent. There are structural, institutional, and global forces impacting Sangita’s poverty and that of millions of other Indian women. Even the metaphor of “outsourcing” mentioned in the program situates the Wests in the place of powerful multinational corporations, with Sangita as the cheap and disposable labor. When Winfrey lauds cross-racial gestational surrogacy as “a beautiful thing” and “women around the world . . . helping other women,” she erases the massive power differential between the two parties. Ling picks up on this theme later in the episode during a discussion of how much surrogacy can change the lives of women in India: Ling: It has a huge, huge impact. And I love what you [Winfrey] said, that women in this country are helping women in India . . . Winfrey: Those women are helping? Ling: Absolutely.114

It is notable that this discussion leaves Kendall West out of the framework, gendering the transaction as “women helping women” rather than “people helping people.” There are several possible explanations: childbirth and childrearing are culturally designated as “women’s work,” the concept of “helping” suggests affective labor, which is commonly relegated to women, and the daytime talk show format is aimed at a largely female audience. I would add, however, that this rhetoric also appropriates the feminist language of empowerment, solidarity, and sisterhood.115 The Oprah program taps into the problematic rhetoric of global sisterhood by decontextualizing Jennifer West from the political and economic power of the United States, and Sangita from the rich and ongoing history of Indian women’s groups that have fought

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institutionalized barriers to women’s autonomy.116 Indeed, Ling refers to the Wests as “cultural ambassadors” whose experiences demonstrate the potential for a stronger relationship between India and the United States. This statement extrapolates from the individual to the political in a gravely misleading way. Sangita and her family will likely benefit economically from an infusion of cash far greater than they could achieve through other means. Yet this transaction does not alter the lives of Indian women at the macro level, and if anything, demonstrates a cultural exchange between Americans and Indians that is enmeshed in systemically uneven power relations. The larger issue of the transnational globalization of women’s work has been interpreted by some as a convenient overlap between the interests of poor and affluent women. As educated, professional women spend more time in the workforce, they rely on the labor of poor women as nannies, domestic servants, and care workers for the elderly. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild warn against viewing these arrangements as a seamless synergy between the needs of each group, contending that while the globalization of child care and housework brings the ambitious and independent women of the world together, . . . it does not bring them together in the way that second-wave feminists in affluent countries once liked to imagine—as sisters and allies struggling to achieve common goals. Instead, they come together as mistress and maid, employer and employee, across a great divide of privilege and opportunity.117

Surrogacy is also often uncritically cast in the same light, as a mutual benefit between equal parties. Because the discourse of surrogacy is so deeply enmeshed in the language of altruism, the “women-helpingwomen” narrative further endangers the weak bargaining power that is granted to surrogates. Other scholars of domestic labor have noted that intimate labor lends itself to rhetorics of care or love, wherein employers argue that their maid or nanny is like a friend or a member of the family.118 By doing so, employers bind the employee more closely to the family, or burden her with additional responsibilities without an increase in pay.119 The rhetoric of “women helping women” serves a similar purpose. This language elevates the contractual transaction

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beyond the sphere of services rendered and into the loftier arena of a gift to be exchanged between women who are “helping” one another. While intended parents may be hesitant to discuss surrogacy in terms of financial loss or gain, the economic benefit to surrogates is commonly cited by the medical staff who run surrogacy centers in India, perform the procedures such as IVF, and deliver the babies. Kalindi Vora writes that surrogates in India are conceptualized as beneficiaries in their relationship to intended parents and medical staff, whereby the discourse of altruism in surrogacy clinics “took the form of a general narrative of the clinic’s project of social work: rehabilitating women who take on surrogacy into more disciplined, self-sufficient and professionalized workers, and helping childless couples from around the world build their families.”120 Dr. Anita Soni, a physician in Mumbai who routinely delivers surrogate babies for Western couples, told the London Evening Standard that “for these surrogate mothers that amount of money is life-changing. It helps them set up a home, get their daughters married or something like that. There is absolutely no exploitation of these women. It is really big money. It is a jackpot.” She adds, “They go through a little bit of emotional trauma, but then they go back home and they realize they have done it for a good cause.”121 Another Mumbai doctor (whose clinic does not allow any contact between surrogates and intended parents) likewise recites the opportunities that surrogacy makes available to the women, saying, “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”122 The context of India is not incidental to the way these observers frame the benefits of surrogacy to Indian women. Indian workers in a variety of occupations are cast as cheap laborers with a “lower cost of living”;123 surrogates are then framed as particularly lucky (“hitting the jackpot”) for making higherthan-average wages while doing what is cast as the most unskilled of labor. Dr. Nayna Patel, the physician used by Kendall and Jennifer West, also regularly cites the mutuality of surrogates and intended parents in her frequent interviews promoting surrogacy in India. Patel described surrogacy to a New York Times reporter as “sisterly,” and as “one woman helping another.” She tells surrogates that the intended mother “cannot have a child which she longs for, which you are going to give, and you

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cannot have a house.”124 Patel has likewise been quoted as saying, “A childless couple gains a child. A poor woman earns money. What could be the problem?” and “There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her [own] family. If this female wants to help the other one . . . why not allow that?”125 Patel goes even further, managing to combine the feminist language of agency and empowerment with the rhetoric of altruism and gift-giving when she says, “The surrogates in Anand have become empowered through giving this beautiful gift to others. With the money, they are able to buy a house, educate their children, and even start a small business. These are things they could only dream before. It’s a winwin situation.”126 Patel’s quotes in particular stress the notion that an equal exchange is taking place between surrogates and intended parents, where money and a baby are given equivalent value. She also emphasizes what she calls the sisterly aspect of surrogacy—this term, of course, evokes not only the aforementioned notion of sisterhood, but also altruism. A tension is raised, but left unaccounted for, between the fantasy that Indian women become surrogates out of altruism, and the acknowledged reality that surrogates will spend the money on needs such as children’s education or dowry, medical bills, housing, and debt. Dr. Soni’s statement also reveals this unacknowledged contradiction when she simultaneously states that surrogacy involves no exploitation of Indian women, but that surrogates experience emotional trauma. The tension reflects a desire to hold on to the traditional unity between childbirth, femininity, and maternity that is challenged by surrogacy, while also acknowledging the economic benefits that surrogacy provides for Indian women. Why is this so difficult to reconcile? First, commercial surrogacy detaches pregnancy from social motherhood while also commodifying gestation. This is troubling to the traditional social order because it puts into question the “natural,” in which womanhood is inextricably bound to maternity, and maternity is cast as the antithesis of commodification. Yet the inescapable economic disparities between surrogates and intended parents in India result in more explicit acknowledgment of the monetary exchange than in the United States, where brokers, surrogates, and intended parents often refrain from discussing this aspect of the

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arrangement. One effect of this greater transparency in India is that the actors involved in surrogacy ideologically and rhetorically distance this form of labor from other highly stigmatized ways women (and men) rely on their bodies for income. The focus on women helping women is a way to differentiate surrogacy from prostitution, to which it is often compared.127 Surrogacy is also paralleled to organ selling; Patel differentiates between the two by situating surrogacy as “natural” (what one reporter calls “harnessing the natural maternal cycle”)128 and organ harvesting as “pathological,” saying, “This [surrogacy] is physiological, pregnancy and delivery. When you remove a kidney, it becomes pathological.”129 Likewise, in the documentary Made in India, a representative of an American surrogacy agency argues that surrogacy is more benign than organ selling because it involves the donation of a “life cycle” rather than an organ, and is thus akin to a favor.130 Surrogacy challenges the dichotomy between altruism and work, where altruism is “good,” and financial motivations are suspect. In effect, surrogacy in India necessarily reveals the uneven points of contact between ideology and lived experience that are more easily naturalized in the context of the United States. Even in India, where surrogacy is openly acknowledged to be a type of labor, it is mediated by reference to altruism. Cross-racial gestational surrogacy is a form of racialized reproductive labor that reveals, and at times challenges, hegemonic ideologies of race, gender, and kinship. Racial difference and genetic determinism are multivalent concepts in cross-racial surrogacy arrangements in India; while surrogates are aware that biological and genetic relatedness is privileged in their own culture and by most intended parents, some challenge these models by forming their own everyday knowledge about the significance of gestation. Other surrogates use racial difference to downplay their connection to the fetus, thus maintaining their own bodily integrity and sense of self. While these negotiations are significant to the surrogates and demonstrate that ideologies of race and genetics cannot be imposed from the top down, intended parents and those responsible for arranging surrogacy contracts continue to benefit from the racial Otherness of the surrogate. The surrogate’s racial difference from the fetus (and her attendant class difference) evidences her status as a temporary caregiver, a reproductive laborer without a valid claim to kinship.

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At the same time that surrogates are cast as mere vessels for pregnancy, an interchangeable and replaceable resource akin to other forms of outsourced labor, the discourse of women helping women also situates surrogates as altruistic givers on an equal playing field with intended parents. This rhetoric depoliticizes the massive inequalities between surrogates and intended parents in India by constructing a false analogy between the needs (or desires) of both parties, while also positing babies and money as an equal exchange. The theme of women helping women is particularly troubling in the context of transnational reproductive tourism, not least because it relies upon problematic, essentialist, and apolitical notions of “sisterhood” between women. While this chapter largely focuses on reproductive tourism from the United States to India, the United States is also a destination for a significant number of reproductive tourists. These include gay and straight couples, as well as single men and women traveling from around the world to take advantage of the lax regulatory environment in the United States. While a growing number of Americans choose to leave the country in order to seek out more affordable ART packages, many more find surrogates within the United States, some with women of different races, and almost universally with women of a lower socioeconomic background. The disparities between intended parents and surrogates in the United States, while generally less stark than in India, are often still remarkable. This raises the question of whether reproductive tourism is happening within the United States, as well as across national borders. To consider surrogacy within the United States as a form of reproductive tourism would mean to take seriously the economic and social disparities between contracting parties, imbalances that increasingly intersect with racial privilege on the part of intended parents. The difference between surrogates and intended parents reflects what Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash call social minorities and social majorities, or what Chandra Mohanty labels “One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds.”131 According to Mohanty, the latter term “draws attention to the continuities as well as discontinuities between the haves and havenots” both within and between national boundaries.132 If reproductive tourism is about traveling away from one’s home to seek out an economic and regulatory environment conducive to one’s reproductive goals, including the supply and demand for gametes and gestational

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carriers, then tourism of this type is possible without renewing one’s passport. A recent first-person account of surrogacy in the New York Times by the reporter Alex Kuczynski raised many of the same concerns and critiques leveled against reproductive tourism abroad. Upon marrying a wealthy investor, Kuczynski transitioned from writing about the social elite of New York City to becoming one of them. The article details her personal struggles with infertility, and eventual decision to use a gestational surrogate from Pennsylvania to carry an embryo made from her own egg and her husband’s sperm.133 While the basic template of Kuczynski’s story matches up with countless narratives of infertility, the article quickly came under fire from readers and other journalists.134 Kuczynski’s article sparked accusations of elitism and exploitation, stemming in part from her frank discussion of what she saw as the benefits of using a surrogate, including the maintenance of her luxurious lifestyle and the privilege of bypassing the physical inconveniences of pregnancy. Kuczynski prides herself on choosing a surrogate with whom she feels she can relate (namely, a woman with college-educated children who can use a computer and play the piano), but this attempt to parallel their cultural capital does more to highlight the massive economic gulf between them. Perhaps most damning are the photographs that accompanied the article. In one, Kuczynski stands holding her baby while a black nanny waits at the ready, posed in front of an impressive, whitepillared home. In another, the surrogate reclines, barefoot and pregnant, on the run-down front porch of her own modest house in Pennsylvania.135 Rather than aligning with the accepted narrative of surrogacy as an equal exchange between women, these images lay bare the power differential between employer and employee. The photographs also resonate as belonging to an earlier time; curiously, the cutting-edge modern technologies used to create this pregnancy seem to be resurrecting an aristocracy. While Kuczynski and her surrogate live in the same country, they seem to be connecting from two different worlds. Despite these concerns, it is not my intention to argue that Indian women (or any women) should not be allowed to engage in surrogacy. To acknowledge that surrogacy is potentially exploitative is not to say that women cannot find agency in using the resources that they have as survival strategies, and ethnographic research in India supports the

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hypothesis that Indian surrogates are doing so.136 What is important is recognizing that the choice to engage in the reproductive labor of surrogacy is made in the context of economic constraints that are inflected by race, class, and gender. While both surrogate and intended parents express agency in constructing kinship narratives and defining difference, they do so within a power matrix that is uneven and imbalanced.

Conclusion From Embryo to “Pre-Born American”

In 2013, Texas Senator Wendy Davis performed a grueling eleven-hour filibuster to block draconian abortion laws in that state, the rules of which required that she not sit, eat, drink, stop speaking on the given subject, or leave the floor for any reason. She did so while wearing a pair of pink sneakers, which became a viral image and an icon of resistance to what has been called the Republican War on Women.1 The measure she fought to block, which institutes requirements that would shut down most abortion providers, eventually passed and closed about half of the state’s clinics. Parts of the law that would shutter even more providers are on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether or not to hear an appeal.2 U.S. feminists are expending a great deal of energy fighting this “war on women,” much of it centered on the erosion of abortion rights as well as recent political maneuvers to limit women’s access to safe and affordable contraception.3 Yet as 2015 Republic presidential hopeful (and medical doctor) Ben Carson stated at a campaign event, “There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country.”4 Carson’s statement suggests that women are somehow separable from “what’s inside”—eggs, embryos, fetuses—to such an extent that a war can be waged on behalf of the “inside” without concern for or consent from the living, breathing (and hopefully voting) woman herself. Additional political blows include the 2014 Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which held that businesses with religious owners are not required to pay for insurance that covers contraception, overruling the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Some corporations that object to coverage for contraceptives, such as the Christian-owned arts and crafts supply store Hobby Lobby, argue that popular devices like the IUD and the “morning 199

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after pill” serve as abortifacients, terminating a pregnancy after conception.5 Such contentions are not scientifically or medically valid; rather, they reflect cultural concerns about women’s sexuality, bodily autonomy, and access to public space. Those most vulnerable to attacks such as these are women whose resources are structurally and institutionally limited: limited financially in order to travel when facing restricted health services, limited in employment opportunities that offer generous insurance or family leave, and limited in their political representation. Young women, poor women, and women of color are targets in this regard, but are also crucially active in organizing against such attempts to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, including groups like the Black Women’s Health Imperative, Sister Reach, SisterSong, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW.6 These groups lobby for reproductive justice, lead grassroots organizing campaigns, promote policy change, and provide education for their communities. As this activism suggests, robust appeals to reproductive justice through an intersectional feminist framework are active and growing in the United States. These could include demands for equitable access to fertility services that are not stratified by sexuality, race, or class. However, this issue is likely to stagnate when the limited amount of media attention devoted to women’s health is diverted to more familiar concerns, such as the erosion of abortion rights or attacks on women’s access to contraception. Despite remaining on the sidelines of feminist activism, ART use is undoubtedly entangled in cultural anxieties and political battlefields over women’s bodily autonomy, gender roles, and perceived threats to the traditional family. As such, reproductive technologies do intersect with concerns that are central to contemporary feminist politics, as evidenced by the recent debates over fetal personhood legislation. Indeed, a growing proportion of arguments that limit women’s reproductive decision making are built upon the rhetoric that life begins at conception, and even an embryo is a rights-bearing person. This chapter will consider the evolving influence of fetal personhood, which provides a fitting conclusion to a book that has focused on surrogacy, in part because fetal personhood legislation could directly affect access to the reproductive technologies that make gestational surrogacy possible. On a broader scale, the fetal personhood debates also demonstrate how ARTs

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can be situated within a larger framework of reproductive justice that foregrounds racial, gender, and economic equity. Despite the obvious implications for abortion rights, the recent introduction of fetal personhood into the public lexicon would seem at first glance to have little impact on the field of reproductive technologies. The personhood agenda is most commonly associated with efforts to roll back Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed women’s right to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. Strategically, the recent push to add personhood amendments to state constitutions across the country reflects a splintering of anti-abortion activists between more traditional pro-life constituencies and those that promote personhood laws.7 Well-established groups continue their decades-long strategy of chipping away at legal abortion through gradual state legislation that constrains practitioners and limits women’s access to abortion services. These groups favor an incremental approach as opposed to the more sweeping personhood amendment tack. The reticence of organizations like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, Americans United for Life, and the National Right to Life Committee to support personhood legislation may stem in part from fears that the far-reaching implications of such amendments could open the door for a Supreme Court challenge that could uphold, and even strengthen, Roe v. Wade.8 This approach contrasts sharply with that of Personhood USA, an organization that has led recent gambits for personhood amendments at the state level. Personhood USA insists that the gradual path is too slow to protect the lives of “preborn Americans.” Its goal is to define life constitutionally as beginning at conception, and thus to grant fertilized eggs the status of legal persons. Such initiatives take aim at specific language in Roe, which essentially states that fetuses would have a “right to life” if recognized as persons.9 One way Personhood USA has shaped the rhetoric of the abortion debate is by referring to fetuses as “preborn” as opposed to “unborn,” with the former denoting a linear trajectory of life rather than an abrupt shift from fetus to child.10 Yet as I will demonstrate, this understanding of personhood (or as the organization defines it, “the cultural and legal recognition of the equal and unalienable rights of human beings”)11 has implications that reach beyond a comprehensive ban on abortion. They include limits on contraception, medical treatment, and the creation, storage, and disposal of human embryos.

