The Outsourced Uterus

I've continued to think about this piece by Judith Warner at the NYT about outsourcing surrogacy to India since I first read it a couple of days ago. Couples in the US who want to have a baby via a surrogate mother are looking at a steep price tag--the article says in the US it may cost couples as much as $80k. Faced with that cost, US couples are increasingly turning to India for women who will gestate and bear children for them for far less--$6k-10k. That is no small amount of money, particularly to these women, for whom that might be equivalent to ten to fifteen years worth of income. Consequently, the women featured in the article seem to enter into surrogacy willingly, even enthusiastically, because it provides them with a way to get a whole lot of much-needed income.

I admit to feeling quite muddy and conflicted about the situation. On the one hand, it seems so wrong to me, not because I think think there's anything inherently bad about assistive reproductive technologies, but because I think there is a point at which relying on another person's extreme poverty to make them willing to do hard, dangerous work for you is fundamentally disturbing. And also because in reading Warner's description makes me think of A Handmaid's Tale multiplied by Battlestar Galactica's The Farm:

Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.

And yet I feel like that's the wrong reaction to have, that as Jill at Feministe points out, this is just another example of the sort of economic exchange that greases the wheels of the global economy:

If we're going to do the surrogacy thing — and we already are doing it — then let's call it what it is: An exchange of money for services. And let's not pussyfoot around the fact that in a whole lot of service industries, the people providing services are poor, female and brown. Think of housekeepers, fieldworkers, childcare providers, elder-care workers — all of these women use their bodies in the service of others. Many of them are exploited, some are abused, and most are under-paid. But we only go into panic mode when the services provided are sexual.

Stick around for some interesting discussion in Feministe's comments.

And then there's the fact that if my pro-choice politics mean anything, they mean that a woman has the right to decide what to do with her body, and whether and when to have children, not just those children that are biologically or legally hers. If an Indian woman thinks she can best provide for her economic wellbeing, and perhaps that of her family, by acting as a surrogate mother for relatively wealthy, privileged folks from developed countries, shouldn't she have the right to make that choice? And the economics of it certainly make sense from the surrogate's end. There are repeated mentions of being able to buy a house with the proceeds of a stint as a surrogate, from women for whom that purchase would unlikely ever be possible without that money.

Of course that begs the question: am I content to live in a world in which the best path to economic independence for a woman--in India or anywhere else--is renting out her body for nine months to be treated in a manner similar to breeding stock? Not especially, no. But until global poverty and racism get dismantled (no short order!), I certainly can't fault Indian women who use the assets other people, rightly or wrongly, seem to value most: their ability to grow babies.

What do you think about this development?