Brown Bodies White Babies

NYU Press
Chapter Title: Introduction: Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy
Book Title: Brown Bodies, White Babies

Book Subtitle: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy
Book Author(s): Laura Harrison
Published by: NYU Press. (2016)
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Introduction
Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy
On the 2007 premiere of the Lifetime television series Army Wives,

the audience is introduced to a woman with a secret. This woman is
Pamela, a former police officer who became a stay-at-home mother
after her husband enlisted in the military; army men, she says, do not
want their wives to work. In order to meet the financial pressures of
a single-income family, Pamela agrees to an unusual form of employ-
ment: carrying twins for an infertile couple. Pamela keeps the surrogacy
a secret from everyone except her husband, and intends to announce
publicly that the babies have died during delivery after she relinquishes
the children to their “real” parents. In classic television fashion, Pamela’s
body does not cooperate with her plans, and the birth becomes a cha-
otic and alarming event. Pamela experiences her first contractions at a
stuffy military tea party, where her water breaks immediately. Her labor
advances dramatically, as signaled to the audience when a concerned
bystander takes one look at Pamela lying on the bathroom floor and
announces, “You’re gonna deliver!”1
Pamela is then covertly rushed to the hospital by the group that will
make up the Army Wives core characters, a cadre of military wives and
Roland, the only military husband. Of course, Pamela does not make it
to the hospital before the first baby begins to crown, requiring an emer-
gency stop at a closed bar, where her new friends deliver the twins on a
pool table. Despite all of the drama leading up to this moment, the true
surprise is revealed when the white surrogate gives birth to two African
American babies. Pamela explains the situation and is reassured that she
is doing the right thing by both providing for her family and giving the
gift of life. The episode, entitled “A Tribe Is Born,” ends with one of the
women throwing open the curtains of the bar and literally shedding light
on the surrogacy as well as the new “tribe” that has gathered to witness it.2
2 | Introduction
Assisted Reproduction and Family Formation

This pilot episode of Army Wives speaks to a number of tensions sur-
rounding how surrogacy is imagined in our culture, as well as the core
themes of this book. A major debate regarding assisted reproductive
technologies (ARTs) among a wide range of scholars, ethicists, and par-
ticularly feminists has been whether the troubling implications of these
technologies are offset by their potential to transform hegemonic and
traditionally restrictive family formations.3 The sociological and anthro-
pological study of reproduction has made abundantly clear that fertility
is about more than biology. Our understanding of reproduction has
always been informed by social rules and expectations, and these norms
influence how individuals go about imagining the possibilities for family
formation.4 The technologies that separate conception, pregnancy, and
parenthood seem to offer new ways to think about reproduction, and
thus much more agency to the individual to create families that may
flaunt cultural norms. When motherhood is separated into biological,
gestational, and social components, new opportunities for pregnancy
and parenthood are created that put the very “nature” of race and kin-
ship into question.
That being said, the nuclear family has not disintegrated since the
advent of reproductive technologies, and neither have beliefs about the
biological basis of racial difference been seriously undermined. What
I term “cross-racial gestational surrogacy”—when a surrogate carries a
pregnancy for intended parents of a different race—demonstrates how
boundaries of likeness and difference are drawn and negotiated. Acts
that on the surface seem to be radically nontraditional and even ar-
tificial are naturalized, such as a woman of color giving birth to the
genetic children of a white couple. Indeed, reproductive technologies,
including surrogacy, are primarily used in a manner that reinforces the
reproduction of the white, heterosexual, married, middle-class family.5
Surrogacy, particularly cross-racial gestational surrogacy, is not just a
scientific but also a cultural phenomenon that serves as a repository
for unease and anxiety concerning central organizing principles in our
society such as race, gender, and kinship. These constructs evolve in
response to social change, including technological and scientific ad-
vancement, yet are not determined by biological or scientific “truths”;
Introduction | 3
rather, such concepts take form through interaction between scientific

and popular discourses. Cross-racial surrogacy reveals how contem-
porary ideologies of race are tightly interwoven with beliefs about sci-
ence, biology, genetics, and nature. In the most common instances of
cross-racial surrogacy, intended parents rely upon the racialized repro-
ductive labor of women of color, employing scientific narratives about
genetic determinism to normalize this cross-racial contact. Meanwhile,
they juggle the competing message that twenty-first-century America is
“post-racial,” or has moved beyond racial hierarchies and discrimina-
tion, with the deeply entrenched belief that races are biologically dis-
crete, natural entities.
So what are the potentials of these technologies? To answer that ques-
tion, we must first understand what surrogacy entails in terms of medi-
cal intervention and financial commitment, and then take a look at who
uses surrogacy and why. While surrogacy itself is not a reproductive
technology, the most common form of commercial or paid surrogacy
today (known as gestational surrogacy) relies upon relatively intensive
medical interventions. When a surrogate is matched with an intended
parent and all appropriate screening, testing, and counseling have taken
place, an embryo transfer occurs. In preparation, the intended mother
or donor receives a combination of hormonal medications to stimulate
egg development, and then medication to trigger ovulation. Eggs are
then harvested through transvaginal ultrasound aspiration, evaluated
for maturity, and inseminated with the sperm of the intended father or
donor. Meanwhile, in order for the embryos to implant successfully, the
surrogate takes hormones to synchronize her uterine lining with the
donor’s reproductive cycle. Within three to five days after the donor
eggs are fertilized in the lab, the selected embryos are implanted into the
surrogate’s uterus through a small catheter. Excess healthy embryos are
often frozen and stored for later use, should the initial attempt fail or for
a future pregnancy. The surrogate continues with the hormonal replace-
ment regime until a negative or positive pregnancy test is confirmed; if
the transfer was a success, the surrogate remains on the hormone regime
throughout the first trimester.6 According to the Centers for Disease
Control, in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments cost roughly $12,400 per
cycle, and fail 70 percent of the time, suggesting an intensive investment
in both time and finances.7
4 | Introduction
This process is referred to as “gestational surrogacy” because the use

of IVF means that the surrogate gestates, but is not genetically related
to, the fetus. In “traditional surrogacy,” the surrogate is artificially in-
seminated with the father’s or donor’s sperm, and the process is thus
less invasive and less expensive. Today, gestational surrogacy tends to be
the preference of both surrogates and intended parents. Gestational sur-
rogacy is much more common than traditional surrogacy in commer-
cial (paid) arrangements because it is less likely that a non–genetically
related surrogate will be deemed the legal mother should a custody
dispute or other complication arise.8 A typical surrogacy in the United
States is facilitated by a for-profit agency, and costs between $75,000 and
$100,000. This bill often includes an estimated $20,000 payment to the
surrogate, as well as fertility clinic fees, legal fees, egg donation fees, and
payments to brokers.9
While reproductive technologies such as IVF or intrauterine insemi-
nation (IUI) are commonly represented as mere aides to natural, het-
erosexual reproduction, the possibilities for family formation that are
created by such technologies far exceed the bounds of the traditional
nuclear family. This is in part reflected in the variety of reasons that
lead people to choose surrogacy. For women, some of the most com-
mon are recurrent miscarriage, congenital absence of the uterus, a pre-
vious hysterectomy, and medical conditions or medications that make
pregnancy too risky, such as cystic fibrosis, severe diabetes, or breast
cancer.10 Women in many parts of the world are increasingly delay-
ing childbearing until later in life, in part due to a lack of female- and
family-friendly workplace policies. Without downplaying the extreme
financial and emotional hardships that often attend reproductive tech-
nology use, they allow those who can afford them greater flexibility in
forming families outside marriage, or after achieving career milestones.
Surrogacy has also created new pathways for reproduction for queer
families. Lesbians frequently use vaginal insemination, intrauterine in-
semination, and in vitro fertilization to achieve pregnancy, and may use
surrogacy if neither partner is able to carry a pregnancy.11 Both lesbians
and gay men frequently face barriers to adoption, and may be motivated
to seek out ARTs by the desire to have a genetically related child. ARTs
have the potential to intervene in normative models of family formation,
whether by opening doors to parenthood for individuals who have his-
Introduction | 5
torically been barred by institutionalized heteronormativity and active

discrimination, or by creating kinship formations that are not biologi-
cally determined, phallocentric, or racially “pure.”
As the title suggests, this project is particularly interested in how race
intersects with reproductive technologies—how brown bodies are de-
ployed in the creation of white babies. Through the advent of the re-
productive technologies that make gestational surrogacy possible, the
maternal body no longer exists as the sole site of reproductive labor.
Both egg and sperm can be donated or purchased, and then fertilized
in a lab, and even the literal labor of pregnancy operates as an available
commodity. The separation between genetics and gestation has opened
the door to racial difference, in multiple forms. A gay male couple in Is-
rael, prohibited from using surrogacy in their own country, can purchase
eggs from a woman of their own religious and racial background and
then hire a woman in Nepal to bear the child. An infertile white woman
in Michigan can find an egg donor in Iowa and an African American
surrogate in a state “friendlier” to surrogacy, like California. A Hispanic
military wife in Texas can bear twins for a Swedish couple who are able
to provide eggs and sperm but not a hospitable womb, and who do not
live in a country that allows for paid surrogacy. As a result of the advent
of gestational surrogacy through in vitro fertilization, the surrogate, no
longer a genetic contributor to the child, need not “match” the charac-
teristics or desires of the intended parents, including their race and eth-
nicity. This means that according to contemporary racial logic, women
of color who act as surrogates for white families are sharing a biological
connection (the “environment” of the womb and more) with the fetus,
while still giving birth to babies who are understood to be white. What
does cross-racial surrogacy tell us about the way we understand race as
a social, genetic, or biological factor? About racial “transmission” and
how it has changed over time? While ARTs have the potential to com-
plicate the socially imposed boundaries that maintain the constructs of
race, kinship, and gender, the racialization of surrogacy reveals an ongo-
ing commitment to their maintenance. This project analyzes both the
emancipatory potential of ARTs and the changing means by which the
challenges they pose are reabsorbed into the hegemonic norm.
The aforementioned episode of Army Wives speaks to some of these
questions. Because she is carrying twins for a couple of another race,
6 | Introduction
Pamela is a cross-racial gestational surrogate. Yet contrary to what the

Army Wives episode represents, the person of color in a cross-racial
matching is nearly always the surrogate, not the intended parents. Sur-
rogates and intended parents are frequently separated by disparities in
class, educational background, and cultural capital, with the intended
parents occupying the more privileged position. When the surrogate is
a person of color and the intended parents are white, race affords the
intended parents another layer of privilege. This reflects a long history
in the United States of economically and racially dominant social groups
relying on the reproductive labor of women of color as nannies, maids,
and caretakers for the elderly.
The producers of Army Wives could have several strategic reasons
for reversing the racial roles. In this episode of Army Wives, Pamela
is prompted to explain her role as a surrogate in order to dismiss the
specter of cross-racial sex. Indeed, the birth of nonwhite twins leads the
group of women to collectively turn to Roland, the only male and only
African American in their ranks, forcing him to deny paternity. Pamela
is doubly situated as a nonmother to the children through visual and
verbal reference to racial difference, reinforcing her gestational role as
purely custodial. She thus does not become a “bad mother” by hand-
ing over the children to their genetic (read: real) parents, and remains
sympathetic to the audience. The program is able to address race in the
pilot episode without explicitly engaging with the issues of power and
privilege that simmer just below the surface.
While this episode does not use the phrase “intended parents,” it is
one that is routinely employed by surrogacy agencies as well as industry
and scholarly sources. The term refers to the individuals who commis-
sion surrogacy and therefore “intend” to raise the child. This terminol-
ogy differentiates the gestational role of the surrogate (and the genetic
contribution of any donors involved in the process) from the social role
of parenting. The concept of “intent” also has legal connotations; a well-
known case of contested surrogacy in the 1990s was decided on the basis
of intent, with the court ruling that a commissioning couple’s intent to
parent trumped a gestational surrogate’s desire to retain custody of the
nongenetic child to whom she gave birth. The precedent of intent set in
this case has since been used to settle other surrogacy-related disputes.12
Given that intent has been used in a legal sense to bolster the rights of
Introduction | 7
commissioning couples at the expense of surrogates, it is also a phrase

that potentially masks the privileges of the former, including race and
class differences that may advantage intended parents socially, economi-
cally, and legally. The phrase “intended parents” will be used throughout
this book, but I will also challenge its potential for benign anonymity by
foregrounding intersectional analyses of how multiple identity catego-
ries coexist to cumulatively shape the experiences of all parties involved.
Cross-racial gestational surrogacy has proliferated in recent decades
due to technological advancements in the reproductive technology in-
dustry, as well as prevailing popular discourses concerning racial “trans-
mission.” Consumers of reproductive technologies are encouraged by
popular scientific discourse to compartmentalize gestation and genet-
ics, believing that the qualities that determine the identity of their fu-
ture child are locked into the child’s genes. As a result, many intended
parents do not hesitate to choose a gestational surrogate of a different
race. This genetic essentialism, in which cultural meanings of the gene
conflate with the scientific or biological, “reduces the self to a molecular
entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral
complexity, with their genes.”13 The role of the surrogate is minimized
when DNA is framed as the sole arbiter of the “true self.”14 Genetic es-
sentialism also raises questions for how our society defines race; as I
will demonstrate, race and ethnicity are cast as attributes carried by
sperm and egg in the ART industry, thus whiteness can be “commer-
cially reproduced”15 even in cross-racial surrogacy arrangements. When
intended parents, surrogates, donors, fertility clinics, and others all play
their parts in the fiction that race is reproduced genetically, then these
actors and institutions are reinforcing a social “truth” about race rather
than a scientific one. In other words, ART use in the United States reifies
cultural attitudes about the biological basis for racial difference, while
scientific and academic arguments to the contrary largely fail to trickle
down into the popular consciousness.
Although gestational carriers are employed in less than 1 percent
of ART procedures tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC),16 the figures are increasing exponentially, with the
number of reporting fertility clinics that offer gestational carrier ser-
vices rising from 69 percent in 200117 to 86 percent in 2011.18 Cross-
racial gestational surrogacy is also a small but seemingly growing
8 | Introduction
phenomenon. In a groundbreaking ethnographic study, the anthro-

pologist Heléna Ragoné calculated that roughly 30 percent of gesta-
tional arrangements in the largest surrogacy programs at the time were
between surrogates and intended parents of different ethnic and racial
backgrounds.19 The exact percentage of surrogacy contracts in the
United States today that are cross-racial is unknown, in part because
the CDC does not collect racial identifiers from the individual clinics
that report ART success rates.
When women of color work as surrogates, they are tapping into a his-
tory of racialized reproductive labor in the United States in which domi-
nant groups rely upon the reproductive potential of nonwhite women,
women whose own reproductive desires have historically been thwarted
and even demonized. Yet reproductive technologies are not determined
by this history. The intimate interracial contact of cross-racial gesta-
tional surrogacy has the potential to blur boundaries of racial “purity.”
It also disrupts long-standing hierarchies valuing the types of families
that deserve to be reproduced, as in the revelatory moment in Army
Wives when a white surrogate gives birth in the service of creating an
African American family. This moment also expands upon traditional
narratives of what birth means for the woman experiencing labor; it is
through surrogacy that Pamela creates her own alternative family for-
mation, made up of a group of army spouses that cross boundaries of
race, class, sex, and military rank. Rather than bonding with the babies
in the traditional fashion, whereby biology determines maternal nature,
Pamela bonds with a group of fictive kin who support her in a way that
her “real” family does not.
The challenge to traditional maternity that Pamela represents in this
episode also raises some of the central questions of this book: what kind
of ideological and cultural work is done socially and legally to shore up
traditional notions of family, gender, and race in the face of changing
reproductive technologies? How are reproductive technologies natural-
ized so that these hegemonic constructs retain cultural salience? Fem-
inists and other ethicists have raised serious concerns about whether
reproductive technologies and surrogacy represent increased agency for
the various actors involved, including infertile women, egg donors, and
surrogates.20 These concerns include whether or not the relative issues
at stake for each of these groups are given equal weight; in other words,
Introduction | 9
does the “natural” desire of intended parents to create a biological family

overshadow the potential economic and bodily exploitation of egg do-
nors and surrogates? Or from another perspective, do paternalistic and
culturally specific concerns about what constitutes exploitative labor in
fact limit women’s agency and ability to support their families? While
this project does not seek to resolve the ethical and moral implications
of surrogacy, I am interested in the tension between the potential for
ARTs to destabilize hegemonic ideologies of what it means to be fam-
ily, a mother, to share “blood” and “likeness,” and the dominant uses of
ARTs that tend to reinforce traditional constructs.
Methods and Overview of the Book

Surrogacy receives popular and legal attention that is disproportionate
to its actual use. Why study surrogacy when it is a statistically infrequent
means of family formation in the United States today? Why do the ethi-
cal, moral, and political conundrums raised by surrogacy loom so large
in the public consciousness? As the sociologist Susan Markens argues,
surrogacy can be read as a form of “symbolic politics,” or “debates that
reflect underlying social tensions and concerns.”21 Likewise, small-scale
or minority phenomena such as cross-racial gestational surrogacy, gay
and lesbian parenting, or interracial marriage provide insight into the
battle lines that are drawn between hegemonic and counterhegemonic
forces, as well as the ways normative ideologies exert and remake them-
selves in the wake of challenges. In light of this, the actual frequency of
gestational surrogacy in the United States is not central to my argument;
this project analyzes the discourse surrounding gestational surrogacy,
how it is naturalized, and whether this naturalization serves to shore up
dominant ideologies of race and kinship.
This book contributes to an active field of literature on reproductive
technologies while addressing understudied aspects of surrogacy within
this scholarship. With notable exceptions, feminist analyses of surro-
gacy have largely focused on the gendered implications of the practice
and minimized the role of race.22 My research takes intersectionality as
a crucial starting point, examining the ways identity categories come
together to form nexuses of privilege and oppression.23 Fertility clinics,
surrogacy agencies, and intended parents often dismiss the role of race
10 | Introduction
in gestational surrogacy arrangements as inconsequential, particularly

in comparison to the race of egg and sperm donors who will contribute
their genetic material. A surrogate is measured instead by markers of
appropriate femininity, including the completeness of her own biologi-
cal family and the perceived authenticity of her altruistic motivations.
Yet gender identity is not isolated from socially identified race, and thus
the race of the surrogate takes on varying levels of importance in re-
lation to other intersectional constructs. For example, white European
and American intended parents may read the race, class, and gender of
surrogates in India as signifiers of docility, hyperfertility, and Other-
ness. These factors then increase the perceived attractiveness of Indian
women as ideal reproductive laborers. Intersectionality adds a critical
layer of analysis to cross-racial gestational surrogacy.
In addition to having a primary focus on gender, much of the rel-
evant scholarship on reproductive technologies has been ethnographic.
These works often study the motivations of the actors involved in ARTs
and interrogate the ethical issues raised by such practices.24 This book
is invested in a different set of questions, primarily concerning the dis-
course on surrogacy in the United States, and what it tells us about larger
ideologies of race, gender, and kinship. Discourse consists of both what
is said and what is silenced, and while capable of transmitting and pro-
ducing power, it can also reveal the mechanisms of power and provide
strategies for resistance.25 Discourse is “a social construction of reality,
a form of knowledge”; thus my analysis speaks to how the discussions
about race, gender, and kinship within surrogacy discourse are not iso-
lated to this small-scale phenomenon, but actually have broader impli-
cations for shifting social roles and identities.26
This project involves a multisited, qualitative analysis of sources, re-
quiring an interdisciplinary methodology that treats surrogacy as a site
that reveals larger social anxieties concerning race, gender, and kinship.
Interdisciplinary, qualitative research allows for themes to emerge after
the process of data collection; in this project, this means that the over-
arching questions about surrogacy led me to certain sites, texts, and
sources, rather than limiting these sources to match one methodologi-
cal approach. As I began to research the development of surrogacy into
a transnational, multibillion-dollar industry, it was clear that this busi-
ness is built upon shifting ideologies of femininity, racial difference,
Introduction | 11
and the value of women’s work. Thus, I was drawn to multiple sites
of investigation, including the law, mass media, the history of racial-
ized reproductive labor, and the contemporary mediated spaces—the
websites and databases—where the services of surrogate and egg do-
nors are advertised. While these sites are multiple, they are not entirely
disconnected from one another. They weave together the complicated
strands of commerce, representation, policy, and historical precedent
with contemporary and rapidly shifting cultural norms about what
makes a family.
Chapter 1 places reproductive technologies in historical perspective,
beginning with the 1978 birth of the first child born through in vitro
fertilization, the attendant explosion of infertility services in the United
States, and the development of gestational surrogacy. This chapter also
considers how the advent of gestational surrogacy complicates the se-
lection of a surrogate, the surrogate population, and the role of race in
the reproductive technology industry. Chapter 1 introduces the femi-
nist framework within which this book is situated by contextualizing
the varied feminist responses to ARTs in the last several decades. Early
feminist writing on ARTs commonly cast these technologies as either
oppressive tools of the patriarchy or an unmitigated good. The reali-
ties of surrogacy beg for a more complicated framework; the following
chapters situate cross-racial surrogacy within specific gendered, racial,
historical, and legal contexts.
Chapter 2 is based on a qualitative analysis of mainstream media
sources that covered surrogacy from 2000 to 2010, including news-
papers, magazines, radio, and television news. Multiple—and often
competing—narratives of surrogacy coexisted in the popular media.
These narratives are significant because it is through the media that
most people are introduced to surrogacy. This analysis resulted in the
emergence of three primary themes in mainstream media coverage of
surrogacy: a “women-helping-women” narrative, the call for regulation,
and “the kinship question.” The theme of women helping women is most
prevalent; it explains surrogacy primarily through the relationship be-
tween women, in which altruism motivates one woman to help another
reach the apotheosis of femininity by becoming a mother. Problemati-
cally, the common representation of this exchange is as an equal one,
whereby the differences between monetary compensation and a child
12 | Introduction
are flattened through the leveling effects of altruism. Another theme is

the recurrent call for regulation, in which narratives of surrogacy (par-
ticularly those warning of the dangers of the practice) have moved away
from a focus on the individual “bad” surrogate or manipulative intended
parents. Instead, these narratives emphasize the lack of regulation at the
state and federal level as the principal villain. In effect, the transfer of
babies through surrogacy is not condemned as inherently exploitative
to either women or children but is rather cast as a market in need of
protective legislation. Finally, media discourse on surrogacy raises the
kinship question, which reflects the anxieties raised by ARTs’ challenges
to the traditional family. There are multiple strands of this discourse;
some focus on the “unnatural,” “brave new world” aspect of ARTs, while
others participate in the naturalization of ARTs by framing ART-created
families as “just like us.”
Chapter 3 examines how discourses of race are influenced by the
economic and reproductive imperatives of society at different historical
moments. This chapter historicizes how ideologies of race and racial
“transmission” were adapted during the era of cross-racial wet nurs-
ing in America in response to the labor needs of the white dominant
classes. Both cross-racial wet nursing and cross-racial gestational sur-
rogacy are evidence of the hegemonic power of dominant groups to
naturalize deeply racialized and gendered practices in ways that eco-
nomically benefit the interests of these groups. In this chapter I com-
pare historical examples of racialized reproduction to contemporary
examples with an analysis of two legal cases involving cross-racial
gestational surrogacy: Johnson v. Calvert, the first case in the United
States in which a gestational surrogate sought child custody, and the
more recent 2009 trial, Marion County Division of Children’s Services
v. Melinger. The specifics of these two cases vary dramatically; most
notably, the African American surrogate Anna Johnson went to court
for custody of the child she bore, while the more recent case focused
on the parental fitness of the white intended father. What these trials
have in common is that in both instances racial difference between the
surrogate and intended parents served the interests of the racially and
economically privileged parties. Like cross-racial wet nursing, cross-
racial gestational surrogacy is part of a complicated history of racialized
reproductive labor in the United States.
Introduction | 13
In chapter 4, I contextualize the shifting popular and scientific dis-