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The first personhood ballot initiative was rebuffed by voters in Colorado in 2008 (and again in 2010 and 2014);12 since then, similar initiatives have failed to collect enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot in Montana, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, California, and Oregon.13 Personhood initiatives have also seen setbacks in the legislature and courts in other states; a constitutional amendment to give fetuses the “inalienable right to life” at every stage of development was defeated by voters in North Dakota in 2014 by a vote of 64 percent against and 36 percent supporting.14 A milestone defeat also occurred in Mississippi, when that state rejected a ballot initiative on personhood in 2011. Activists and commentators on both sides of the issue viewed the Mississippi amendment as a surefire win for the personhood cause. The many conservative, religious, and pro-life voters in Mississippi were considered natural supporters of an amendment that would define life as beginning “from the moment of fertilization.”15 In a telling indication of the contemporary erosion of women’s reproductive rights, both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor of Mississippi voiced support for the amendment.16 The measure was opposed by pro-choice organizations such as NARAL Pro-Choice America, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and other groups representing medical professionals. These organizations vocalized their concerns as the election neared, corresponding with a dramatic drop in public and political support for the measure.17 The ACOG released a statement contending that the proposition “substitutes ideology for science and represents a grave threat to women’s health and reproductive rights that will have long-term negative outcomes for our patients and society.”18 Critics warned that by defining life as beginning at fertilization, the amendment could ban IVF as well as forms of birth control such as intrauterine devices and emergency contraceptives that prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg into the uterus.19 Personhood amendments could also have negative implications for treatment of serious medical problems in pregnant women, including cancer and ectopic pregnancies. Proponents of the measure denied the likelihood of these consequences or downplayed their significance. A Mississippi obstetrician who supported the amendment stated

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that the aforementioned issues were “actually minor concerns when you look at the thousands of babies dying by woman’s choice,” while a communications director from Personhood USA suggested that women who need cancer treatment can postpone medical intervention until the fetus can be safely delivered via Cesarean section.20 In a decisive defeat, 58 percent of votes cast on Election Day rejected the proposition.21 A retroactive poll of ten thousand residents sponsored by Mississippi Personhood USA found that the greatest opposition stemmed from the potential for the amendment to limit access to in vitro fertilization, followed by the fear that pregnant women would be denied medical care that could harm the fetus.22 It is interesting that despite linkages between personhood and the pro-life agenda, which Mississippi voters were assumed to support, those polled articulated threats to IVF access as a main factor in their opposition to the bill. These poll results also suggest that the public may have greater concerns about limitations on the creation of a fetus than about women’s health more broadly, or women’s right to agency over their bodies. Their concerns about impediments to IVF are warranted, given the numerous impositions that such amendments could potentially impose upon IVF treatment. In vitro fertilization is both expensive and emotionally and physically draining; in order to increase the likelihood that the procedure will succeed, clinicians routinely fertilize multiple eggs in a single round of IVF. After several days, one or more fertilized eggs are transferred to a woman’s uterus, with the goal that one embryo will successfully implant.23 The remaining fertilized eggs that are not transferred may be frozen for future use by the intended parents.24 It is not uncommon for more than one embryo to implant when several are transferred, or for embryos to divide, resulting in the birth of multiples; indeed, the United States has the highest recorded rate of multiple birth deliveries per ART treatment cycle, at 34.2 percent.25 Multiples increase the risk of pregnancy complications, leading some women to “selectively reduce” the numbers to twins or even singletons.26 Because the proposed personhood amendment in Mississippi defined life as beginning at the moment of fertilization, all abortion—including selective reduction—would be illegal, as would the disposal, and potentially even the freezing, of unused pre-implantation embryos. Under current U.S. law, individuals are generally allowed to dispose of unused

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embryos if both parents agree, suggesting that based on contemporary standards governing IVF, embryos are not considered persons.27 Personhood laws could change this; critics of these laws fear that fertility doctors could be held responsible for the “lives” of embryos that do not result in a successful pregnancy, or for the accidental destruction of preembryos. The amendment could also limit human embryonic stem cell research on unused embryos donated by couples that have undergone IVF.28 The evidence suggests that the fetal personhood movement in Mississippi faltered when voters interpreted it as limiting the ability of individuals to create families. While a relatively stable segment of the population responds favorably to the notion of personhood as it pertains to the right to terminate a pregnancy, it appears that the general public is far more hesitant to limit the ability of individuals to create a pregnancy. Similar reluctance emerged when a personhood bill was proposed in Virginia in 2012, despite the inclusion of language stating that “nothing in this section shall be interpreted as affecting lawful assisted conception.”29 Infertility rights advocates from RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) were convinced that this language would not protect infertility treatment, and rallied unprecedented support to fight the bill. These objections, and the media attention that they garnered, led to the eventual tabling of a bill that had been considered a “done deal” by lawmakers.30 As Susan Crockin and Lee Collins note in their analysis of this event, infertility advocates were far more successful than protests by groups fighting for civil liberties and reproductive choice: The objections of traditional groups, such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, that HB1 would lay the groundwork to outlaw abortion, were both expected and lacked the potential to peel off pro-life support for HB1. Battling HB1 on behalf of babies and families was powerful.31

As this quote suggests, fetal personhood amendments threaten the “right” to have sex without babies and babies without sex.32 To return to the defeat of personhood legislation in Mississippi, it is notable that while voters were concerned about access to IVF, census data demonstrate that the median household income in that state in 2013 was

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$37,963. This is more than $14,000 lower than the median household income for the United States as a whole.33 According to the ASRM, the average cost of an IVF cycle is around $12,400, and Mississippi is not one of the fourteen states that require insurers to cover or offer coverage of infertility diagnoses and services.34 A blog post linked to the website Daily Kos analyzed CDC data on fertility success rates and census data to assess the per capita IVF use per state. According to this analysis, Mississippi ranks forty-sixth, with 8.6 IVF users per 100,000 people. States in the bottom ten also tended to be low density, low population, and low average household income, leading the blogger, Abbie Waters, to conclude that because of the high out-of-pocket expense of IVF, people in the lower-ranking states are unable to afford procedures at the same rate as those in the highest-ranking states.35 What does it mean that Mississippi’s politically conservative population was opposed to restricting a medical procedure that few of its citizens can afford? Why were Mississippi voters prioritizing their right to access IVF despite its prohibitive costs? For one, faith in the existence of a private sphere in which the nuclear family is deservedly immune to government intervention (unless one is poor, gay, or nonwhite) is a key feature of a consumer-driven culture that privileges the perceived freedom of choice and the imperative of privacy. By threatening the legality of reproductive medicine that makes procedures such as IVF and practices like gestational surrogacy possible, personhood amendments likewise threaten the sanctity of what the queer theorist Lee Edelman terms reproductive futurism.36 Reproductive futurism presupposes the absolute and inherent goodness of heteronormative reproduction by limiting any discourse that would counter it, rendering dissent unthinkable. According to Edelman, We are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child. The figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed.37

Even in a state with lower-than-average usage of IVF, and less disposable income among residents, restricting access to these procedures

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may represent an unacceptable interference with the “natural” drive to family formation. Indeed, the desire to reproduce within the heterosexual nuclear family is so deeply naturalized, and reproductive technologies so thoroughly integrated into American society, that even many critics argue that the idealized end result of reproductive technologies and surrogacy (a child) warrants their continued practice. For example, despite identifying many pitfalls to surrogacy arrangements, Debora Spar argues that the market for babies is undeniable and thus must be accepted and regulated. After a book-length critique of the inequities and moral complexities of surrogacy and reproductive technologies in The Baby Business, Spar concludes with a claim that speaks to the very core of reproductive futurism: “It’s hard to imagine that we could ever put this particular genie back in its bottle. Moreover, it’s not at all clear that we should. For the baby business—unlike, say, the arms race or the heroin trade—produces a good that is inherently good.”38 By comparing the “baby business” to things that many people would find inherently bad, such as highly addictive drugs and global nuclear armament, Spar further reinforces her claim. Unquestioningly valuing the end result of gestational surrogacy, for example, neglects the material and historical inequities that exist within the relationship between surrogate and contracting parties. Fetal personhood amendments that would extend legal personhood to a zygote threaten access to this unquestioned good, if tangentially. Like gestational surrogacy, fetal personhood speaks to broader issues that resonate beyond neat divisions of pro-life or pro-choice. For one, the ideology of fetal personhood prioritizes the alleged right to life of the fetus over the bodily autonomy of pregnant women in ways that while obviously deeply gendered, are also classed and racialized. Women of color and low-income women are particularly vulnerable to state intervention into reproductive decision making, and are more likely to be targeted for punitive interventions.39 For example, while white women and women of color have comparable rates of drug use during pregnancy, women of color experience racial discrimination in rates of arrest and prosecution.40 This is due in part to structural and institutional systems that are more likely to surveil and ensnare low-income women and women of color. In a study of state legal actions against pregnant women in the United States between 1973 and 2005—including arrests,

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increased jail time, and forced medical interventions—the researchers Jeanne Flavin and Lynn Paltrow found that women of color made up 59 percent of those targeted.41 A survey of New York hospitals found that those serving low-income women of color were more likely to test new mothers for drug use, and more likely to report positive results to the state.42 As Dorothy Roberts has argued, the racism behind such prosecutions of black mothers is overlooked due to “an institutionalized system that selects Black women for prosecution and from a deeply embedded mythology about Black mothers. These two factors make the disproportionate prosecution of Black mothers seem fair and natural, and not the result of any invidious motivation.”43 Women of color are viewed as less worthy of protection, and more in need of intensive state intervention on behalf of fetuses and children. This punitive approach to child protection is galvanized by fetal personhood rhetoric that separates the priorities of the fetus from the health of the mother. The case of a Texas woman, Marlise Munoz, is particularly salient in this regard. Munoz was declared brain dead shortly after suffering a pulmonary embolism in her home, but was kept alive on a ventilator at a local hospital. Munoz, a Latina woman who worked as a paramedic, was fourteen weeks pregnant at the time of her incapacitation; as a result, the hospital would not remove life support despite the wishes of her family. Hospital administrators cited the Texas Advance Directives Act, which states that “a person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment” from a patient who is pregnant.44 While the hospital was not actually prohibited from removing life support, the law protected the hospital from liability as long as life support was sustained.45 When reporters began to investigate the act more closely, its authors confirmed that such an application was not within the intent of the law, which was meant to keep a pregnant woman “in a persistent vegetative state” alive via ventilator until delivery (raising its own deeply problematic concerns), but not a pregnant woman who was legally dead.46 Anti-abortion activists, however, were interested in the personhood of the fetus, rather than the life or death of Munoz. Pro-life groups were quick to raise the issue of fetal personhood; a representative from the group Texas Alliance for Life referred to the fetus as an “unborn child” and “a separate person.”47 By the time a judge decided that she should be removed from life support, Munoz had been declared legally dead,

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and her pregnancy had advanced to twenty-two weeks.48 Personhood USA predictably decried the decision, describing the demise of the fetus as “the first forced abortion documented in Texas.”49 This quote reflects a rhetorical move on the part of pro-life forces to represent women as at the mercy of abortion providers. Rather than positing the pregnant woman and fetus as opponents (an alternative tactic of anti-abortion groups), this rhetoric suggests that the pregnant woman is also a victim of forces that would compel her to seek an abortion. If the pregnant woman is construed as a victim, then pro-life forces can step in as women’s alleged advocates, not their adversaries. It is crucial, however, to contrast the funds and energy the pro-life movement put into keeping “alive” the pregnancy of Marlise Munoz with the overall resources allocated to Latina women’s reproductive health and family services in the state of Texas. In 2011 the Texas state legislature cut funds for family planning by two-thirds, and barred Planned Parenthood from receiving state money.50 These cuts led to the closure of seventy-six family planning clinics in the state.51 Latina women in Texas face significant barriers to reproductive health care, including cost of contraception and exams, limited access to public transportation, and immigration status.52 With fewer clinics available, women have experienced long delays in appointments, diagnoses, and treatment of reproductive health conditions like cervical, breast, or uterine cancer.53 After pressure by human rights advocacy campaigns such as Nuestro Texas, launched by the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the state legislature increased funding for women’s health in 2015. Nuestro Texas argues that even with increased funding, only three in ten women receive the services they need.54 As these data demonstrate, Latina women in Texas experience limited access to basic reproductive health care at the same time that the focus on fetal rights and fetal personhood kept Marlise Munoz on life support to “protect” her fetus, a decision that National Public Radio compared to “keeping dead bodies ‘alive’ to harvest their organs.” Perhaps the most important issue that pro-life groups could support in order to protect fetal health in Texas would be the repeal of the “affiliate rule” that defunded Planned Parenthood, which had been the largest source of preventative reproductive health care in the state.55

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As the Munoz case demonstrates, supporters of fetal personhood legislation will not only pursue restrictions on safe, legal abortion, they also endorse extremist positions to limit women’s bodily autonomy. This insidious encroachment of fetal rights represents both a strategy and a consequence of the movement to limit women’s reproductive decision making. The story of Marlise Munoz, while exceptional in some ways, is frighteningly mundane in others, in that it is indicative of the restrictive and punitive public policy that many elected officials would like to mandate across the board. Fetal personhood also demonstrates a point at which the interests of women of disparate socioeconomic statuses intersect: women who for various reasons may be minimally invested in protecting abortion rights are organizing to block fetal personhood legislation because it threatens their access to reproductive technologies, or that would take end-of-life decisions out of the hands of their families. Fetal personhood legislation could motivate a range of women to recognize their shared interest in what is deceptively cast as a single-issue debate. The fact that the infertility community has been so central to the defeat of personhood amendments—at times even more successful than pro-choice organizing—suggests that reproductive technologies could galvanize a broader resistance to the political erosion of women’s reproductive autonomy. An issue like personhood has proven the potential to unite the interests of women across a spectrum of socioeconomic, educational, and age-related standpoints in opposition to legislative attempts to restrict reproductive autonomy. The necessary next step is to use this momentum to forge alliances between infertility rights advocates and pro-choice organizations, with the goal of politicizing women to think more broadly about reproductive rights and reproductive justice. This would need to be a movement with racial justice at its center, and the voices of women of color in its leadership, a movement that places the concerns of egg donors and surrogates on equal footing with those seeking fertility services, and that ties the threat of fetal personhood to IVF with the threat of fetal personhood to women like Marlise Munoz. In order for this coalition building to happen, feminists and other supporters of reproductive rights must continue to make connections between the various locations of women—particularly women of color—as mothers, as ART users, as reproductive laborers, as targets of punitive state policies, and as orga-

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nizers of resistance. Such a complicated, multifaceted picture has the potential to bring more women to the table, and to fracture the façade of a post-racial world that reproductive technologies often reinforce. While the potential for ARTs to complicate traditional notions of kinship, gender, and race is very real, the contemporary attacks on women’s reproductive autonomy suggest the challenges that we continue to face.

Notes

Introduction

1 “A Tribe Is Born.” 2 Ibid. 3 Surrogacy itself is not an assisted reproductive technology (ART), but contemporary surrogacy arrangements typically involve some level of ART intervention. The CDC, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) differentiate between “surrogates” and “gestational carriers” in their terminology—they use “surrogate” to refer to women who are contracted to carry a pregnancy using their own eggs and (usually) the intended father’s sperm. “Gestational carrier” or “gestational surrogate” is used to describe a woman who has a fertilized embryo implanted into her uterus, and thus is not genetically related to the fetus she carries. Some scholars have critiqued the shift in terminology from “surrogate” to “gestational carrier,” arguing that the latter term objectifies the surrogate and trivializes her role in the pregnancy. See Teman, Birthing a Mother. This book will focus mostly on gestational surrogacy. For clarity, rather than differentiating between “surrogate” and “gestational carrier,” I primarily use “gestational surrogate” and “traditional surrogate” to distinguish between the two types. 4 Franklin, “Conception through a Looking Glass,” 748. 5 Mamo, Queering Reproduction; Roberts, Killing the Black Body. 6 American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Third-Party Reproduction.” 7 Beim, Elashof, and Hu-Seliger, “Personalized Reproductive Medicine.” 8 Crockin, “Growing Families in a Shrinking World.” 9 Holcomb and Byrn, “When Your Body Is Your Business.” 10 ASRM, “Third-Party Reproduction.” 11 Mamo, Queering Reproduction. 12 Spivack, “Law of Surrogate Motherhood.” 13 Nelkin and Lindee, DNA Mystique. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 65. 16 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Society for Reproductive Medicine, Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, 2011 Assisted Reproductive Technology. 17 Thompson, Making Parents.

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18 CDC, ASRM, and SART, 2011 Assisted Reproductive Technology. 19 Ragoné, “Of Likeness and Difference,” 65. 20 For a few examples of these debates, see Balsamo, “Notes toward a Reproductive Theory of Technology”; Cahn, “Reproducing Dreams”; Goodwin, “Assisted Reproductive Technology and the Double Bind”; Shanley and Asch, “Involuntary Childlessness”; and Spar, “Free Markets, Free Choice?” 21 Markens, Surrogate Motherhood, 8. 22 Recent scholarship on surrogacy as a form of reproductive tourism has provided a more deeply racialized analysis of this topic by authors such as Daisy Deomampo, Sayantani DasGupta, Shamita Das Dasgupta, Marcia Inhorn, Sharmila Rudrappa, Amrita Pande, Imrana Qadeer, Kalindi Vora, and others. 23 See Davis, Women, Race, and Class; Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Lorde, Sister Outsider; and Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” 24 See Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood; Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie”; Teman, Birthing a Mother; Mamo, Queering Reproduction; Thompson, Making Parents; Kahn, Reproducing Jews; and Ivry, Embodying Culture. 25 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction. 26 Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis, 122; Hesmondhalgh, “Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis.”

Chapter 1. The Path to Gestational Surrogacy 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11

“‘Test Tube Baby’ First of Many”; “Don’t Get Hopes Up.” Franklin, “Conception through a Looking Glass.” “‘Test Tube Baby’ First of Many.” Spar, Baby Business, 26. I follow the cultural studies theorist Jennifer Slack in identifying the context as “not something out there, within which practices occur or which influence the development of practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effects generally, constitute the very context within which they are practices, identities, and effects.” See Slack, “Theory and Method of Articulation,” 125. CDC, 2006 Assisted Reproductive Technologies Success Rates, 3. Mamo, Queering Reproduction; Spar, Baby Business; Farquhar, Other Machine. Mamo, Queering Reproduction; Spar, Baby Business. Mamo, Queering Reproduction; Spar, Baby Business. The eventual shift in terminology from “infertility” services and “artificial” reproductive technologies to “fertility” clinics and “assisted” reproductive technologies reflects the normalization of the industry; while the term “infertility” implicates a disease model, and “artificial” suggests a technological interference into so-called natural reproduction, to “assist” one’s “fertility” is far more palatable. American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Frequently Asked Questions.” Mamo, Queering Reproduction.

