The invisible surrogate: Regulatory mechanisms and the erasure of the (re)productive presence of commercial surrogates

• In Event: Transgressive Markets in Assisted Reproduction: Queering family construction in the 21st century

Abstract

Surrogates have become central figures in addressing infertility, yet in India (the world’s largest ART market) they remain at the bottom of the ART food-chain. Dangling in a multitude of limbos she barely manages to stand on the shifting sands of constantly changing regulations, counter-regulations and bans. While her physiological role is well-defined, viz. to carry the child to term and then relinquish it, her position within the larger social structure hovers between liminality and erasure. The state’s acceptance of her is intriguingly contradictory: while it acquires kudos for banning commercial surrogacy that purportedly exploits ‘poor’ surrogates, it does precious little to grant her more legal agency and rights. The newly minted Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2016 in fact mandates that the birth certificate of children born via such means not mention the surrogate and is thus complicit in erasing not just the voice of the surrogate but her very labour and (re)productivity. The surrogate evaporates the moment the child is born, is erased as the ‘birth mother’, and from the lives of couples who distance themselves from this ‘proof’ of their own infertility. Narratives of the relinquishment act as a veneer for the unexamined ontology of being invisibilised. Drawing upon four years of fieldwork in Mumbai and Jaipur we here examine how the surrogate has evolved as a re(productive) labourer and as a category for anchoring our moral battles; revealing how the state, through its very rhetoric of rescue consigns her instead to the black-box of anonymity and exploitation.

Authors

• Rakhi Ghoshal, Unitedworld School of Law

• Bronwyn Parry, King's College London