courses of race since the mid-twentieth century by analyzing databases
of egg donors and surrogates created by agencies to connect intended
parents with the women who provide these services. From lists put
together by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and RE-
SOLVE: The National Infertility Association, I selected agencies that
provided both egg donation and surrogacy services. This allowed me to
contrast how traits like the race and ethnicity of surrogates and egg do-
nors were represented both within and across organizations. This chap-
ter examines the tenacity with which a biological framework for race
has persisted, aided by the increased commodification of scientific re-
search. Race, alongside traits such as eye color, intelligence, and person-
ality, is coded as having biological origins. Reproductive technologies
demonstrate that despite scientific debates, ARTs and other race-based
medicines continue to promote and reflect a popular understanding of
distinct biological races. Thus the egg donor and surrogacy databases
built by ART clinics reflect often-unspoken assumptions about race and
heritability, and demonstrate how scientific and academic assertions of
the biological meaninglessness of race largely fail to trickle down into
the popular consciousness.
Chapter 5 extends my analysis of cross-racial gestational surrogacy
to consider the transnational circuits of reproductive labor from the
United States to India, particularly what is known as “reproductive
tourism.” Broadly speaking, reproductive tourism is a relatively recent
term coined to describe the increasing travel across national boundar-
ies by individuals seeking fertility services, including donor eggs and
sperm, procedures such as in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy. Repro-
ductive tourism is motivated by a number of factors, such as the varied
legal restrictions on ARTs in many European nations, long waiting lists
for donors and surrogates, and prohibitively expensive prices that pro-
spective parents can greatly reduce by “shopping around” for services.
Through secondary sources, magazine, newspaper, and television cover-
age, and documentary films, this chapter examines how notions of race
and genetic determinism are mapped uneasily onto surrogacy in India.
Intended parents benefit from the racial and economic “difference” be-
tween themselves and Indian surrogates. These power differentials in-
clude the stark reality that surrogates have little recourse should they be
14 | Introduction
mistreated. Intended parents are also able to naturalize their claims to

kinship with their future children in juxtaposition to the “Otherness” of
the surrogate. I conclude this chapter with a reimagining of reproduc-
tive tourism as something that happens not only transnationally, but
also within national borders. If one takes seriously the social disparities
between contracting parties, I ask, does reproductive tourism also exist
within the United States?
To varying extents, each chapter addresses material that is in some
way time-sensitive. New media narratives of surrogacy are constantly
being produced, fertility clinics are updating their databases with every
new donor and surrogate that they accept, and the purview of repro-
ductive tourism expands continuously as entrepreneurial individuals set
their sights on nations whose reproductive resources remain untapped.
Most significantly, innovations in reproductive technologies advance at
a rate with which it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep pace. However,
the arguments and theoretical frameworks that underpin this research
remain relevant, largely because this project resonates beyond the speci-
ficity of ARTs and draws historicized comparisons that tap into a much
longer tradition of cross-racial reproductive labor.
I conclude this study by linking the core themes to the increasing
hostility to women’s reproductive rights at the local, state, and national
level, namely, the recent spate of state amendments concerning fetal
personhood. As feminist theory and practice have consistently urged
us to recognize, personal or private matters such as ART use can in fact
have enormous repercussions for how we think about, politicize, and
adjudicate some of the most sacred aspects of our existence. While this
book examines a narrow slice of the field of reproductive politics and
reproductive justice, many readers will come to this topic with some
personal experience or future aspirations regarding pregnancy, fertility,
and family building. I was not a mother when I began researching this
book, but have given birth to two children during the writing process.
The experience of being pregnant while reading, researching, and writ-
ing about ideologies of gender, fertility, and motherhood has changed
the way I think about my own position within these frameworks. I hope
that this book will offer readers a new way of thinking as well, particu-
larly about how our intersecting identities shape our expectations of
fertility services, our access to them, and how we view ourselves as a
Introduction | 15
consumer or (re)producer within this active market. I hope that this

book provides readers with the understanding that whether we ever
enter the market for fertility services ourselves, surrogacy and the
discourse surrounding it are indicative of broader social debates and
contestation over gender roles, boundaries of racial difference, and the
meaning of kinship.
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NYU Press
Chapter Title: Introduction: Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy

Introduction
Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy
On the 2007 premiere of the Lifetime television series Army Wives,

the audience is introduced to a woman with a secret. This woman is
Pamela, a former police officer who became a stay-at-home mother
after her husband enlisted in the military; army men, she says, do not
want their wives to work. In order to meet the financial pressures of
a single-income family, Pamela agrees to an unusual form of employ-
ment: carrying twins for an infertile couple. Pamela keeps the surrogacy
a secret from everyone except her husband, and intends to announce
publicly that the babies have died during delivery after she relinquishes
the children to their “real” parents. In classic television fashion, Pamela’s
body does not cooperate with her plans, and the birth becomes a cha-
otic and alarming event. Pamela experiences her first contractions at a
stuffy military tea party, where her water breaks immediately. Her labor
advances dramatically, as signaled to the audience when a concerned
bystander takes one look at Pamela lying on the bathroom floor and
announces, “You’re gonna deliver!”1
Pamela is then covertly rushed to the hospital by the group that will
make up the Army Wives core characters, a cadre of military wives and
Roland, the only military husband. Of course, Pamela does not make it
to the hospital before the first baby begins to crown, requiring an emer-
gency stop at a closed bar, where her new friends deliver the twins on a
pool table. Despite all of the drama leading up to this moment, the true
surprise is revealed when the white surrogate gives birth to two African
American babies. Pamela explains the situation and is reassured that she
is doing the right thing by both providing for her family and giving the
gift of life. The episode, entitled “A Tribe Is Born,” ends with one of the
women throwing open the curtains of the bar and literally shedding light
on the surrogacy as well as the new “tribe” that has gathered to witness it.2
2 | Introduction
Assisted Reproduction and Family Formation

This pilot episode of Army Wives speaks to a number of tensions sur-
rounding how surrogacy is imagined in our culture, as well as the core
themes of this book. A major debate regarding assisted reproductive
technologies (ARTs) among a wide range of scholars, ethicists, and par-
ticularly feminists has been whether the troubling implications of these
technologies are offset by their potential to transform hegemonic and
traditionally restrictive family formations.3 The sociological and anthro-
pological study of reproduction has made abundantly clear that fertility
is about more than biology. Our understanding of reproduction has
always been informed by social rules and expectations, and these norms
influence how individuals go about imagining the possibilities for family
formation.4 The technologies that separate conception, pregnancy, and
parenthood seem to offer new ways to think about reproduction, and
thus much more agency to the individual to create families that may
flaunt cultural norms. When motherhood is separated into biological,
gestational, and social components, new opportunities for pregnancy
and parenthood are created that put the very “nature” of race and kin-
ship into question.
That being said, the nuclear family has not disintegrated since the
advent of reproductive technologies, and neither have beliefs about the
biological basis of racial difference been seriously undermined. What
I term “cross-racial gestational surrogacy”—when a surrogate carries a
pregnancy for intended parents of a different race—demonstrates how
boundaries of likeness and difference are drawn and negotiated. Acts
that on the surface seem to be radically nontraditional and even ar-
tificial are naturalized, such as a woman of color giving birth to the
genetic children of a white couple. Indeed, reproductive technologies,
including surrogacy, are primarily used in a manner that reinforces the
reproduction of the white, heterosexual, married, middle-class family.5
Surrogacy, particularly cross-racial gestational surrogacy, is not just a
scientific but also a cultural phenomenon that serves as a repository
for unease and anxiety concerning central organizing principles in our
society such as race, gender, and kinship. These constructs evolve in
response to social change, including technological and scientific ad-
vancement, yet are not determined by biological or scientific “truths”;
Introduction | 3
rather, such concepts take form through interaction between scientific

and popular discourses. Cross-racial surrogacy reveals how contem-
porary ideologies of race are tightly interwoven with beliefs about sci-
ence, biology, genetics, and nature. In the most common instances of
cross-racial surrogacy, intended parents rely upon the racialized repro-
ductive labor of women of color, employing scientific narratives about
genetic determinism to normalize this cross-racial contact. Meanwhile,
they juggle the competing message that twenty-first-century America is
“post-racial,” or has moved beyond racial hierarchies and discrimina-
tion, with the deeply entrenched belief that races are biologically dis-
crete, natural entities.
So what are the potentials of these technologies? To answer that ques-
tion, we must first understand what surrogacy entails in terms of medi-
cal intervention and financial commitment, and then take a look at who
uses surrogacy and why. While surrogacy itself is not a reproductive
technology, the most common form of commercial or paid surrogacy
today (known as gestational surrogacy) relies upon relatively intensive
medical interventions. When a surrogate is matched with an intended
parent and all appropriate screening, testing, and counseling have taken
place, an embryo transfer occurs. In preparation, the intended mother
or donor receives a combination of hormonal medications to stimulate
egg development, and then medication to trigger ovulation. Eggs are
then harvested through transvaginal ultrasound aspiration, evaluated
for maturity, and inseminated with the sperm of the intended father or
donor. Meanwhile, in order for the embryos to implant successfully, the
surrogate takes hormones to synchronize her uterine lining with the
donor’s reproductive cycle. Within three to five days after the donor
eggs are fertilized in the lab, the selected embryos are implanted into the
surrogate’s uterus through a small catheter. Excess healthy embryos are
often frozen and stored for later use, should the initial attempt fail or for
a future pregnancy. The surrogate continues with the hormonal replace-
ment regime until a negative or positive pregnancy test is confirmed; if
the transfer was a success, the surrogate remains on the hormone regime
throughout the first trimester.6 According to the Centers for Disease
Control, in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments cost roughly $12,400 per
cycle, and fail 70 percent of the time, suggesting an intensive investment
in both time and finances.7
4 | Introduction
This process is referred to as “gestational surrogacy” because the use

of IVF means that the surrogate gestates, but is not genetically related
to, the fetus. In “traditional surrogacy,” the surrogate is artificially in-
seminated with the father’s or donor’s sperm, and the process is thus
less invasive and less expensive. Today, gestational surrogacy tends to be
the preference of both surrogates and intended parents. Gestational sur-
rogacy is much more common than traditional surrogacy in commer-
cial (paid) arrangements because it is less likely that a non–genetically
related surrogate will be deemed the legal mother should a custody
dispute or other complication arise.8 A typical surrogacy in the United
States is facilitated by a for-profit agency, and costs between $75,000 and
$100,000. This bill often includes an estimated $20,000 payment to the
surrogate, as well as fertility clinic fees, legal fees, egg donation fees, and
payments to brokers.9
While reproductive technologies such as IVF or intrauterine insemi-
nation (IUI) are commonly represented as mere aides to natural, het-
erosexual reproduction, the possibilities for family formation that are
created by such technologies far exceed the bounds of the traditional
nuclear family. This is in part reflected in the variety of reasons that
lead people to choose surrogacy. For women, some of the most com-
mon are recurrent miscarriage, congenital absence of the uterus, a pre-
vious hysterectomy, and medical conditions or medications that make
pregnancy too risky, such as cystic fibrosis, severe diabetes, or breast
cancer.10 Women in many parts of the world are increasingly delay-
ing childbearing until later in life, in part due to a lack of female- and
family-friendly workplace policies. Without downplaying the extreme
financial and emotional hardships that often attend reproductive tech-
nology use, they allow those who can afford them greater flexibility in
forming families outside marriage, or after achieving career milestones.
Surrogacy has also created new pathways for reproduction for queer
families. Lesbians frequently use vaginal insemination, intrauterine in-
semination, and in vitro fertilization to achieve pregnancy, and may use
surrogacy if neither partner is able to carry a pregnancy.11 Both lesbians
and gay men frequently face barriers to adoption, and may be motivated
to seek out ARTs by the desire to have a genetically related child. ARTs
have the potential to intervene in normative models of family formation,
whether by opening doors to parenthood for individuals who have his-
Introduction | 5
torically been barred by institutionalized heteronormativity and active

discrimination, or by creating kinship formations that are not biologi-
cally determined, phallocentric, or racially “pure.”
As the title suggests, this project is particularly interested in how race
intersects with reproductive technologies—how brown bodies are de-
ployed in the creation of white babies. Through the advent of the re-
productive technologies that make gestational surrogacy possible, the
maternal body no longer exists as the sole site of reproductive labor.
Both egg and sperm can be donated or purchased, and then fertilized
in a lab, and even the literal labor of pregnancy operates as an available
commodity. The separation between genetics and gestation has opened
the door to racial difference, in multiple forms. A gay male couple in Is-
rael, prohibited from using surrogacy in their own country, can purchase
eggs from a woman of their own religious and racial background and
then hire a woman in Nepal to bear the child. An infertile white woman
in Michigan can find an egg donor in Iowa and an African American
surrogate in a state “friendlier” to surrogacy, like California. A Hispanic
military wife in Texas can bear twins for a Swedish couple who are able
to provide eggs and sperm but not a hospitable womb, and who do not
live in a country that allows for paid surrogacy. As a result of the advent
of gestational surrogacy through in vitro fertilization, the surrogate, no
longer a genetic contributor to the child, need not “match” the charac-
teristics or desires of the intended parents, including their race and eth-
nicity. This means that according to contemporary racial logic, women
of color who act as surrogates for white families are sharing a biological
connection (the “environment” of the womb and more) with the fetus,
while still giving birth to babies who are understood to be white. What
does cross-racial surrogacy tell us about the way we understand race as
a social, genetic, or biological factor? About racial “transmission” and
how it has changed over time? While ARTs have the potential to com-
plicate the socially imposed boundaries that maintain the constructs of
race, kinship, and gender, the racialization of surrogacy reveals an ongo-
ing commitment to their maintenance. This project analyzes both the
emancipatory potential of ARTs and the changing means by which the
challenges they pose are reabsorbed into the hegemonic norm.
The aforementioned episode of Army Wives speaks to some of these
questions. Because she is carrying twins for a couple of another race,
6 | Introduction
Pamela is a cross-racial gestational surrogate. Yet contrary to what the

Army Wives episode represents, the person of color in a cross-racial
matching is nearly always the surrogate, not the intended parents. Sur-
rogates and intended parents are frequently separated by disparities in
class, educational background, and cultural capital, with the intended
parents occupying the more privileged position. When the surrogate is
a person of color and the intended parents are white, race affords the
intended parents another layer of privilege. This reflects a long history
in the United States of economically and racially dominant social groups
relying on the reproductive labor of women of color as nannies, maids,
and caretakers for the elderly.
The producers of Army Wives could have several strategic reasons
for reversing the racial roles. In this episode of Army Wives, Pamela
is prompted to explain her role as a surrogate in order to dismiss the
specter of cross-racial sex. Indeed, the birth of nonwhite twins leads the
group of women to collectively turn to Roland, the only male and only
African American in their ranks, forcing him to deny paternity. Pamela
is doubly situated as a nonmother to the children through visual and
verbal reference to racial difference, reinforcing her gestational role as
purely custodial. She thus does not become a “bad mother” by hand-
ing over the children to their genetic (read: real) parents, and remains
sympathetic to the audience. The program is able to address race in the
pilot episode without explicitly engaging with the issues of power and
privilege that simmer just below the surface.
While this episode does not use the phrase “intended parents,” it is
one that is routinely employed by surrogacy agencies as well as industry
and scholarly sources. The term refers to the individuals who commis-
sion surrogacy and therefore “intend” to raise the child. This terminol-
ogy differentiates the gestational role of the surrogate (and the genetic
contribution of any donors involved in the process) from the social role
of parenting. The concept of “intent” also has legal connotations; a well-
known case of contested surrogacy in the 1990s was decided on the basis
of intent, with the court ruling that a commissioning couple’s intent to
parent trumped a gestational surrogate’s desire to retain custody of the
nongenetic child to whom she gave birth. The precedent of intent set in
this case has since been used to settle other surrogacy-related disputes.12
Given that intent has been used in a legal sense to bolster the rights of
Introduction | 7
commissioning couples at the expense of surrogates, it is also a phrase

that potentially masks the privileges of the former, including race and
class differences that may advantage intended parents socially, economi-
cally, and legally. The phrase “intended parents” will be used throughout
this book, but I will also challenge its potential for benign anonymity by
foregrounding intersectional analyses of how multiple identity catego-
ries coexist to cumulatively shape the experiences of all parties involved.
Cross-racial gestational surrogacy has proliferated in recent decades
due to technological advancements in the reproductive technology in-
dustry, as well as prevailing popular discourses concerning racial “trans-
mission.” Consumers of reproductive technologies are encouraged by
popular scientific discourse to compartmentalize gestation and genet-
ics, believing that the qualities that determine the identity of their fu-
ture child are locked into the child’s genes. As a result, many intended
parents do not hesitate to choose a gestational surrogate of a different
race. This genetic essentialism, in which cultural meanings of the gene
conflate with the scientific or biological, “reduces the self to a molecular
entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral
complexity, with their genes.”13 The role of the surrogate is minimized
when DNA is framed as the sole arbiter of the “true self.”14 Genetic es-
sentialism also raises questions for how our society defines race; as I
will demonstrate, race and ethnicity are cast as attributes carried by
sperm and egg in the ART industry, thus whiteness can be “commer-
cially reproduced”15 even in cross-racial surrogacy arrangements. When
intended parents, surrogates, donors, fertility clinics, and others all play
their parts in the fiction that race is reproduced genetically, then these
actors and institutions are reinforcing a social “truth” about race rather
than a scientific one. In other words, ART use in the United States reifies
cultural attitudes about the biological basis for racial difference, while
scientific and academic arguments to the contrary largely fail to trickle
down into the popular consciousness.
Although gestational carriers are employed in less than 1 percent
of ART procedures tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC),16 the figures are increasing exponentially, with the
number of reporting fertility clinics that offer gestational carrier ser-
vices rising from 69 percent in 200117 to 86 percent in 2011.18 Cross-
racial gestational surrogacy is also a small but seemingly growing
8 | Introduction
phenomenon. In a groundbreaking ethnographic study, the anthro-

pologist Heléna Ragoné calculated that roughly 30 percent of gesta-
tional arrangements in the largest surrogacy programs at the time were
between surrogates and intended parents of different ethnic and racial
backgrounds.19 The exact percentage of surrogacy contracts in the
United States today that are cross-racial is unknown, in part because
the CDC does not collect racial identifiers from the individual clinics
that report ART success rates.
When women of color work as surrogates, they are tapping into a his-
tory of racialized reproductive labor in the United States in which domi-
nant groups rely upon the reproductive potential of nonwhite women,
women whose own reproductive desires have historically been thwarted
and even demonized. Yet reproductive technologies are not determined
by this history. The intimate interracial contact of cross-racial gesta-
tional surrogacy has the potential to blur boundaries of racial “purity.”
It also disrupts long-standing hierarchies valuing the types of families
that deserve to be reproduced, as in the revelatory moment in Army
Wives when a white surrogate gives birth in the service of creating an
African American family. This moment also expands upon traditional
narratives of what birth means for the woman experiencing labor; it is
through surrogacy that Pamela creates her own alternative family for-
mation, made up of a group of army spouses that cross boundaries of
race, class, sex, and military rank. Rather than bonding with the babies
in the traditional fashion, whereby biology determines maternal nature,
Pamela bonds with a group of fictive kin who support her in a way that
her “real” family does not.
The challenge to traditional maternity that Pamela represents in this
episode also raises some of the central questions of this book: what kind
of ideological and cultural work is done socially and legally to shore up
traditional notions of family, gender, and race in the face of changing
reproductive technologies? How are reproductive technologies natural-
ized so that these hegemonic constructs retain cultural salience? Fem-
inists and other ethicists have raised serious concerns about whether
reproductive technologies and surrogacy represent increased agency for
the various actors involved, including infertile women, egg donors, and
surrogates.20 These concerns include whether or not the relative issues
at stake for each of these groups are given equal weight; in other words,
Introduction | 9
does the “natural” desire of intended parents to create a biological family

overshadow the potential economic and bodily exploitation of egg do-
nors and surrogates? Or from another perspective, do paternalistic and
culturally specific concerns about what constitutes exploitative labor in
fact limit women’s agency and ability to support their families? While
this project does not seek to resolve the ethical and moral implications
of surrogacy, I am interested in the tension between the potential for
ARTs to destabilize hegemonic ideologies of what it means to be fam-
ily, a mother, to share “blood” and “likeness,” and the dominant uses of
ARTs that tend to reinforce traditional constructs.
Methods and Overview of the Book