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12 Markens, Surrogate Motherhood. 13 Mamo, Queering Reproduction. The “miracle baby” phenomenon is particularly rampant in media coverage of the pregnancies of aging celebrities. This coverage largely ignores the technological interventions used to achieve pregnancy, describing the pregnancy of forty-seven-year-old Kelly Preston (wife of John Travolta), for example, as a “miracle” rather than attributing it to the use of donor eggs and/or IVF. See Chiu, “‘This Is a Miracle.’” 14 Roberts, Killing the Black Body. This trend continues today and is compounded by evidence that women of color not only face higher rates of infertility, but also are less likely to obtain access to fertility services. In “Involuntary Childlessness, Reproductive Technologies, and Social Justice,” the feminist theorists Mary Lyndon Shanley and Adrienne Asch note that “poorer women and those who lack health insurance are less likely to go to a doctor for fertility assistance and race, education level attained, marital or cohabitation status, and socioeconomic status all affect access to fertility services” (858). 15 Briggs, Somebody’s Children. 16 Markens, Surrogate Motherhood. 17 Ibid.; Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions; Williams, “Save the Children?” 18 Ragoné, “Of Likeness and Difference.” 19 Briggs, Somebody’s Children. 20 Roberts, Shattered Bonds. 21 Ragoné and Twine, Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood; Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie. 22 Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 271. Ana Teresa Ortiz and Laura Briggs ask why parents in the United States pay more to adopt babies from countries such as Romania when research shows that these children have emotional and behavioral problems that are similar to those of post–foster care children in the United States. Briggs and Ortiz uncover cultural tropes of the “toxic” U.S. child and “resilient” transnational child produced through decades of arguments about race, class, and poverty in the United States. The authors offer an alternative to the rhetoric of a “healthy white baby crisis” by arguing that “there have never been many babies, and there has long been transnational adoption. What has changed is that the last several decades have seen an exceptional demonization of the poor and their reification as a biological underclass.” See Ortiz and Briggs, “Culture of Poverty,” 53. Similarly, in a study of adoptive parenting in the United States, Christine Ward Gailey found that the international adopters she interviewed “seemed to assume that the poor in another county were healthier or more morally upright than the poor of their own country.” Gailey found that even couples who professed not to care whether the child “looked like them” specified that the child not be “black” (of African descent). See Gailey, “Ideologies of Motherhood,” 52. These findings support Roberts’s argument that as a “product,” black children in the United States (and perhaps abroad) are positioned as undesirable. See Roberts, Shattered Bonds.

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| Notes

Ginsburg and Rapp, Conceiving the New World Order. Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions; Mamo, Queering Reproduction. Cahn, Test Tube Families, 135. Mamo, Queering Reproduction. Nelson, More Than Medicine. Mamo, Queering Reproduction. See Shalev, Birth Power; Andrews, Between Strangers; Thompson, Making Parents; Markens, Surrogate Motherhood. Andrews, Between Strangers; Markens, Surrogate Motherhood; Shalev, Birth Power. Shalev, Birth Power. Shanley, “‘Surrogate Mothering’ and Women’s Freedom,” 165. Narayan, “‘Gift’ of a Child.” Rich, Of Woman Born. Tong, Feminist Thought; Thompson, Making Parents. Ince, “Inside the Surrogate Industry.” Dworkin, Right-Wing Women, 181–82. Corea, “What the King Cannot See”; Tong, Feminist Thought; Dworkin, Intercourse. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex. Rothman, “Reproductive Technology.” Corea, “What the King Cannot See.” Van Balen and Inhorn, introduction to Infertility around the Globe. Thompson, Making Parents. Rothman, “Reproductive Technology”; Anderson, “Is Women’s Labor a Commodity?” Oliver, “Marxism and Surrogacy”; Corea, “What the King Cannot See”; Anderson, “Is Women’s Labor a Commodity?”; Mamo, Queering Reproduction; Charo, “Problems in Commercialized Surrogate Mothering.” Thompson, Making Parents. Despite the variety of feminist responses to surrogacy and reproductive technologies more broadly, the anti-surrogacy, anti-technology perspective is still often cast as the feminist viewpoint. For example, a recent article in Newsweek magazine asserts that feminists “liken gestational carriers to prostitutes who degrade themselves by renting out their bodies.” See Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” It is not unusual for feminist debates to be boiled down to a one-sided position in mainstream public discourse, as evidenced by the feminist pornography debates of the 1980s in which the sex-positive feminist position was largely overshadowed by the anti-pornography stance of feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Moreover, feminist arguments regarding prostitution and surrogacy are commonly linked (as in the Newsweek piece) under the assumption that both practices are part of a spectrum in which patriarchal and economic oppression coerce women to sell that which should exist beyond commodification—their bodies.

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48 Price, “What Is Reproductive Justice?”; Oaks, Giving Up Baby. 49 Thompson, Making Parents, 70. 50 Spar, Baby Business. Reports on the pay received by surrogates can be quite inconsistent. A 2008 article in Newsweek noted that surrogacy payments in the United States typically range from $20,000 to $25,000, in contrast to the $10,000–$15,000 payment that Spar cited in The Baby Business. See Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” 51 Kiefer, “Gallup Brain.” 52 Almeling, Sex Cells. 53 Spar, Baby Business. 54 Roof, Poetics of DNA. 55 Dolgin, “Just a Gene.” 56 Quiroga, “Blood Is Thicker Than Water.” 57 Sharp, Strange Harvest. 58 The issue of bonding was raised in the two most famous cases of contested surrogacy, which will be discussed further throughout this book. In the dispute in which the surrogate was the biological mother of the child, known as the Baby M case, the judge allowed scientific evidence regarding bonding to be included in the court’s records because he concluded that they were relevant to the baby’s interests. See Hanley, “Bonding Is Described.” In contrast, in Johnson v. Calvert, the gestational surrogate’s claim to have bonded with the fetus was roundly dismissed. See Crockin and Jones, Legal Conceptions. 59 This is not to suggest that intended parents have little interest in the psychological and physical health of surrogates; some U.S. agencies report screening out up to 90 percent of applicants. See Teman, Birthing a Mother. 60 Ragoné, “Of Likeness and Difference.” 61 Ibid.; Thompson, Making Parents. 62 In her study of gestational surrogates and intended parents in Israel, Teman finds that intended mothers engage in “claiming practices” to transition into social motherhood. These claiming practices include kin claiming, in which the intended mother conceptualizes the child-to-be as her own kin, and maternal claiming, in which she adopts the identity and status of “mother.” These claiming practices are necessary for intended mothers, Teman argues, because these women do not have the physical experience of gestating and birthing the child, which is traditionally constitutive of becoming a mother. See Teman, Birthing a Mother. 63 Hamilton, “She’s Having Our Baby.” Statistics regarding the ratio of gestational to traditional surrogacy may be deceiving. Due in part to the lack of regulation of fertility services in the United States, and the fact that traditional surrogacy does not necessarily require technological intervention, it is impossible to state the numbers of traditional surrogacy with certainty. Many traditional surrogates are family members or friends of intended parents, and therefore may act without legal contracts or fertility clinic assistance, thus remaining below the radar of the CDC. See Teman, Birthing a Mother.

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64 Ragoné, “Of Likeness and Difference.” This stance would seem to blur the boundaries between biological and social motherhood, such that egg donation is equated with the social role of mother. Yet in gestational surrogacy, the egg donor is rarely positioned as a potential “mother” to the child. This suggests that gestation plays a role in the creation of a mother (the traditional surrogate is both the biological mother and the gestator) even though the significance of gestation is downplayed by gestational surrogates and intended parents. 65 Teman, Birthing a Mother, 36. 66 In her ethnographic interviews with traditional surrogates, Ragoné found an alternative interpretation of how one becomes a mother. Her informants described motherhood as an optional role. Traditional surrogates downplayed the importance of biological relatedness and stressed the significance of nurturing and love. By doing so, the surrogates reinforced the status of the intended mother as the only mother. Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie.” While this framework would seem to suggest that traditional ideologies of kinship are easily renarrativized to bypass genetic determinism, traditional surrogacy has been nearly eclipsed by gestational surrogacy, largely because the latter maintains genetic ties. 67 For statistics on surrogate births, see Teman, Birthing a Mother; Saul, “Building a Baby”; and Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” 68 Hartocollis, “And Surrogacy Makes Three.” 69 Carey, “Surrogate Births Growing in Popularity.” In 2010 clinics that were members of SART reported the births of 1,353 babies resulting from 2,652 gestational carrier cycles. These births accounted for roughly 2.4 percent of all children born from assisted reproductive technologies that year. See American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Recommendations for Practices Utilizing Gestational Carriers.” 70 Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” 71 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “2011 National ART Success Rates.” 72 The social institutions with an interest in contributing to the formation of public policy on ARTs are multiple. Professional organizations, including the ASRM and RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, lobby for favorable ART legislation such as policies that would allow intended parents to be listed on a child’s birth certificate instead of the surrogate. Courts have also demonstrated a willingness to use the law to define and delimit the definition of family. For example, the case of Nancy S. v. Michele G., heard by the California appellate court in 1991, centered on a lesbian couple that dissolved their relationship but were unable to agree on a custody arrangement. The court decided that the nonbiological mother had no legal claims to parental status. The court found that building on the definition of parenthood could threaten the parental rights of so-called natural parents, exposing them to custody claims by other family members, stepparents, and even nannies. In this case, the court narrowly defined motherhood in order to avoid the potential for future cases to further blur kinship boundaries. See Crockin and Jones, Legal Conceptions. Likewise, in 2005 the Indiana state legislature attempted to pass a law that would limit access to ARTs to married couples. Laura Mamo

Notes

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99

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argues that such legislation attempts to “maintain the gendered social order, with its reliance on heterosexuality and the nuclear family form.” See Mamo, Queering Reproduction, 57. As these examples suggest, while social institutions such as medicine or law do not act unilaterally or monolithically, they can contribute to the social structural factors that limit or expand the definition of family. Brody, “Much Has Changed in Surrogate Pregnancies”; Simons, “You Want My Body for $3 an Hour?” Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie.” Brody, “Much Has Changed in Surrogate Pregnancies.” Schulte, “Sharing the Gift of Life.” Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood, 85. Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie.” Spar, Baby Business. Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy, 12. Ibid. Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor. Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy, 288. Gamson, “The Belly Mommy and the Fetus Sitter,” 123. Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor, 7. Ciccarelli and Beckman, “Navigating Rough Waters,” 30–31. Kuczynski, “Her Body, My Baby.” Drabiak et al., “Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy.” Ibid., 304. Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor. Drabiak et al., “Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy,” 305. Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie”; Drabiak et al., “Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy.” Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie,” 355. Teman, “Social Construction of Surrogacy Research,” 1109. Cahn, Test Tube Families, 146. Cahn notes that the division between family and the market is not actually as firm as commodification anxiety would suggest. We pay for family-related services such as childcare, and we settle family disputes like divorce through monetary transactions. Through an analysis of the rhetoric of commodification regarding the sale of sperm and eggs, she concludes that “suspicions about marketization are tangled up with fears about eugenics, slavery, and personhood.” Cahn contends that gametes can be treated as commodities without diminishing their nonmarket value, and proposes a regulated market for these products. See Cahn, Test Tube Families, 151. Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy. Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie.” Teman, Birthing a Mother. Surrogacy in Israel undoubtedly carries different cultural and religious connotations than surrogacy in the United States, in part be-

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121 122 123 124 125

126 127

| Notes

cause of the strong sense of national identity, as well as the state-sponsored drive to reproduce Jewish citizens. Why then do U.S. surrogates use the rhetoric of epic struggle similar to their Israeli counterparts, despite different social contexts? Ragoné’s research suggests that this narrative justifies the sacrifices that surrogates and their families make during the pregnancy, and that it reiterates the assertion that no sum of money is equivalent to the gift of life that they are capable of giving. See Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie.” Ragoné, “Of Likeness and Difference.” Kessler, “Recruiting Wombs.” Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates,” 45–51. Frozen Angels. Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor, 44. Roberts, “Race and the New Reproduction,” 311. Spring, “Trade in Fertility.” Thompson, “Skin Tone.” Ibid., 144. See, for example, Weil, “A Wrongful Birth?” Rodriguez, “Lawsuit.” Shange, “Black on Purpose.” Rodriguez, “Lawsuit.” Rapp, Testing Women, 39. Samerski, “Genetic Counseling.” Bridges, Reproducing Race, 98. Roberts, Fatal Invention, 222. Shanley and Asch, “Involuntary Childlessness.” Chandra, Copen, and Stephen, “Infertility Service Use,” 2. Ibid., 7. This disparity lessens when financial barriers are reduced. African Americans in the military, for example, use ARTs at roughly proportionate levels to whites when offered the same health insurance coverage. See Cahn, Test Tube Families, 141. Gurmankin, Caplan, and Braverman, “Screening Practices and Beliefs.” Mamo, Queering Reproduction. Taylor, Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram; Casper, Making of the Unborn Patient. Gurmankin, Caplan, and Braverman, “Screening Practices and Beliefs.” Some changes have been wrought by the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which includes multiple provisions related to reproductive health. The act requires that all new private insurance plans provide preventative screening without a co-pay, including screening for sexually transmitted infections, cervical cancer, and assistance with breastfeeding, as well as contraceptive coverage. Pollack, “Affordable Care Act and Reproductive Health.” Ginsburg and Rapp, Conceiving the New World Order. For a partial list of feminist analyses of surrogacy, see Boling, Expecting Trouble; Cherry, “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture”; Corea, “What the King

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Cannot See”; Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy”; Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions; Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Markens, Surrogate Motherhood; Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie”; Shanley, “‘Surrogate Mothering’ and Women’s Freedom”; Spar, Baby Business; and Thompson, Making Parents.

Chapter 2. “Mommy’s Tummy Was Broken”

1 Markens, Surrogate Motherhood. 2 Ibid. 3 Some Americans had formed an opinion of surrogacy prior to the Baby M case; a study conducted in 1985 and published in 1988 found that, among college students, surrogacy was the least acceptable method of compensating for infertility. College students reported adoption as the most acceptable method, followed by artificial insemination (AI) using the intended father’s sperm, IVF, embryo transplant, donor IVF, and surrogate motherhood. Researchers found that 16.1 percent of white students and 13.4 percent of black students described surrogacy as acceptable. See Dunn, Ryan, and O’Brien, “College Students’ Acceptance of Adoption,” 284. 4 See Cherry, “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture”; Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy”; Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions. 5 Markens, Surrogate Motherhood, 103. 6 For further feminist analyses of the Baby M case, see Shalev, Birth Power; Spar, Baby Business; Markens, Surrogate Motherhood; and Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions. For feminist analyses of Johnson v. Calvert, see Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy”; Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Roberts, “Genetic Tie”; and Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions. 7 I used Internet search engines to access online news magazines like Salon.com, websites like NPR.org, televisions news archives, and the archives of newspapers like the New York Times, all within the aforementioned historical periodization of 2000–2010. The expansion to online search engines broadened the scope of archives to include sources that were not captured by academic search engines. As Susan C. Herring notes in “Content Analysis for New Media: Rethinking the Paradigm,” the analysis of content that is available via the Internet may lead to alternative methods of data gathering or analysis. For example, news media sources may include hyperlinks to related stories, leading the researcher to sources or sites that are outside the original search paradigm. While this approach does not create an exhaustive compilation of all news media sources during the given time period, it responds to the fluid and interactive nature of contemporary news media. 8 Reproductive tourism, or the travel across national borders for fertility services, is a rapidly growing phenomenon, and was mentioned in numerous articles. I will discuss reproductive tourism further in chapter 5, and thus chose not to focus on articles that were explicitly about transnational surrogacy in this chapter. 9 Altheide and Schneider, Qualitative Media Analysis. 10 Ibid.

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McIntosh and Cuklanz, “Feminist Media Research.” Hopkins, “Bad Copies.” Williams, Kitzinger, and Henderson, “Envisaging the Embryo.” Markens, “Markens’s Response,” 207. Williams, Kitzinger, and Henderson, “Envisaging the Embryo,” 795. Ibid., 797. Ibid., 798. Ibid., 809. Condit, “Hegemony in a Mass-Mediated Society.” Hobson, Body as Evidence, 10–11. Smolowe and Stoynoffe, “Teaming with Love.” Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood. For other discussions of surrogacy and altruism, see Fixmer-Oraiz, “Speaking of Solidarity”; Pande, “Transnational Commercial Surrogacy”; Raymond, “Reproductive Gifts”; Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, “Birthing a Market”; Teman, “Social Construction of Surrogacy Research”; and Drabiak et al., “Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy.” Franklin, “Postmodern Procreation.” Shapiro, “Very Special Delivery.” While critics of surrogacy have cast doubt upon the altruistic motivations espoused by surrogates, it is not as if surrogacy is the only employment in which individuals are expected to express “stock” motivations. Soldiers, for example, may reference patriotism over free college tuition, and medical students may cite the desire to save lives and downplay monetary gain. As with surrogacy, this is not to suggest that the stated motivations are false, but rather that motivations in general may be quite nuanced. Fiske, Television Culture, 93. Research studies on the motivations of surrogates include Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood; Ciccarelli and Beckman, “Navigating Rough Waters”; Teman, Birthing a Mother; and Teman, “The Social Construction of Surrogacy Research.” Advertising has long presented images of the headless female body. In the context of surrogacy, the image takes on a unique set of meanings. Failing to reveal the face of the pregnant woman could be read to mean that she wishes to remain anonymous—that surrogacy is a shameful occupation. This reading is belied by the text of the article, in which surrogates gladly share their full names and life stories. Alternatively, the pregnant stomach can be read as a stand-alone incubator or baby machine, a thing apart from the subjectivity of the surrogate herself. The identity of the pregnant woman is secondary to her role as a gestational carrier, and thus inconsequential to a cover story that seeks to understand the lives of “surrogate mothers.” Either interpretation serves to entice readers to purchase the magazine and learn more about the “curious lives” of gestational surrogates. Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” Ibid., 44. Ibid.

