Sociologist response to "Wombs for Rent"

Sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman wrote me back with her perspective on my Wombs for Rent post that I wrote in response to Judith Warner's piece, Outsourced Wombs. (Warner's NY Times thread now has more than 150 comments.)

In my previous post, I had summarized what I had learned from Katz Rothman at a Breastfeeding and Feminism symposium last September. Here are her provocative thoughts written specifically in response to the Indian surrogacy situation:

"In the [NY Times] responses, I am struck by someone saying that it's 'just' her womb, not important like if it was an egg. It's amazing how totally the genetic imagery has taken over.

"Women's wombs don't walk around separately; we are not walking wombs. To be pregnant is a whole-body experience, as intimate a connection as one human being can have with another. Those who connected this to prostitution are right, it is an intimate physical relationship, but unlike the brief contact of a sexual encounter, this goes on for months and months. And the relationship is not with the paying customer, but with the created baby. At birth, babies recognize their mother's voices, are living in the rhythms of her day -- newborns, for example, tend to wake up at what was the pregnant women's busiest times of the day. This is not a 'surrogate' relationship, but an actual lived one.

"Yes, some women can apparently now become fathers: place their seed in a woman's body and have a baby 'delivered' to them. And they can do that in a loving relationship, as a lesbian couple might do or as sisters, cousins, dear friends might if they share egg and pregnancy. Or they can do that as slave owners did when they implanted their seed into their property to increase their slave holdings. Or they can do that in this new, outsourced way, in which they do not own the woman's body but rent it, with -- as Marx pointed out -- no ongoing relationship, no tie but money.

"And yes, in this brave new world, empowerment for women in poverty can mean selling these services, can mean prostitution, can mean selling organs. It truly can be better to do these things than not. As it could truly be better for a woman in Auschwitz to give sexual services to a guard in exchange for another bit of gruel. The problem lies not with the woman making the 'choice,' but with the situation. We women of the wealthy world profit from the exploitation of poor women, men and children with almost every shirt we put on our backs, almost every bite of food we take. We exploit people in poverty and never have to think about it. And now we can profit in our motherhood -- but unlike the shirt and the food, this time the product is going to grow up and demand an explanation."

Final thoughts from Mojo Mom: Katz Rothman's mention of slavery is a challenging idea for those who want to view the surrogacy arrangement in the realm of "individual choice." But I had thought about the slavery connection as well. Modern slavery is no longer about explicitly "owning" a person. It's about exploiting workers without having to be accountable: controlling people through threats, intimidation, violence, absolute economic dependency, trafficking, or other coercion. For more on this I recommend Kevin Bales' book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy.

We need to be vigilant about upholding the principles of reproductive justice. Just look at historic and modern abuses: coercive practices throughout the world, compulsory sterilization, historical adoption abuses and corruption in our own country.

Even contraception and medically-accurate sex education are under fire in the United States. Who would have thought we'd lose so much ground on those basic issues? And of course if Roe v. Wade is overturned, many states already have abortion bans drafted and ready to encact.

I am passionate about the principles of reproductive justice and I encourage you to learn about this framework. It's the lens I use to look at the world, and when I do, I am worried that women's basic rights to self-determination are under fire here at home and around the globe.

Wombs for rent in India

Judith Warner has a must-read Domestic Disturbances blog post about "Outsourced Wombs" in India. Warner is troubled but can't quite reach the point of calling this callous exploitation of Indian women, who earn the equivalent of 10 to 15 years of normal income for serving as a gestational surrogate for rich Western couples.

The post and the reader comments are all worth reading to see the variety of angles that people take on this issue. I am haunted by the AP Photo of anonymous surrogate mothers in Anand India dressed in surgical scrubs, complete with masks. They might as well be wearing burqas. (I can't reprint the photo here; be sure to follow the link to see it.) The women are wearing blue or pink scrubs, which I assumed corresponds to the gender of the baby they are carrying. How would you like to have your identity covered over with a label representing the fetus you were carrying?

I think it's ultimately harmful to all women any time women are objectified solely as baby-making machines. These are people, adult women with lives, thoughts, personalities, human and reproductive rights. Some will argue that this includes the right to rent out their wombs, much as some people would argue in favor of sex work or selling body organs. I can't support the concept of commercialized surrogacy in any way, shape or form.

Think about the larger social implications. Women are poor--hey, they can rent out their wombs, right? Indian families can't afford to take care of their children--no problem, just gestate an extra baby for a white American couple. Is this what colonialism looks like in the 21st century? What about Indian women who can't have children? What about the effect on the women's families while they are "away" gestating? What does it mean about the way we view women's bodies as a commodity? What does this say about the value of Indian children?

Would we assume that women like us could carry a baby for nine months and give it up with no emotional attachment? What does it mean to be a mother? Is it all in the "seed," the genetic material in the egg and sperm? What about the contribution of the mother who nourished those two cells to grow into a human being?

Last September I heard Dr. Barbara Katz Rothman, a sociologist and adoptive mother, give a provocative keynote address at the Symposium on Breastfeeding and Feminism at UNC. Taking a look back at my notes, she argued that the language of "seed" is the language of patriarchy, the language of control, the language of getting the women to do the right thing. In this framework, the baby belongs to the man, to the state. The woman has nothing to add. Nurturing becomes about minimizing the damage you do, because you can't improve the original essence.

Economically-driven surrogacy seems to invoke all these dynamics, perhaps allowing the paying women clients to assume the man's role in this "seed driven" world, but that is a hollow victory in a process that ultimately exploits human relationships.

I didn't become a feminist so that some day I could exploit other women as well as a man can. Did you?