Surrogacy receives popular and legal attention that is disproportionate
to its actual use. Why study surrogacy when it is a statistically infrequent
means of family formation in the United States today? Why do the ethi-
cal, moral, and political conundrums raised by surrogacy loom so large
in the public consciousness? As the sociologist Susan Markens argues,
surrogacy can be read as a form of “symbolic politics,” or “debates that
reflect underlying social tensions and concerns.”21 Likewise, small-scale
or minority phenomena such as cross-racial gestational surrogacy, gay
and lesbian parenting, or interracial marriage provide insight into the
battle lines that are drawn between hegemonic and counterhegemonic
forces, as well as the ways normative ideologies exert and remake them-
selves in the wake of challenges. In light of this, the actual frequency of
gestational surrogacy in the United States is not central to my argument;
this project analyzes the discourse surrounding gestational surrogacy,
how it is naturalized, and whether this naturalization serves to shore up
dominant ideologies of race and kinship.
This book contributes to an active field of literature on reproductive
technologies while addressing understudied aspects of surrogacy within
this scholarship. With notable exceptions, feminist analyses of surro-
gacy have largely focused on the gendered implications of the practice
and minimized the role of race.22 My research takes intersectionality as
a crucial starting point, examining the ways identity categories come
together to form nexuses of privilege and oppression.23 Fertility clinics,
surrogacy agencies, and intended parents often dismiss the role of race
10 | Introduction
in gestational surrogacy arrangements as inconsequential, particularly

in comparison to the race of egg and sperm donors who will contribute
their genetic material. A surrogate is measured instead by markers of
appropriate femininity, including the completeness of her own biologi-
cal family and the perceived authenticity of her altruistic motivations.
Yet gender identity is not isolated from socially identified race, and thus
the race of the surrogate takes on varying levels of importance in re-
lation to other intersectional constructs. For example, white European
and American intended parents may read the race, class, and gender of
surrogates in India as signifiers of docility, hyperfertility, and Other-
ness. These factors then increase the perceived attractiveness of Indian
women as ideal reproductive laborers. Intersectionality adds a critical
layer of analysis to cross-racial gestational surrogacy.
In addition to having a primary focus on gender, much of the rel-
evant scholarship on reproductive technologies has been ethnographic.
These works often study the motivations of the actors involved in ARTs
and interrogate the ethical issues raised by such practices.24 This book
is invested in a different set of questions, primarily concerning the dis-
course on surrogacy in the United States, and what it tells us about larger
ideologies of race, gender, and kinship. Discourse consists of both what
is said and what is silenced, and while capable of transmitting and pro-
ducing power, it can also reveal the mechanisms of power and provide
strategies for resistance.25 Discourse is “a social construction of reality,
a form of knowledge”; thus my analysis speaks to how the discussions
about race, gender, and kinship within surrogacy discourse are not iso-
lated to this small-scale phenomenon, but actually have broader impli-
cations for shifting social roles and identities.26
This project involves a multisited, qualitative analysis of sources, re-
quiring an interdisciplinary methodology that treats surrogacy as a site
that reveals larger social anxieties concerning race, gender, and kinship.
Interdisciplinary, qualitative research allows for themes to emerge after
the process of data collection; in this project, this means that the over-
arching questions about surrogacy led me to certain sites, texts, and
sources, rather than limiting these sources to match one methodologi-
cal approach. As I began to research the development of surrogacy into
a transnational, multibillion-dollar industry, it was clear that this busi-
ness is built upon shifting ideologies of femininity, racial difference,
Introduction | 11
and the value of women’s work. Thus, I was drawn to multiple sites
of investigation, including the law, mass media, the history of racial-
ized reproductive labor, and the contemporary mediated spaces—the
websites and databases—where the services of surrogate and egg do-
nors are advertised. While these sites are multiple, they are not entirely
disconnected from one another. They weave together the complicated
strands of commerce, representation, policy, and historical precedent
with contemporary and rapidly shifting cultural norms about what
makes a family.
Chapter 1 places reproductive technologies in historical perspective,
beginning with the 1978 birth of the first child born through in vitro
fertilization, the attendant explosion of infertility services in the United
States, and the development of gestational surrogacy. This chapter also
considers how the advent of gestational surrogacy complicates the se-
lection of a surrogate, the surrogate population, and the role of race in
the reproductive technology industry. Chapter 1 introduces the femi-
nist framework within which this book is situated by contextualizing
the varied feminist responses to ARTs in the last several decades. Early
feminist writing on ARTs commonly cast these technologies as either
oppressive tools of the patriarchy or an unmitigated good. The reali-
ties of surrogacy beg for a more complicated framework; the following
chapters situate cross-racial surrogacy within specific gendered, racial,
historical, and legal contexts.
Chapter 2 is based on a qualitative analysis of mainstream media
sources that covered surrogacy from 2000 to 2010, including news-
papers, magazines, radio, and television news. Multiple—and often
competing—narratives of surrogacy coexisted in the popular media.
These narratives are significant because it is through the media that
most people are introduced to surrogacy. This analysis resulted in the
emergence of three primary themes in mainstream media coverage of
surrogacy: a “women-helping-women” narrative, the call for regulation,
and “the kinship question.” The theme of women helping women is most
prevalent; it explains surrogacy primarily through the relationship be-
tween women, in which altruism motivates one woman to help another
reach the apotheosis of femininity by becoming a mother. Problemati-
cally, the common representation of this exchange is as an equal one,
whereby the differences between monetary compensation and a child
12 | Introduction
are flattened through the leveling effects of altruism. Another theme is

the recurrent call for regulation, in which narratives of surrogacy (par-
ticularly those warning of the dangers of the practice) have moved away
from a focus on the individual “bad” surrogate or manipulative intended
parents. Instead, these narratives emphasize the lack of regulation at the
state and federal level as the principal villain. In effect, the transfer of
babies through surrogacy is not condemned as inherently exploitative
to either women or children but is rather cast as a market in need of
protective legislation. Finally, media discourse on surrogacy raises the
kinship question, which reflects the anxieties raised by ARTs’ challenges
to the traditional family. There are multiple strands of this discourse;
some focus on the “unnatural,” “brave new world” aspect of ARTs, while
others participate in the naturalization of ARTs by framing ART-created
families as “just like us.”
Chapter 3 examines how discourses of race are influenced by the
economic and reproductive imperatives of society at different historical
moments. This chapter historicizes how ideologies of race and racial
“transmission” were adapted during the era of cross-racial wet nurs-
ing in America in response to the labor needs of the white dominant
classes. Both cross-racial wet nursing and cross-racial gestational sur-
rogacy are evidence of the hegemonic power of dominant groups to
naturalize deeply racialized and gendered practices in ways that eco-
nomically benefit the interests of these groups. In this chapter I com-
pare historical examples of racialized reproduction to contemporary
examples with an analysis of two legal cases involving cross-racial
gestational surrogacy: Johnson v. Calvert, the first case in the United
States in which a gestational surrogate sought child custody, and the
more recent 2009 trial, Marion County Division of Children’s Services
v. Melinger. The specifics of these two cases vary dramatically; most
notably, the African American surrogate Anna Johnson went to court
for custody of the child she bore, while the more recent case focused
on the parental fitness of the white intended father. What these trials
have in common is that in both instances racial difference between the
surrogate and intended parents served the interests of the racially and
economically privileged parties. Like cross-racial wet nursing, cross-
racial gestational surrogacy is part of a complicated history of racialized
reproductive labor in the United States.
Introduction | 13
In chapter 4, I contextualize the shifting popular and scientific dis-

courses of race since the mid-twentieth century by analyzing databases
of egg donors and surrogates created by agencies to connect intended
parents with the women who provide these services. From lists put
together by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and RE-
SOLVE: The National Infertility Association, I selected agencies that
provided both egg donation and surrogacy services. This allowed me to
contrast how traits like the race and ethnicity of surrogates and egg do-
nors were represented both within and across organizations. This chap-
ter examines the tenacity with which a biological framework for race
has persisted, aided by the increased commodification of scientific re-
search. Race, alongside traits such as eye color, intelligence, and person-
ality, is coded as having biological origins. Reproductive technologies
demonstrate that despite scientific debates, ARTs and other race-based
medicines continue to promote and reflect a popular understanding of
distinct biological races. Thus the egg donor and surrogacy databases
built by ART clinics reflect often-unspoken assumptions about race and
heritability, and demonstrate how scientific and academic assertions of
the biological meaninglessness of race largely fail to trickle down into
the popular consciousness.
Chapter 5 extends my analysis of cross-racial gestational surrogacy
to consider the transnational circuits of reproductive labor from the
United States to India, particularly what is known as “reproductive
tourism.” Broadly speaking, reproductive tourism is a relatively recent
term coined to describe the increasing travel across national boundar-
ies by individuals seeking fertility services, including donor eggs and
sperm, procedures such as in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy. Repro-
ductive tourism is motivated by a number of factors, such as the varied
legal restrictions on ARTs in many European nations, long waiting lists
for donors and surrogates, and prohibitively expensive prices that pro-
spective parents can greatly reduce by “shopping around” for services.
Through secondary sources, magazine, newspaper, and television cover-
age, and documentary films, this chapter examines how notions of race
and genetic determinism are mapped uneasily onto surrogacy in India.
Intended parents benefit from the racial and economic “difference” be-
tween themselves and Indian surrogates. These power differentials in-
clude the stark reality that surrogates have little recourse should they be
14 | Introduction
mistreated. Intended parents are also able to naturalize their claims to

kinship with their future children in juxtaposition to the “Otherness” of
the surrogate. I conclude this chapter with a reimagining of reproduc-
tive tourism as something that happens not only transnationally, but
also within national borders. If one takes seriously the social disparities
between contracting parties, I ask, does reproductive tourism also exist
within the United States?
To varying extents, each chapter addresses material that is in some
way time-sensitive. New media narratives of surrogacy are constantly
being produced, fertility clinics are updating their databases with every
new donor and surrogate that they accept, and the purview of repro-
ductive tourism expands continuously as entrepreneurial individuals set
their sights on nations whose reproductive resources remain untapped.
Most significantly, innovations in reproductive technologies advance at
a rate with which it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep pace. However,
the arguments and theoretical frameworks that underpin this research
remain relevant, largely because this project resonates beyond the speci-
ficity of ARTs and draws historicized comparisons that tap into a much
longer tradition of cross-racial reproductive labor.
I conclude this study by linking the core themes to the increasing
hostility to women’s reproductive rights at the local, state, and national
level, namely, the recent spate of state amendments concerning fetal
personhood. As feminist theory and practice have consistently urged
us to recognize, personal or private matters such as ART use can in fact
have enormous repercussions for how we think about, politicize, and
adjudicate some of the most sacred aspects of our existence. While this
book examines a narrow slice of the field of reproductive politics and
reproductive justice, many readers will come to this topic with some
personal experience or future aspirations regarding pregnancy, fertility,
and family building. I was not a mother when I began researching this
book, but have given birth to two children during the writing process.
The experience of being pregnant while reading, researching, and writ-
ing about ideologies of gender, fertility, and motherhood has changed
the way I think about my own position within these frameworks. I hope
that this book will offer readers a new way of thinking as well, particu-
larly about how our intersecting identities shape our expectations of
fertility services, our access to them, and how we view ourselves as a
Introduction | 15
consumer or (re)producer within this active market. I hope that this

book provides readers with the understanding that whether we ever
enter the market for fertility services ourselves, surrogacy and the
discourse surrounding it are indicative of broader social debates and
contestation over gender roles, boundaries of racial difference, and the
meaning of kinship.
NYU Press
Chapter Title: “Mommy’s Tummy Was Broken”: Surrogacy Enters the Mainstream

2
“Mommy’s Tummy Was Broken”
Surrogacy Enters the Mainstream
Being a surrogate is like giving an organ transplant to some-

one, only before you die, and you actually get to see their joy.
—Jennifer Cantor, surrogate
Kinship is created through love and hospitality, rather than

blood connection. Formal adoption is the gift of a child;
sperm and egg donation are the gift of a child; surrogacy is
the gift of a child.
—Liza Mundy, journalist
When they [surrogacy arrangements] go bad, it’s so sad. You

feel sorry for the baby. Who are the baby’s parents?
—Mitzi Heineman, Michigan surrogacy broker
These quotes are each pulled from popular media sources in the years
spanning the first decade of the twenty-first century. They reflect com-
plicated beliefs about femininity, motherhood, altruism, and kinship,
and raise the question of who is to blame when these potent, ideology-
laden elements fail to combine into a successful surrogacy arrangement.
In the years following the advent of in vitro fertilization, the growth in
the fertility industry and its implications were often framed in polarizing
terms by media, activists, and academics. The tendency toward extreme
characterizations of ARTs was exacerbated in the 1980s and 1990s, with
each decade marked by a story of surrogacy-gone-wrong that captured
the imagination of the public and helped shape the discourse on surro-
gacy in the United States.1
The first, the 1987 case In re Baby M, propelled the practice of sur-
rogacy into the popular consciousness when a traditional surrogate
43
44 | “Mommy’s Tummy Was Broken”
refused to relinquish her biological child to the intended parents. The

New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the parental rights of the surrogate
but awarded primary custody to the biological intended father based on
the legal standard of the “best interests of the child.” During the trial,
the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times
published a combined 270 articles on surrogacy, up from 41 articles the
year prior, propelling what was then a relatively obscure practice into
the popular consciousness.2 This remarkable spike in reporting marks
the entrance of surrogacy into the national forum, and in a manner that
divided feminists, ethicists, legislators, women’s health advocates, and
the public on the acceptability of the practice. After the Baby M case,
Americans were likely not only to have heard of surrogacy, but also
to have taken a personal stance on whether or not it was a legitimate
means of family formation.3 The Baby M case was followed by Johnson
v. Calvert in 1993, in which Johnson, an African American gestational
surrogate, attempted (and failed) to gain custody of the son she bore
for white intended parents. This case was significant in that it set legal
precedent for custody disputes concerning gestational surrogacy. In ad-
dition, although the media and the courts repeatedly dismissed the no-
tion that race played any role in the Johnson v. Calvert trial, feminist
scholars questioned whether racist stereotypes of black women could be
separated from the judgments made about Johnson’s right to mother.4
According to the sociologist Susan Markens, these cases fell into the
trope of surrogacy “horror stories” that “reflected and reinforced anxiet-
ies over the future of motherhood and the family in an era of rapidly
changing beliefs about women’s roles and the decline of the normative
nuclear family.”5 The Baby M case and Johnson v. Calvert served in many
ways as sounding boards for cultural unease surrounding race, reproduc-
tion, and the family.6 Both proceedings suggested the potential of the law
not only to shore up hegemonic ideologies of class, race, and gender but
also to produce narratives that could narrow the definition of “mother,”
“father,” or “family,” thus reining in the potentially destabilizing effects of
ARTs. These cases also demonstrate that ART “horror stories” tell us far
more about the cultural, political, and economic context in which they
emerge than about the fitness to parent of the individuals in question.
This chapter analyzes print media and television news coverage of
surrogacy in the United States from 2000 to 2010. With LexisNexis as
“Mommy’s Tummy Was Broken” | 45
the primary database, supplemented by Internet search engines, I nar-

rowed my search using variations on the query term “surrogacy,” in-
cluding “gestational surrogate,” “traditional surrogate,” and “gestational
carrier.”7 Because law and public policy play such a significant role in
how surrogacy is experienced, I chose to limit sources geographically,
selecting those that were published within and focused primarily upon
surrogacy and surrogates in the United States.8 From this archive, I en-
gaged in feminist media analysis of roughly ninety sources, including
newspaper and magazine articles, as well as mainstream television news
programs or programs that contain news, like ABC News and The Today
Show. I did not include a full overview of fictionalized representations
of surrogacy from television or film (although these texts from the same
time period could add valuable analysis in further research), but rather
limited my sources to what are deemed “news media.”
With increased (albeit stratified) access to the Internet, news media
content is immediately accessible via tablet, computer, and smartphone,
with stories often “shared” via social media platforms in addition to tra-
ditional sources.9 As such, news media are integrated into everyday life,
and inform users’ sense of social and cultural norms and values. Main-
stream news media stake their claim on objectivity, often masking the
fact that media transmit dominant ideologies to their readers, whether
through the information that they include, or that which they omit.10
As my analysis of these media sources demonstrates, certain themes
become salient in ways that correspond to dominant ideologies about
gender, reproduction, and family structure.
I limited my analysis to sources dating from 2000 to 2010 because
this decade does not have its own surrogacy horror story. While surro-
gacy disputes did occur during this period, none captured the national
imagination in the way that the Baby M case or Johnson v. Calvert did.
Without such cautionary tales to shape overdetermined tropes of a sur-
rogacy “nightmare,” what discourse on surrogacy was being produced?
What happens to the discourse on surrogacy when American culture
lacks a consensus on what the practice means, or even a polarized debate
over predetermined positions? These questions animate the analysis of
media coverage of surrogacy that is undertaken in this chapter. Because
I see this decade as a departure from the 1980s and 1990s, I did not seek
to replicate themes found in earlier feminist research on surrogacy, but
rather sought patterns across the various texts. Through feminist media
research, patterns concerning the media representation of surrogacy
emerge, and the significance of these themes is analyzed.11 I discovered
patterns between texts through similarities in descriptive words (for ex-
ample, describing surrogacy as a gift, as priceless, as an act of love), a
focus on certain actors (like the role of intermediary agencies, or the
absence of federal regulation), or repeated rhetorical devices (such as
the “surprising reveal” that a pregnant woman is actually a surrogate). I
then categorized articles and transcripts within each discrete theme, and
selected representative examples and, at times, counterexamples.
The archive for this chapter is made up of such sources because they
are representative of the mainstream popular media discourse on surro-
gacy. As Patrick Hopkins has explored in relation to the issue of cloning,
laypeople learn not only about the science and technology of an event
but also the ethical, moral, political, and religious stakes from media
sources.12 The media are an important source of public knowledge about
health and medical research, and it is often through media that public
policy battles are waged.13 As Susan Markens writes, “What is said in the
public sphere tells us a lot about what is culturally salient and, more im-
portantly, what is politically feasible and viable.”14 The media can influ-
ence what issues become matters of public concern through “the framing
of stories, the selective presentation of particular themes, oppositions,
associations, ‘templates,’ ‘facts,’ and claims rather than others.”15 In the
case of surrogacy, the media influence public opinion through a vari-
ety of choices in their reporting: stories may prioritize the rights of the
intended parent over the surrogate, or represent surrogates as victims
of exploitation. They may focus exclusively on the relatively uncom-
mon cases of custody disputes, or paint all surrogates as selfless miracle
workers. This selective framing is of course not unique to this particu-
lar coverage, but could arguably have greater influence over matters like
surrogacy, in which most people have limited personal experience.
Media commonly frame controversial issues through a binary struc-
ture, a “dispute between two contrasting perspectives.”16 Williams, Kitz-
inger, and Henderson note this in relation to media coverage of stem
cell research in England, where media presented two neatly packaged
perspectives: one insisting that stem cell research was an abuse of em-
bryos, the other that the scientific benefits outweighed the risks. The
binary nature of the debate was often premised through headlines or

opening questions stated by newscasters: is embryonic stem cell re-
search “a miracle cure or Frankenstein science?” “the stuff of dreams or
nightmares?”17 The researchers noted that a serious effect of this binary
framework was the near-complete marginalization of women’s and femi-
nist perspectives, whether as media sources, journalists, citizens, or even
physical beings who produce the eggs that the research requires. Dis-
courses found in media “are never presented ‘raw’—they are mediated
through news institutions, values and conventions involving editorial/
journalists’ choices such as which story to cover, whom to interview and
how to edit and frame the debate.”18
In an analysis of print media coverage of reproductive technologies
between 1986 and 1991, Celeste Condit likewise found that the media
response was multivocal, or signified many things. Yet the dominant
rhetorical maneuver that emerged from media was one that exposed
audiences to the extremes of each position (in this case, ARTs as either
a miracle or as pure exploitation) and then presented a third option that
served as a seemingly neutral or middle ground. This “accommodation-
ist perspective” is not actually neutral, but rather serves the interests of
the press, medical specialists, and infertile middle-class couples, formed
“because of the ability of these groups to construct rhetorical accounts
that articulated each others’ interests.”19 I mention Condit’s findings not
to assume that the same study would be replicated today, but because
they reflect the constructedness of media discourse. They also serve as
a reminder that dominant narratives in news media become dominant
not naturally or inevitably, but as a result of a confluence of social, politi-
cal, and economic factors.
Media narratives are filtered by what the feminist theorist Janell
Hobson calls corporate or “Big Media”: “the increasing consolidation
of media through media company mergers, in which diverse media are
owned by the same corporation,” resulting in “an increasingly homog-
enized presence of multimedia pushing similar dominant and corpo-
rate narratives while squeezing out independent voices and alternative
media.”20 This homogenization of media is significant for understanding
the discourse surrounding surrogacy in part because, again, most Amer-
icans are introduced to surrogate parenting through media accounts of
the practice rather than personal experience.
The Baby M case in particular caused surrogacy to transition from a

little-known medical practice to a topic of discussion around the water
cooler. This evolution has been aided by highly publicized use of sur-
rogacy by celebrities such as Joan Lunden, Melissa Harris-Perry, Sarah
Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, Kelsey Grammer, James Taylor,
Neil Patrick Harris, and Ricky Martin.21 While fictional representations
of surrogacy are largely out of the scope of this chapter, surrogates can
also be found in film and on television past and present (for example,
on the television shows The New Normal, Modern Family, My Name
Is Earl, The Good Wife, Six Feet Under, Friends, Brothers and Sisters,
Private Practice, Ugly Betty, Glee, Lie to Me, and Army Wives). In ef-
fect, while discourse about surrogacy is produced across a wide variety
of sites, what the majority of Americans learn about the practice is
filtered through media accounts in newspapers, magazines, television,
and the web.
Several prominent themes emerge from the archive examined in this
chapter. The most predominant theme found in print media coverage of
surrogacy from 2000 to 2010 is what I call the women-helping-women
narrative. The second major theme is the call for regulation, in which
the problematic aspects of surrogacy are attributed to the lack of state
and federal regulation. The third and perhaps most overarching theme
is what I call the “kinship question,” or the question of what surro-
gacy means for the definition of mother, father, or child, including the
challenges posed by queer parenting through ARTs. While these three
themes are not equally weighted in media representation, as a whole
these narratives about surrogacy contribute to public perceptions of
normative families, gender, women’s work, and kinship formation.
Women Helping Women

When stories of surrogacy are featured in the news media, one theme
recurs consistently: that of surrogacy as a means for women to help
other women. What Heléna Ragoné calls the “selfless” or “altruistic
idiom” crops up in quotes from surrogates, intended parents, fertility
service staff, and reporters.22 The altruistic idiom is closely bound to
media presentations of infertile couples as desperate,23 having worn
out all other available options in their unquestioned and unquenchable
desire for a child. The desperation of the tragically infertile is matched

with the selflessness of the altruistic surrogate, who expresses her heart-
felt wish to help a couple form a family “of their own.” This selflessness
outweighs other concerns, as the husband of a gestational surrogate
told the Washington Post. While he was initially reluctant to endorse his
wife’s decision, he came around after doing some research, realizing, “It’s
just the ultimate act of selflessness, and I’m happy to be just a little part
of it.”24 This call and response can appear scripted, which is unsurprising
considering that surrogates and intended parents are of course cogni-
zant of the “appropriate” narratives.25 Indeed, as the cultural theorists
John Fiske and Roland Barthes have argued, all representation relies
upon “cultural knowledges” such that “each narrative is a rewriting of
these already written ‘knowledges’ of the culture and each text makes
sense only in so far as it rewrites and re-presents them for us.”26 Surro-
gacy narratives have developed in the last decades and formed cultural
knowledges; as a result, media accounts of surrogacy are encoded and
decoded in relation to all representations of “the surrogacy story.”
Other scholars have theorized the validity and/or instrumentality of
altruism narratives, but such value judgments are outside the scope of
this project.27 Instead, I am interested in the cultural weight of altru-
ism narratives, and what kind of work they perform in naturalizing and
normalizing surrogacy. If in most surrogacy arrangements the intended
parents are wealthier than the surrogate, why are these stories framed
as if they occur on a level playing field, merely as one woman helping
another? This section considers this question, and unpacks how the
theme of women helping women emerges in media accounts of surro-
gacy. These stories are symptomatic of how altruism becomes a domi-
nant framework for understanding surrogacy, thus contributing to the
perception of surrogacy in the popular imagination. I also analyze the
counternarrative of the “wrong reasons” for becoming a surrogate that
emerges alongside the dominant narrative framework.
In 2008 Newsweek magazine ran a cover displaying the torso-only
image of a woman clutching her bare and very pregnant stomach with
the words “Womb for Rent: The Complex World of Surrogate Mothers”
stamped across her body. Depicted in shades of gray, the image strips
the surrogate of an individual identity, suggesting that the womb is sepa-
rable from the subjectivity of the woman it accompanies. This illustra-
tion also casts surrogacy in an aura of mystery: who are these faceless
women and why do they “rent” that most intimate of female spaces?28 In
the accompanying article, entitled “The Curious Lives of Surrogates,” the
reporters Lorraine Ali and Raina Kelley reveal a shocking statistic: up to
50 percent of women acting as gestational surrogates in Texas and Cali-
fornia are married to men serving in the U.S. military.29 Ali and Kelley
mark surrogacy as a controversial practice, noting that surrogates “chal-
lenge our most basic ideas about motherhood, and call into question
what we’ve always thought of as an unbreakable bond between mother
and child.”30
Despite what they note as the increasing acceptance of the practice,
the journalists argue that “the culture still stereotypes surrogates as ei-
ther hicks or opportunists whose ethics could use some fine-tuning.”31
Ali and Kelley conclude that little is known about the lives of surrogates
and thus set out to interview women who act as gestational carriers.
This Newsweek article inspired follow-up stories on surrogacy in vari-
ous mediums, including newspapers, radio, and television. As the title of
the Newsweek article suggests, media coverage of gestational surrogates
positions them as “curiosities.” What links these stories is a remark-
ably similar framing of surrogacy as a unique category of employment
marked by altruistic motivations.
The Newsweek article acknowledges that surrogates have widely dis-
parate motivations, financial situations, and relationships with the in-
tended parents, yet Ali and Kelley find one common denominator:
All were agreed that the grueling treatments, morning sickness, bed rest,
C-sections and stretch marks were worth it once they saw their intended
parent hold the child, or children . . . for the first time. “Being a surrogate
is like giving an organ transplant to someone,” says Jennifer Cantor, “only
before you die, and you actually get to see their joy.”32
What unites all surrogates, according to Ali and Kelley, is the common
goal of helping another couple to form a family, a goal akin to the lifesav-
ing decision to donate an organ. In the same piece, the surrogate Amber
Boersman states, “Some people can be successful in a major career, but
I thought I do not want to go through this life meaning nothing, and I
want to do something substantial for someone else. I want to make a
difference,” while the surrogate Gernisha Myers says, “I know I am doing