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Pesca, “Military Wives Becoming Surrogate Moms.” Nosheen and Schellmann, “Most Wanted Surrogates.” Kessler, “Recruiting Wombs,” 174–75. Teman, Birthing a Mother. Nosheen and Schellmann, “Most Wanted Surrogates.” Pesca, “Military Wives Becoming Surrogate Moms.” Ibid. “The Few, the Proud, the Surrogates.” Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy. This appears to be a case of cross-racial gestational surrogacy in which the surrogate is white and the intended parents nonwhite. Anderson’s race is not stated in news coverage, which suggests that she is white, the unmarked racial identity, whereas the intended parents are Hispanic. Dakss, “Our Mother Teresa.” Argetsinger, “Surrogate Returns Couple’s Hopes for a Child Fivefold.” Argetsinger, “Surrogate Mother Gives Birth to Quintuplets.” Dakss, “Our Mother Teresa”; “Surrogate Surprise Times Five.” Argetsinger, “Surrogate Mother Gives Birth to Quintuplets.” “Surrogate Quints Delivered.” Argetsinger, “Surrogate Mother Gives Birth to Quintuplets.” Argetsinger, “Surrogate Returns Couple’s Hopes for a Child Fivefold.” “Big Bundle of Joy Surrogate Quints.” Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood. Ibid., 85. “Surrogate Surprise Times Five.” Ragoné, “Chasing the Blood Tie.” Ragoné found that the gift language was less common in gestational surrogacy arrangements because the surrogate was not literally giving a part of herself (her egg) within the arrangement. Elly Teman reads this as evidence that “in gestational surrogacy, it seems, the ability to deny the surrogate’s role in creating the baby is both easier and more tempting.” See Teman, Birthing a Mother, 198. Schulte, “Sharing the Gift of Life.” Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor, 7. Ragoné, Surrogate Motherhood. Hennessy-Fisk, “Dream Transferred.” “Surrogate Relishes Unique Role.” Perrine, “Would You Risk Your Health for Money?” “Labor of Love: Surrogate Pregnancy.” Miller, “Outsourcing Childbirth.” Baby Mama.

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Butler, Undoing Gender, 91. Lyerly, “Marking the Fine Line,” 686. Ibid. Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor. Lyerly, “Marking the Fine Line,” 695–96. Ibid. Hopkins, “Bad Copies,” 11. See also Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions. Spar, Baby Business, 305. Ibid. Ibid., 306. Drabiak et al., “Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy.” Arons, “Future Choices.” Havins and Dalessio, “Reproductive Surrogacy at the Millennium.” Uniform Law Commission, “Parentage Act.” Arons, “Future Choices.” Thompson, Making Parents. Almeling, Sex Cells. Center for American Progress, “Guide to State Surrogacy Laws.” Arons, “Future Choices.” Drabiak et al., “Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy.” Price, “Future of Compensated Surrogacy.” RESOLVE, “2014 State Legislative Accomplishments.” Some states also require a husband’s consent for a woman to donate her eggs. See Arons, “Future Choices.” Ibid. Crockin, “Growing Families in a Shifting World.” Drabiak et al., “Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy,” 303. Crockin, “Growing Families in a Shifting World.” Arons, “Future Choices”; Markens, Surrogate Motherhood. Markens, Surrogate Motherhood; Spar, Baby Business. Teman, Birthing a Mother. Israel approved a law in 1996 that regulates paid surrogacy. Potential surrogates and intended parents must meet stringent requirements and pass screening by a state-authorized commission. According to Teman, surrogacy is more commonly accepted in Israel because the practice supports the pronatalist agenda of the state. Surrogacy law in Israel, Teman argues, “strengthens, rather than challenges, national and religious boundaries through regulations ensuring that children born in surrogacy are unequivocally recognized as fullfledged Jews and as Israeli citizens. Surrogacy is permitted only to citizens and permanent residents of Israel, preventing international surrogacy.” Ibid., 13. Teman, “My Bun, Her Oven.” Greenhouse, “French Supreme Court Rules Surrogate-Mother Agreements Illegal.” Crockin, “Growing Families in a Shrinking World.” Drabiak et al., “Ethics, Law, and Commercial Surrogacy.”

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Havins and Dalessio, “Reproductive Surrogacy at the Millennium.” Crockin and Jones, Legal Conceptions, 213. See American Society for Reproductive Medicine website, www.ASRM.org. Lyerly, “Marking the Fine Line.” Crockin, “Growing Families in a Shrinking World,” 737. “Wisconsin Surrogate Mothers Cannot Be Denied Insurance.” “Egg Donor Option Preserved in Oklahoma!” For ASRM Bulletins archive, see Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, “ASRM Bulletins.” Millhollon, “Jindal Vetoes Surrogacy Bill.” Markens, Surrogate Motherhood. This list of references to surrogacy is based on the NOW website (www.NOW.org) as of July 7, 2014. Parker, “Exploitation of Surrogate Mothers.” This article is linked from the NOW website’s Media Center at http://now.org/read-this/surrogacy-exposed/. Matson, “Let Young Women Speak”; Doubossarskaia, “Surrogate Motherhood.” “Reproductive Rights and Justice,” NOW.org, n.d., accessed July 7, 2014, http:// now.org/issues/abortion-rights-reproductive-issues/. NARAL Pro-Choice America, “What Is Choice?” RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association website, http://www.resolve.org/. Perez, “Surrogacy: The Next Frontier.” Women’s Bioethics Project website, http://www.womensbioethics.org/index.php. Perez, “Surrogacy: The Next Frontier.” Price, “Future of Compensated Surrogacy.” Markens, Surrogate Motherhood, 103. Ibid. Ibid. “Surrogacy: Wombs for Rent?” Ibid. Saul, “Would-Be Parents Find Surrogacy Agency Closed.” “Surrogate Agency Owner Pleads Guilty.” “Surrogacy: Wombs for Rent?” Saul, “Would-Be Parents Find Surrogacy Agency Closed.” Zarembo, “Hoping for a Baby, Falling Prey to Fraud.” Ibid. Ibid. Plotz, “Stork Market.” Dunklin, “Scandal Centers on Colleyville Woman.” Crockin and Jones, Legal Conceptions. Lewin, “Man Accused of Killing Son.” Saul, “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules.” “Am I the Only One?” Saul, “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules.”

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140 141 142 143

“Am I the Only One?,” 2. Saul, “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules.” “Michigan Surrogacy Law.” This case is interesting on multiple levels: it in many ways overlaps with the traditional surrogacy horror story because Baker chose not to relinquish the twins. The popular television host Dr. Phil McGraw sides clearly with the Kehoes on an episode dedicated to the case, arguing that Baker had no right to judge Kehoe’s mothering ability based on her past history of mental illness. Indeed, audience response to the show on Dr. Phil’s website and blog cast Baker as the villain, resulting in a follow-up appearance by Baker in an attempt to clear her name. A poll on Dr. Phil’s website asks audience members whether mental illness should prevent a woman from becoming a mother. Of 668 votes, 12 percent voted yes, while 88 percent voted no. See “Should Mental Illness Prevent a Woman from Becoming a Mother?” “Am I the Only One?,” 15. Ibid., 20. Saul, “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules.” “Surrogate vs. Adoptive Parents.” Koppel, “Surrogacy Battles.” Cohen, “A Legal Puzzle.” Koppel, “Surrogacy Battles.” Arons and Chen, “Future Choices II.” Court of Appeals of Ohio, Ninth District, J.F., Appellant, v. D.B. et al., Appellees; Nash, “Surrogate Loses Case”; Crockin and Jones, Legal Conceptions. Court of Appeals of Ohio, J.F., Appellant, v. D.B. et al., Appellees. Nash, “Surrogate Loses Case.” Schlesinger, “When Surrogacy Turns into Custody.” Gattaca. Briggs and Kelber-Kaye, “‘There Is No Unauthorized Breeding,’” 94. Gardner, “Love, Not a Laboratory, Makes a Good Parent.” “Surrogate Relishes Unique Role”; Friend, “Blueprint for Life.” Belkin, “Too Many Ways to Have a Baby.” Ibid. Mundy, “It’s All in the Genes.” Bowe, “Octomom and Her Babies.” Ibid.; Belkin, “How Many Children Is Too Many?” Kinnick, “Media Morality Tales,” 10. Belkin, “How Many Children Is Too Many?”; Factora-Borchers, “War on Choice”; Poniewozik, “Eight Is Too Much”; Stateman, “Octuplets Mom Speaks.” Coontz, The Way We Never Were. Gardner, “Love, Not a Laboratory, Makes a Good Parent.” “What Makes a Parent.” Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” “Special Delivery.”

144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171

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Blustain, “Modern Childbirth,” 175. Riessman, “Women and Medicalization.” Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions. Thompson, Making Parents, 142. Ibid.; Kuczynski, “Her Body, My Baby”; Nosheen and Schellmann, “Most Wanted Surrogates.” Rimer, “No Stork Involved.” Ibid. Winerip, “My Sister, My Surrogate.” Thompson, Making Parents, 149. Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” Argetsinger, “Surrogate Returns Couple’s Hopes for a Child Fivefold.” “Surrogate Relishes Unique Role.” “Special Delivery.” Walters, All the Rage, 221. The first study of the effects of surrogacy on children was completed in Great Britain in 2002. The study found that intended parents who form families through surrogacy demonstrate better parenting skills than parents in traditionally formed families. See Gardner, “Love, Not a Laboratory, Makes a Good Parent.” Human Rights Campaign website, www.HRC.org. Bellafante, “Surrogate Mothers’ New Niche.” “Full House: Surrogate Mother Delivers for Gay Couple.” Ibid. “Surrogate Relishes Unique Role.” “Gary and Tony Having a Baby.” See Walters, Tolerance Trap for an in-depth critique of the “born this way” discourse, gay marriage, and the effects of the rhetoric of “tolerance” for the project of gay civil rights. Boodman, “Fatherhood by a New Formula.” Ibid. Hawk, “Single Fathers and Gestational Surrogacy.” Mamo, Queering Reproduction. Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” Rudrappa, Discounted Lives. This is not to say that the good mother/bad mother binary has disappeared from American ideologies of motherhood more broadly. I would argue that if anything, it remains stronger than ever in the cultural imagination. Yet without a contemporary surrogacy horror story such as the Baby M or Johnson v. Calvert case, this trope is less central to surrogacy narratives in particular. In its place, many media accounts focus on the lack of regulation as a primary cause of surrogacy disputes. Thompson, Making Parents. Franklin, “Postmodern Procreation,” 328. Foucault, History of Sexuality.

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Chapter 3. From Mammies to Mommy Machines

1 For more on this division between self and other in pregnancy, see Young, On Female Body Experience. 2 Lee, “Biobanks of a ‘Racial Kind.’” 3 Finkler, Experiencing the New Genetics, 3. 4 Yalom, History of the Breast. 5 Schiebinger, Nature’s Body. 6 Baumslag and Michels, Milk, Money, and Madness. 7 Blum, At the Breast. 8 Ibid.; Baumslag and Michels, Milk, Money, and Madness. 9 Newcome, Compleat Mother, 7. 10 Newcome seemed to have viewed himself as a defender of babies, whom he referred to as “helpless infants” without a voice of their own. The rhetoric that children need protection from the dangerous whims of their mothers is remarkably similar to contemporary anti-abortion discourse in which fetuses are represented as persons deserving of protection from the perils of the womb. 11 Yalom, History of the Breast, 106. 12 Ibid. 13 Golden, A Social History of Wet Nursing. 14 Lara, Essay on the Injurious Custom. 15 Schiebinger, Nature’s Body. While couched in very different rhetoric, Linnaeus’s concerns about the “environment” of the womb are remarkably similar to the “lifestyle” concerns voiced by contemporary intended parents who hire gestational surrogates—some go so far as to mail their surrogates nonhazardous “green” cleaning products or insist that they not pump their own gas. See Ali and Kelley, “Curious Lives of Surrogates.” 16 Schiebinger, Nature’s Body. Schiebinger notes that proscriptions against wet nursing were closely tied to the rise of separate spheres; by promoting maternal breastfeeding, philosophers and scholars justified women’s position within the home and separation from the public sphere of politics and influence. 17 Ibid. 18 McMillen, “Mothers’ Sacred Duty.” 19 Lara, Essay on the Injurious Custom, 39. 20 Dawkes, Nurse’s Guide, 50. 21 Trubowitz, “‘But Blood Whitened,’” 87. 22 Golden, Social History of Wet Nursing. 23 Blum, At the Breast. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.; Golden, Social History of Wet Nursing; Yalom, History of the Breast. 26 Blum, At the Breast. 27 Quoted in Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, 57. 28 Cited in Blanton, Medicine in Virginia, 177.

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29 McMillen, “Mothers’ Sacred Duty.” 30 Cited in Dunaway, African-American Family, 139. These quotes are from letters dating from 1836–1845 and 1859. 31 Thompson, Making Parents, 81. 32 Ibid. It is important to note that Thompson also finds examples of women who reject genetic essentialism and instead revalue the importance of gestation in order to justify reproductive decisions. While this may seem to counter my argument that biological and genetic discourses are used to normalize cross-racial surrogacy, it is in fact representative of my larger contention that scientific narratives about genes and race are not embraced by the lay public as absolute “truths” but are instead strategically accepted or rejected depending on a multiplicity of socioeconomic, racial, gender, and historical factors. 33 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 126. 34 Wade, “Race, Ethnicity, and Nation,” 6. 35 Salmon, “Cultural Significance of Breastfeeding.” 36 Ibid. 37 In 1910 Tennessee became the first state to adopt a one-drop statute, which determined that even “one drop” of black blood was a mark of permanent inferiority. 38 Golden, Social History of Wet Nursing, 153. 39 Blum, At the Breast; Golden, Social History of Wet Nursing; McMillen, “Mothers’ Sacred Duty.” 40 Quoted in Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, 55. 41 Ibid., 152. 42 Golden, Social History of Wet Nursing, 152. 43 Ibid. 44 McMillen, “Mothers’ Sacred Duty.” 45 Ibid. 46 Golden, Social History of Wet Nursing, 153. 47 Blum, At the Breast. 48 Golden, Social History of Wet Nursing, 152. 49 Somerville, Queering the Color Line; Gould, “American Polygeny.” 50 Somerville, Queering the Color Line. 51 Ibid.; Gould, “American Polygeny.” 52 Gould, “American Polygeny.” 53 Somerville, Queering the Color Line; Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind. 54 Blum, At the Breast. 55 Cherry, “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture,” 110. 56 Gould, “American Polygeny”; Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind. 57 Gould, “American Polygeny,” 112. 58 Morgan, Laboring Women, 16. 59 Ibid., 36. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 3.

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62 Stepan and Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science,” 171. 63 Roberts, Killing the Black Body. 64 Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 63. Jones notes that the figures for black female employment were probably higher than these statistics suggest because census takers did not always specify the occupation of sharecroppers. 65 Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 238. 66 Cherry, “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture,” 112. 67 McMillen, “Mothers’ Sacred Duty.” 68 Wallace-Sanders, Mammy, 19. 69 Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy.” 70 Coble, Cleaning Up. 71 Hochschild, “Love and Gold.” 72 Hochschild, “Childbirth at the Global Crossroads.” 73 Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor. 74 That being said, I am not following theorists who argue that a contemporary surrogate is no more than a “high-tech mammy”; to do so elides the radically different contexts of slavery and the market economy for gestational surrogacy today. Rather, I aim to situate cross-racial wet nursing within a continuum of a very specific type of reproductive labor—one in which the body of the laboring woman is essential to the service that she provides. See Blum, “Symposium,” 194. 75 Thompson, Making Parents. 76 Ibid., 145. 77 Dawe, Tan, and Xiao, “Cell Migration from Baby to Mother.” 78 Martone, “Scientists Discover Children’s Cells.” 79 See Chesler, Mothers on Trial; Markens, Surrogate Motherhood; Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy”; Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions; Cherry, “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture.” 80 I put “white” in quotations because while the Calverts were routinely described as white in the press, Crispina Calvert was Filipina. The Calverts could also have been described as a mixed-race couple. 81 Dalton, “Nonbiological Mothers.” 82 Johnson v. Calvert. 83 Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy.” 84 Dalton, “Nonbiological Mothers.” 85 Johnson v. Calvert, 84. 86 Rose, “Mothers and Authors.” 87 Johnson v. Calvert, 84. 88 Mydans, “Surrogate Denied Custody.” 89 Haddad, “Surrogate Mom Loses Claim”; Cherry, “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture.” 90 Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy,” 539. 91 Wolf, “‘Mercenary Hirelings’ or ‘a Great Blessing’?”

