What makes a multimillion-dollar, transnational intimate industry possible when most people see it as exploitative? Using the newly emergent case of commercial surrogacy in India, this article extends the literature on stratified reproduction and intimate industries by examining how surrogacy persists and thrives despite its common portrayal as the “rent-a-womb industry” and “baby factory.” Using interview data with eight infertility specialists, 20 intended parents, and 70 Indian surrogate mothers, as well as blogs and media stories, we demonstrate how market actors (...) justify their pursuits through narrating moral frames of compassion and altruism that are not incidental but systematic to and constitutive of transnational surrogacy. We observed two predominant moral frames: surrogacy liberates and empowers Indian women from patriarchal control; and surrogacy furthers reproductive rights. Within these frames, the market exchange of money for babies is cast as compassion, which allows commissioning clients to sidestep accusations of racism, classism, and sexism. Yet, we reveal that the ability to navigate around these threats relies on racist, classist, and sexist tropes about Third World working-class women. Further, we find that surrogate mothers did not experience significant changes in economic status after surrogacy. (shrink)

Transnational surrogacy involves the movement of people, gametes, embryos, and surrogates across international borders. It is now possible to obtain ova from Ukraine and sperm from Denmark, and have the resulting embryos transferred to a Thai surrogate for gestation. This new trend in reproductive travel highlights the increasingly globalized, disaggregated, and commodified nature of reproduction. The demand for transnational surrogacy derives from the differential legal status of surrogacy across jurisdictions. Commercial surrogacy is banned in most European countries, Australia, China, Taiwan, (...) Japan, Mexico, Turkey, and some U.S. states. Other countries, such as Brazil, Israel, and the United Kingdom, have .. (shrink)

The United States has become an ideal marketplace for those seeking selective technologies that are illegal, inaccessible, or unavailable in their own countries. Specifically, technologies such as commercial egg donation, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and sex selection are prohibited or highly regulated in many nations, but remain legal and largely unregulated in the United States. Based on in-depth interviews with US fertility industry providers, including physicians and egg donor and surrogate brokers, this article analyzes how the ideologies of genetic determinism and (...) consumer choice are embedded in the industry. These are transformed into competitive advantages that may appeal to foreign nationals unable to acquire the technologies, services, and reproductive materials to which they feel entitled. Regardless of providers’ particular attitudes regarding the uses of selective technologies, their overall practice reinforces intended parents’ desires to have some control over their potential children’s appearance, temperament, abilities, and behavior. Despite other nations’ laws and policies, ideologies supportive of the use of selective technologies do not, obviously, end at the US borders, and the globalization of communications, media, and transportation technologies enable their spread. (shrink)

Specific studies of the “situated ethics” of international surrogacy that address the structural conditions and local moral economies that sustain the trade are needed. In this essay, I describe the intimate industry of surrogacy in Thailand, exploring the local moral economy in which surrogacy is described as a form of Buddhist merit making and an opportunity to provide for one’s own children. This offers a further example of how other ethical values beyond the strictly economic are negotiated in commercial surrogacy (...) relationships. Situated ethics allow us to locate and understand the tensions, competing logics, and contradictions within ethical practices. (shrink)