something good for somebody else. I am giving another couple what
they could never have on their own—a family.”33 Of the eight surrogates
quoted in the Newsweek article, five used altruistic language in direct
quotes such as “giving,” “doing something good,” or wanting to “help
someone” and “make a difference.” This language casts surrogacy in a
beneficial light, with agency on the part of the surrogate who has chosen
to come to the aid of a needy family. The article briefly addresses the
history of surrogacy custody disputes and conflicts that sometimes arise
between parties. Nonetheless, the piece opens and closes with descrip-
tions of a happy and satisfied surrogate, Jennifer Cantor, who concludes
that surrogacy “was exactly the experience I imagined it would be.”34
After the Newsweek article was published, National Public Radio
(NPR) aired a report on military wives as surrogates that echoed these
themes, with the added twist that military wives make particularly re-
liable surrogates. The host, Mike Pesca, begins the piece by stating,
“Military wives are often determined and selfless, and because they are
military wives, they usually could use a little extra income. That is a for-
mula that makes them perfect candidates to be surrogate mothers.”35
The phrasing “a little extra income” taps into the long-standing, and now
largely anachronistic, view of women’s income as merely supplementary
to that of the male breadwinner. While it sidelines the economic motiva-
tions for surrogacy in favor of the emotional or personal motivations (de-
termination, selflessness), it also downplays the positive, and potentially
essential, contributions that surrogates make to their family’s economy.
While Pesca’s comment does frame gestational surrogacy as work, it is
work that is motivated by appropriately feminine character traits, par-
ticularly selflessness.
The women’s fashion magazine Glamour also published an article on
military wives who act as commercial surrogates. Like the NPR story, the
Glamour article played up the assumption that military wives’ connection
to the service leaves them financially insecure, yet also more responsible
and diligent. The article cited the director of the Los Angeles Center for
Surrogate Parenting, who said, “Military wives make very good surro-
gates. . . . They’re independent and self-sufficient since their husbands are
away from home a lot.” She added, “When military wives have a contract
they do everything and anything to abide by it.”36 Both the NPR and
Glamour pieces gender military wives in interesting ways—as feminine

yet steely, selfless but pragmatic.
All of these media stories tap into a powerful reservoir of positive
sentiment in American culture by linking surrogacy to military service:
during a time when America was at war they represented surrogacy
as a patriotic act, a way for a military wife to do her own duty to care
selflessly for her family and for the nation. In an analysis of the News-
week article, the scholar Bree Kessler argues that the surrogate’s act of
“breaking out of her primary role as a mother to that of a primary (or
secondary) earner is sanctioned because it is performed in the name of
nationalism.”37 I would add that it is not only nationalism but also altru-
istic intent that sanctions the surrogates’ actions. A surrogate pregnancy
creates future citizens but also creates mothers, fathers, and families.38
Glamour highlighted the financial motivations of military wives to
become surrogates, noting that one surrogate’s husband earned only
$26,000 a year in the military. The motivations of the surrogates are
represented as divided between the poles of reason and emotion: “for
her, taking the job was an emotional decision, born of a desire to help
an infertile couple start a family. But it also made financial sense.” The
author later asks, “What drives these women to take on such an emo-
tionally and physically demanding job? All of the surrogates we spoke
to cited the desire to help another couple finally have a family. Then
there’s the bottom line. Financial concerns figure into these decisions.”39
The Glamour article plays up the tension between remuneration and
altruism, suggesting that the two do not mix easily. The issue of com-
pensation is also central to Mike Pesca’s NPR interviews, yet cautiously
approached. Miss Angel, a soon-to-be gestational surrogate and wife to
a soldier deployed in Iraq, demurs when Pesca asks her how much she
is earning for her services. She replies that it is “not about the financial”
for her, but rather, “it’s about helping a family.”40 Pesca also interviews
Stephanie Caballero, the founder of Extraordinary Conceptions, an egg
donation and surrogacy agency in San Diego. Pesca presses Caballero to
elaborate on the monetary aspect of surrogacy, to which she replies that
“most women don’t ask about the money first, and if they do, we don’t
accept them.”41
Caballero’s comment suggests that the expression of altruistic motiva-
tions is not only rewarded, but may be required for would-be surrogates.
The altruistic motivations of surrogates were also the focus of readers

who supported the practice in the letters to the editor section of News-
week. Two of the four respondents to “The Curious Lives of Surrogates”
defended surrogacy, speaking to both altruism and the important role
surrogacy plays in creating families. After criticizing the “cold, transac-
tional cover line” of “Wombs for Rent,” one respondent writes, “My two
sons were born of women of unwavering strength and tenacity who en-
dured injections, bed rest, many failed cycles and miscarriages. But they
didn’t quit, having vowed that we, strangers, would know the joy of par-
enthood.”42 By describing himself and his partner as “strangers” to the
surrogate, the commentator reinforces the surrogate’s benevolence—she
is even willing to endure these physical and emotional tolls for someone
outside her own kin group or social network. Moreover, the focus on al-
truistic motivations and the production of families combine to natural-
ize surrogacy as a way for one woman to help another do something she
is not capable of on her own. As Viviana Zelizer notes in The Purchase
of Intimacy, while it is not actually unusual for intimacy and economics
to mix (as they do in surrogacy arrangements), it may be experienced
as unsettling for observers and participants who share in the perception
that these two arenas are antithetical to one another.43 This emotional
dissonance is mediated by reference to altruism in surrogacy narratives,
which also serves as a leveling device between intended mothers and
surrogates.
This narrative work is exemplified by another highly publicized sur-
rogacy story; in 2005 the Arizona surrogate Teresa Anderson refused
payment for her contracted services after learning that she would be
giving birth to quintuplets. Anderson, whom the intended parents, En-
rique Moreno and Luisa Gonzalez, referred to as “our Mother Teresa,”
was implanted with five embryos that developed into five fetuses.44
The intended parents agreed that Anderson should be the one to de-
cide whether to “selectively reduce” the number of fetuses (despite their
own reluctance to do so), but Anderson declined. A news reporter asked
Anderson what she “gets” out of the experience, to which she replied,
“The gift of life, giving them five children, making their lives forever
changed and happy.”45 Anderson and the intended parents forged a
strong connection during the pregnancy, a bond that reporters use to
explain Anderson’s altruistic actions. The intended mother, Gonzalez,
speaks to this bond in an interview with the Washington Post, stating of

Anderson, “I feel she’s part of my family now.”46 In a press release from
the hospital where the children were born, Gonzalez also stated that
Anderson “has given me my dream; she has given us our family.”47 An-
derson is described in the press as a “hero,” her pregnancy a “miracle,”
and her actions a “gift.”48 In an interview on the Today Show, the doctor
responsible for delivering the quintuplets stated that Anderson and her
own family are not well off (she originally looked into surrogacy as a
way to earn money),49 so to refuse payment was “one of the greatest gifts
of giving. She gave life to these parents and then gave back the money
that they are going to need to feed and clothe and raise these babies. I
think that’s just what people should be. That’s just wonderful.”50
The belief that Anderson’s actions reflect “what people should do”
is compelling precisely because her decision to carry all five fetuses to
term and to refuse payment for her services is in many ways hyperboli-
cally altruistic. Based on recommendations by the American Society for
Reproductive Medicine, Anderson should not have been implanted with
five embryos to begin with; the ASRM recommends the implantation
of no more than two embryos for women under the age of thirty-five.51
Not only did the doctor far exceed these recommendations, but neither
Anderson nor Luisa Gonzalez recollected being warned of the dangers
of the potential for multiple births, or the adverse health outcomes that
could result for both the surrogate and the children.52 Yet altruism is
so closely linked to surrogacy in the popular imagination that Ander-
son’s decision, while praiseworthy, is cast as the only appropriate course
of action. If surrogacy were considered a form of work like any other,
Anderson’s refusal to accept payment for an extraordinary task would
differentiate her from other laborers. In contrast, Anderson is described
as “the quintessential surrogate” on Good Morning America. Because her
labor is inseparable from gendered beliefs about altruism, nurturance,
and motherhood, Anderson is cast as both the ideal and the outlier—
while not every surrogate would do the same, her actions reflect every-
thing that a surrogate should be.53
These examples speak to the salience of the women-helping-women
narrative in media coverage of surrogacy.54 The predominance of this
narrative implicates both a thematic framing of surrogacy by those cov-
ering the stories and the self-representation of the parties involved (sur-
rogates and intended parents). Ragoné argues that “the selfless idiom
allows them [surrogates] to achieve their objectives in a nonthreatening
way, in a manner that does not challenge the status quo in which women
are said to be care givers and nurturers.”55 While Ragoné’s research ad-
vances an argument regarding the use of the altruistic idiom by surro-
gates, this does not explain the embrace of this narrative by those who
cover surrogacy stories in the media. In interviews with surrogates, jour-
nalists frequently adopt a vocabulary laden with affective language; for
example, the following exchange between the reporter Sandra Hughes
and the surrogate Teresa Anderson relies on the emotional resonance of
altruism:
Hughes: What did they [intended parents Gonzalez and Moreno] tell
you that struck a chord in your heart?
Anderson: That they hadn’t been able to have a child in ten years. It
looked like they had a lot of love to give and I wanted to help.56
The reporter’s language (“struck a chord in your heart”) begins from

the assumption that Anderson’s motivations are not purely financial—
the language of altruism (“heart,” “love,” “help”) positions Anderson’s
actions within the feminine sphere of nurturance in contrast to the sup-
posedly logic-driven motivations of the marketplace. Ragoné and other
ethnographers have investigated why surrogates foreground certain
motivations while downplaying others; these examples make clear that
the media also actively construct the women-helping-women narrative
through the framing of surrogacy stories.
Ethnographic data indicate that references to altruism or gifting lan-
guage are common not only in media accounts of surrogacy but also
in narratives produced by surrogates and intended parents. Surrogates
commonly describe the service that they provide as a gift, which de-
commodifies the exchange of a child and reinforces the conviction held
by many surrogates (and intended parents) that no amount of money
is equal compensation for “giving” someone a child or creating a fam-
ily.57 A gestational surrogate who was featured in the Washington Post
echoed this, stating, “To be honest, I wish I could have done it and not
taken money for it. It’s like when you give someone a gift, you know
they’re going to love it, and you can’t wait to see the look on their faces
when they open it. That’s the ultimate.”58 Despite the language of gift-
ing and the seeming desire for a more “pure” or nonmonetary altruistic
exchange expressed by this surrogate, most are paid for their labor. (Sur-
rogacy advocates draw a crucial distinction between the compensation
surrogates receive for the physical labor of pregnancy, which is legal, and
payment for the child, which is illegal.)
Thus a certain tension emerges in surrogacy discourse between two
seemingly distinctive fields: altruism and work. Work, in the United
States, has commonly been defined as labor for pay, a definition that
has historically devalued women’s contributions to the household econ-
omy. Conversely, altruism is motivated by less tangible rewards such as
emotional satisfaction or personal growth, and thus precludes financial
gain. Yet contract surrogacy exists at the intersection of altruism and
work. Surrogates report altruistic motives while receiving payment for
their services. Waldby and Cooper explain that clinical labor such as
surrogacy is rarely analyzed as a form of work because surrogates are
portrayed as altruistically motivated and giving for “the public good,”
even when compensation is provided.59 As previously mentioned, many
surrogates deal with this tension publicly by refusing to reveal remu-
neration to reporters and privately by leaving financial arrangements to
lawyers and agencies rather than discussing them directly with intended
parents.
The centrality of this tension between the altruistic and the economic
is evidenced by the existence of counternarratives of surrogates who are
doing it “for the wrong reasons.” The “wrong reasons” are overwhelm-
ingly cast as financial, particularly when the surrogate will spend the
money on herself rather than saving for a child’s college fund, paying a
loved one’s medical bills, or other purportedly selfless actions. A binary
emerges in which altruism and financial gain are mutually exclusive:
“good” surrogates act to create a child for an infertile couple, while “bad”
surrogates callously calculate their earnings. “Good” surrogates avoid
conflating family with work; “bad” surrogates blur the boundaries of this
long-standing division in American society.60
Angela Howard, a military wife and surrogate, exemplifies this tension
in an interview with the Los Angeles Times reporter Molly Hennessy-Fisk.
Howard describes her own motivations as altruistic, in contrast to other
surrogates she knows who plan to use the money for a vacation or in-
clude a post-birth breast lift in their contractual requirements. Howard

disapproves, telling Hennessy-Fisk that surrogacy is about the couple’s
hope for a family: “It’s not just dollar signs.”61 Similarly, in an interview
with USA Today, the gestational surrogate Jen Betts refuses to reveal how
much she was paid for carrying the child of a gay male couple. The money
is a plus, Betts acknowledges, but she argues that she could make the
same amount working full-time at McDonald’s. She criticizes surrogates
who negotiate additional fees into their contracts should they undergo
an invasive procedure such as a Cesarean section, and she concludes that
“there are some surrogates, unfortunately, who do it for the money.”62
According to Betts’s logic, “doing it for the money” is always bad, and
any surrogate who does not wholeheartedly embrace self-sacrifice (for
example, by requiring supplemental payment for the additional pain and
risk of a C-section) is not in it for the right reasons.
Yet economics do undoubtedly play a role in the decision to become
a surrogate, as evidenced by a Self magazine article entitled “Would You
Risk Your Health for Money?” The number of women considering sur-
rogacy as a form of employment rose due to the major economic reces-
sion that took shape in 2009, according to the program director of a
surrogacy agency in California. The director acknowledges that agencies
are faced with a larger pool of potential surrogates, yet “for the more
altruistic woman, the payoff is the child, regardless of the economy.
But when women do it just for the money and something unexpected
happens—multiples, complications, bed rest—she never feels she is get-
ting enough.”63 Even during an economic meltdown with skyrocketing
rates of unemployment and foreclosure, remuneration was still cast as
an illegitimate motivation in media accounts.
An episode of Good Morning America entitled “Labor of Love: Sur-
rogate Pregnancy” gives authoritative weight to the wrong reasons/right
reasons binary. A psychologist consulted by the host of the program ex-
presses the importance of finding an “appropriate person” who is doing
it “for the right reasons”—reasons that are apparently so obvious to the
viewing audience that she does not explain what they might be.64 The
same is true of the wrong reasons: a 2008 article in the Wall Street Jour-
nal claims that “if surrogates appear as naive victims and the rich their
exploiters, in the popular imagination, there’s no shortage of villainous
surrogates, who scheme to keep the baby or fake their pregnancies.”65
The reporter goes on to name only one incidence of such “villainous”

behavior; in this narrative, the public allegedly views surrogates as naive
victims, yet the simultaneous portrayal of wicked, scheming surrogates
warrants little empirical evidence.
The public also encounters representations of surrogacy through
scripted television and movies. One film in particular manages to in-
corporate both the “wrong reasons” and the women-helping-women
narrative as a means to reach its resolution. The popular 2008 movie
Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, reinforces stereotypi-
cal views of infertility and surrogacy. Fey’s character, Kate Holbrook, is
a wealthy, middle-class white woman who has put pregnancy on hold
to pursue a career, and is thus (predictably) unable to have children.
After an obstetrician estimates that Kate’s chances of conceiving are in-
finitesimal, Kate hires a gestational surrogate, Angie Ostrowiski (played
by Poehler). From the beginning of the film, Poehler’s character is deci-
sively cast as an inappropriate mother—her ethnic last name, poor hy-
giene, bad manners, greed, lies, and manipulation all categorize her as
“white trash,” a category marked by failed whiteness.
After an unsuccessful round of IVF, Angie pretends that she is preg-
nant with Kate’s child so that she will continue to receive payment. Un-
beknownst to either woman, Angie is pregnant with a child of her own, a
plot twist that allows her character to be redeemed by the end of the film
by renouncing her scheme and becoming a “good mother” (with good
motherhood signified by adopting middle-class pregnancy mores such
as avoiding caffeinated beverages). Kate miraculously conceives after she
meets the “right man,” and thus the threat of reproduction without men
(for Kate) and pregnancy without motherhood (for Angie) is neutral-
ized by the reinstatement of the traditional nuclear family. While the
film clearly reinforces stereotypes of surrogates as greedy, manipulative,
and uneducated, as well as stereotypes of infertile women as the selfish
victims of feminism-gone-wrong, it avoids fully embracing the tradi-
tional surrogacy horror story. It is Angie’s dim-witted boyfriend who
is cast as the mastermind behind the plot to scam Kate, and a pregnant
Angie finds herself unable to continue the charade. Despite the betrayal,
Kate accompanies Angie to the hospital when she goes into labor, an
act of altruism and women helping women that is rewarded when Kate
finds out that she too is pregnant, against all odds.66
Why does this specter of the “wrong reasons” haunt media accounts
of surrogacy? How did altruism become the only acceptable motivation
for becoming a surrogate, with money as an “added bonus” but never as
the primary factor? The women-helping-women narrative has become
a staple of media accounts because it naturalizes surrogacy as an ap-
propriately feminine task, decommodifies the child transfer that occurs,
and overlooks the massive power imbalance between surrogates and in-
tended parents. The women-helping-women narrative becomes part of
what the feminist theorist Judith Butler calls a “regulatory discourse,”
which requires that an individual subscribe to a normative narrative arc
in order to achieve the goal of bodily autonomy.67 This is not to say that
the women-helping-women discourse is a false or inaccurate reflection
of surrogates’ motivations; rather, this regulatory discourse tells us more
about the narrative of surrogacy that is produced by media accounts
of the practice. The right-versus-wrong binary runs parallel to larger
ideologies of good and bad motherhood; although a surrogate is not a
social mother, the “good” surrogate as represented in media accounts
must deliver a specific narrative arc that maps onto the traits of the
“good mother,” including sacrifice, altruism, nurturance, and empathy.
Thus the discursive theme of the “wrong reasons” is actually a produc-
tive tension: cautionary tales of the occasional “bad” surrogate serve to
reinforce the normativity of the “good” surrogate, who exemplifies all
the qualities of a “good” woman/mother.
The Call for Regulation

The second theme that emerges prominently in popular media dis-
course on surrogacy is the call for regulation. The United States is
distinctive in that it has almost no regulatory protection for those who
participate in ARTs.68 This lack of regulation, particularly regarding
ART research, can be attributed to a variety of cultural, economic, and
political factors. These include protectionist policies toward research on
women and fetuses, the focus on positive outcomes (i.e., a child) rather
than long-term effects of ARTs, and a lack of research funding from
the federal government.69 For example, anti-abortion sentiment in the
1980s resulted in cuts to federal funding for infertility research, shift-
ing spending to the private sector.70 Because reproductive medicine is
treated more like a business than a form of research, new technologies

are introduced without extensive investigation into their effectiveness
or their safety.71 Moreover, clinics and researchers who produce data
on ARTs have little motivation to publish information on the potential
harms or low success rates of procedures.72
Calls for regulation routinely present the moral and ethical ques-
tions surrounding surrogacy as stemming largely from the haphaz-
ard legislation of the issue. Headlines proliferate with titles like “Brave
New Babies,” “Making Babies,” “Children on Demand,” “The Stork
Market,” “Building a Baby,” and “Buying Babies Bit by Bit.” The rheto-
ric of “building” or “buying” a baby “on demand” from the market
positions ARTs (and children) as uneasy commodities that require a
regulatory framework. References to the novel Brave New World imply
that new reproductive technologies are propelling society toward
Huxley’s dystopian vision in which prenatal genetic engineering as-
signs children to specific social and occupational castes and so-called
natural reproduction is eradicated altogether. Citation of this novel in
particular serves as a trope, “a stand alone reference, image, and warn-
ing about dehumanization, totalitarianism, and technology-wrought
misery,” even when few who recognize the reference may have actually
read the text itself.73
One of the most prominent theorists to weigh in on the problem of
regulation in the fertility industry is Debora Spar, president of Barnard
College and author of The Baby Business. Spar argues that surrogacy is
a commercial arrangement that must be regulated and that “rather than
banning surrogacy (which would likely serve only to drive the practice
abroad or underground) states could regulate it, using traditional chan-
nels of authority to control the market or blunt its roughest edges.”74 Spar
compares surrogacy to adoption, a practice that faces some overlapping
ethical dilemmas such as the potential for the coercion of low-income
women and the commodification of children. Despite this, inter-country
adoption is regulated via the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention, which
Spar argues could be extended to include surrogacy arrangements.
Spar contends that surrogacy regulation should be applied at the inter-
national level, and should cover all parties involved in the surrogacy
process, from intended parents and surrogates to egg and sperm do-
nors. She calls for the establishment of property rights and contractual
guidelines, as well as safeguards to protect low-income women who will

inevitably act as surrogates for wealthier families.75
According to Spar, all the pieces are in place for the regulation of
surrogacy, but “what is lacking is what only states can provide: rules
to guide transactions, regulation to prevent abuse, and a global frame-
work for cross-border trade.”76 Without uniform federal legislation to
regulate the legality and enforcement of surrogacy contracts, massive
legal confusion is created at the state level.77 The closest equivalent is
the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA), approved in 2002 by the National
Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws, which includes
stipulations regarding gestational surrogacy and ARTs.78 The UPA de-
clares that parentage is established when a woman gives birth to a child,
or when a genetic link to the child can be proven—thus under the UPA,
traditional and gestational surrogacy arrangements result in different
parentage outcomes. In traditional surrogacy arrangements, the sur-
rogate and sperm provider (usually the intended father) are the legal
parents, whereas in gestational surrogacy arrangements in which hus-
band and wife provide the gametes, both intended father and mother are
parents by law.79 The UPA has been enacted by only nine states,80 which
have not all incorporated the document verbatim.81
Another measure is the 1992 Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certi-
fication Act, which was passed in response to pressure to regulate ARTs
and standardize the way that clinics report success rates. The act re-
quired the creation of a federal registry of ART success rates; under the
current version of the act, all clinics performing ART procedures must
report success rates to the CDC. Along with the CDC, the registry is run
by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (SART), a branch
of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, and RESOLVE: The
National Infertility Association.82 Despite the passage of this act, no fed-
eral requirements exist regarding payment to donors, and ethical deci-
sions are left to professional organizations that have little authority to
enforce what regulations they do devise.83
States differ not only on the validity of surrogacy contracts, but also
whether contracts are banned, voided, penalized, or regulated. Eight
states have passed laws banning, voiding, and/or penalizing surrogacy
contracts, while ten states have laws regulating surrogacy, some with
restrictions on compensation or type (traditional versus gestational).84
Michigan maintains the harshest penalties for surrogacy: contracts

are unenforceable, and being party to a surrogacy contract is a misde-
meanor eligible for up to a year in jail and/or a $10,000 fine. Those who
broker such contracts are open to felony charges, a $50,000 fine, and/
or ten years in jail.85 In other states such as Indiana and Kentucky, sur-
rogacy contracts are legally nullified, yet surrogacy agencies in those
states actively advertise their services.86 Surrogacy bills have been con-
tentiously debated in state legislatures, with politicians often (although
not entirely) divided along political lines (with Democrats supporting,
and Republicans in opposition to surrogacy). The Minnesota legislature,
for example, passed a bill that set standards for gestational surrogacy
contracts in 2008, which was subsequently vetoed by Republican gov-
ernor Tim Pawlenty. That bill would have allowed intended parents to
stipulate in their contracts that surrogates not drink alcohol, smoke, or
be exposed to radiation. The state of Washington attempted to pass a bill
that would have repealed that state’s prohibition on surrogacy in 2011,
but the surrogacy provisions to the bill were defeated. A bill was enacted
to allow surrogacy in Louisiana in 2014, but was vetoed by Republican
governor Bobby Jindal. The bill would have required post-birth genetic
testing and background checks for intended parents, and only allowed
married, heterosexual couples to contract with surrogates.87 While the
aforementioned bills were attempting to lift prohibitions or regulate sur-
rogacy contracts, a bill was proposed in the state of Kansas that would
have made entering into such contracts illegal, punishable by a fine of
$10,000 (the bill was withdrawn after public and political opposition
surfaced).88 These various approaches to regulating surrogacy suggest
that the issue is a political one, in that it taps into ideologies about sexu-
ality and women’s bodily autonomy.
States also differ on the nuances of surrogacy arrangements: some
allow only women with children of their own to become surrogates, oth-
ers legislate whether the surrogate can use her own egg (as a traditional
surrogate), or have an opportunity post-birth to change her mind and
keep the child. Moreover, some states legally require that married sur-
rogates obtain their husbands’ permission to proceed; this anachronis-
tic policy arguably reveals larger social anxieties concerning paternity
and the adulterous undertones of surrogate pregnancy.89 The parties
involved may be required to undergo psychological and physical testing
and agree to state-sponsored home visits. In addition, states can man-