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92 Cherry, “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture,” 14. This language was also used in a case in which a gestational surrogate was listed as the mother on a child’s birth certificate. The surrogate, who had no intention to parent the child, went to court to have her name removed from the document. The first court to hear the case ruled that this would not be in the best interests of the child. A higher court later ruled that paternity laws should be applicable to women, thus a “genetically unlinked” woman has the same right to contest maternity as a “genetically unlinked” man has to contest paternity. Referring to the surrogate as a “genetically unlinked host of a fetus,” the court determined that she need not be listed on the birth certificate as the child’s legal mother. See Cahn, Test Tube Families, 106. 93 Bridges, Reproducing Race, 232. 94 Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions, 94–95. 95 Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy,” 545. 96 Ibid. 97 Cherry, “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture.” 98 “Surrogate to Appeal Loss.” 99 Nelkin and Lindee, DNA Mystique. 100 Ibid. 101 This is not to say that bonding is always trumped by other ideologies. In antiabortion discourse, for example, bonding and fetal personhood reinforce one another. Some state laws require women to view an ultrasound before an abortion, based on the expectation that the ultrasound will promote bonding, and reinforcing the notion that fetuses have rights and personhood that must be protected from the “mother.” 102 “U.S. Judge Will Rule Monday.” 103 Rose, “Mothers and Authors,” 626. 104 Rapp, Testing Women, 87. 105 Ibid. This can even include superstitious beliefs about the effects of maternal thought and action during pregnancy. Rapp interviewed mothers who attributed their children’s cleft palate to falling down during pregnancy or using scissors, and another who was warned to stay away from a relative with developmental disabilities for fear that it was “catching.” Perhaps the most familiar contemporary manifestation of this discourse is the ever-evolving advice to pregnant women on the safety of consumption (of food, drugs, and alcohol) as well as activity (exercise, work, and entertainment) during pregnancy. 106 The conclusions concerning schizophrenia are found in Anna Murphy Paul’s Origins: How the Nine Months before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. Researchers analyzed the life events of adults who were in utero during the Nazi siege of Holland, famine in China, and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and found that they were more likely to suffer from schizophrenia. See Belkin, “Womb with a View.” This is not the first era in which maternal environment has been cited as a correlate to mental illness; the terms “refrigerator mother” and “schizophrenogenic

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mother” emerged as postwar explanations for childhood autism and schizophrenia. See Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood. In the tellingly titled “At Risk from the Womb,” the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that “a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation.” Fischbach and Loike, “Maternal-Fetal Cell Transfer in Surrogacy,” 35. Wartman, “Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb.” Rosalind Petchesky makes a similar point, arguing that the concept of the womb as a “hostile environment” positions the fetus and pregnant woman as adversaries. Petchesky, “Fetal Images.” Hausman, Viral Mothers, 58. Kristof, “At Risk from the Womb.” Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions. Taylor, Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram, 78. These claims fit quite neatly alongside decades of widely published research by respected psychologists, including John Bowlby and Harry Harlow. Bowlby had been publishing research since the 1950s theorizing that infants had an evolutionary, adaptive need to be in close proximity to their mothers, similar to the phenomenon of “imprinting” among birds. In the absence of this relationship with the mother, children could suffer the effects of “maternal deprivation.” Bowlby was deeply suspicious of the consequences of full-time employment for mothers on their children’s development; he likened the effects to parental death, war, or famine. In the same decade, Harry Harlow’s famous studies on attachment seemed to bolster Bowlby’s claims; Harlow found that rhesus monkeys that were denied access to a maternal figure would never learn normal patterns of play or reproduction, and would injure their offspring. When given a choice between two “surrogate” mothers, a wire monkey that dispensed food and a cloth monkey that did not, the baby monkeys preferred to be with the “comforting” cloth monkey, transferring only to the wire monkey for nourishment. Harlow interpreted these findings to mean that baby monkeys had a need for affection and an attachment figure. See Eyer, Mother-Infant Bonding. Taylor, Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram. Ibid.; Petchesky, “Fetal Images.” The fervent embrace of this theory by the anti-abortion movement is evidenced by the free three- and four-dimensional ultrasounds provided by so-called pregnancy crisis centers that promote a pro-life agenda. In 2011 South Dakota became the first state to require that women seeking an abortion first receive counseling at unlicensed, nonmedical, and often faith-based pregnancy crisis centers. See Sulzberger, “Women Seeking Abortions.” In addition, many doctors attribute nonmedical benefits to ultrasounds based on the belief that once women view an ultrasound and bond with the fetus, they are more likely to obey doctors’ orders and change behaviors that are hazardous. Taylor, Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram; Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions.

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119 “Science Watch: The Key Role of Smell”; Hershenson, “Bonding for Infants and Inmate Mothers”; Kayne, “Connecticut Opinion.” 120 This points to an important caveat in the discussion of bonding: while feminist theorists have tended to be critical of bonding theories and technological interventions that medicalize pregnancy writ large, this does not necessarily reflect women’s experiential response to practices like ultrasound. Petchesky notes that these critiques can become reductionist; women have taken part in demanding technological advancements, and as Rayna Rapp also argues, women’s engagement with these technologies is often mediated by class and race. See Petchesky, “Fetal Images”; Rapp, Testing Women. Johnson v. Calvert provides an example of the complicated relationship between women and bonding theories. Johnson’s legal team attempted to strategically deploy those theories that seem to reify biological essentialism in the service of proposing a radical redefinition of motherhood. 121 Anna J. v. Mark C. 122 “U.S. Judge Will Rule Monday.” 123 In an interesting twist, a gestational surrogate was temporarily awarded custody of triplets after a Pennsylvania trial court upheld her contention that the biological father of the children had not taken the appropriate steps to “bond” with the infants after they were born. The Pennsylvania Superior Court later reversed this decision and returned custody to the father, accusing the surrogate of “impropriety.” See Crockin and Jones, Legal Conceptions, 263. 124 “Judge Makes It a ‘Glorious Day.’” 125 Murray, “Woman Loses Bid to Be Parent”; Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy,” 533; Mydans, “Surrogate Denied Custody.” 126 Anna J. v. Mark C. 127 Ibid. 128 “Surrogate to Appeal Loss.” 129 Quoted in Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy,” 543. 130 The Johnson ruling was found to be flawed in a 1994 case, Belsito v. Clark. The case involved a heterosexual couple that was suing so that they, and not the surrogate, would be named the legal parents on the child’s birth certificate. The court determined that the intent-based approach was lacking because if two lesbian women decided to raise a child, one donating the egg and the other gestating the fetus, both would be the “natural” mother according to Johnson. The court did not take the opportunity to challenge the presumption that a child can have only one “natural” mother, but instead ruled that kinship (and thus legal parentage) is a matter of “shared DNA or genetics.” See Rose, “Mothers and Authors,” 630. 131 Johnson v. Calvert, 100. 132 Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions. 133 Anna J. v. Mark C. 134 Strathern, “Displacing Knowledge,” 346. 135 Holladay, “Lawyer”; In Re the Adoption of Infants H. Interestingly, Huffman was a military wife at the time of the surrogacy arrangement, meaning that her health

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insurance was used to pay for delivery costs. Military wives are often sought as surrogates in part because of their insurance benefits. This may impact the number of surrogates of color because certain minority groups are overrepresented in the military. In Re the Adoption of Infants H. Surrogate Mothers, Inc. was founded by the attorney Steven Litz in 1984; the company claims to have handled nearly three hundred surrogate births and has a record that Litz describes as “pretty decent.” The Indianapolis Star reports that Litz infrequently operated in Marion County (the location of the twins’ birth) after one of his initial surrogacy contracts was declared unenforceable in that jurisdiction. Litz defended surrogacy as a preferable alternative to adoption in the Indianapolis Star in 2001, arguing that with surrogacy, “you’re dealing with better women. The typical woman who places her baby up for adoption is a 17-year-old welfare mom. A typical surrogate mom is 28, married, employed and a high school graduate who wants to help someone.” See Holladay, “Lawyer”; Corcoran, “Judge Asks Feds to Review Surrogacy”; Corcoran, “Lawyer Again at Eye of Storm.” Corcoran, “Adoption Deal Questioned.” In Re the Adoption of Infants H. Ibid. Saul, “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules.” Holladay, “Lawyer.” Saul, “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules.” In Re the Adoption of Infants H. Murray, “Adoption Fight.” Corcoran, “Adoption Deal Questioned.” In Re the Adoption of Infants H. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Spar, “Building a Better Baby Business.” Crockin and Jones, Legal Conceptions, 240. Vora, “Medicine, Markets, and the Pregnant Body.” Marks, “Race: Past, Present, and Future,” 25. Ibid. Marion County Division of Indiana Department of Child Services v. S.M. Ibid. Murray, “Adoption Fight.” See also Holladay, “Lawyer”; and Corcoran, “State Appeals Twin Girls’ Adoption.” Holladay, “Lawyer.” Ibid. Harris, “Introduction: Economies of Color,” 4. Saul, “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules.” Thompson, Making Parents, 149–50.

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163 Gewertz, “Yet Another Issue in Surrogate Case.” 164 The issue of “Indian blood” (or lack thereof) was brought to national attention again in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled in a 5–4 decision that a Native American child should be returned to her white adoptive parents after her biological father petitioned to regain custody. The court ruled that the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act did not apply because the biological father had relinquished custody at birth, but also because the child was identified as less than 1 percent Native American. See Rogan, “Supreme Court Rules.” The case raised interesting questions about the legal parsing of heritage into quantifiable data (another article describes the child as 3/256 Cherokee), and the implications for determinations of kinship. See Brooks, “‘Baby Veronica’ Adoption Case.”

Chapter 4. The Woman or the Egg?

1 For more on feminist science studies, see the work of Anne Balsamo, Karen Barad, Carol Cohn, Evelyn Fox Keller, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Ruth Hubbard, Suzanna Kessler, Helen Longino, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Emily Martin, Londa Schiebinger, Nancy Stepan, and Banu Subramaniam, among others. 2 Azoulay, “Reflections on Race”; Somerville, Queering the Color Line. 3 Scientists in the nineteenth century did not view traits such as intelligence or morality to be separable from biology; rather, they considered all characteristics to be traceable to the body. Evidence suggests that these beliefs linger in contemporary legal discourse, such as the “testosterone defense,” which has been used to rationalize violent crimes perpetrated by men. See Somerville, Queering the Color Line. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Ibid.; Ordover, American Eugenics. 6 Bamshad and Olsen, “Does Race Exist?”; Holden, “Personal Genomics.” 7 Harris, “Research Center to Study Health-Race Link”; Wade, “Race Is Seen as Real Guide”; Kristof, “Is Race Real?” 8 For example, complicated research studies may be boiled down to ten-second sound bites or mined for the most controversial or “sexiest” conjectures, distorting the findings and mistakenly suggesting a consensus on the “end” of race. 9 Keller, “Feminism and Science”; Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology”; Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.” 10 Koenig, Lee, and Richardson, “Introduction: Race and Genetics in a Genomic Age.” 11 Reardon, Race to the Finish, 6. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 14. 15 Vanouse, “Race, Inter-Race and Post-Race”; Reardon, Race to the Finish. 16 Skinner, “Racialized Futures.”

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Reardon, Race to the Finish. Stepan, “Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship,” 37. UNESCO, “Introducing UNESCO.” UNESCO published a revision to this statement the following year explaining that not all scientists agreed with the premise that race is an invalid concept. The historian Joseph Graves argues that “the statement seems to represent both a scientific and a political retreat from that of 1950” because “it still defends the validity of the concept race.” Graves attributes this backpedaling to “dissatisfaction among more scientifically conservative members of the genetics and anthropology communities, who might have believed that liberal ‘political’ concerns had compromised the scientific integrity of the first statement.” See Graves, Emperor’s New Clothes, 150–51; UNESCO, “Statement by Experts on Race Problem.” Marks, “Race: Past, Present, and Future.” Reardon, Race to the Finish. Skinner, “Racialized Futures,” 466. Reardon, Race to the Finish, 42. Graves, Emperor’s New Clothes, 152. Ibid. “Human Genome Project Information Archive.” Lee, “Racial Realism.” Koenig, Lee, and Richardson, “Introduction.” Ibid. Reardon, “Decoding Race and Difference.” Lee, “Biobanks of a ‘Racial Kind.’” Koenig, Lee, and Richardson, “Introduction,” 1. Lee, “Biobanks of a ‘Racial Kind.’” Wailoo, Nelson, and Lee, introduction to Genetics and the Unsettled Past. Sankar, “Moving beyond a Two-Race Mantra.” The sociologist Janet K. Shim finds that many epidemiologists studying cardiovascular disease rely on a construction of race based on cultural difference rather than biological difference. Cultural difference is understood as “the customary beliefs, norms, and practices of a racially or ethnically defined social group,” such as environment and eating habits. This construction of race is popular among researchers, she argues, because it is seen as a politically correct way to discuss racial difference without referencing biology or genetics and is perceived to be a “factual” reflection of observable behavioral differences. This is problematic, Shim contends, because it leads epidemiologists to assume that patterns of behavior (which are often pathologized) can be “read off of ” racial categorization. In effect, the cultural explanations of racial difference have similar implications as the genetic explanations of racial difference; both use race as a proxy for group differences (whether cultural or biological), and both are in danger of potentially reifying between-group differences. According to Shim, “the selective embrace of cultural and other relatively apolitical parameters of difference—without tracing or acknowledging their often structural and historical

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roots—tends to uphold extant social hierarchies.” See Shim, “Constructing ‘Race’ across the Science-Lay Divide,” 414, 418. Race-based medicine can be defined as “screening, diagnosis, or prescription based on the assignment of an individual to a social group associated with their appearance, language, or culture, which is presumed to serve as a marker of the geographic origins of their ancestors.” See Condit and Bates, “How Lay People Respond,” 98. Lee, “Racial Realism.” Condit and Bates, “How Lay People Respond.” Another example of a race-specific drug is Iressa, a medication approved for Asian populations with late-stage lung cancer. See Duster, “Molecular Reinscription of Race.” “Not a Black and White Question.” Kahn, “Race in a Bottle.” Braun et al., “Racial Categories in Medical Practice.” Ibid. Lee, “Biobanks of a ‘Racial Kind.’” Saulny, “Counting by Race.” In addition, the revisions created a separate racial category for “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” See Nobles, “Racial Categorization and Censuses.” Prewitt, “How to Fix Census’ Broken Race Question”; Harris-Perry, “Black by Choice.” Royal et al., “Inferring Genetic Ancestry.” Begley, “Shaking the Family Tree.” DNA.ancestry.com, accessed June 10, 2014. “Importance of Ancestry.” Nelson, “Reconciliation Projects.” Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr. While some genealogists and scholars of human genetics argue that this commercial DNA testing is largely harmless, representatives from many Native American tribes respond differently. Such advocates worry that the results of DNA sampling could contradict the oral and written histories of tribal communities, or that individuals with no affiliation to Native American culture will use DNA testing to gain access to tribal privileges. See Bolnick et al., “Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing”; Wolinsky, “Genetic Genealogy”; Royal et al., “Inferring Genetic Ancestry.” Nixon, “DNA Tests Find Branches.” Nelson, “Reconciliation Projects.” Thompson, “Race Science.” Goodman, “Seeing Culture in Biology,” 232. The anthropologist Susan Martha Kahn found a similar disconnect between authoritative debates and daily practice in her study of assisted reproduction in Israel. The determination of maternity is particularly important in Israeli society

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because Jewish identity is traced through the mother, and arbitrates Israeli citizenship. In the case of egg donation, rabbis are divided over whether the egg donor or the gestational mother is the “true” mother, and thus whether the child is Jewish if one of the two potential mothers is not. Despite these concerns, Kahn argues, secular laws have been passed to regulate ovum donation, and Israeli Jews, both secular and religious, have purchased the eggs of non-Jewish women to create what they consider to be Jewish babies. These disjunctures between religious, medical, and secular authorities and the practices of consumers suggest that, as Charis Thompson argues, intended parents are active agents in negotiating their beliefs to match up with their reproductive desires. See Kahn, Reproducing Jews; Thompson, Making Parents. Thompson, Making Parents. Ibid., 149. Ibid. Ibid. Kahn, Reproducing Jews. Thompson, Making Parents. Ibid. Mamo, Queering Reproduction, 194. Rapp, Testing Women, 39. Browner and Press, “Normalization of Prenatal Diagnostic Screening.” Samerski, “Genetic Counseling,” 713. Mamo, Queering Reproduction. Ibid. Rajan, Biocapital. Schmidt and Moore, “Constructing a ‘Good Catch.’” Ibid., 29. Holcomb and Byrn, “When Your Body Is Your Business.” Teman, Birthing a Mother. Plotz, “Stork Market.” Teman, Birthing a Mother. RESOLVE, “RESOLVE: About Us.” Thompson, Making Parents. Ibid. Arons and Chen, “Future Choices II.” Spar, Baby Business, 51. Thompson, “Skin Tone and the Persistence of Biological Race,” 131. Finkler, Experiencing the New Genetics. Schmidt and Moore, “Constructing a ‘Good Catch.’” Moore, Sperm Counts. Naglieri and Bardos, “General Ability Measure for Adults.” Frozen Angels, a 2005 documentary about the ART industry, includes the story of a woman who purchased sperm from a catalog made up entirely of Nobel Prize

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winners. In an interview, her son (who was portrayed as failing to live up to his genetic potential) expressed doubts about the capacity of genes to determine a child’s outcome. The director also interviews a doctor who argues that the wealthy are the perfect test pilots for reproductive technologies like genetic manipulation because they can afford to take such risks. Arons and Chen, “Future Choices II.” Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Financial Compensation,” 305. Spar, Baby Business. Almeling, Sex Cells. Mamo, Queering Reproduction; Schmidt and Moore, “Constructing a ‘Good Catch.’” See Growing Generations website, www.growinggenerations.com. Schmidt and Moore, “Constructing a ‘Good Catch,’” 30. Mundy, “It’s All in the Genes.” The U.S. Office of Management and Budget Directive No. 15 determined the following categories that would be used in the U.S. census: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, White, Hispanic/Latino or not Hispanic/Latino. See Braun et al., “Racial Categories in Medical Practice.” Shim, “Constructing ‘Race’ across the Science-Lay Divide,” 409. Ibid. Mamo, Queering Reproduction. Ibid., 205. As Dorothy Roberts notes in Fatal Invention, as a result of the slave trade African Americans have largely been limited in their ability to trace their ancestry to specific localities. As a result, African American donors are less likely to list ethnicities alongside their race than are white donors. Roberts explains that the recent boom in genetic ancestry testing has been particularly appealing to African Americans as “a type of racial justice, righting a wrong inflicted by racism and gaining a valuable possession that most Americans have always been able to claim if they wanted to.” See Roberts, Fatal Invention, 233. Ibid., 228. Thompson, Making Parents, 168. Braun et al., “Racial Categories in Medical Practice.” Teman, Birthing a Mother, 112. Reardon, Race to the Finish, 54. Ibid. Banks, “Multilayered Racism.” Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters. Glenn, “Consuming Lightness,” 166. Thompson, “Skin Tone and the Persistence of Biological Race.” Roberts, Fatal Invention. See also Almeling, Sex Cells.

