Surrogacy2

Should surrogacy be banned?

Should surrogacy be regulated?

If so, how?

Should surrogacy be paid or "altrustic"?

Sophie Lewis: Why is gestational surrogacy differentiated from so-called "normal" or "natural" gestation?

The state convinces us that sex is a labor of love in the same way that it convinces us making breakfast and raising kids is a labor of love

Reproductive labor

Emotional labor

Caring labor

Social reproduction: Activities that reproduce both life and capitalism daily and intergenerationally

Public / Private Distinction

The private sphere: the idea that familial, domestic, and intimate relations are separate from the economy and political insitutions

Sex, having and raising children, cleaning the house, and other familial relations are all private acts

The public / private distinction is historically gendered, such that:

• Women are confined to the private, the intimate, and the domestic
• Men act in the public sphere, participate in politics, labor for a wage

This distinction produces partriarchal power over women, such as economic dependency, and domestic and sexual violence within marriage and relationships

"The commodification of women's reproductive labor... - whether domestic work, sex work, care work or, in the case of surrogacy, 'womb work' - produces such intense anxieties as it allows for the extension of the market into the private and intimate sphere of sexuality and reproduction. Surrogacy... is troubling to many because it defies laws of nature, family, religion, motherhood, and the act of giving birth. The assumption underlying such anxieties is that while human labor may be bought and sold, women's reproductive labor is intrinsically not a commodity" (Pande 13).

What happens if we look at mothering through the lens of surrogacy rather than looking at surrogacy through the normative lens of mothering?

-Sophie Lewis

"Baby Gammy"

Pattharamon Chanbua refused to abort Gammy for his congenital heart disorder and cognitive disability

"Given that birth has typically been the marker of individual humans' genealogies and positions within families and racial hierarchies, the rise to prominence of bodies-in-labor whose babies are not racially continuous with themselves - nor kin - introduces new subversive potential to the scene of global reproduction" (Lewis 192).

What does the narrative of the surrogate as a mere vessel carrying biogenetic property obscure?

"Newborns are all aliens - alienated products of gestational labor - who require constant adoption, reappropriation, and care upon their exit from their unity with the mother's flesh" (Lewis 197).

Should gestation be renumerated or altruistic?

Should all people who can get pregnant demand "wages for pregnancy"?

What are the benefits or downsides of rendering surrogacy and pregnancy in general as equivalent?