date that the intended parents are a married couple, that the intended
mother is physically unable to have a child of her own, or that one of the
intended parents will be biologically related to the prospective child.90 It
is becoming increasingly common for states to allow pre- or post-birth
orders, particularly to married, heterosexual couples that are genetically
related to the child. These orders allow for the name of the intended
parents, rather than the surrogate, to appear on the birth certificate, and
may negate the need for a post-birth adoption. When parents are not
genetically related to the child, however, the process of confirming legal
parentage is more complicated, and more likely to change from state to
state.91 Such policies and legislation also raise concerns about who these
regulations would actually protect—intended parents and their genetic
“property,” the health and decision-making power of surrogates, or both.
These conflicting guidelines at the state level are problematic because
surrogacy often involves interstate travel, with intended parents con-
tracting an agency in one state to hire a surrogate in another. In these
situations, surrogacy agencies and intended parents “shop around” for
the most amenable legal landscape, such that “agencies operating across
state lines . . . utilize the law of the most supportive jurisdiction, and
in this way circumvent the federal government’s regulation of interstate
commerce.”92 Same-sex couples have faced particular challenges with
interstate travel for surrogacy because until very recently, their mar-
riages (and thus recognition of their joint parentage) were not recog-
nized from one state to the next. For this reason, gay parents using ARTs
have often been advised to seek post-birth adoption whether they are
married or not.93 Crossing state lines for surrogacy is complicated by
the fact that many states have no legal provisions for surrogacy at all;
when contract disputes arise, the courts are reliant upon existing laws
that apply unevenly to surrogacy conflicts, including laws governing pa-
ternity, baby selling, adoption, donor insemination, and termination of
parental rights, as well as state and federal constitutions.94
In this sense, the United States follows a different trajectory than
other developed nations in its response to surrogacy; the practice is
banned or restricted in Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland,
Italy, Denmark, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.95
Israel stands out as one of the few countries in which surrogacy is legal,
and contracts are enforced by law.96 While Israel allows surrogacy, the
legal restrictions are strict, permitting only heterosexual, married cou-
ples to hire a surrogate, and only single or divorced women to act as
surrogates.97 France, in contrast, outlawed surrogacy as early as 1991 on
the basis that “it violates a woman’s body and improperly undermines
the practice of adoption,” in addition to eugenics-based fears expressed
by France’s solicitor general that “one could start choosing the mother
according to the color of her eyes, her hair, etc. and one could thus plan
the human race.”98 Queer folks face additional restrictions and discrimi-
nation around the world: the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and
France all deny gay couples access to IVF.99
Other scholars and activists who call for the regulation of surrogacy
compare the practice to organ donation; both are marketed as acts of
altruism, and both involve exchanges across state lines. Surrogacy agen-
cies take advantage of state-by-state variation in regulations in order
to attract out-of-state clients to regions with favorable surrogacy laws,
such as California, Texas, and Arkansas. Katherine Drabiak and her co-
authors claim that “uniform federal standards would prevent harmful
jurisdictional-forum shopping by decreasing the possibility for agencies
to exploit potential surrogates, parents, and discrepancies in the law for
their own financial gain.”100 Writing in the McGeorge Law Review, the
legal scholars Weldon Havins and James Dalessio propose such a stan-
dard: a Uniform Gestational Surrogacy Contract Act that would vali-
date gestational surrogacy contracts and establish guidelines for their
enforceability.101 Courts have also called for legislative action when
faced with the difficult task of applying existing case law on adoption
and donor insemination to disputed custody arrangements involving
reproductive technologies. However, lower courts now routinely make
legal distinctions between traditional and gestational surrogates, often
treating traditional surrogates as birth mothers under existing adoption
law and gestational surrogates as “nonmothers.”102
While ethicists, judges, and legal scholars may demand increased
regulation of the fertility industry, organizations that represent the pa-
tients and practitioners of reproductive medicine take a different tack.
The nonprofit American Society for Reproductive Medicine describes
itself as “a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to the advancement
of the art, science, and practice of reproductive medicine,” which sup-
ports “advocacy on behalf of patients, physicians, and affiliated health

care providers.” Founded in 1944, the ASRM positions itself as a leader
in the fight for reproductive rights with the ability to influence pub-
lic policy and legislation.103 The ASRM’s Ethics Committee reports on
ethical issues arising in the field of reproductive medicine. The commit-
tee’s guidelines are nonbinding (members do not have to follow them
in order to be certified), tend to be more descriptive than directive, and
are made up of professionals in bioethics, law, and reproductive medi-
cine.104 The ASRM describes itself as defending reproductive medicine
and is actively involved in either opposing, endorsing, or modifying
bills that impact the field in the realms of infertility insurance cover-
age, autonomy of fertility agencies, and parentage decisions. In 2012 the
ASRM came out with professional guidelines for gestational surrogacy,
including the requirement that the surrogate is represented by a lawyer
familiar with the appropriate contracts, and licensed to practice law in
all applicable states or international contexts. The legal theorist Susan
Crockin describes these guidelines as “laudatory,” but “neither practical
nor practiced in the United States.”105
As the ASRM’s activities suggest, state-level decisions impact surro-
gates and intended parents even when they do not directly address the
legality of the practice itself. In July 2010, for example, the Wisconsin
Supreme Court ruled that insurance companies must cover the medi-
cal expenses of pregnancy for insured women who act as surrogates.
The court decided that insurers cannot deny care based on the means
by which a woman becomes pregnant.106 This ruling is significant be-
cause insurance coverage can be a major expense for intended parents
who have to purchase a plan for their surrogate. Some bills may seem
only tangentially related to surrogacy, but are quite influential because
they affect one of the multiple medical components required for IVF. In
March 2010 a bill reached the Oklahoma state senate that would have
made it illegal to compensate egg donors, a move opposed by the ASRM,
the Oklahoma State Medical Society, and RESOLVE: the National Fer-
tility Association.107 Other surrogacy-related bills that have been intro-
duced or moved through state legislatures in recent years include an
Arizona bill that would prohibit the purchase of eggs; the Florida As-
sisted Reproductive Technology Act, which would require agencies to
conduct criminal background checks and mental health evaluations
of intended parents, gestational surrogates, and donors; a proposal to

establish a Maryland commission to study the “health and social well
being” of children born through surrogacy; bills that would extend in-
fertility insurance in Missouri and Maryland; a bill that would increase
ART reporting requirements in Michigan; and the Embryo Donation
and Adoption Act in Tennessee, which would categorize any child born
of a donated embryo as adopted.108 As previously mentioned, Louisi-
ana governor Bobby Jindal vetoed a bill in 2014 that had proposed a
legislative framework for surrogacy in that state. Despite the bill’s nar-
row language—it excluded gay couples, only covered surrogacy that was
“medically necessary,” and limited compensation—Jindal explained his
veto by citing ethical concerns raised by the pro-life community.109
While women’s rights organizations such as the National Organiza-
tion for Women (NOW) and prominent feminists like Betty Friedan and
Janice Raymond took an active (if greatly divided) role in the framing of
the surrogacy debates at the end of the twentieth century,110 today main-
stream feminist organizations are far less vocal on the issue of surrogacy.
At the time of analysis, NOW’s website included only four references
to surrogacy,111 two of which were links to external articles. One link
was to a 2013 Washington Post opinion piece, which cites anti-surrogacy
NOW board member Kathy Sloan. Sloan opposes surrogacy, which the
article describes as exploitative, based on the perceived reproduction
of race- and class-based hierarchies.112 The site also included two blog
posts that mention surrogacy: one addressing the concerns of young
feminists includes “respective regulation around surrogacy” as a com-
ponent of reproductive justice, while the other asks whether “surrogate
motherhood” is a feminist issue.113 Neither blog entry endorsed or op-
posed surrogacy or called for a specific feminist policy position on the
subject. In contrast to the somewhat tepid response to surrogacy, the
NOW website promoted grassroots feminist activism around other is-
sues that fall under the banner of reproductive rights, with pages such
as “Stop the Return of the Abortion Ban” and “Hey SCOTUS—Drop
Your Zone,” the latter of which prompts readers to e-mail the Supreme
Court.114
NARAL Pro-Choice America, a feminist organization dedicated to
protecting abortion rights, is even more subdued on the issue of sur-
rogacy. Under the heading “What Is Choice?” the NARAL website listed
four topics: abortion, birth control, sex education, and healthy preg-
nancy. The site defines pro-choice as “protecting women’s access to safe,
legal abortion. It also means working on ways to help reduce the need
for abortion, like improving access to birth control. And it means sup-
porting women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term.”115 This
mission statement reflects the defensive position taken by organizations
such as NOW and NARAL in response to a contemporary political envi-
ronment that is extremely hostile to women’s reproductive rights claims.
These organizations dedicate their energies to halting the erosion of
abortion rights and attacks on contraception, and thus arguably have
fewer resources to allocate to activism surrounding reproductive tech-
nologies, whether supporting or opposing practices such as surrogacy.
Rights organizations that are not specifically feminist, such as the
Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and RESOLVE: The National Infer-
tility Association, continue to focus on surrogacy. Similar to the HRC,
the RESOLVE website offered updates of current legislation described
as “pro-family” or “anti-family” and gave visitors an opportunity to
become advocates by contacting their legislators.116 There is no ques-
tion why the HRC and RESOLVE are active supporters of legislation
that would protect surrogacy and fertility treatments: the constituents
of both groups (gay and lesbian couples and the infertile, respectively)
benefit from such lobbying because they use reproductive technologies
to form families, whether through donor eggs and sperm, IVF, or gesta-
tional carriers. As Miriam Perez points out in an article for the website
RH Reality Check, many reproductive rights advocates who work on
surrogacy-related issues say little about the ethics of surrogacy itself, in-
stead opting to create “best practices” for surrogacy agreements.117 Perez
highlights the organization Women’s Bioethics Project, a Washington
State group that does not define itself as feminist, but describes itself
as a bridge between scholarship and policy, with the goal of promoting
“the thoughtful application of biotechnology to improve the status of
women’s lives” while protecting vulnerable populations.118 Reproductive
technologies are one of the three key issues listed on the organization’s
website, and Perez reports that it has collaborated with a Washington
politician on a bill he introduced to the state legislature that would legal-
ize surrogacy in that state. The group neither endorsed nor opposed the
bill, but worked with its creators to ensure that it did not discriminate
based on family type, that it protected informed consent, and that the
reproductive decision-making rights of surrogates were maintained.119
The bill, which NOW testified in support of at a House Judiciary Com-
mittee debate, failed to pass the Senate.120
Despite limited attention to surrogacy regulation as a feminist issue
by women’s rights groups, mainstream media accounts that call for regu-
lation are commonly inspired by an ART-related scandal such as a case
of contested surrogacy, a fraudulent agency, or an “unfit” intended par-
ent. This section will explore media coverage of such events, arguing
that what unites them is the move away from the traditional surrogacy
“horror story” and toward a call for regulation rather than criminal-
ization. In analyzing print media coverage of surrogacy between 1980
and 2002, Markens argues that “media coverage of surrogate parent-
ing, particularly the horror stories that focus on custodial disputes
over surrogate-born children, reflected and reinforced anxieties over
the future of motherhood and the family.”121 Markens found that early
coverage of surrogacy focused on the ways swift medical advancement
combined with a lack of regulation to produce surrogacy nightmares.122
I contend that the lack of regulation has emerged as a master narrative
in contemporary media accounts of surrogacy, weaving through what
Markens found to be the competing frameworks of “baby selling” versus
“the plight of the infertile couple.”123
Agency Fraud
The 2009 PBS television news investigation “Surrogacy: Wombs for
Rent?” reflects a shift in the surrogacy narrative, wherein a fraudulent
surrogacy agency is the catalyst for disaster, rather than a “bad” surrogate
or desperate mother. This episode of PBS’s NOW series follows Beth and
Marcio Madrones, intended parents who sought out a surrogacy agency
after Beth underwent a radical hysterectomy at age twenty-seven. It also
tells the story of Salina Ramirez, a twenty-five-year-old single mother of
two. Both the Madroneses and Ramirez were contracting with a Cali-
fornia agency called SurroGenesis; Beth and Marcio Madrones had paid
the agency $22,000 to secure a gestational surrogate, and Ramirez was
pregnant with the child of a Spanish couple. In the introduction to the
segment, the PBS correspondent Maria Hinojosa describes surrogacy
as a “business” that is “ripe for exploitation and fraud.”124 From this

lead-in one might expect a critique of surrogacy as a practice in which
wealthy intended parents exploit lower-class surrogates or greedy sur-
rogates manipulate desperate infertile couples. In contrast, the opening
scenes refrain from casting surrogates and intended parents into polar-
ized camps or scripted caricatures. True, Beth and Marcio Madrones
fit the stereotype of the desperate infertile couple, and Ramirez the ste-
reotype of the low-income surrogate, but the two parties are not pitted
against one another. Rather, they share a common third-party enemy:
the surrogacy agency that ran off with the intended parents’ money and
abruptly left Ramirez, who was four months pregnant, without health
insurance.125 The agency e-mailed clients in 2009 to inform them that
the tens of thousands of dollars that they had paid up front to the com-
pany (up to $90,000 per couple) were gone.126
Beth and Marcio Madrones joined a class action lawsuit against
SurroGenesis and its owner, who had disappeared with their money
in addition to the $2.5 million of nearly sixty other clients. Faced with
the prospect of tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, Ramirez’s
doctor recommended that she terminate her pregnancy if the intended
parents were not willing or able to pay for a new insurance policy. The
couple had already sold their apartment to come up with $50,000 in up-
front costs, but promised to find a way to pay her bills. While the owner
of SurroGenesis later pled guilty to federal charges of wire fraud,127 she
remained at large at the time that this show aired, rendering both the
intended parents and surrogate relatively powerless.128
The SurroGenesis scandal was picked up by mainstream publications
such as the New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times, as
well as by local news channels covering the stories of hometown cli-
ents scammed by the company. The New York Times quotes Andrew W.
Vorzimer, a lawyer who says that “many of them [the intended parents]
have lost their savings, and any chance of having a family is completely
destroyed. We’ve got couples in the midst of pregnancies with no abil-
ity to pay the surrogate, or even make insurance payments, which have
gone unpaid.”129 As this quote illustrates, contemporary media accounts
that focus on a call for regulation typically cast both surrogates and in-
tended parents as innocent victims of an unregulated industry in which
any individual capable of building a website can set up shop as a sur-
rogacy agent. The Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Zarembo describes
signing with an agency as “an act of faith” and quotes a victim of the Sur-
roGenesis scandal who likewise acknowledges that “there’s a huge com-
ponent of faith that goes into this and people aren’t as rigorous as they
would be in any other business transaction.”130 This language speaks to
the aforementioned tension surrounding the commodification of chil-
dren. The article explains, if not justifies, the naïveté of the intended par-
ents by implicitly referencing the unspoken assumption that children are
priceless and thus surrogacy is unlike “any other business transaction”
in which one would protect against fraud. The same victim describes
the SurroGenesis debacle as “leaving blood on both sides” because the
surrogates “are often young women, nonaffluent, who don’t have a lot of
education or financial resources.”131
This framework, in which intended parents are blinded by their des-
peration for a child and the altruism of surrogates is abused, moves away
from previous representations in which either the surrogate or intended
parent was cast in the role of the villain. As Zarembo notes, “The process
of paying surrogates has been controversial since its inception—but the
initial fears focused more on surrogates themselves, not on the pros-
pect of unreliable or unscrupulous brokers.”132 Zarembo is implicitly
referencing the Baby M case, the prototypical horror story in which the
intended parents and surrogate fought a bitter legal battle over child
custody, and each side accused the other of dishonesty and misconduct.
In contrast, both surrogates and intended parents involved in the Sur-
roGenesis debacle are largely portrayed as naive—either too altruistic
or too desperate to be sufficiently skeptical of the deceitful middleman.
In contemporary discourses, then, the profit-motivated middleman be-
comes the site of new anxieties about kinship and family.
Reporters point to the fact that many states require no qualifications
for an individual to open a surrogacy agency. The Washington Post
quotes the University of Southern California law professor Alexander
Capron as saying that “in most U.S. states until recently, nothing would
stop you from opening ‘Sam’s Sperm Bank and Delicatessen.’”133 Like-
wise, an article in the Dallas Morning News notes that agencies are not li-
censed by the state and require little more than a phone number, website,
and P.O. box in order to start a business matching surrogates with in-
tended parents. The article cites Amy Demma, a lawyer who agrees that
“anyone can hang a shingle,” as well as the medical ethicist Dr. Arthur
Caplan, who calls the fertility industry “an underground economy.”134
The lack of state or federal regulation over the actions of surrogacy
agencies is a common theme not only in reports of fraudulent agencies,
but also in the coverage of contested surrogacy cases. In cases of sur-
rogacy gone wrong, blame has frequently been attributed to inadequate
screening of surrogates and intended parents by agencies. Perhaps the
most shocking example of inadequate screening occurred in 1995 with
the tragic death of a child born through surrogacy. A twenty-six-year-
old single man named James Alan Austin paid $30,000 for an Indiana
woman to act as a gestational surrogate. Austin beat the five-week-old
child to death with his fists and a plastic coat hanger, prompting debate
over who should be allowed to hire the services of a surrogate.135 In re-
sponse, the legal scholar Lori Andrews argued that
the case points up the whole debate about whether surrogacy should
come under the adoption model, with intensive screening of the home
the child is going to, or the biological reproduction model, under which
there’s no screening. Should we license all parents, since they can do a lot
more damage than drivers or beauticians or others we license?136
The Austin case, and Andrews’s analysis of it, reflects a lack of social
and legal consensus over whether surrogacy should be treated as akin
to adoption, and thus deserving of intensive state intervention, or akin
to traditional reproduction, and therefore a supposedly private mat-
ter. While this private/public dichotomy of reproduction is necessarily
a false one (considering that low-income families, queer families, and
people of color often face intensive state intervention into all types of
family building), it is indicative of how the implications of ARTs have
outpaced society’s capacity to adjudicate them.
Contested Surrogacy
The question of regulation becomes particularly significant when tradi-
tional notions of kinship cannot be applied to settle a custody dispute.
This was the result when a Michigan couple, Amy and Scott Kehoe,
decided to pursue surrogacy after repeated failed attempts at pregnancy.
The Kehoes also purchased donor eggs and sperm, meaning that the
resulting child would not be genetically related to the couple or to the
surrogate.137 Amy Kehoe selected Shelly Baker, an experienced surro-
gate who had already given birth to four children of her own and had
undergone two successful surrogate pregnancies.138 The parties made
a verbal agreement that Baker would act as a gestational surrogate and
receive payment for medical expenses. The verbal nature of the agree-
ment was due to the unfriendly legal atmosphere toward surrogacy in
Michigan, a state that defines surrogacy as contrary to public policy and
renders such contracts unenforceable.139
Baker gave birth to twins, which she placed with the Kehoes in what
she would later describe on the daytime television program Dr. Phil as a
“puppy dog adoption.” Baker was referring to her sense that the Kehoes
were not taking the process seriously and were not prepared to receive
two newborns.140 Despite her reservations, Baker did not voice her con-
cerns about the fitness of the intended parents until after Kehoe was
named the legal mother of the children in a routine court proceeding
to confirm the adoption. During the court appearance, Baker learned
that Amy Kehoe had a history of mental illness and a decade-old ar-
rest record for cocaine possession. Nonetheless, Baker gave her assent
when asked by the judge whether she felt that the Kehoes were capable
parents for the twins. A month later, Baker returned to court requesting
full custody, charging that Amy Kehoe’s mental health and criminal past
posed a danger to the children. Because Michigan law voids surrogacy
contracts and favors the rights of the “birth mother,” Baker was awarded
custody of the twins even though she was not their genetic mother or
intended parent.141
It would seem in this case that regulation of surrogacy is not the root
of the problem. The state of Michigan has one of the toughest anti-
surrogacy stances in the country, which it enforced by voiding the ver-
bal contract between parties and awarding custody to Shelly Baker. The
state of Michigan imposes fines and jail time upon those who enter sur-
rogacy contracts, a position that it has upheld against legal challenges in
the Michigan Court of Appeals in 1981 and 1992. In the latter case, the
court defined its compelling interests (preventing children from becom-
ing commodities, serving the best interests of the child, and protecting
women from exploitation) and added that any arrangement involving
“conception and relinquishment of parental rights by the surrogate is

void.”142 Nonetheless, the Kehoes framed the court’s decision as “legal
kidnapping” of “their children” when they spoke out in public appear-
ances.143 The Kehoes had hired an attorney to handle the requirements
for adoption, such as home evaluations, letters of recommendation from
employers and psychiatrists, and physical evaluations. But, as Dr. Phil’s
legal expert Lisa Bloom states in the episode, “I can’t imagine any com-
petent attorney recommending that someone do a surrogacy agreement
in Michigan. Michigan very clearly says they are void and have no ef-
fect in Michigan, and can even be a crime.”144 Shelly Baker also blames
the legal system for her conundrum, arguing on Dr. Phil that laws in
Michigan should be changed to require the full disclosure of an intended
parent’s background, including a home study, before any surrogate un-
dergoes IVF. Bloom concurs, ending the show by positing the Kehoes’
situation as a cautionary tale to other couples:
So many of these problems arose because this was a legally murky area
in Michigan, and everybody understood that Michigan didn’t like surro-
gacy agreements. So they tried to get around it with a verbal agreement.
If you’re entering into something that’s legally murky in your state, before
you even think about it, before conception, before an agreement, before
shaking hands with somebody, you have to consult with an experienced
specialist in that area and get good legal advice at the very, very begin-
ning. I think that would have solved a lot of the problems that happened
here.145
New York Times coverage of the case also framed it as a cautionary tale,
claiming that “surrogacy is largely without regulation, with no authority
deciding who may obtain babies through surrogacy or who may serve
as a surrogate.”146 Likewise, ABC News coverage of the proceedings
described the case as a “surrogate nightmare,” but concluded that both
sides had a legitimate argument and that surrogacy is an “unregulated,
really difficult legal morass to try to traverse.”147 While public opinion
seems to have sided with the Kehoes based upon audience response to
the Dr. Phil show and Baker’s own assertion that she has been treated
“like a monster,” the case also suggests that a call for regulation is made
even in states that have laid out a surrogacy policy. Because the question
of kinship is so unclear, this claim differs from a clear-cut surrogacy