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117 Thompson, “Skin Tone and the Persistence of Biological Race.” 118 This is without even considering the unpredictability of reproducing skin tone, even within genetically related families. Thompson notes that the variation of skin tone, hair type, and hair color within families and between generations “is the subject of a history and a literature of racial discrimination and passing” of which egg donation is the “latest instantiation.” Ibid., 137. 119 Ibid. 120 Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters. 121 Petchesky, “Fetal Images,” 405. 122 Thompson, “Skin Tone and the Persistence of Biological Race,” 132. 123 Condit et al., “Role of ‘Genetics’ in Popular Understandings of Race,” 260. 124 Others may have had surrogacy databases or profiles that they sent to intended parents after screening. Agency J, for example, posted several sample profiles of surrogates with pictures on its website, and it offered to send “mini-profiles” after a phone interview, and full profiles after signing up with the program. I did not include these as examples of surrogacy databases. 125 Teman, Birthing a Mother, 55. 126 Holcomb and Byrn, “When Your Body Is Your Business.” 127 Teman, Birthing a Mother, 199–200. 128 Goslinga-Roy, “Body Boundaries,” 117. 129 Thompson, Making Parents. 130 Berlant, “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus,” 113. 131 Almeling, Sex Cells, 63. 132 See Butler, Bodies That Matter. 133 Roberts, “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies.”

Chapter 5. “I Am the Baby’s Real Mother” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Barry, “Weeks after Deadly Nepal Quake.” Eglash, “Among Nepal’s Earthquake Survivors.” Kamin, “Israel Evacuates Surrogate Babies.” Eglash, “Among Nepal’s Earthquake Survivors.” Kamin, “Israel Evacuates Surrogate Babies.” Libermann and Naik, “Surrogate Mother Yearns for India.” Rudrappa, Discounted Life. Nelkin and Lindee, DNA Mystique. Ibid. Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor. Ibid., 65. Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India.” Points, “Commercial Surrogacy and Fertility Tourism.” Crockin, “Growing Families in a Shrinking World.” Ibid. Spar, Baby Business.

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Martin, “Reproductive Tourism”; Markens, “Interrogating Narratives.” Hochschild, Outsourced Self. Pande, Wombs in Labor, 13. Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, “Birthing a Market.” Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India.” Rudrappa, Discounted Life. Ibid. Kamin, “Israel Evacuates Surrogate Babies.” Bhalla and Thapliyal, “India Seeks to Regulate.” “Surrogacy/Egg Donation Guaranty,” ProactiveFamilySolutions.com, n.d., accessed April 4, 2012, http://www.proactivefamilysolutions.com. Chu, “Wombs for Rent, Cheap.” Rudrappa, Discounted Life. Hyder, “India Debates New Surrogacy Laws”; “Bill Seeks to Regulate Wombs-forRent”; Rudrappa, Discounted Life. Rajalakshmi, “Abetting Surrogacy”; Roy, “Protecting the Rights of Surrogate Mothers.” Rajalakshmi, “Abetting Surrogacy.” Dhar, “Gaps in Surrogacy Bill.” Qadeer, “ART of Making Babies.” Rudrappa, Discounted Life. Deomampo, “Gendered Geographies of Reproductive Tourism.” Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor. Rudrappa, “Mother India.” Rudrappa, Discounted Life. Surrogacy hostels are financed by the clinics in which ART procedures are performed, embryos are transferred, and the surrogate eventually gives birth. See Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India.” Hochschild, Outsourced Self. Rudrappa, Discounted Life. Gentleman, “India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood.” Hochschild, Outsourced Self. Deomampo, “Gendered Geographies of Reproductive Tourism.” Rudrappa, Discounted Life. Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India,” 978. Boris and Parrenas, Intimate Labors. Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy. Haworth, “Surrogate Mothers.” Bhalla and Thapliyal, “India Seeks to Regulate.” Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies. Roy, “Protecting the Rights of Surrogate Mothers.” Banerjee, “Reorienting the Ethics of Transnational Surrogacy,” 110. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 22.

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Banerjee, “Reorienting the Ethics of Transnational Surrogacy,” 111. Ibid. Pande, “‘It May Be Her Eggs but It’s My Blood.’” Haworth, “Surrogate Mothers,” 124. Banerjee, “Reorienting the Ethics of Transnational Surrogacy,” 118. I draw this reading of agency from Carole Browner and Carolyn Sargent, who problematize the definition of “agency” in Reproduction, Globalization, and the State, citing other scholars who note that “exercising agency does not necessarily produce an unequivocally positive outcome,” and that “individuals’ actions may further the interests of a larger group while undermining their own.” See Browner and Sargent, “Toward Global Anthropological Studies of Reproduction,” 13. For example, in her study of surrogates at Hope Maternity Clinic, Pande found that nineteen of the forty-eight women were hired by nonresident Gujaratis (Indians from the state of Gujarat now living in different parts of the world), ten by international clients, and the remainder by Indian residents. See Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India.” Made in India. Banerjee, “Race and a Transnational Reproductive Caste System.” Pande, “‘It May Be Her Eggs but It’s My Blood”; Chu, “Wombs for Rent, Cheap.” Google Baby. Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India,” 977. Deomampo, “Transnational Surrogacy in India.” Pande, Wombs in Labor. Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India,” 977. Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor, 84. Rudrappa, Discounted Life, 63–64. Pande, “‘It May Be Her Eggs but It’s My Blood,’” 380. Hochschild, “Childbirth at the Global Crossroads,” 25. Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India.” See Martone, “Scientists Discover Children’s Cells”; Wartman, “Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb.” Made in India. Srinivasan, “Assisted Reproductive Technologies.” In fact, initial boundaries are often set by surrogacy agencies. The Switzers were not permitted to meet Aasia until after their children were born, and Proactive Family Solutions insists that “by keeping ‘relationships’ out of the formula, we are able to lessen the emotional connection.” See Proactive Family Solutions website, www.proactivefamilysolutions.com. Aitchison, “Theorizing Other Discourses”; Wonders and Michalowski, “Bodies, Borders, and Sex Tourism.” Aitchison, “Theorizing Other Discourses.” Planet Hospital website, www.planethospital.com. Ibid.

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83 Nancy Wonders and Raymond Michalowski make a similar argument regarding prostitution. The authors contend that under circumstances in which it is nearly impossible for women to earn a living wage, “some women do not sell their bodily labor to produce a commodity; instead their bodies become commodities.” Jobs like sex work (and, I would argue, surrogacy) become an acceptable choice for women who are responsible for supporting themselves and their families. In surrogacy, women’s bodies become commodities at the same time that they are selling their bodily labor to produce a commodity, namely, a child. See Wonders and Michalowski, “Bodies, Borders, and Sex Tourism,” 551. 84 hooks, Black Looks, 23. 85 Ibid., 25. 86 “Lisa Ling Investigates: Wombs for Rent,” 2. 87 Deomampo, “Gendered Geographies of Reproductive Tourism,” 531. 88 Cohen, “Search for a Surrogate.” 89 Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor, 65. 90 Qadeer, “Social and Ethical Basis of Legislation.” 91 Rudrappa, Discounted Life. 92 Qadeer, “Social and Ethical Basis of Legislation.” 93 Pande, Wombs in Labor. 94 Rudrappa, Discounted Life. 95 Pande, Wombs in Labor. 96 West does say that he was assured by the doctor that “babies are all relatively similar in size.” His turn to a medical authority for this reassurance indicates the assumed natural difference between Indian women and white men, and that the notion that she could carry the child is counterintuitive. 97 Rudrappa, “Mother India.” 98 Google Baby. 99 Becker, Butler, and Natchtigall, “Resemblance Talk.” 100 Bhatia, “Mumbai Clinic Sends Couple Email.” Morrison’s husband, Chris Morrison, also describes India as “like the Wild West,” despite the high quality of care that they received for their dangerously premature newborns. It is interesting that the couple describes India as the Wild West, a term that connotes lawlessness, chaos, and danger, while also speaking resentfully of the restrictive British laws that forced them to seek surrogacy abroad in the first place. By emphasizing the difference between the Wild West of India and the civilization of Britain, Morrison clearly demarcates the proper place for himself and his family. 101 “Outsourcing Surrogate Mothers.” 102 Haworth, “Surrogate Mothers,” 124. 103 Hochschild, “Childbirth at the Global Crossroads,” 25. 104 Pande, “‘It May Be Her Eggs but It’s My Blood.’” 105 Teman, Birthing a Mother. 106 “Lisa Ling Investigates: Wombs for Rent,” 13. 107 Pande, “Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India.”

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108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115

Ibid. Vora, “Medicine, Markets, and the Pregnant Body.” Pande, “Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India,” 622. Ibid., 623. “Lisa Ling Investigates: Wombs for Rent,” 12. Ibid. Ibid., 16. The concept of “global sisterhood” was popularized by Western feminists during the 1970s, and was based on the position that women across the world are united in sisterhood, stemming from their shared experience of gender inequality. Critics, many of whom are transnational feminists, contend that this iteration of global sisterhood verges on biological essentialism and flattens power relations between women, assuming that all women are equally oppressed by all men. One such women’s group, called Sama, has taken on the issue of surrogacy in India. Sama, an organization focusing on women’s health, has critiqued the ART Regulation Bill that is making its way through the Indian legal system, warning that the much-needed regulation appears to privilege the concerns of intended parents over those of surrogates. See Roy, “Protecting the Rights of Surrogate Mothers”; Rajalakshmi, “Abetting Surrogacy.” Ehrenreich and Hochschild, introduction to Global Women, 11. Qayum and Ray, “Traveling Cultures of Servitude.” Ibarra, “My Reward Is Not Money”; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Domestica. Vora, “Medicine, Markets and the Pregnant Body.” Bhatia, “Investigation: Surrogate Baby Delivered Every 48 Hours.” Of the eight reader comments posted in response to this online article, five were negative. Of these five, three comments made a comparison between the exploitation of surrogates and the history of British imperialism and colonial rule over India. Gentleman, “India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood.” Vora, “Transmission of Care.” Bellafante, “Surrogate Pregnancy Goes Global.” Dolnick, “Another Job Being Outsourced.” See also Hochschild, “Childbirth at the Global Crossroads,” 25. Bhalla and Thapliyal, “India Seeks to Regulate.” According to Pande, the specter of sex work constantly hangs over the surrogates in her study. While surrogates are reassured by clinic workers that they are not engaged in prostitution, clinic staff also compare “bad” surrogates (e.g., those who ask for more money or are considered unfit mothers) to sex workers, situating them as cautionary tales for the other women. See Pande, “Commercial Surrogacy in India.” This is reminiscent of the “good” versus “bad” surrogate trope discussed earlier in this book. In media representations of surrogacy in the United States, women who frankly discuss or display non-altruistic motivations are frequently cast as bad women/mothers by other surrogates, reporters, or agency staff. Chu, “Wombs for Rent, Cheap.”

116

117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124 125 126 127

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129 Ibid. 130 Made in India. 131 Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism; Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 227. 132 Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 227. 133 Kuczynski, “Her Body, My Baby.” 134 Frank, “Rent-a-Womb Is Where Market Logic Leads.” 135 Kuczynski, “Her Body, My Baby.” 136 See Deomampo, “Transnational Surrogacy in India” for an extended analysis of how Indian surrogates express agency and resistance even in contexts that structurally limit their power and opportunities.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Nicks, “Wendy Davis on the Filibuster.” Liptak, “Supreme Court Allows Texas Abortion Clinics to Remain Open.” Applebaum, “What the Hobby Lobby Ruling Means.” Lachman, “Ben Carson Says There’s a War on ‘What’s Inside of Women.’” Liptak, “Supreme Court Rejects Contraceptives Mandate.” For more on these organizations, see their websites at www.sparkrj.org, www. latinainstitute.org, sisterreach.org, www.bwhi.org, www.sistersong.net. Graham, “For Pregnant Women, Two Sets of Rights”; Collins and Crockin, “Fighting ‘Personhood’ Initiatives.” Crary, “Multistate Personhood Push”; Collins and Crockin, “Fighting ‘Personhood’ Initiatives”; Cohn, “Mississippi Personhood Amendment Defeated.” Collins and Crockin, “Fighting ‘Personhood’ Initiatives.” Dubow, Ourselves Unborn. Personhood USA website, http://www.personhoodusa.com/. Collins and Crockin, “Fighting ‘Personhood’ Initiatives.” “‘Personhood’ Movement Slowed.” RESOLVE, “2014 State Legislative Accomplishments”; North Dakota, State Concurrent Resolution No. 4009. Crisp, “Mississippians to Vote on ‘Personhood’ Issue”; Eckholm, “Push for ‘Personhood’ Amendment.” Crisp, “Mississippians to Vote on ‘Personhood’ Issue.” Jonsson, “Mississippi ‘Personhood’ Measure.” American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “ACOG Statement.” Eckholm, “Push for ‘Personhood’ Amendment.” Crisp, “Mississippians to Vote on ‘Personhood’ Issue”; Grady, “Medical Nuances Drove ‘No’ Vote.” Wetzstein, “Loss Steels Resolve in ‘Personhood’ Movement.” Ibid. Fertility Authority, “Chilling Effect of Mississippi’s ‘Personhood Amendment.’” Ibid.

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Chambers et al., “Economic Impact of Assisted Reproductive Technology.” Tarkan, “Lowering Odds of Multiple Births.” Paulk, “Embryonic Personhood.” Shearer, “Far-Stretching Reach of Mississippi’s Personhood Amendment.” The issue of human embryonic stem cell (HESC) research has remained in the political spotlight even after the Mississippi defeat. Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and Republican presidential candidate, told a crowd outside a campaign stop in Florida that HESC is “the use of science to desensitize society over the killing of babies”; this despite Gingrich’s support for stem cell research in the past. See Retassie, “Gingrich Wants Panel to Look at IVF Clinics.” Collins and Crockin, “Fighting ‘Personhood’ Initiatives,” 690. Ibid. Ibid., 691. The 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut guaranteed a constitutional right to birth control for married people. The same right was granted to unmarried individuals in 1972 with Eisenstadt v. Baird. Department of Numbers, “Mississippi Household Income.” American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Frequently Asked Questions.” Waters, “IVF Use in America.” Edelman, No Future. Edelman uses the term “reproductive futurism” to discuss the ways queer resistance to heteronormativity is framed as a political impossibility. While I borrow this term from Edelman, I understand it more literally, as an ideology that reifies the inherent goodness of the figure of the child, at the expense of a critical analysis of reproductive politics. This is similar to Lauren Berlant’s argument that the public and private spheres in America have collapsed, resulting in a culture in which “the fetal/infantile person is a stand-in for a complicated and contradictory set of anxieties and desires about national identity.” See Berlant, Queen of America Goes to Washington City, 6. Edelman, No Future, 11. Spar, Baby Business, 196. See American Civil Liberties Union, “Coercive and Punitive Governmental Responses”; Flavin, Our Bodies, Our Crimes; Roberts, Killing the Black Body. Flavin, Our Bodies, Our Crimes. The authors specify that these statistics reflect those cases in which racial demographics were available. See Paltrow and Flavin, “Policy and Politics of Reproductive Health Arrests.” Rhode, “Terrible War on Pregnant Drug Users.” Roberts, “Unshackling Black Motherhood.” Ecker, “Death in Pregnancy.” Goodwyn, “Strange Case of Marlise Munoz.” Ibid. Martin, “Texas Laws Unclear.” “Fort Worth Hospital Ends Life Support.”

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49 Mason, “Baby Munoz.” 50 Center for Reproductive Rights and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Nuestra Voz, Nuestra Salud. 51 National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, “Nuestro Texas.” 52 Center for Reproductive Rights and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Nuestra Voz, Nuestra Salud. 53 Ibid. 54 National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, “Nuestro Texas.” 55 Ibid.; Center for Reproductive Rights and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Nuestra Voz, Nuestra Salud.`

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Index

abortion, 19–20, 66–67, 112–113, 199, 201– 209 accommodationist perspective, 47 ACOG. See American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists active management, 79–80 adoptable children, 19–20, 213n22 adoption, 71, 74, 118–27 Affordable Care Act, 42, 218n125 African American Lives, 138 African Americans, 41, 102–3, 108, 133– 34, 157; donor databases and, 151–53, 237n105; “Infants H” case and, 118–27; race-based medicine and, 136–37, 235n37, 235n40; race-based therapies and, 136, 234n36. See also black women agencies, surrogacies and, 68–71, 142–48, 168–69 agency, 173–74, 181, 240n60, 243n136 Ali, Lorraine, 50, 79 Almeling, Rene, 162 altruism, 33, 189–90; surrogacy and, 30–31, 34, 87, 162–63, 192–93; women helping women and, 48–59, 220n25 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), 116–17, 202 American Medical Association, 143 American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), 13, 19, 29, 143–44, 148, 204– 5; surrogacy, kinship and, 54, 61, 64–65 Anderson, Teresa, 53–55, 81 Andrews, Lori, 71 anti-abortion activists, 207 aristocracy, 91–97

Army Wives, 1–2, 5–6, 8 ARTs. See assisted reproductive technologies ASRM. See American Society for Reproductive Medicine assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), 79, 117, 142; Affordable Care Act and, 42, 218n125; birth stories for, 80–81; call for regulation and, 59–76; CDC on, 18, 61; cross-racial gestational surrogacy and, 2–9; culture and ideologies of, 8–9; decisions for genetics in, 77–78; egg donations race and, 140–64; ethnographic scholarship of, 10; family and, 2–9, 87–88; feminists and, 11, 17–42, 214n47; gays/lesbians, singles and, 4–5, 20–21, 41, 63; gender focus on research for, 10; geneticization and, 141–42; global context of, 167–69; “horror story” context in, 44–45; ideology and culture of, 8–9; infertility, race and growth of, 18–21; interracial couples and, 38; intersecting race and class in, 37– 42, 89–90; Johnson v. Calvert and, 104–18; kinship, gatekeepers and, 27; Marion County Division of Children’s Services v. Melinger and, 104; neutralizing perspective of, 17–18; perspective on use of, 151; “post-racial” age and racialization of gametes in, 145–64; pragmatic approach to regulation of, 31; public response to, 87–88; queer folks and class significance in, 84–85; race and, 7, 18–21, 37–42, 89–90, 139–64, 235n60; religion and, 38, 140–41; social censure and nontraditional usage of, 38–39; society defining race in, 7

273

274

| Index

Assisted Reproductive Technology Regulation bill, 169 Austin, James Alan, 71, 120–21 The Baby Business (Spar), 60, 206 Baby Mama, 58 Baby M case, 118, 215n58, 219n3, 225n200; in unsuccessful surrogacy cases, 43–45, 48, 70, 74, 105, 108, 115 “Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb,” 111 Baker, Shelly, 72–74 ballot initiatives, 202, 204 Banerjee, Amrita, 173–74 Barthes, Roland, 49 Becker, Gay, 187 Belkin, Lisa, 77 Belsito v. Clark, 75, 231n130 Berlant, Lauren, 160–61 Betts, Jen, 57, 81–82 Bimber, Danielle, 75 “biracial status,” 118–27 birth certificates, 229n92 birth stories, 80–81 black women, 100–103, 228n64; in “Infants H” adoption case, 118–27; infertility rates and, 19, 213n14; in Johnson v. Calvert, 12, 104–18; wet nursing in Americas and, 95–104 body autonomy restrictions, 200, 209–10 body measurements, 130, 233n3 Boersman, Amber, 50–51 bonding, 80, 86, 106, 109, 112; dismissal of, 110, 229n101; “maternal deprivation” and failure of, 113, 230n114; surrogacy and, 27, 215n58; theories, 113–14, 231n120; ultrasound and theory of, 113, 230n117 Boris, Eileen, 171 Boucher, Jonathon, 98 boundaries, 181, 240n78 Brave New World (Huxley), 60 breastfeeding, 92–94, 97–102, 227n37

Bridges, Khiara, 108–9 Briggs, Laura, 19–20, 77 Brisman, Melissa, 80 Brown, Jerry, 74 Brown, Louise, 17–18 Brown, Tony, 84–85 Brown v. Board of Education, 134 “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules,” 124 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 199 Butler, Judith, 59, 163 Caballero, Stephanie, 52–53 Cadogan, 94 California Court of Appeals, 114 California Supreme Court, 106–18 call for regulation, 11–12, 48, 59–76, 88, 124 Calvert, Christopher, 109, 125 Calvert, Crispina, 106–18, 125, 228n80 Calvert, Mark, 106–18, 125, 228n80 Cantor, Jennifer, 43, 51, 81 Caplan, Arthur, 71 Capron, Alexander, 70 Carr, Elizabeth, 17 Carson, Ben, 199 Catholic Church, 18, 38 Caucasians, 19, 142, 151–52, 157 CDC. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention celebrities, 17, 48 census, U.S., 151, 237n100 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 3, 7, 18, 61 Cesarean section, 50, 57, 170, 185–86 chastity, 171 Cherry, April, 100, 102 children, 19–20, 145–64, 166, 186–87, 213n22, 241n96; care of, 192; protection of, 207 Children in Need of Services, 120 Chu, Henry, 169 Clark, Kenneth, 134

Index

class, 6, 35–42, 75–76, 84–87, 89–90, 92– 93, 188 clinical labor, 32–33 Collins, Lee, 204 color blindness, 154–55 commercial surrogacies, 194–95 commodification anxiety, 35, 217n96 commodities, 182, 241n83 compensation, 25–26, 32–34, 52–57, 148, 215n50, 221n44 The Compleat Mother, or, An Earnest Perswasive to All Mothers (Especially Those of Rank and Quality) to Nurse Their Own Children (Newcome), 92 Condit, Celeste, 47, 157 “Constructing a ‘Good Catch,’ Picking a Winner,” 142 contested surrogacy, 6, 71–76, 105, 124 Coontz, Stephanie, 79 Cooper, Melinda, 32–33, 56, 103–4, 167, 176 Corea, Gena, 22–23 courtroom, race construction in, 104–26 Cramblett, Jennifer, 39 Crockin, Susan, 65, 204 cross-border reproductive care, 167–68 cross-racial gestational surrogacies, 7, 166, 175, 180; altruism and marginalization in, 33–34; Army Wives and, 1–2, 5–6, 8; ARTs and, 2–9; complications with advent of, 11, 17–42; disparities in class and, 6, 89–90; Johnson v. Calvert and, 104–18; “nature” of race and kinship in, 2–3; nongenetic roles and nonbonding in, 86; nuclear families and, 2, 4; “one-drop rule” in, 91; race, kinship and, 119; racialized reproductive labor and, 126–27; racial politics and, 163–64; reproductive tourism, India and, 13–14, 165–98; risks for white privilege and, 160; split borders of pregnancy in, 90–91; women helping women and, 188–98; women of color and, 8

|

275

cross-racial wet nursing, 91–104 cultural authority, 89, 91 cultural consumption, 181–82 culture, 8–9, 36, 217n99 “The Curious Lives of Surrogates,” 50, 53 Dalessio, James, 64 dating websites, 149–50 Davis, Wendy, 199 DCS. See Indiana Department of Child Services Demma, Amy, 70–71 Deomampo, Daisy, 184 The Dialectic of Sex (Firestone), 23 disaster relief organizations, 165 discourse template, 150, 158 discrimination, 41, 64, 238n118 disease screenings, 153–54 DNA tests, 106, 109, 135, 138–39 “Does Race Exist?,” 131 domestic labor, 192 dominant class, 101–4 donor databases: African Americans and, 151–53, 237n105; dating website similar to, 149–50; disease screenings in, 153– 54; heteronormativity of, 150–51; racial purity, ethnicities, restrictions in, 153; skin tones in, 94, 132, 152, 154–56, 159, 238n118; Thompson research on, 140, 145, 153, 155, 238n118; visualization techniques in, 156–57 donors, 148–57, 150 Drabiak, Katherine, 64 Dr. Phil, 72–74, 224n143 drug addiction, 111 dry-feeding, 92 Dworkin, Andrea, 22–23, 214n47 Dysarz, Thomas, 83 earthquake, 166 economics, 174, 193–94 Edelman, Lee, 205

276

| Index

egg donations, 52, 60, 65–67, 72, 74–75, 175, 209; agencies and genetic information of, 146–48; analysis of race on surrogates and, 13, 40, 129–64; ARTs, race and, 140–64; babies generated by surrogacy and, 145–64; compensation and, 148; databases, 129–64, 159; genetic determinism echoed by narratives of, 147–48; intended parents seeking, 129–30; kinship and, 76, 79, 81; marketability and, 26, 148–51; motherhood and, 28–29, 216n64; stereotypes and altruism of, 162 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 192 elitism, 197 Embryo Donation and Adoption Act, 66 empowerment, 172, 174, 191, 194 Esteva, Gustavo, 196 ethnicity, 133–34, 140, 144–146, 149, 151–57, 186–88, 234n20 Europe, 91–93, 95, 98–100 exploitation, 173–74, 197–98, 242n121, 243n136 Extraordinary Conceptions, 52 families, 81–82, 153, 231n30; ARTs and, 2–9, 87–88; heterosexual nuclear, 116, 205–6, 216n72; surrogates sought by India and white, 183–88. See also nuclear families Fatal Invention (Roberts), 153 FDA. See Food and Drug Administration, U.S. femininity, 31, 35, 92, 162, 182 feminism 11, 17–20, 22–42, 105, 199–201, 214n47; genomics and race studies by, 130, 233n1; surrogacy and, 21–22, 66– 68; womb environment and, 160–61 fertility, 14–15, 67–68, 86–87, 182, 185, 199– 210, 212n9 Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act, 61, 143 fetal development, 110–11, 229n105

“Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture,” 156–57 fetal personhood, 113, 200–207, 209–10 fetuses, 171, 178, 195, 201–2, 229n106; biological connections and, 180–81; gestation and dangers to, 111–12, 229n106 Fey, Tina, 58 films, 48, 57–58, 76–77 financial commitment, gestational surrogacy and, 3–4 Firestone, Shulamith, 23 Fiske, John, 49 Flavin, Jeanne, 207 flexible surrogates, 161 Florida Assisted Reproductive Technology Act, 65 Flynn, James, 75 Food and Drug Administration, U.S. (FDA), 136–37, 235n40 Foucault, Michel, 88, 97 Frankenberg, Ruth, 1, 154–56 Friedan, Betty, 66 GAMA IQ test, 147 gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT), 18 gametes, 145–64 Gamson, Joshua, 32 Gates, Henry Louis, 138 Gattaca, 76–77 “gayby boom,” 82–83 gays/lesbians, 9, 26, 57; ARTs and, 4–5, 20–21, 41, 63; contested surrogacy and, 74; couples, 158; stereotypes, 84; surrogacy and, 74, 82–85 gender, 10–11, 180, 183, 190–93, 195–98; racialized reproductive labor and, 89– 91, 107–8, 110, 112, 126, 146, 163, 169–76; reproductive technologies and, 164 “genetic and hereditary stranger,” 107 genetic determinism, 118, 122, 147–48 genetic essentialism, 167, 188 geneticization, 40–41, 122, 132, 141–42

Index

genetics, 99, 107, 110, 124, 141; ARTs and decisions for, 77–78; egg donor information and agencies on, 146–48; “evidence at trial” and determinism of, 117; gestation and, 90, 105–6, 114–16; intelligence and, 146–47, 236n91; racial categories for traits and, 132; in racial identity, not gestation, 96, 105–6, 227n32; recreational, 138–39, 235n55; strangers, 127 genomics, 130–31, 135, 233n1 gestation, 158–59; fetal dangers and, 111– 12, 229n106; genetics and, 90, 105–6, 114–16; racial identity genetics and, 96, 105–6, 227n32 gestational surrogacies, 3–5, 7–8, 25, 27, 64; birth statistics of, 29, 216n69; disaggregation of motherhood in, 26; discourse and naturalization of, 9–15; intended parents and, 28, 215n59, 215n62; as mothers on birth certificates, 229n92; nuclear families and path of, 19, 29; pregnancy and, 90–91; ratios and preferences for, 28, 215n63; traditional surrogacies compared to, 211n3 GIFT. See gamete intrafallopian transfer gifting language, 55–56, 221n57 Gilman, Sander, 102 Ginsburg, Faye, 20 global sisterhood, 191, 242n115 Golden, Janet, 98 Gonzales, Luisa, 53–55 good mother/bad mother ideology, 6, 31, 36, 58–59, 162–63, 225n200 Google Baby (documentary), 186–87 Goslinga-Roy, Gillian, 160 Grayson, Deborah, 107–9 Griswold v. Connecticut, 244n32 Hague Adoption Convention, 60–61 Handel, Bill, 37–38 Hansen, Jennifer, 36

| 277

Harris, Angela P., 123–24 Harris-Perry, Melissa, 137 Hausman, Bernice, 112 Havins, Weldon, 64 health insurance, 41, 65–66, 69, 218n120 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), 144 health regulation, 242n116 hegemony: norms of, 103, 117; “hegemony of racial thinking,” 139 Heineman, Mitzi, 43 Henderson, Lesley, 46–47 Hennessy-Fisk, Molly, 56–57 heredity. See lactational heredity HESC. See human embryonic stem cell heteronormativity, 5, 83–84, 150–51, 244n36 heterosexuality, 217n72 heterosexual nuclear family, 116, 205–6, 216n72 “Hey SCOTUS—Drop Your Zone,” 66 HGP. See Human Genome Project Hinojosa, Maria, 68–69 HIPAA. See Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act The History of Sexuality (Foucault), 97 A History of the Breast (Yalom), 93 Hobson, Janell, 47 Hochschild, Arlie, 103, 188, 192 Hollingsworth, Donald, 74 Hollingsworth, Sean, 74 hooks, bell, 182 Hopkins, Patrick, 46 “horror stories,” 225n200; surrogacy, 44– 45, 58, 68, 70, 74, 88, 224n143 hostels, 170–71, 239n39 Howard, Angela, 56–57 HRC. See Human Rights Campaign Huffman, Zaria Nkoya, 118–27 human embryonic stem cell (HESC), 244n28 Human Fertility and Embryology Authority, 168

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Human Genome Project (HGP), 135 human rights, 24, 208 Human Rights Campaign (HRC), 67 Huxley, 60 ideologies, 8–12, 89–127 immigrants, 98–99, 103 India: altruism in, 189–90; biological connections in, 180–81; documentary, 75, 179, 185–86, 195; hostels regulated in, 170–71, 239n2; reproductive tourism, surrogacy and, 13–14, 165–98; surrogacies in, 168–69, 172–75, 240n61; surrogacy regulation bill of, 169; white family seeking surrogates in, 183–88; Wild West description of, 241n100; women’s health regulations in, 242n116 Indiana Court of Appeals, 119–21 Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS), 118–20 Indiana Supreme Court, 119 Indian Child Welfare Act, 125 Indian origin story, 184–85 “Infants H” case, 118–27 infection, spread of, 94, 98 infertility, 1, 18–21, 143–44, 213n14, 219n3 infertility rights advocates, 204, 209–10 intelligence, genetics and, 146–47, 236n91 intended parents, 121, 175; boundaries and, 181, 240n78; concerns of “Infants H” case, 119–26; egg donors sought by, 129–30; gestational surrogacies and, 28, 215n59, 215n62; Indian origin story and, 184–85; judicial system in favor of, 115–17, 231n123; race and, 151– 54, 156, 159–60, 195; surrogacy and, 6–7, 10, 159–60, 174, 176, 185–86 interracial couples, 9, 38 intimacy, 31–32 intimate laborers, 171–72

intrauterine insemination (IUI), 4, 85 in vitro fertilization (IVF), 203; costs and dependability of, 3–4; lesbians using IUI and, 85; miracle baby through, 19, 213n13; motherhood fragmented by, 18, 212n5; repercussions of, 17–18; restricted access to, 205–6 Israel, 63–64, 140–41, 143, 157–58, 222n96, 235n60 IUI. See intrauterine insemination IVF. See in vitro fertilization Jindal, Bobby, 62, 66 Johnson, Anna, 12, 106–18, 125, 228n80 Johnson v. Calvert, 12, 44–45, 104–6, 115, 117, 121, 125–27, 215n58, 225n200, 231n120 Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology, 113 judicial system, 115–17, 231n123 Kahn, Susan, 140–41 Kehoe, Amy, 71–74 Kehoe, Scott, 71–74 Kelber-Kaye, Jodi, 77 Kelley, Raina, 50, 79 Kessler, Bree, 52 kinship, 10–11, 121–22, 195; ARTs, gatekeepers, and, 27; ASRM, surrogacy and, 54, 61, 64–65; biological and social components of, 76; cross-racial gestational surrogacy and, 119; egg donations and, 76, 79, 81; gene racialization and, 141; Johnson v. Calvert and, 104–18; media coverage and themes of, 85; media on surrogacies and, 11–12, 15, 43–88; “nature” of race and, 2–3; queer folks, surrogacy and, 82–85; race and, 2–3, 85–87, 175–81; racial categories and, 126, 140; reproductive technologies and, 164; surrogates distancing from, 80–81 Kitzinger, Jenny, 46–47

Index

Koenig, Barbara, 135 Koppel, Ted, 79 Kuczynski, Alex, 197 Laboring Women (Morgan), 100–101 “Labor of Love: Surrogate Pregnancy,” 57–58 lactational heredity, 97–102, 227n37 Lamarckism theory, 141–42 Lambda Defense and Education Fund, 83 Lara, Benjamin, 94–95 Latina women, 35, 41, 200, 207–208 lawsuits, 39, 75, 104–27 Lee, Sandra Soo-Jin, 135 Leela (surrogate), 177–78 legislation, 61–62, 65–66, 71, 74, 168–169, 200–201, 204, 209, 216–217n72 lesbians. See gays/lesbians Lewontin, Richard, 133 LexisNexis, 44–45 Ling, Lisa, 183–87, 190–92 Linnaeus, Carl, 93, 226n15 “Lisa Ling Investigates: Wombs for Rent,” 183 Litz, Steven, 118–19, 122, 232n137 lobby groups, 200 Longoria, Eva, 138 Lunden, Joan, 80–81 Made in India (documentary), 175, 179, 185–86, 195 Madrones, Beth, 68–69 Madrones, Marcio, 68–69 Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Thompson), 24–25, 140 “mammies,” 97–98, 102–3, 171 Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Wallace-Sanders), 103 Management and Budget (OMB), 137 marginalization, 33–34, 37, 39