“horror story”; since neither the Kehoes nor Baker had any genetic tie
to the child, a binary good mom/bad mom framework did not cohere.
Another instance of contested surrogacy covered by news media from
2000 to 2010 included a custody dispute between a gay male couple and
the sister of one of the men, who served as a gestational surrogate. Ange-
lia Robinson sued for custody after giving birth to twins in 2006 for her
brother, Donald Hollingsworth, and his husband, Sean Hollingsworth.
The twins were not genetically related to Robinson, having been created
using Sean Hollingsworth’s sperm and donated eggs. Although Robin-
son had signed a pre-birth agreement to give up all parental and cus-
tody rights,148 the state of New Jersey followed its decision in the case
of Baby M, and ruled that Robinson and Sean Hollingsworth were the
legal parents, giving no parental rights to Donald Hollingsworth.149 The
judge noted that New Jersey discourages surrogacy due to the poten-
tial negative effects on a child of being separated from his or her “birth
mother.”150
Given that the children in this suit were to be raised by two fa-
thers, the judge’s words may also suggest a preference for a two-parent,
opposite-sex family formation. Laws that limit the number of legal par-
ents to two may be part of the problem, at least in some states. A Cali-
fornia Democrat recently proposed raising the number of legal parents
in that state so that additional parents (such as a sperm donor or sur-
rogate) could provide support for and have the right to a relationship
with the child. Such legislation could offer legal parenthood to more
than just the intended parents in a surrogacy arrangement, which could
“formalize commitments to the children, provide access to health in-
surance and citizenship, or even to provide a contingency against state
intervention by the child welfare system.”151 The bill was passed, but ve-
toed by Democratic governor Jerry Brown. If such legislation existed in
New Jersey it is possible that Angelia Robinson’s gestational and familial
(although nongenetic) connection to the children could be recognized
without taking rights away from the nongenetic intended father, Donald
Hollingsworth. This kind of legislation could open the door for ARTs
to pose a much more radical challenge to traditional kinship structures
that hinge upon the two-parent, nuclear, heterosexual family, which per-
haps explains its eventual veto.
In 2003, the gestational surrogate Danielle Bimber unexpectedly left

the hospital with triplets after she said that the intended parents failed
to promptly retrieve the newborn babies post-birth. The biological in-
tended father, James Flynn, claimed that he and his fiancée were merely
delayed in doing so, and that further delays were caused by both Bim-
ber and the hospital where the children were born. Numerous trials
ensued in both Pennsylvania and Ohio, during which at various times
the egg donor sued for custody, Bimber and Flynn were named the
legal parents, Flynn and the egg donor were named the legal parents,
Bimber and her husband were given custody, and Flynn was required to
pay child support.152 Following the precedent of a case called Belsito v.
Clark, Ohio determines parentage by first establishing a parent’s genetic
relationship to the child, and then assessing whether the genetic parents
have waived parental rights. This stands in contrast to states like Cali-
fornia, Nevada, and New York, which use the intent-based approach.
The Ohio Court of Appeals also ruled that Bimber had breached con-
tract and was thus required to repay Flynn the money she had earned
from the surrogacy, child support payments, and any legal fees he had
incurred.153
Finally, in 2006, after Bimber had been raising the triplets for two and
a half years, a Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled that Bimber had no
legal standing to custody over the children, and required that she relin-
quish them to Flynn.154 Issues of class were also raised throughout the
trials, wherein the wealthier intended father argued that he was more
capable of raising the children and attending to their medical needs than
were the working-class Bimbers, who were already raising three children
of their own. Media coverage of the case reinforced the class difference
between the two, with one article describing the “vastly different means”
of Flynn, a college professor, and Bimber, who had dropped out of col-
lege, worked minimum-wage jobs, and filed for bankruptcy. The article
contrasts Bimber with Flynn, who “said he earned $136,000 a year, lived
in an affluent community and has a biological connection to the chil-
dren.” Flynn is also quoted as saying that he and his fiancée “can do a
better job in taking care of them [the children]. We can spend more time
with them than other people—than Danielle can do. We can do a better
job educating them and do a better job in taking care of their medical
needs.”155
As these cases demonstrate, the technology necessary to create these

kinship questions surpasses society’s preparedness to answer them, par-
ticularly when class, sexuality, and ability influence questions of parental
fitness. The lack of overarching regulation leaves both surrogates and
intended parents vulnerable, particularly when they do not reflect the
standards of heteronormative, middle-class, white parenting. Increasing
attention to the lack of regulation in the surrogacy industry suggests that
the legitimacy of surrogacy itself is no longer the primary issue. Instead,
as surrogacy (and reproductive technologies more broadly) grows in-
creasingly common, media attention is shifting toward broader ques-
tions of its meaning, its impact, and how conflicts will and should be
addressed.
The Kinship Question

Even when a surrogacy arrangement proceeds flawlessly, the asyn-
chrony between the biological and social components of “mother” and
“father” are exposed. This division presents a challenge to the tradi-
tional, uncomplicated assumption that the designation of mother is
coterminous with the act of giving birth. In this respect, surrogacy
is similar to adoption, and in fact genetic parents may be required
to adopt the children they commission through surrogacy. Media
accounts of surrogacy, as with adoption, express a fascination with
origins—who are the child’s biological parents? Who are the legal par-
ents? How many possible combinations of mother/father/egg donor/
sperm donor/surrogate can be breathlessly arranged in order to paint
a tangled web of kinship possibilities? Some media accounts take this
disunion as a portent of a dystopian future: if parents are willing to
“design” a child using donor eggs, donor sperm, and a gestational
surrogate, then little stands in the way of a society divided between
genetically engineered “haves” and the naturally inferior “have-nots.”
This fear is dramatized in the 1997 film Gattaca, in which a new social
hierarchy has emerged between “invalids” (individuals born of natural
reproduction) and “valids” (genetically engineered to possess superior
traits). In this futuristic film, invalids are second-class citizens, barred
from prestigious jobs and socially outcast, while valids carefully moni-
tor the population to ensure exclusivity.156
The scholars Laura Briggs and Jodi Kelber-Kaye argue that Gattaca
can “tell stories about how genes and science threaten the ‘pure’ and
‘natural’ family,” which resonates with “U.S. cultural anxieties about
genes.”157 These anxieties emerge in news media accounts of surrogacy
in which surrogacy is painted with the same brush as reproductive tech-
nologies including IVF, prenatal genetic diagnosis (PGD), and fetal sex
selection, all part of a slippery slope of “dangerous” reproductive tech-
nologies. A 2002 article in the Christian Science Monitor begins with
a discussion of surrogacy but then warns of “a chilling array of com-
ing reproductive technologies that will allow parents to make complex
decisions at the time of conception about their children’s genetics and
traits.”158 An article in USA Today likewise argues that “surrogacy could
lead to genetic engineering,” and encourages readers to redirect their
fears of human cloning to ARTs: “If you want something genuine to fret
about, experts suggest considering what already is occurring at the local
in vitro fertilization clinic,” namely, the genetic screening of embryos.159
In this discourse, reproductive technologies are interchangeably held
up as symbols of technology gone wrong, from IVF, which transformed
Nadya Suleman into “Octomom,” to PGD, which would allow parents to
select a child’s traits down to his or her eye color. As Lisa Belkin admits
in the New York Times,
In all those years of writing on the subject I often dismissed the “slippery
slope” argument, because I never really believed that anyone would go
through the physical and financial strain of IVF or P.G.D. for frivolous
reasons. I naively thought that human nature would regulate itself. I am
learning that I was wrong.160
I would argue that it is not frivolity that alarms those who warn of
a snowball effect in which technology races ahead of regulation, ethi-
cal debate, or even common sense. Rather, it is the creation of fami-
lies, parents, and children that, from Belkin’s perspective, “nature never
intended.”161 Reproductive technologies raise the question of what it
means to be a parent, pushing the distinction between biological and
social parenting such that ARTs are interpreted by some as the harbin-
ger of the dissolution of the nuclear family or, at the least, a new (and
troubling) definition of that institution. As Liz Mundy writes in the
Washington Post, “these technologies are setting in motion a social ex-

periment that will unfold over decades, creating hundreds of thousands
of families in which the role of genetic ties will be newly tested—and the
meaning of family reevaluated.”162 The aforementioned case of “Octo-
mom” Nadya Suleman led to very public discussions of what constitutes
legitimate family formation, and who has the right to use reproductive
technologies in the first place.
Nadya Suleman catapulted to the nation’s attention in 2009 after giv-
ing birth to octuplets, the result of IVF treatments in which her doctor
implanted more than the recommended number of fertilized embryos.
Suleman was only the second woman in the United States to give birth
to octuplets, and the first to whom all eight children survived.163 As
details emerged about Suleman’s life, a media frenzy ensued. Reporters
“discovered” that Suleman was unemployed, single, of ambiguous racial/
ethnic background, had allegedly undergone plastic surgery to look like
celebrity mom Angelina Jolie, and—most shockingly—was already a
mother of six, all conceived using assisted reproductive technologies.164
These revelations were cast as scandalous evidence of Suleman’s mater-
nal unfitness. As one critic noted, “rather than being embraced by the
media and diaper companies like the McCaughy septuplets and other
multiple-birth families before her, the single woman with a sketchy em-
ployment history and an anonymous sperm donor was lambasted by the
press as morally, and perhaps mentally, bankrupt.”165 Suleman has been
described as “crazy,” “self-deluded,” a drain on state finances, and an in-
capable mother.166 Suleman’s story is worth reflecting upon because she
seemingly epitomizes the concerns that animate the “slippery slope” dis-
course of reproductive technologies. Suleman flouted the unspoken rule
that in order for ARTs to be socially acceptable, they must be positioned
as an aid to the married, the heterosexual, the tragically infertile, or at
the very least, families that can reflect back some aspect of this accepted
narrative. Suleman did not conform to the normative model of fam-
ily formation; her nonmarital status and her technologically enhanced
reproductive excess positioned her as undeserving of being “assisted”
by reproductive technology. The story of the “Octomom” (a moniker
that in itself conjures images of the monstrous and obscene) tapped into
fears of the hyperfertile female Other—a threat to the sanctity of the
traditional family.
Indeed, news media accounts of reproductive technologies, and sur-

rogacy in particular, often set up what the historian Stephanie Coontz
describes as the myth of an idyllic American family. This mythic family,
which existed in some amorphous past, is represented as much more
natural, uncomplicated, and pure than the fragmented cyborgian fam-
ily of today.167 For example, the author of the Christian Science Monitor
article asks, “But have we really come to the point where conventional
childbearing—Mother Nature’s way—is being upstaged by an artificial
process that researchers might approvingly call Mother Nurture?”168
This quote employs the well-known (and highly problematic) binary of
nature versus nurture, while also aligning conventional and natural in
contrast to the “artificial” process of reproductive technologies.
The TV news host Ted Koppel epitomizes this sentiment in an ABC
News segment on surrogacy, stating, “Babies—it used to be so basic.
But now Dad may be a sperm bank, Mom an egg donor.”169 Not only
does this statement pass itself off as a truism, it knowingly elides the
social and biological aspects of parenthood (conflating fatherhood with
sperm donation) while also referencing an imagined past in which even
paternity was always self-evident. Likewise, Lorraine Ali and Raina Kel-
ley claim in Newsweek that “surrogates challenge our most basic ideas
about motherhood, and call into question what we’ve always thought of
as an unbreakable bond between mother and child” (emphasis mine).170
A nearly identical statement appears in a CBS Sunday Morning piece
entitled “Special Delivery,” in which the reporter Kelly Wallace states
that “surrogacy remains an act raising questions about our whole no-
tion of motherhood, that unmistakable bond between mother and child”
(emphasis mine).171 All of these quotes imply that the advance of repro-
ductive technologies signals the loss of something that was natural, el-
emental, and effortless, including the instinctual bond between mother
and child. Yet, as many feminist scholars have pointed out, the concept
of natural reproduction is itself a social construction.
If “natural” signifies the absence of technological or medical inter-
vention, then pregnancy in America is unnatural at best; nearly all U.S.
births occur in hospitals, where women experience (and often welcome)
varying levels of “active management,” including pain medication, in-
ducement, and Cesarean section.172 Women have historically been ac-
tive agents in the medicalization of pregnancy in the United States. Early
twentieth-century Progressive reformers campaigned for “twilight sleep”

during pregnancy despite the misgivings of medical professionals who
feared its effects and resented the intrusion into their sphere of influ-
ence.173 What’s more, the concept of a natural bond between mother and
child is far from transhistorical. Maternal-infant bonding and attach-
ment theories rose to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, premised on
the notion that the instinctive bond between mother and child forms the
basis for all social relations. Proponents of these theories compared the
effect on a child of a woman’s full-time employment to that of her death,
insisting that “maternal deprivation” includes institutionalization and
neglect, as well as the effects of multiple caretakers and separation from
the mother.174 Bonding today is framed as both natural and tenuous—
the recent push at the state level to require transvaginal ultrasounds as
a prerequisite for abortion suggests that a woman’s “natural” maternal
instinct can (and in some cases, must) be sparked through technological
intervention.
Yet as the former examples suggest, motherhood, the natural, and the
feminine have traditionally been aligned in opposition to science and
technology. Strategies of normalization and naturalization are required
in order to create mothers and fathers through science while maintain-
ing hegemonic ideologies of the natural family. As the feminist theorist
Charis Thompson argues, “one way to stabilize shifting notions of what
is natural and normal around reproduction is to compensate with ex-
tremely conservative or stereotypical—parodic—understandings of sex,
gender, and kinship.”175 Parents in media accounts of surrogacy discur-
sively locate their children securely within traditional kinship structures.
One tactic is to create a birth story that incorporates technological in-
tervention into family formation. Interestingly, these birth stories often
take on a conservative aspect, revolving around the failure of the ma-
ternal body—mommy’s “belly” or “tummy” is “broken.”176 The surro-
gacy lawyer Melissa Brisman told her own daughter, “The doctor took
a piece of Daddy and took a piece of Mommy and put it inside some-
one else because my tummy was broken.”177 The actress Joan Lunden,
who has two sets of twins through surrogacy, tells the New York Times
that she will explain the situation to her brood through the metaphor
of baked goods: “It’s almost like we can’t cook the cupcakes in our oven
because the oven is broken. We’re going to use the neighbor’s oven.”178
Lunden’s metaphor distances the surrogate from direct kinship, but sug-
gests a communal tie or bond that is not severed after the “cupcakes” are
“baked.” Other narratives emphasize the custodial role of the surrogate
as akin to a babysitter or a temporary caregiver. The son of a gestational
surrogate explains to the New York Times, “I thought it [the baby] was
going to be my brother or sister. It was like, ‘Huh?’ And then she [his
mother] explained that my aunt couldn’t carry the baby and my mom
is carrying for her. Like the hen keeping the eggs warm in the nest.”179
This “kinship work” is a form of agency; surrogates and parents “claim
or disown bonds of ancestry and descent, blood and genes, nation and
ethnicity” to legitimize their own family formations.180
These stories are part of a competing discourse in media accounts
that naturalize surrogacy by representing families created through sur-
rogacy as “just like everyone else,” often by describing a perfectly ordi-
nary family scene or birth story before revealing that the child was born
of a surrogate. Examples include the following:
She’s built perfectly for it: six feet tall, fit and slender but broad-hipped.
Which is why she found herself two weeks ago in a birthing room in a
hospital in Huntsville, swollen with two six-pound boys she had been
carrying for eight months. Also in the room was Kerry Smith and his
wife, Lisa, running her hands over the little lumps beneath the taut skin
of Cantor’s belly. “That’s an elbow,” said Cantor, who knew how the babies
were lying in her womb. “Here’s a foot.” Lisa smiled proudly at her hus-
band. She is, after all, the twins’ mother.181
In the early months of Teresa Anderson’s pregnancy last fall, it seemed

every other trip to the doctor brought another burst of mind-blowing,
life-altering news. First one heartbeat. Then two heartbeats. Then three,
and four, and finally the bombshell truth confirmed during her January
ultrasound: She was carrying five babies. Five! Anderson had never imag-
ined such a thing could happen. How could anyone take care of so many
children? Yet as her body has transformed and the due date draws nearer,
one thought has comforted her: They aren’t hers.182
Doug Metcalfe cut the umbilical cord immediately after Jen Betts gave
birth to baby Sara. It had been a difficult pregnancy, and everyone was
relieved that the delivery, though a few weeks early, had gone well. “Then
they put her on my tummy, and I cried, which I do with all of them be-
cause I can’t help it,” Betts says. “Doug picked her up off my tummy and
hugged her. It was incredible.” After a week in intensive care, the baby was
discharged from the hospital. Except for photos, Betts hasn’t seen Sara
since. . . . Betts, 26, is a gestational surrogate.183
It’s their big night. The race is on. Melissa and Michael Musman from
Brooklyn, New York, have rushed to the OSF [Saint Francis Medical
Center] in Peoria, Illinois. They’re having their first child. And they
barely made it. Only Melissa’s not the one giving birth, Tracy is. She’s a
surrogate.184
The “reveal” of the surrogate mother in these passages is meant to

surprise the reader, but, I would argue, not necessarily to Other the non-
traditional family. Rather, by using firsthand accounts of “real” families,
the authors discursively situate surrogacy as “the new normal” (also the
title of a short-lived NBC sitcom about a surrogate and two gay dads).
In an analysis of media accounts of gay parents, the feminist theorist
Suzanna Walters finds a remarkably similar narrative structure, one that
“asserts the absolute ordinariness of the family life as a precursor to the
introduction of the gay theme.”185 Walters also notes the proliferation of
studies meant to prove that children of gay parents are “no worse off ”
than those of straight parents. The thought that such children could per-
haps be better off in a nontraditional family is never considered. Similar
studies of surrogate-born children suggest that these alternative family
formations are always analyzed in comparison to the socially accepted
normative family.186
Surrogacy and Queer Families

The discourse on how surrogacy alters traditional kinship structures
has also been shaped by the use of surrogates by gay parents. Gay
parents (and particularly gay men) are increasingly taking advantage
of surrogacy as part of the “gayby boom” explosion of queer fami-
lies. Transnational adoption is progressively more difficult for gay
intended parents; many countries exclude gay parents from eligibility
requirements, forcing them to hide their sexuality and adopt singly,

rather than as a couple.187 This environment makes surrogacy an appeal-
ing option, with a number of surrogacy agencies serving an exclusively
gay clientele and surrogates actively choosing gay couples over hetero-
sexual pairs.188 In many ways, the gay dads featured in mainstream
media articles about surrogacy exemplify the discursive normalization
of nonnormative families because both their queerness and their use of
a surrogate require naturalization.
For example, in an interview with the first gay couple in America
to parent quadruplets, Diane Sawyer states on Primetime Live that “the
irony is the two men challenging convention about babies, fertility,
and family are, in fact, unexpected champions of traditional values.”189
Sawyer goes on to reveal that the two gay men who had their children
through a surrogate are anti-abortion, Republican, and Catholic. The
couple, Michael Meehan and Thomas Dysarz, were left in legal limbo
after Kentucky courts refused to allow their surrogate to relinquish her
parental rights to Meehan. Although Meehan was the biological father,
the courts argued that it was unreasonable to claim that one parent
(Meehan) could be better than two (Meehan and the surrogate), which
seemed to presume that to parent in the plural is reserved for heterosex-
ual couples. Primetime Live spoke to a lawyer from the gay legal rights
organization Lambda Defense and Education Fund, who countered
that the court-appointed lawyer for the state was really saying that “a
2-parent family made up of two men or two women is, by his definition,
simply not in the best interest of the child,” an argument supported by
the fact that Kentucky did not allow gay couples to adopt at that time.
Despite Meehan and Dysarz’s insistence upon their own traditional val-
ues, the courts refused to recognize the kinship structure that they had
created.190
Gay, surrogacy-created families like these are often prompted to
frame themselves as traditional or “normal” by the media. One gay dad
who spoke to USA Today emphasized that he was not making a political
statement in deciding to create a family through surrogacy: “We didn’t
go into this wanting to be trailblazers. We went into this wanting to be
a family.”191 The following exchange was made in a 2010 interview be-
tween prospective parents, the gay rights activists Gary Spino and Tony
Brown, and the CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien:
O’Brien: Is it ironic, though, that one of the most activist things you’re
doing right now is incredibly traditional? You want to be a family.
You want to have a baby. That is very traditional for a bunch of activ-
ists, isn’t it?
Spino: It is. And we’ve been taught since you’re born, grow up, get mar-
ried, have a kid. It’s really unfair to then say, you know what? You
can’t do that.192
By presenting these two fathers as “traditional,” O’Brien implicitly as-

sumes that gay parenting presents no challenge to heteronormativity.
Like the “born that way” discourse of homosexuality embraced by main-
stream gay rights organizations and accepted as a truism by progressive-
leaning Americans, the idea that gay parenting is “traditional” (and thus
tolerable) decidedly circumvents a more radical argument for queer
parents’ rights.193 A gay dad explains his decision to use a surrogate
by explicitly comparing his family to the idealized, hegemonic norm:
“I don’t know if it’s a decision [to have children] that’s any different
than a straight couple makes. We had the house, the dog and the white
picket fence, and we decided we wanted to spend the rest of our lives
together.”194 The article also notes that he and his partner have been to-
gether for twelve years, further normalizing them as monogamous and
stable in contrast to stereotypes of gay men as promiscuous. Another
gay intended father describes his relationship with an egg donor in a
way that mirrors heteronormative notions of complementarity and ro-
mantic love. Scott, the intended father, says he knew that Tabby was “the
one” as soon as they met: “‘We just clicked,’ he recalled. ‘I thought, ‘I’d
marry that girl.’ She seemed happy and serene,’ traits the Harvard MBA
wanted to balance his ‘revved up, Type A personality.’”195 Scott’s com-
ments naturalize his relationship with Tabby as more than a payment
for service; his masculine, driven, and ambitious side is stabilized by her
feminine calm.
Needless to say, not all gay intended fathers employ highly gendered
heteronormative discourses to normalize their ART-inspired arrange-
ments, and men who do so are arguably more likely to be interviewed
in the pages of the Washington Post or appear on prime-time television.
Class is also significant in determining who will use reproductive tech-
nologies. A gay single father interviewed by National Public Radio ac-
knowledges that surrogacy cost him nearly $100,000 before his triplets
were born. He also hired a live-in nanny with training as a nurse to care
for the children at night, change their diapers, and cook for the fam-
ily.196 As this story suggests, class, in the form of disposable income,
may also play a role in the number of media stories devoted to gay male
parents rather than lesbian parents. While gay men are more likely to
use surrogacy, and to have the economic resources necessary to do so,
lesbians routinely use vaginal insemination and intrauterine insemina-
tion (IUI) to conceive. Lesbians have also used IVF to give both partners
a biological connection (genetic or gestational) to their future child by
creating embryos using the eggs of one partner and donated sperm, and
then having the embryos implanted into the other partner.197 Lesbians
may also use a surrogate if one or both women are unable to carry a
pregnancy to term. Lesbians receive less media attention than gay men
in general, and this trend holds true in relation to media coverage of
reproductive technologies.
The question of kinship is a central theme in media accounts of sur-
rogacy and in media coverage of reproductive technologies writ large.
This speaks to the broader argument of this project, that reproductive
technologies have the potential to destabilize normative ideologies of
kinship, gender, and family, and yet many of these challenges are re-
incorporated into the hegemonic norm through processes of natural-
ization. This is exemplified by the birth stories that intended parents
construct, the assimilationist rhetoric expressed by and imposed upon
gay intended parents, and the multiple news reports that assert the ordi-
nariness of surrogate families. The proliferation of these stories and the
anxiety circulating within them suggest that this naturalization is not
seamless and that the possibilities for reproductive technologies cannot
be contained within one normalizing discourse.
The Absence of Race