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279

Marion County Division of Children’s Services v. Melinger, 12, 104 Markens, Susan, 9, 44, 46, 68 market-driven pregnancy, 173 Marks, Jonathan, 121 “maternal deprivation,” 113, 230n114 maternity, 8, 107, 115, 194, 229n22, 235n60 McCaughy septuplets, 78 McGraw, Phil, 72–74, 224n143 McMillen, Sally, 96 media, 75–76, 131; absence of race and, 85–87; “accommodationist perspective” of, 47; homogenization of, 47; queer folk surrogacies and, 82–85; society and influence of, 46; stem cell research and, 46–47; Suleman octuplets and, 77–78; on surrogacies and kinship, 11–12, 15, 43–88; surrogacy agency fraud and, 68–71; surrogacy in, 44–45, 49–50, 219n7, 220n28; surrogate altruism and, 87; women helping women surrogacies in, 48–59 See also surrogacy media themes medical interventions, 3–4 medical tourism agency, 181 medicine, 130, 136–37, 235n37, 235n40 Meehan, Michael, 83 Melinger, Stephen, 118–27 mental illness, 72, 224n143 Metcalfe, Doug, 81–82 Metcalfe, Sara, 81–82 Michigan, 62, 66, 71–73 Michigan Court of Appeals, 72–73 military wives, 36, 50–52, 56 miracle babies, 19, 213n13 Mississippi, 205 Mohanty, Chandra, 173, 196 Moore, Lisa Jean, 142, 150 Moreno, Enrique, 53, 55 Morgan, Jennifer, 100–101 Morrison, Susan, 187

280

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motherhood, 104–18; egg donations and, 28–29, 216n64; feminists on, 23; gestational surrogacy and disaggregation of, 26; good mother/bad mother ideology, 6, 31, 36, 58–59, 162–63, 225n200; IVF and fragmentation of, 18, 212n5; as optional role, 29, 216n66; surrogacy, separation anxiety and, 29, 216n72; surrogates and images of, 162– 63; surrogates challenging ideology of, 79; unsuccessful surrogacy cases of, 12, 44–45, 121, 125–27, 215n58, 225n200, 231n120 multiple births, 78, 81, 83, 203 Mundy, Liza, 43, 77–78, 151 Munoz, Marlise, 207–9 Musman, Melissa, 82 Musman, Michael, 82 Myers, Gernisha, 51, 85–86 NARAL Pro-Choice America, 66–67 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 137 National Organization for Women (NOW), 66–68 National Public Radio (NPR), 51–52 National Survey of Family Growth, 41 Native Americans, 95, 125, 233n164, 235n55 naturalization, 9–15, 81–82, 87–88, 90, 96, 104 nature, 2–3, 9 Nazism, 133 Nelson, Alondra, 139 Newcome, Henry, 92, 226n10 the New World, 91–104 NIH. See National Institutes of Health NOW. See National Organization for Women NPR. See National Public Radio nuclear families, 231n30; cross-racial gestational surrogacy and, 2, 4; gestational surrogacy path and, 19,

29; heterosexual, 116, 205–6, 216n72; mainstream surrogacies and, 44, 58, 77, 87; racialized reproductive labor and, 104, 107–9, 116, 228n74 Nuestro Texas, 208 “nurse’s guide,” 94 nurture, nature vs., 9 “Nurturing in the Service of White Culture,” 100 Obama, Barack, 135, 137 O’Brien, Soledad, 83–85 “Octomom,” 77–78 octuplets, 77–78 OMB. See Management and Budget “one-drop rule,” 91, 137 “One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds,” 196 Oprah Winfrey Show, 138, 183, 185–86, 190–91 organ donation, 64 organ selling, 195 Otherness, 181–88 Our Bodies, Ourselves, 21 Paltrow, Lynn, 207 Pande, Amrita, 170, 177, 189 Parrenas, Rhacel, 171 Parslow, Richard, 107–8, 114–16 Patel, Nayna, 168, 170, 183, 193–94 Pawlenty, Tim, 62 Perez, Miriam, 67–68 “Personal Genomics: The Touchy Subject of ‘Race,’” 131 Personhood USA, 201–4, 208 Pesca, Mike, 51–52 Petchesky, Rosalind, 113, 156–57 PGD. See prenatal genetic diagnosis phenotypic markers, 37–38, 131, 146, 154–57 Planet Hospital, 179, 181–82 Planned Parenthood, 208 Poehler, Amy, 58 polygeny, 99–101

Index

popular scientific imagination, 141–42 post-racial age, 145–64 power evasion, 156 Prakash, Madhu Suri, 196 pregnancy, 57–58, 112, 114, 173, 230n109; “active management” in, 79–80; chastity during, 171; fetal development responsibilities and, 110–11, 229n105; gestational surrogacies and, 90–91; legal actions against women and, 206– 7; racialized and classed idealization of, 35–36 pre-implantation embryos, 203–4 prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD), 77 Primetime Live, 83 Proactive Family Solutions, 169 pro-choice organizations, 202, 209–10 pro-life movement, 66, 201–208 “purchase of intimacy,” 31–32 The Purchase of Intimacy (Zelizer), 53, 172 Puritans, 95 queer folks, 4–5, 9, 41, 64, 82–85 Queering the Color Line, 130 race, 10–11, 233n8; analysis of egg donors, surrogates and, 13, 40, 129–64; analysis of surrogacies and, 132; ARTs and, 7, 18–21, 37–42, 89–90, 139–64, 235n60; boundaries by, 139, 235n60; Brown v. Board of Education on segregation and, 134; census categories of ethnicity and, 151, 237n100; children’s ethnicity and, 186–87; color-coding sperm vials by, 142; commodification of, 135–39; courtroom and constructing, 104–26; discourse on, 163–64; “ethnic group” terminology instead of, 133–34, 234n20; feminist studies on genomics and, 130, 233n1; fertility services intersecting class and, 86–87; genetics, traits and categories of, 132;

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historicized ideologies of, 12, 89–127; identity of, 96, 227n32; intended parents and, 151–54, 156, 159–60, 195; justice for, 209; kinship and, 2–3, 85–87, 175–81; media coverage and absence of, 85–87; medicine based on, 136–37, 235n37, 235n40; phenotypic markers of, 154–57; politics and shifting discourse of, 133–35; pregnancy idealized by class and, 35–36; privilege by, 156; purity of, 153; questioning “nature” of kinship and, 2–3; rejecting geneticization of, 122; reproductive technologies and, 5, 164; reproductive tourism and differences of, 187–88; size differences of babies and, 186, 241n96; therapies based on, 136, 234n36; in U.S., 109; white privilege and ignoring surrogates, 86–87 “Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease,” 131 “race suicide,” 131 racial categories, 126, 132, 137, 140 racialization, 145–64, 167, 180 racism, 44, 130, 135–136, 154, 207 Ragoné, Heléna, 8, 30, 34–35, 142–43, 158; women helping women and, 48–49, 55, 221n57 Ramirez, Salina, 68–69 Rapp, Rayna, 20, 40, 110 Raymond, Janice, 66 Reardon, Jenny, 132–34 recreational genetics, 138–39, 235n55 religion, 36, 38, 99–100, 140–41, 217n99 reproduction, 22–23, 205–8, 244n36; biology of, 176–77; rights in, 14–15, 199–210; technologies in, 5, 164, 200– 201, 209 reproductive labor, 169–76, 180, 183, 190–93, 195–98; gender and racialized, 89–91, 107–8, 110, 112, 126–27, 146, 163; nuclear families and racialized, 104, 107–9, 116, 228n74

282

| Index

reproductive tourism, 86, 212n22, 219n8; cross-border reproductive care and, 167–68; cultural consumption and, 181–82; exploitation in, 173; femininity and fertility in, 182; global practices of, 166; India, cross-racial gestational surrogacy and, 13–14, 165–98; racial differences and, 187–88; U.S. destination for, 196–97 Republican War on Women, 199 research, 9–15, 34–35, 233n8; media and stem cell, 46–47; Thompson on donor database, 140, 145, 153, 155, 238n118 “Research Center to Study Health-Race Link,” 131 resemblance talk, 187 RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, 13, 61, 65, 67, 143–44, 204, 216n72 Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (Koenig, Lee, Richardson), 135 Richardson, Sarah, 135 right to life, 202 Right-Wing Women (Dworkin), 22–23 risks, 112, 160, 230n109 Roberts, Dorothy, 41, 153, 163, 207 Robinson, Angelia, 74 Roe v. Wade, 201 Ross, Loretta, 24 Rothman, Barbara Katz, 22 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 94 Rudrappa, Sharmila, 170 Samerski, Silja, 141 Sangita (surrogate), 185–86, 190–91 SART. See Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies Saul, Stephanie, 124 Sawyer, Diane, 83 schizophrenia, 111, 229n106 Schmidt, Matthew, 142, 150 segregation, 134 separation anxiety, 29, 216n72

septuplets, 78 sexuality, 83–84, 94, 100–101, 150, 171, 216n72, 242n127 Shange, Savannah, 39 Shim, Janet, 152 single people, 20–21, 41, 118–27, 158 SisterSong, 24 skin tone, 94, 132, 152, 154–57, 159, 238n118 slavery, 22, 39, 95, 97, 99–103, 105, 228n74 Sloan, Kathy, 66 Smith, Kerry, 81 Smith, Lisa, 81 social censure, 38–39 “The Social Construction of Surrogacy Research,” 34–35 A Social History of Wet Nursing (Golden), 98 society, 7, 46. See also cultural authority; dominant class Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (SART), 61, 143–44 Somerville, Siobhan, 130 Soni, Anita, 193–94 Spar, Debora, 60–61, 206 “Special Delivery,” 79 sperm bank, 39, 142, 150 Spino, Gary, 84–85 state mandates, 61–66, 70–73, 109 stem cell research, 46–47 Stepan, Nancy, 102, 133 stereotypes, 25, 162, 179; of gay men, 84; racist, 44; of surrogates, 50, 58, 69 “Stop the Return of the Abortion Ban,” 66 “strategic naturalization,” 104 Strathern, Marilyn, 117 Suleman, Nadya (“Octomom”), 77–78 surrogacies, 32, 35; adoption placement debates for, 71; agencies and, 68–71, 142–48, 168–69; altruism in, 30–31, 34, 87, 162–63, 192–93; analysis of race and, 132; ASRM, kinship and, 54, 61, 64–65; babies generated by egg donations and, 145–64; bills, 62, 65–66; biological

Index

connections and, 106; bonding and, 27, 215n58; celebrity publicized, 48; commercial, 194–95; for compensation, 25–26, 56–57, 215n50; contested, 71–76, 124; contracts, 21–22, 61–66, 64, 158– 59; contracts and state mandates for, 61–66; costs and dependability of, 3–4; countries banning, 63–64; cross-racial gestational, 166, 180, 191, 195; culture and religion in Israel’s, 36, 217n99; databases, 157–64, 238n124; economic benefits in, 193–94; egg donation databases and, 129–64; federal legislation and, 61, 71; feminists and, 21–22, 66–68; fertility treatments and, 67–68; in films and television, 48, 57–58; gays/ lesbians and, 74, 82–85; gestational, 3; gifting language and, 55–56, 221n57; “horror stories,” 44–45, 58, 68, 70, 74, 88, 224n143, 225n200; ideology shifts and, 10–11; inadequate screenings of, 71; in India, 13–14, 165–98, 240n61; industry, 168; infertility in, 219n3; intended parents and, 6–7, 10, 159–60, 174, 176, 185–86; intent-based approach for, 75; Israel and, 63–64, 143, 157–58, 222n96; kinship and media on, 11–12, 15, 43–88; lesbians/gays, 74, 82–85; as liberating to women, 31; mainstream, 44, 58, 77, 87; market-driven pregnancy and, 173; in media, 44–45, 49–50, 219n7, 220n28; Michigan state mandates in, 62, 66, 71–73; morality of, 60; motherhood and unsuccessful, 12, 44–45, 121, 125–27, 215n58, 225n200, 231n120; NARAL, abortion and, 66– 67; organ donation compared to, 64; organ selling and, 195; queer folks, kinship and, 82–85; racialization of, 167, 180; reasons for, 4, 170; regulations on, 12; rights organizations for, 67–68; separation anxiety, motherhood and, 29, 216n72; stories naturalizing family,

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283

81–82; survival and exploitation in, 197–98, 243n136; television and, 48; traditional, 4, 25–29, 211n3; transnational, 82–83, 86–87, 178, 213n22, 219n8, 243n136; United Kingdom and, 143; U.S. and industry of, 142–43, 158–59; white family seeking Indian, 183–88; women helping women in, 48–59; women’s lives changed by, 191– 92; for “wrong reasons,” 49, 56–59. See also gestational surrogacies; traditional surrogacies surrogacy cases, 118, 215n58, 219n3, 225n200; Baby M in unsuccessful, 43–45, 48, 70, 74, 105, 108, 115; Johnson v. Calvert, 12, 44–45, 104–6, 115, 117, 121, 125–27, 231n120; media themes and unsuccessful, 43–48 surrogacy media themes, 219n7, 220n28; analysis and sources in, 11–12, 43–88; call for regulation, 59–76, 73, 88; discourse on, 12; kinship and, 85; kinship question in, 11; of questioning kinship, 76–82; unsuccessful cases in, 43–48; women-helping-women, 11, 48, 54–55, 58–59, 88, 189, 192 “Surrogacy: Wombs for Rent?,” 68 Surrogate Mothers, Inc., 118–19, 232n137 surrogates, 49, 190–91; agency exercised by, 173–74, 240n60, 243n136; altruism valued in, 162–63; common goal of, 50–51; compensation and, 33–34, 52; defining selves as vessels, 161; demographics of, 33–34; exploitation of, 242n121; flexible, 161; as “genetic strangers,” 127; health insurance and, 65–66; images of motherhood and, 162–63; India and white family seeking, 183–88; infertile couples employing, 1; intended parents and race of, 151–54, 156, 159–60, 195; kinship and distancing, 80–81; laborers in, 169–72; media focus on altruism of, 87;

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surrogates (cont.) motherhood challenged by ideology of, 79; mothers as, 166, 171, 174, 176–78, 180–81, 185–86; population, 30–36, 50– 52, 217n96; quintuplets and compensation refusal by, 53–55, 221n44; race and analysis of egg donors and, 13, 40, 129–64; relationships, 32; specter of sex works and, 242n127; stereotypes of, 50, 58, 69; unfavorable, 56–57; white privilege and ignoring race of, 86–87 SurroGenesis, 68–70 Switzer, Brian, 179 Switzer, Lisa, 179, 185–86 “technoscientific phenomena,” 132 television, 48, 57–58, 72–74, 79, 83, 110, 224n143 Teman, Elly, 28–29, 34–36, 158–59, 222n16 tests, 106, 138, 147 Texas Advance Directives Act, 207 third party facilitator, 179 Third World Difference, 173 Thompson, Charis, 24–25, 80, 96, 104, 124–25; donor database research and, 140, 145, 153, 155, 238n118 traditional surrogacies, 4, 25–29, 211n3 traits, 130, 132, 148–57, 233n3 transnational adoption, 82–83, 87, 213n22 transnational children, 213n22 transnational surrogacies, 82–83, 86–87, 178, 213n22, 219n8, 243n136 transnational surrogacy, 86, 178, 219n8, 243n136 “A Tribe Is Born,” 1 Trubowitz, Rachel, 95 Twain, Mark, 182 ultrasound, 113, 230n117 UNESCO. See United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Uniform Gestational Surrogacy Contract Act, 64

Uniform Parentage Act (UPA), 61, 117 United Kingdom, 143, 168 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 133–34, 234n20 United States (U.S.), 136–37, 145–46, 151, 235n40, 237n100; lactational heredity and, 102; mammy figures in, 171; maternal-infant bonding and, 112–13; race in, 109; racial discourse in, 163– 64; reproductive tourism destination of, 196–97; surrogacy industry in, 142–43, 158–59; third party facilitator in, 179 UPA. See Uniform Parentage Act U.S. See United States Viral Mothers (Hausman), 112 visualization techniques, 156–57, 161–63 Vohra, Najima, 188 Vora, Kalindi, 121, 193 Vorzimer, Andrew W., 69 Waldby, Catherine, 32–33, 56, 103–4, 167, 176 Wallace, Kelly, 79 Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly, 103 Walters, Suzanna, 82 Waters, Abbie, 205 West, Jennifer, 183–87, 190–93 West, Kendall, 183–87, 191, 193 wet nurses, 107–8; advice and warnings of, 94–95; Americas and black, 95–96; Americas in New World and, 95–104; aristocracy and, 91–97; black women in Americas and, 95–104; cultural authority and cross-racial, 89, 91; European immigrants in pools of, 98–99; naturalization of, 90, 96; negative appraisals of, 92–93, 226n10; New World and choosing, 93–95; racialized reproductive labor and, 126–27; white class needs and cross-racial, 12, 89;

Index

womb environment concerns of, 93– 94, 226nn15–16 white privilege, 86–87, 108 Wild West, 241n100 Williams, Clare, 46–47 Winfrey, Oprah, 183–87, 190 womb environment, 89–90, 93–94, 123, 158, 160–61, 226nn15–16 “Womb for Rent: The Complex World of Surrogate Mothers,” 49–50 “Wombs for Rent, 53 women, 19, 22–23, 66–67, 100–101; body autonomy restrictions of, 200, 209–10; empowerment or exploitation of, 174; hostility towards reproductive rights of, 14–15, 199–210; India’s health regulations for, 242n116; Latina, 208; legal actions against pregnant, 206–7; pro-life forces and, 208; surrogacy as liberating for, 31; surrogacy changing lives of, 191–92; surrogate population

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285

and, 30–36, 50–52, 217n16. See also black women; feminists; gays/lesbians women helping women, 166, 188, 190–91; altruism and, 48–59, 220n25; military wives and, 50–52, 56; news media and surrogacies of, 48–59; Ragoné and, 48– 49, 55, 221n57; surrogacy media theme of, 11, 48, 54–55, 58–59, 88, 189, 192; “what people should do” and, 54 Women’s Bioethics Project, 67–68 women’s health movement, 21 “Would You Risk Your Health for Money?,” 57 wrong reasons, for surrogacy, 49, 56–59 Yalom, Marilyn, 93 Young, Iris Marion, 90 Zarembo, Alan, 70 Zelizer, Viviana, 31–32, 53, 172 zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT), 18

About the Author

Laura Harrison is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

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