The near absence of any discussion of race in media coverage of sur-
rogacy was also quite remarkable throughout this sample. For example,
the shocking Newsweek article about military wives as surrogates
mentions race only briefly, stating that “thanks to reproductive sci-
ence, Gernisha Myers, who is African-American, is now 18 weeks
pregnant with the twins of Karin and Lars, a white couple who live in
Germany.”198 In this quote, the article attributes the existence of cross-
racial surrogacy to “science,” which is frequently pitted against “nature”
in media accounts of reproductive technologies. Myers’s race is implic-
itly referenced again when the authors assert that her lack of genetic tie
to the child is also what allows her to remain detached from any poten-
tial bonding during pregnancy. Emphasizing Myers’s nongenetic role
after identifying her racial difference to the couple serves to normalize
the pregnancy, banishing the threat of interracial procreation. Yet even
this aside about race is unusual within the sample; most articles make
no mention of race (of the surrogate, intended parents, or egg donors)
whatsoever.
The exception to this absence of race in media coverage of surrogacy
occurs in articles that explicitly address reproductive tourism, which
were largely excluded from this U.S.-based sample. I will discuss repro-
ductive tourism at length in chapter 5, but a great deal of media cover-
age on transnational surrogacy, particularly the growth of this industry
in developing countries, seems to promote a simplified “surrogacy as
victim” narrative.199 These narratives are often racialized in that they
rely on the stereotype of “Third World” women as disempowered, op-
pressed, and exploited by their poverty and their nationality.
By failing to address race, the majority of media accounts of surro-
gacy in the United States impose an assumed unmarked white identity
upon those who hire surrogates, and those who act as surrogates. The
primary difference that is highlighted between surrogates and intended
parents is class, not race. Class and race intersect in determining one’s
access to and need for fertility services, given that women of color are at
higher risk for infertility in the United States than white women. More-
over, the insufficient discussion of race in media coverage bolsters the
assumption that a racialized reading of surrogacy is unnecessary or su-
perfluous. Because almost all commercial surrogacy arrangements are
gestational, the race of the surrogate is considered to be inconsequential,
since she is not contributing her genetic material to the future child. Yet,
as chapter 3 will demonstrate, this dismissal of race ignores the history
of racialized reproductive labor in the United States, and the ways racial
difference can benefit white intended parents. It also suggests an arti-
ficial color blindness in an industry that is built upon monetizing and
geneticizing difference, from intelligence to hair texture. By ignoring

race, media coverage of surrogacy reinforces white privilege and the role
it plays in reproductive politics.
***
Surrogacy narratives in the twenty-first century have largely avoided
characterizing either the surrogate or the intended parent as the vil-
lain; instead, journalistic accounts of surrogacy focus on the altruism
of the surrogate, the process of kinship construction, and the lack of
regulation in the ART industry.200 The reasons for this shift are multiple:
first, alternative family formations, including gay and lesbian parenting,
transnational adoption, interracial marriage, voluntary childlessness,
and single-parent families, are increasingly common in the United
States. Such family formations exceed the boundaries of the traditional
nuclear family in which same-race, married, heterosexual men and
women raise children to whom they are both biologically related. As the
number of nontraditional families rises in American society, and repre-
sentations of such families increasingly permeate popular culture, the
shock value of surrogacy and other reproductive technologies arguably
diminishes. While it was once common for couples to hide the use of
even low-tech ARTs such as artificial insemination, today both celebri-
ties and average Americans often openly acknowledge their use of such
technologies.
Indeed, the public response to reproductive technologies can be
traced alongside the changing terminology used to describe fertility ser-
vices. The very acronym of ART stood for “artificial” reproductive tech-
nologies in previous decades, but has now shifted to “assisted” as these
procedures have become both naturalized and normalized.201 As the
term “test tube babies” suggests, early incarnations of IVF were viewed
as artificial, in the sense of being man-made in a laboratory rather than
“natural” or God-given. While babies born through ARTs may still be
referred to as “miracles” today, the miracle is one that was “assisted”
through logical recourse to science and medicine. This naturalization of
ARTs has itself been assisted by the reproductive technology industry,
which has actively managed the public perception of fertility clinics and
the priceless (yet pricey) end result that can never quite be guaranteed.
When ARTs are represented as “natural science in the service of the nat-
ural family,” then the value of these technologies becomes increasingly

difficult to critically question.202
The three themes of women helping women, the call for regulation,
and the kinship question all contribute to a discourse on surrogacy that
frames the issue in the popular imagination. While some cases of con-
tested surrogacy are still cast as traditional surrogacy “horror stories” by
vilifying the surrogate or intended parents, many more frame the horror
as a result of a lack of federal regulation. This framework is shored up by
the women-helping-women narratives in surrogacy discourse that posit
surrogacy as a leveling device between women—the exchange of money
is mediated by the “gift” of a child and cloaked in affective language of
altruism. Yet the kinship question lingers in surrogacy discourse, re-
flecting anxiety over a perceived disruption of traditional ideologies of
what it means to be a mother, a father, and a family. Even when nonnor-
mative kinship patterns are naturalized through normalizing strategies
employed by both intended parents and those who tell their stories, legal
roadblocks remain in place as a reminder of the hegemonic authority of
traditional ideology.
In addition to mapping out the popular understanding of surrogacy,
all three themes demonstrate the ideological work done to naturalize
surrogacy as a legitimate form of family formation, even if it is one that
requires increased levels of surveillance and control. Indeed, the de-
sire to regulate the ART industry (and surrogacy’s role within it) can
be read as evidence of ART’s incorporation into the social norm and a
reflection of biopower, which, according to Foucault, is the “power over
life” through which populations are managed, disciplined, and normal-
ized.203 The call to regulate ARTs is, for better or for worse, a reflection
of the process of normalization. Questions of power and difference are
likewise central to chapter 3, which establishes cross-racial surrogacy
within a specific history of cross-racial reproductive labor in the United
States. An analysis of that history demonstrates how contemporary
cross-racial surrogacy arrangements are naturalized and normalized,
despite what are often glaring imbalances of wealth and social capital
between the parties involved.
NYU Press
Chapter Title: From Mammies to Mommy Machines: Gender and Racialized Reproductive
Labor

3
From Mammies to Mommy Machines
Gender and Racialized Reproductive Labor
The history of racialized reproductive labor in the United States includes

both continuities and disruptions. Consumer desire in the realm of ARTs
shapes competing discourses about racial difference, and thus inflects
epistemologies of race at various historical moments. That being said,
the usurpation of raced bodies in the service of reproductive labor has
remained relatively stable within the framework of shifting ideologies of
maternity, gender, race, and science. Cross-racial gestational surrogacy
has a historical counterpart in the practice of cross-racial wet nursing,
and a comparison between the two reveals similar ways that knowledge
production is influenced by the economic needs of the dominant class.
This chapter does not undertake a comprehensive history of the (well-
documented) practice of wet nursing in Europe and the United States.
Rather, I analyze how cross-racial wet nursing is symptomatic of the
intersectionality of race, science, and reproductive labor, and how domi-
nant social groups benefit at the expense of women of color.
In the surrogacy and ART industries, characteristics of gestational
surrogates such as race, ethnicity, and class are typically cast as incon-
sequential to the outcome of the fetus. The caveat lies with the “envi-
ronment” of the womb. Pregnant women face a litany of behavioral
restrictions based on what is often mercurial medical advice about
prenatal health, with surrogates uniquely vulnerable to surveillance
during pregnancy. For example, a commissioning couple may express
concern over hiring a rural or low-income surrogate because they fear
that she will not follow urban and middle-class pregnancy mores such
as avoiding all caffeine and alcohol, eating organic foods, or exercising.
The same couple is less likely to anticipate that their future child will
inherit so-called working-class values or traits through exposure to the
environment of the womb. Likewise, intended parents may hesitate to
89
90 | From Mammies to Mommy Machines
hire a surrogate because she is obese, but not because her red hair indi-
cates a volatile temperament that could influence the disposition of the
child-to-be. However, this demarcation between gestation and genetics
has not always been clear, only in part because scientific understandings
of the gene are relatively recent. Popular and scientific beliefs about the
transmission of traits through reproduction are deeply invested in the
politics of reproductive labor, especially the practices that are believed to
benefit society at a particular historical moment. Moreover, the politics
of reproductive labor in the United States have always been racialized.
Laws regulating intimate cross-racial contact are a significant measure
of how Americans construct categories of race, and the policing of racial
boundaries is tied to politics and the economy.
Like cross-racial wet nursing, gestational surrogacy is also a racial-
ized and classed practice, particularly when the surrogate is a woman
of color and the intended parents are white. Of course, not all racialized
ideologies are homogeneous; while this chapter focuses primarily on the
reproductive labor of African American women in the United States,
chapter 5 will address the reproductive tourism industry—situated as
it is within a transnational web of racial politics. The growing trend of
cross-racial gestational surrogacy in the United States is a small but sig-
nificant indicator of the continued reliance of middle- and upper-class
women on the reproductive labor of women of color. Like cross-racial
gestational surrogacy, cross-racial wet nursing did not need to be “nor-
mal” in terms of statistical frequency in order to be normalized and even
naturalized.
Reproductive labor can encompass a wide range of practices, from
pregnancy and nursing to birth and everyday childcare. What makes
surrogacy stand out as a form of reproductive labor is in part its bodily
specificity. As Iris Marion Young argues, pregnancy blurs binaries be-
tween inner and outer, self and other. In the case of surrogacy, this split-
ting is exacerbated by additional contradictions—mother/not mother,
my body/your baby.1 The substances that pass between the pregnant
woman and the fetus complicate clear-cut boundaries of self and other
and thus require work on the part of all parties involved to clarify these
borders. When surrogacy is cross-racial, this ideological work involves
the privileging of genetics over gestation to shore up the understand-
ing that the race of the fetus is determined at conception and is not
From Mammies to Mommy Machines | 91
influenced by the surrogate. This belief has particular salience in the

United States due to the historical policing of racial boundaries through
social and legal practices, such as the early twentieth-century “one-drop
rule.”2 On the surface, the practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy
suggests that the fear of interracial mixing is a relic of a racist past when
the color line was strictly enforced, prior to the takeover of “the hege-
mony of the gene.”3 On the contrary, cross-racial gestational surrogacy
shares many similarities with cross-racial wet nursing, a historical form
of cross-racial reproductive labor in the United States. Like cross-racial
gestational surrogacy, wet nursing blurred the bodily boundaries that
invested the color line with cultural authority. Both practices potentially
destabilize the rigid barriers of racial difference by legitimizing the in-
termingling of bodily fluids, and particularly the life-giving properties
of the placenta and breast milk.
If this is the case, why was cross-racial wet nursing tolerated in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during a period in which the
repercussions for other types of intimate cross-racial contact could range
from censure to death? Both practices are evidence of the hegemonic
power of dominant groups to naturalize deeply racialized and gendered
practices in ways that serve their economic, political, and social inter-
ests. In the case of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, this naturalization
is aided by narratives of maternal-fetal conflict and fetal personhood
that have taken on new salience alongside attacks upon women’s re-
productive autonomy. This chapter concludes by illustrating how these
competing ideologies play out in surrogacy disputes. I analyze two legal
cases that demonstrate how racial difference between surrogate and in-
tended parent can be used in seemingly contradictory ways to uphold
the parental rights of intended parents.
Cross-Racial Wet Nursing in the Eighteenth and

Nineteenth Centuries
The politics of wet nursing in England and other parts of Europe shifted
between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, influencing how wet
nursing was taken up in the New World. Aristocratic British women
in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries commonly circum-
vented the task of infant feeding—along with other household physical
labor—by delegating this responsibility to a woman of lower socioeco-

nomic status. In 1700 less than half of all British women breastfed their
infants, while the rest were nourished by “dry-feeding” or wet nurses.4
It was not unusual for children to be sent away from their mothers to be
breastfed in the country by peasant women, who were considered closer
to nature; this practice was symptomatic of the division of women by
class.5 Hegemonic ideologies of femininity cast aristocratic women as
frail, sickly, and unfit for physical labor (narrowly excepting childbirth),
whereas working-class and peasant women were viewed as naturally
sturdy and physically robust.6
Nonetheless, aristocratic women were not the only ones to employ
wet nurses; working women also did so in order to continue their con-
tributions to the family economy, and families of all classes turned to
either wet nurses or dry feeding when mothers fell ill or died.7 Despite
the high infant mortality associated with these alternatives to maternal
nursing, many upper-class women were faced with pressures to eschew
breastfeeding regardless of their personal preference, whether as a signal
of family status, a reflection of Victorian beauty standards, or to avoid
the contraceptive effects of nursing.8
Despite this, mothers faced condemnation for failing to breast-
feed by physicians, social philosophers, and clergymen, even when
wet nursing was commonly practiced. This rhetoric is exemplified
in a late seventeenth-century publication with the lengthy title The
Compleat Mother, or, An Earnest Perswasive to All Mothers (Especially
Those of Rank and Quality) to Nurse Their Own Children, by Henry
Newcome. In it, the clergyman compares himself to the biblical fig-
ure of David as he battles the Goliaths of “custom” and “fashion” that
were corrupting the maternal responsibilities of English women. This
condemnation of “fashion” in favor of the “natural” (especially as per-
taining to women) was also very much a hallmark of Enlightenment
thought. Newcome chastised the English aristocracy, asserting that
even peasant children were better off than those born into nobility, for
the child of the wealthy was likely “turn’d out, exil’d from his Moth-
ers embraces as soon as from her Womb, and assigned to the Care of
some Stranger, who hath no other Endearments toward it, than what
are owing solely to her Interest.”9 Newcome’s negative appraisal of wet
nursing paralleled other Enlightenment-era criticisms of the aristoc-
racy, which championed individual merit and effort over inherited

power and wealth.10
By the mid-eighteenth century, bourgeois British families had largely
turned away from the practice of wet nursing. Public opinion and the
weight of medical authority in England had shifted; breastfeeding be-
came a symbol of women’s maternal devotion, and the refusal to comply
was cast as a sign of personal selfishness associated with an aristocratic
lifestyle. In A History of the Breast, Marilyn Yalom contends that this
change was in part a reflection of the political ideologies of the time;
“physical health offered a metaphor for the health of the state,” and thus
what was good for the child (maternal breastfeeding) was good for the
nation.11 The practice of sending children to the countryside declined
in popularity, and women who continued to use wet nurses for health
reasons did so within the home, giving the mother the authority to over-
see and manage the process.12 This shift in the geography of wet nursing
also impacted the population of employable women, from the “ruddy”
and supposedly healthy country nurse to the morally ambiguous urban
mother.13
“Some Directions for Chusing a Nurse”

Guidebooks on childrearing were common in Europe and England
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.14 While many took the
opportunity to speak out against wet nursing, the physicians, clergy-
men, and social commentators who wrote such manuals also recognized
the importance of advising families on how to choose a nurse should
one prove necessary. The careful choice of a wet nurse was significant
because of the high stakes involved: the wet nurse initiated intimate
bodily contact across class lines, posing a perceived threat to the health,
character, and morality of her charge. Anxiety over the fitness of the wet
nursing population grew alongside the increased separation of spheres
between men and women as well as the attendant pressures of intensive
mothering.
The relationship between the character of the wet nurse, her milk,
and its effects on the child was highly debated. The racial taxonomist
Carl Linnaeus warned that wet nursing not only violated the laws of
nature, but endangered infants. Linnaeus claimed that lower-class wet
nurses ate unhealthy foods, drank copious amounts of alcohol, and

could potentially infect a child with venereal diseases.15 Both Linnaeus
and other scholars, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that chil-
dren were imbued with the character of the lactating woman through
her breast milk, and thus the milk of an immoral woman could forever
taint a child.16 Moreover, the anti–wet nursing stance of authors such
as Rousseau, Linnaeus, and Cadogan were closely tied to beliefs about
the proper role of women in the home as both caring wives and loving
mothers.17
As a result, advice and warnings about wet nurses ranged from their
character, morality, and psychological health to physical attributes and
environmental concerns. In a 1790 essay, Dr. Benjamin Lara rejected
the popular advice that redheaded wet nurses should be avoided (their
fiery hair was said to reflect an unstable personality) but did not dismiss
the importance of the nurse’s temperament.18 Lara insisted that the wet
nurse be “strong, healthy, active, and of good disposition. Irritability is
hurtful to the milk, and consequently will prejudice the child.”19 The
physique of the wet nurse was also important; in an eighteenth-century
“nurse’s guide” that took the form of a dialogue between a nurse and a
physician, the doctor instructed the nurse on the following:
Choose one that is of a middle Size, that is neither of a Poor or lean Habit,
nor overloaded with Fat. A very lean Woman may have an impvorish’d
Blood, and bad Milk for the same reason; and a gross Fat woman may be
subject to Humours, which spoil the milk. See that she is of a Sanguine
(that is a fresh) Complexion, and has plump and firm flesh. If she has her
monthly Discharges, she is hardly fit for this office; for ‘tis a Sign that she
is of an hot Constitution, and therefore amorous, and not subject to the
self-denial that’s requir’d of a good Nurse.20
As this example illustrates, the physicality of the body was read as symp-
tomatic of the quality of the milk, and because breast milk was believed
to be none other than whitened blood, “bad blood” translated directly to
“bad milk.” Lara also tapped into the ancient suspicion of menstruating
women, viewing “monthly discharges” as an indicator of hypersexual-
ity and moral lassitude. As these examples suggest, the milk of the wet
nurse was thought to transfer her constitution to the child, and thus
fears about the quality of the nurse were translated into anxieties over
the reproduction of the nation. This rhetoric is a historical example of
the familiar overdetermination of the female body as a site of contagion,
and particularly the marked body of the peasant woman as a poten-
tial contaminate of the vulnerable body politic. The historian Rachel
Trubowitz argues that the cultural obsession with wet nursing, milk, and
blood in England during the seventeenth century was a reflection of
the brewing “boundary panic” between the English and Others as that
nation engaged in colonization, travel, and foreign trade.21 One way of
containing this threat was in the shift toward treating wet nurses less
as servants to be managed by mothers and more as medical resources
under the authority of doctors.22 In the New World, the reproductive
labor of wet nursing was both classed and racialized, altering the dis-
course concerning the practice and the stakes of the debate.
Wet Nursing in the Americas

While the practice of wet nursing was transplanted to the New World
by English colonizers, white women in America were strongly urged to
breastfeed their own children by authorities ranging from Puritan reli-
gious leaders to medical doctors.23 The debates surrounding maternal
breastfeeding were about more than infant health—they also served as
an emblem of the emerging democratic values of the New World and an
Enlightenment-era rejection of the social system of British aristocracy.24
When families did turn to the services of a wet nurse, their options were
largely limited by the available female labor pool. Early settlers turned
to Native American women as wet nurses, but as the institution of slav-
ery spread during the colonial period, enslaved women also breastfed in
place of mothers who were recovering after childbirth, to supplement
the milk of a woman who was ill, or when a woman died in labor.25 His-
torians conclude that roughly 20 percent of slave-owning families used
black wet nurses, although the statistics on cross-racial wet nursing have
been debated due to inconsistencies in the historical record.26 Evidence
for the use of black wet nurses can be found in newspaper advertise-
ments, such as the following 1776 ad in the Georgia Gazette: “Wanted
by the Month: A HEALTHY CAREFUL NEGROE WENCH for a WET
NURSE. One without a child will be most agreeable, or with a child
not above six months old.”27 An 1804 ad in the Virginia Argus similarly
demonstrates the use of black wet nurses: “Wanted to hire or purchase a
wet nurse without a child of her own.”28
The first announcement points to concerns with the health and “qual-
ity” of the wet nurse, while the second indicates that slave owners were
willing to purchase an enslaved woman specifically for the purpose of
wet nursing. Both suggest that if white slave owners were concerned
about the potential threat of “contamination” posed by black wet nurses,
these concerns were overcome by necessity. The historian Sally McMillen
argues that while cross-racial wet nursing may not have been the norm
in the South, there is little evidence to suggest that the practice offended
the “racial sensibilities” of white people as a whole.29 This is supported
by evidence in the letters of a mid-nineteenth-century North Carolina
woman, who wrote that her baby’s good health was attributable to the
“fine, healthy, careful Negro woman” who nursed her. Likewise, after the
(unexplained) “loss” of an enslaved wet nurse, another Appalachian slave
owner joked to his brother that “as she [the wet nurse] has always been
a necessary institution in your Domestic affairs, I see no other channel
for you in the future, than to ‘shut up shop’ and discontinue the business”
of having children.30 While anecdotal, these reports suggest that cross-
racial wet nursing was normalized, even naturalized, despite its status as
a minority phenomenon, similar to cross-racial surrogacy today.
In the economic and political context of the antebellum South, reli-
ance on the labor of enslaved people in the service of white reproduc-
tion was incorporated into the natural order of domestic affairs. This
in many ways parallels the techniques of naturalization and normaliza-
tion that emerge in response to assisted reproductive technologies in the
contemporary United States. The feminist theorist Charis Thompson
contends that naturalization “encompasses the ways in which scientific,
biological, or ‘natural’ idioms normalize and control the physically or
socially deviant, pathological, or dangerous.”31 In the case of cross-racial
gestational surrogacy, the scientific and biological discourse of genetic
essentialism can be deployed by intended parents to naturalize the racial
identity of the fetus as determined by genetics, not gestation.32 Likewise,
in cross-racial wet nursing, popular and scientific theories of heredity
were strategically embraced or rejected in order to normalize the poten-
tially socially destabilizing cross-racial contact between nurse and child.
While some slave owners undoubtedly feared the love and intimacy
forged between nurses and their white charges, the makeup and origin
of breast milk also held rich historical and cultural symbolism. As Mi-
chel Foucault notes in The History of Sexuality, the meaning of blood
shifted in the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie continued to fear
“bad blood” in the form of heredity even as the power of aristocratic
“blue blood” waned. This fear, Foucault contends, spawned an entire
literature concerning health, hygiene, and the raising of children such
that from the eighteenth century on, the bourgeoisie “converted the blue
blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality.”33
Indeed, “ideas about vigor, well-being, and appropriate sexual morality
and behavior were intertwined with notions of purity of blood and racial
difference.”34 The theory that breast milk was none other than whitened
blood strengthened the arguments made by doctors that women should
breastfeed their own children—if breast milk was indeed the mother’s
own blood, then what better source of nourishment for a child than that
life-giving source?35 In this respect, breast milk was compared favorably
to semen as a vital source of life.36
Yet breast milk could also be a source of danger: childhood experts
in the nineteenth century warned that through wet nursing, lower-class
blood entered the body of the upper-class child. The elision between
blood and milk that is found in medical texts is of particular relevance to
cross-racial wet nursing in America because “African blood” translated
into enslavement. Children born with African blood were born into
slavery, even those whose fathers were white slave owners. This practice
had an established history in the United States; in 1662 the Virginia As-
sembly held that children were determined to be enslaved or free by the
“condition of the mother.” This doctrine indicated that inconsistencies
in the logic of blood would be tolerated in order to shore up the domi-
nant hierarchy of race and gender.37 Considering this history, if breast
milk was viewed by many as none other than whitened blood, what did
this mean for white children nursed by black slaves? It is to this question
of “lactational heredity” that I will turn shortly.38
While white Southerners may have normalized the use of black wet
nurses, Northern and foreign travelers to the South in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries routinely exaggerated reports of black
“mammies” serving as wet nurses, as they considered cross-racial nurs-
ing to be a remarkable oddity.39 Such visitors questioned how the milk

of a black wet nurse would affect the burgeoning characteristics of the
infant. The clergyman Jonathon Boucher, a recent arrival from England
at the turn of the nineteenth century, expressed horror at the practice in
his correspondence home, declaring, “I cannot be reconcil’d to have’g my
bairns nurs’d by a Negro Wench. Seriously, that is a monstrous Fault I
find with ye people here, & surely it is the source of many Disadvantages
to their Children.”40 To this traveler, cross-racial wet nursing raised the
specter of the racial contamination of white purity. According to Janet
Golden in A Social History of Wet Nursing, “Some believed that children
literally drank up their wet nurses’ moral and physical imperfections
and that their ‘temper and disposition’ were ‘molded in great measure
by the state of the wet nurse’s mind.’”41 Beliefs about the dangers of wet
nursing were not limited to Europe; antebellum American physicians
also studied the effects of environment and heredity on the milk pro-
duced by wet nurses, proposing theories with “complex, fluid, and over-
lapping notions of heredity, constitution, and environment.”42
These theories were quite flexible—and deeply gendered. Because
“heredity” was expanded to encompass conception, gestation, and nurs-
ing, a person’s negative characteristics well into adulthood could be at-
tributed to wet nursing, while positive traits were deemed the result of
good breeding and good blood. In addition, traits were not believed to
be inherited equally from both parents; men were thought to pass on the
capacity for analysis and reasoning, while women imbued character and
emotion, and thus the wet nurse would primarily influence the disposi-
tion but not the intelligence of the child.43 Even temporary states could
infect breast milk and harm the child. Women in the nineteenth century
were warned against breastfeeding when ill, nervous, “overexcited,” or
“deranged.”44 This view aligned with the philosophy of mind/body dual-
ism that associated irrationality, excess, and permeability with feminin-
ity and corporeality. Physicians sought to control the blurry boundary
between the dangerously porous bodies of women and the vulnerable
infant through science, reason, and rationality—all “masculine” charac-
teristics of the mind.
By the mid-nineteenth century, increasing immigration and urban-
ization in the North meant that the pool of available wet nurses in this
region largely consisted of Irish and German immigrants (and later in
the century, women from southern and eastern Europe). In the North,
the urban immigrants who served as wet nurses were viewed as a threat
to the health of infants and to the home. These recent immigrants were
not considered fully white, and in urban areas many had become moth-
ers out of wedlock, thus raising anxieties about cross-race and cross-
class contact.45 Theories of “lactational heredity” were commensurate
with the xenophobic politics of the urban North, including the belief
that foreigners were polluting America’s superior native stock.46 Eugeni-
cists and nativists opposed cross-racial wet nursing just as they opposed
miscegenation, stemming from the racist fear of the contamination of
“pure” white bloodlines.47 Yet very different views of racial heredity took
root in the South than the North. According to Golden, “Cross-race wet
nursing led Southerners to evolve a fixed and ultimately modern notion
of heredity—that parents endowed their offspring with certain physical
traits at the time of conception,” in contrast to the coexisting ideology of
heredity as “a dynamic force, influencing development from the time of
conception through weaning.”48
The view held by many in the South is comparable to the contempo-
rary popular understanding of genetics—namely, that a wide range of
traits and characteristics, including race, are determined at the time of
conception by the genetic contribution of the mother and father. This
language of genetics was not, of course, the way scientists would have
explained racial difference at the time. Rather, race was primarily under-
stood using the pre-evolutionary theories of monogeny and polygeny.
Monogeny was the leading Euro-American theory of race in the eigh-
teenth century, based on the belief that humans of all races were part of
the same species. Racial difference was thought to result from environ-
mental conditions that led to the degeneration of certain racial groups,
with whites reflecting the slightest level of degeneration, and blacks the
greatest; this theory aligned with the Christian origin story in which all
humans were the offspring of Adam and Eve.49 Polygeny, known as the
“American” school of anthropology, began to develop in the early nine-
teenth century but reached its peak in the 1840s and 1850s.50 Polygen-
ists asserted that each race was in fact an entirely different species with
distinct origins, both biologically and geographically.51 American scien-
tists were eager to demonstrate their independence from the yoke of Eu-
ropean intellectual thought, and the theory of polygeny was important
to this project of differentiation.52 Moreover, the scientific embrace of

polygeny in America cannot be understood separately from the context
of slavery.53 While many polygenists were Northerners who did not sup-
port the institution of slavery, the polygenist view of heredity and race
shored up political and economic justifications for slavery. In regard to
black women’s reproductive labor, polygeny was commensurate with the
assumption that enslaved people were both naturally maternal (hence an
appropriate mammy or wet nurse) and hypersexual (thus necessitating
careful supervision by whites).54 As April Cherry argues in “Nurturing
in the Service of White Culture,”
Although Black women could never be righteous mothers to their own

children, they could be used to mother others, as long as those mother-
ing relationships were constrained or supervised by Whites. Under this
conception of Black womanhood, Black women could be called on to care
for the children of “real” women as servants, wet nurses, and the like.55
On a larger scale this hereditary view of race suggested that the enslave-
ment of blacks was legitimate because the inferiority of the “darker
races” was inborn and reproducible.56 Despite this, many Southern
slaveholders were resistant to fully endorse polygeny’s divergence
from the Christian origin story, and as a result this theory never took
hold as a dominant narrative of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century.
Defenders of slavery did not need to rely on polygeny alone as a scien-
tific justification for the enslavement of black people; indeed, a subset of
monogenists also argued that the degeneration of African races legiti-
mized their enslavement.57
This alleged inferiority was mapped onto the bodies of African
women from the point of first contact in order to justify their labor,
both “productive” (in homes and fields) and “reproductive” (as mam-
mies and wet nurses). Jennifer Morgan examines both types of work
in Laboring Women, and contends that “Europeans had a tradition
of identifying Others through the monstrous physiognomy or sexual
behavior of women,” with writings that repeatedly referenced “long-
breasted” women with unmatched fecundity such that “the shape of
her body marked her deviant sexuality and both shape and sexuality
evidenced her savagery.”58 As a result, travelers to Africa and the colo-
nies expected to encounter the deviant female sexuality of African and

enslaved women, marked by sagging breasts, hyperfertility, and painless
childbirth.
This continued reference in literature, letters, and art to African
women’s sexuality and physical difference was central to the growing
need for enslaved people, and the knowledge that Africans would serve
this need. Morgan contends that “African women’s Africanness became
contingent on the linkage between sexuality and a savagery that fit-
ted them for both productive and reproductive labor.”59 This ideology
marked black women as both hypermaternal and hypersexual, two
constructs that were traditionally considered binary opposites. The fe-
tishization of the breast marks a particularly loaded point of intersec-
tion between sexuality and savagery, the maternal and the monstrous.
If the breasts of African women served as an icon of their fitness for
enslaved labor, then this iconicity would seem to distinctly justify and
naturalize their role as wet nurses for physically delicate and morally
elevated white women.
Cross-racial wet nursing is a telling indication of the value of black
women’s reproductive labor because laws regulating intimate cross-
racial contact speak to the ways Americans have constructed categories
of race.60 Although cross-racial wet nursing was not adjudicated by law,
the difference in how cross-racial wet nursing and heredity were under-
stood within various political and economic systems in the country (i.e.,
slavery versus an urban market economy) suggests that the meaning of
race—and even the interpretation of science—was inseparable from the
political and economic interests of the dominant class. Members of the
white dominant class in the New World were deeply invested in legislat-
ing interracial contact in order to differentiate themselves from enslaved
people and other people of color: “enslavement on the basis of racial
heredity forced a social and juridical identity upon men and women of
African descent that also defined the parameters of slavery in American
colonies.”61 While white elites used the law to ensure that the children
of slaves would be born into slavery, or to punish acts of miscegena-
tion between white women and African men, cross-racial wet nursing
was condoned in the geographical and political context in which it pro-
vided the greatest benefit to the dominant group. White populations in
the South and North were in certain ways “doing” race differently, and
interpreting—as well as producing—the knowledge necessary to justify

their reproductive labor practices.
Nancy Stepan and Sander Gilman argue that when racial science and
political life were congruent, the tenets of racial science went “virtu-
ally uncontested” by the mainstream scientific establishment.62 This
argument points to the interaction between scientific epistemology
and hegemonic social norms. The variation in social acceptance of the
theory of lactational heredity in the United States at a specific historical
moment supports the hypothesis that when racial science and politi-
cal power were incongruent, the same racial science was not passively
accepted. It seems quite remarkable that two such contradictory views
could take root and enjoy scientific support simultaneously. What this
suggests is that popular views of race do not merely parrot or passively
integrate scientific findings; instead, views on race are produced interac-
tively within networks of power that include economic, political, sexual,
and gendered dimensions.
Although the practice of cross-racial wet nursing sharply decreased
after the abolition of slavery in 1865, the reproductive labor of women
of color as domestic workers for white families remained consistent.
After emancipation, many black women worked outside the home as
domestic servants, laundresses, or sharecroppers in labor-intensive jobs
that limited time spent with their own children in their own homes.63
Black families were reliant on the agricultural labor of women in the
rural South; in 1870 more than four out of ten married women were
employed, mainly in agriculture, while over 98 percent of their white
counterparts listed their occupation as “keeping house” on the census.64
In 1910 more than 50 percent of all black women were engaged in paid
labor, and one-third were domestic workers. Over half of black women
worked as domestic servants by 1920, and three out of five were so em-
ployed by 1930. While this number decreased after World War II as a
result of changing employment opportunities for women, in 1960 one-
third of working black women held jobs in “traditional occupations.”65
As April Cherry argues, “the nature of the work that Black women were
expected to perform did not change after slavery. African American
women have continued to perform affective labor under the constant
supervision of White people, including the rearing of White children as
mammies, nannies, and daycare providers.”66
The image of women of color as natural caretakers for white children

continues to have a deep impact on the American psyche. It is important
to note that the romanticization of black women as mammies emerged
post-Reconstruction, produced by white Americans in part to retroac-
tively justify slavery as a system in which kindly masters provided be-
nign protection to devoted slaves.67 That this nostalgic reverence for the
mammy did not materialize until it was politically and socially expedient
is further evidence that ideologies of race and gender prove malleable in
the service of maintaining hegemonic norms. In Mammy: A Century of
Race, Gender, and Southern Memory, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders notes
that the image of the mammy is one in which the black caregiver not
only embraced her white charges wholeheartedly, but in fact loved these
children more than her own. Wallace-Sanders contends that “her [the
mammy’s] behavior and maternal status are inextricably linked when
her biological (black) children function only to reaffirm her attachment
to her surrogate (white) children.”68 This perception that black women
are natural caretakers for white children and even prefer them to their
own continues to serve a function in American society despite the aca-
demic and political deconstruction of this racist and deeply gendered
stereotype. Representations of black womanhood in the United States
are overdetermined by stereotypical images of black motherhood; in ad-
dition to the mammy, the figures of the matriarch, jezebel, and welfare
queen continue to frame public perceptions of black women.69
Moreover, the supposed wellspring of love and nurturance that is at-
tributed to black women in relation to white children has been expanded
to encompass a larger segment of women of color. After 1965, the pas-
sage of more liberal immigration laws led to an increase in immigration
by women from Latin America and the Caribbean, and as social move-
ments paved the way for greater employment opportunities for African
Americans, immigrant women filled the gap in domestic service.70 This
“feminization of migration” has contributed to the surplus of “Third
World” women serving as domestic workers for wealthy Western fami-
lies.71 As Arlie Hochschild argues, “Marx’s iconic male, stationary indus-
trial worker has been replaced by a new icon: the female, mobile service
worker,” and surrogacy is an extension of this shift.72 As a form of what
Cooper and Waldby term “clinical labor,” reproductive services are con-
tracted out along lines that are stratified by gender, race, and class.73
Cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements involving women of

color and white intended parents in the United States are entrenched
in the history of racialized reproductive labor, and like cross-racial wet
nursing, the scientific and political justifications of cross-racial surro-
gacy prove malleable to benefit the reproductive desires of the dominant
white majority.74
Constructing Race in the Courtroom

The influence of race in reproductive labor today is highly negotiated.
Couples pick and choose what elements of identity they interpret as heri-
table, embracing those aspects of dominant scientific thought that are
congruent with their own reproductive “choreography” and downplaying
those that are not.75 During the era of cross-racial wet nursing, multiple
ideologies of racial “transmission” coexisted in the same time and place.
The determining factor in whether a population would embrace or reject
these theories was not based purely on the scientific evidence provided,
nor was the evidence itself politically and socially neutral. These com-
peting ideologies were able to coexist because different segments of the
population were invested in the racial politics of reproductive labor in
markedly disparate ways, and could perhaps shift their commitment to
racial ideologies depending upon context. I contend that this phenom-
enon, what Charis Thompson calls “strategic naturalization,” is also
evident in contemporary legal negotiations over kinship in gestational
surrogacy arrangements.76 Thompson discusses strategic naturalization
in terms of how ART users (including both surrogates and intended
parents) negotiate the relationship between the natural and the cultural.
This term also applies to the strategic deployment of scientific theories
in the arena of reproductive technologies, such as the impact of gesta-
tion, genetics, and bonding. The legal cases that I analyze suggest that
the courts have a vested interest in maintaining hegemonic ideologies
of race, gender, and family, and that they have exercised their authority
to protect these interests. Two legal cases, Johnson v. Calvert and Marion
County Division of Children’s Services v. Melinger, demonstrate how coex-
isting and competing ideologies of maternal-fetal relations, gender, and
race are strategically naturalized in order to shore up dominant beliefs
about race and kinship that are put into question by ARTs.
Johnson v. Calvert
To review, in a gestational surrogacy arrangement the surrogate shares
no genetic connection to the prospective child; she is implanted with a
fertilized embryo made from sperm and egg of the prospective parents
or donors. Nonetheless, in the case of cross-racial gestational surrogacy,
the implantation of the embryo initiates a form of intimate cross-racial
contact; just as the hormones of the wet nurse produced milk to nour-
ish her charge, the developing fetus is reliant upon the placenta of the
pregnant woman to sustain life. Cells also cross the placenta during
pregnancy in a process known as “microchimerism,” traveling both from
the fetus to the pregnant woman and vice versa. These cells have been
found to migrate into the tissues and organs of the pregnant woman,
including her bone marrow, skin, liver, blood,77 and even brain.78 With-
out assessing the implications of these more recent scientific findings,
it is clear that the relationship between surrogate and fetus is biological,
even though a genetic connection is not shared.
A careful balance is orchestrated in the field of reproductive technol-
ogies between the increased acceptability of interracial contact through
gestational surrogacy and the existing impediments to racial mixing at
the level of gametes. In the shorthand of the ART industry, race is fre-
quently mapped onto gametes, gametes represent genetics, and genetics
are coded for kinship; as this suggests, in cross-racial gestational sur-
rogacy the significance of racial difference is more than skin deep. This
import is revealed in what is perhaps the second-most widely known
case of contested surrogacy after that of In re Baby M in 1988—Johnson
v. Calvert in 1993. The Johnson v. Calvert case has proved compelling to
feminists for a number of reasons: as an indication of the public policy
response to surrogacy as a “social problem” in the United States, as a
symptom of the contemporary struggles to define kinship, and as an
extension of the exploitation of black women’s bodies during slavery,
amid others.79 While my analysis is indebted to these significant contri-
butions, it will focus on the way that coexisting and competing scientific
narratives of genetics and maternal-fetal subjectivity take precedence
over one another depending upon their capacity to shore up (or oc-
casionally challenge) dominant, hegemonic ideologies of race, kinship,
and gender. Johnson v. Calvert demonstrates this through the selective
privileging of genetics over gestation, despite popular and scientific at-

tention to the impact of “bonding” and the uterine environment.
The events leading up to the Johnson v. Calvert trial(s) began with
a contract signed between a married “white” couple, Mark and Crisp-
ina Calvert, and an African American woman named Anna Johnson.80
Johnson agreed to act as a surrogate for a sum of $10,000 plus a life in-
surance policy. The embryo Johnson carried was created using the gam-
etes of both Calverts. Thus, Johnson was not genetically related to the
prospective child. The relationship between Johnson and the intended
parents rapidly deteriorated; Johnson felt that the Calverts were not sup-
portive during her difficult pregnancy, while the Calverts accused her of
hiding a history of miscarriage and stillbirth. Johnson sent the couple a
letter prior to the birth of the child stating that if they did not immedi-
ately pay her in full she would consider the contract void and would not
relinquish parental rights.81 As a result, both parties filed suit to declare
legal parentage of the fetus.82 The significance of this lawsuit exceeded
the interests of the two parties; it was also the first time a gestational sur-
rogate had filed for custody. The case would thus set legal precedent and
alter the surrogacy landscape of California, and the nation.83
The case was heard at three levels of the court system in California:
superior or trial court, appellate court, and the California Supreme
Court. In a dizzying legal quandary, both Crispina Calvert and Anna
Johnson claimed legal motherhood of the child under the same stat-
ute: California’s Uniform Parentage Act (UPA). The UPA was initially
intended to protect “illegitimate” children by determining paternity
regardless of marital status, but also states that the woman who gives
birth to a child is that child’s natural mother.84 Johnson claimed that this
wording established her as the legal mother, while DNA tests incontro-
vertibly confirmed that Calvert was the genetic contributor of the egg,
and thus the “biological” mother. The trial court ruled that the Calverts
were the “genetic, biological, and natural father and mother,” that the
contract was legal, and that Johnson had no parental rights.85 As I will
discuss further, this slippage between biological and genetic worked to
position only one potential mother (Crispina Calvert) as having a “bio-
logical” connection to the child despite the deeply embodied relation-
ship between the pregnant woman (Johnson) and the fetus.
The appellate court, however, employed an unusual reading of the

UPA to determine whether Anna Johnson or Crispina Calvert was the
“natural” mother. While the UPA states that the woman who gives birth
to a child is that child’s legal mother, the appellate court interpreted the
act to reinforce genetics over gestation, confirming the conclusions of
the trial court. The California Supreme Court, in contrast, held that
while the UPA recognizes both genetics and gestation as potential de-
terminants of maternity, when both are at issue (Calvert as the genetic
mother and Johnson as the gestational mother), then she who intended
to raise the child is the legal mother. Because Johnson had not intended
to parent when she entered the contractual agreement with the Calverts,
she had no legal claim to motherhood.86 Moreover, the court ruled that
gestational surrogacy is not counter to public policy and that termina-
tion of the parental rights of the surrogate is not unconstitutional.87
These rulings would provide precedent for future surrogacy-related
court decisions and mark California as a surrogacy-friendly state.
Efforts by the Calverts’ legal representation to position Johnson as
outside the natural, biological nuclear family also served to erode John-
son’s claim to motherhood. The courts refused to legitimize the poten-
tial of reproductive technologies to complicate kinship, specifically the
fractioning of motherhood into multiple genetic, gestational, and social
components. Superior court judge Richard Parslow was firm in his as-
sertion that the child could not have two legal mothers, a situation that
he described as “ripe for crazy making.”88 Using rhetoric that situated
Johnson as a nonmother, Parslow drew analogies between Johnson’s
role as a surrogate and other, more familiar adult-child relationships.
Parslow argued that Johnson was like a wet nurse or a foster parent,
a “genetic and hereditary stranger” who “provided care and nurturing
during the time the natural mother couldn’t care for him.”89 As the legal
theorist Deborah Grayson argues, this framing not only delegitimized
Johnson’s maternal claims, but also firmly resituated her within the
“appropriate” relationship between a black woman and a white child.
Grayson argues that when the judge compares Johnson to a wet nurse,
“in addition to having demeaning racial undertones, by employing the
available language of servitude the phrase also works to resituate John-
son in her place as a laboring black body. In so doing, the history of con-
flating African American women’s reproductive labor with their labor as

workers is recalled.”90
It is significant that Parslow compared Johnson to a wet nurse because
of the historical connotation of wet nurses as economically underprivi-
leged, morally suspect, “mercenary hirelings.”91 Historically, wet nurses
were viewed as a potential threat to the stability of the “legitimate” nu-
clear family; for Parslow, Johnson perhaps materialized as a contempo-
rary successor to this destabilizing figure. This language does situate
Johnson within the history of black women’s reproductive labor in the
United States. However, Parslow is not as much conflating reproductive
labor with other types of work as actually differentiating between ma-
ternal labor (what a mother does for her child) and “work.” If Johnson
is like a wet nurse, then the labor that she engages in is paid labor, sepa-
rated from the unpaid, affective labor of mothering. Parslow’s statement
assumes that the compensation Johnson received as a surrogate places
her squarely in the service economy, categorically excluding the pos-
sibility of emotional connection or authentic maternal investment. This
thinking taps into feminist debates over surrogacy that stemmed from
the Baby M case, in which feminists disagreed on whether reproductive
labor was a unique type of work, one that could not be legislated along
the same lines as other contractual wage-based forms of employment.
By parsing out the two types of labor and situating Johnson’s labor as
nonmaternal (indeed, Parslow refers to Johnson as “a host in a sense”),
the judge circumvents the threat posed by blurring these boundaries.92
The “likeness” of the child to his genetic parents, the Calverts, was
also posited as a commonsense marker of legitimate kinship in the dis-
course surrounding the trial. It is important to note that despite John-
son’s self-identified mixed-race heritage, the media and the courts read
Johnson as simply “black,” while the Calverts were routinely identified
as a “white” couple, disregarding Crispina Calvert’s Filipina heritage.
The race of the participants was simplified in a way that upheld the
privileges afforded to whiteness; according to the ethnographer Khiara
Bridges, this racial “flexibility” is central to the persistence of race as
“an organizing principle of U.S. society,” such that “race has had to be
flexible enough to be manipulated in multiple and frequently contradic-
tory ways, as required by the exigencies of the day.”93 This racial sim-
plification was bolstered in another respect: as a dark-skinned woman,
Johnson was marked as visually Other to the “white” baby, disrupting

the normative picture of a traditional nuclear family. DNA, invisible to
the naked eye, was mapped onto the visible and naturalized as a marker
of biological kinship through reference to phenotype. This correlation
between physical likeness and familial bond implicitly delegitimized
Johnson’s claim to motherhood.
The media picked up on the question of “likeness,” quoting Crispina
Calvert as saying that the baby “looks just like us,” while her husband
described the trial as “our blackest nightmare.”94 When Crispina Calvert
referenced “likeness” as shorthand for her shared genetic connection to
the child, the unspoken assertion was that baby Christopher was not
like Johnson, and that Johnson’s skin color was evidence that the child
did not belong to (or with) her. As Grayson argues, Crispina Calvert’s
statement was not only one of belonging, but also of exclusion: “Chris-
topher’s likeness serves not only as a (meta)physical and conceptual link
indicating rights to parentage but also because likeness operates as a sign
for blood—for the closed, racialized membership of family and race.”95
In the United States, race has historically been attributed through the
rule of hypodescent, meaning that an individual of mixed-race heritage
is ascribed the racial status of the less privileged group. Following this
logic, to declare Johnson the legal mother of baby Christopher would
have made the boy black.96 Finding the Calverts to be the legal parents
of the child not only shored up traditional definitions of family, but also
maintained socially constructed boundaries of race by refusing to imag-
ine a context in which a black woman could be the mother to a white
child.97 In this instance, the raced body of the surrogate can be read
as a text that marks her liminality both socially and legally; whether
knowingly or not, white intended parents benefit from the racial “differ-
ence” inherent to cross-racial surrogacy arrangements. The law has the
potential not only to shore up hegemonic ideologies of class, race, and
gender but also to produce narratives that can narrow the definition of
“mother,” “father,” or “family,” thus reining in the potentially destabiliz-
ing effects of ARTs.
While these factors eroded Johnson’s claim to motherhood, she also
tapped into psychological theories of prenatal maternal-infant bonding
to legitimize her claims. While these theories enjoyed extensive scientific
and popular currency at the time of Johnson’s trial, her claims to have
bonded with the child were largely met with skepticism. Johnson was ac-
cused of harboring ulterior motives for seeking custody, including greed
and attention; Mark Calvert raised these concerns in the press, saying
that “the only bonding Anna Johnson has is with your television cam-
eras.”98 Johnson’s claim to motherhood as based on the physical labor of
pregnancy and birth, which has traditionally been overdetermined as
“natural” and “essential” to womanhood, was denaturalized. From the
perspective of the Calverts, their future child was already an individual
at the time that the embryo was implanted in Johnson’s womb, a product
of their uniquely combined genetic inheritance. This assumption points
to a significant complexity raised by the case; in gestational surrogacy
arrangements, maternal bonding theories compete with other inter-
related ideologies of fetal subjectivity, including fetal personhood and
genetic essentialism. Genetic essentialism, in which cultural meanings
of the gene conflate with the scientific or biological, “reduces the self to
a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical,
and moral complexity, with their genes.”99 The concept of the gene has
taken on such weighty symbolism in contemporary culture that its value
has eclipsed the gestational, standing in as a metaphor for identity, self-
hood, and familial relationships.100 The selective dismissal of bonding
in favor of genetic essentialism demonstrates that while competing and
often incompatible ideologies coexist in the reproductive arena, the au-
thoritative weight attributed to them is determined by their relationship
to the dominant social order.101
Johnson claimed that she had unexpectedly begun to bond with the
fetus during her pregnancy, culminating in her inability to abide by the
contract that she had signed and surrender the child to his genetic par-
ents.102 Her lawyers attempted to shift the focus from genetics to ges-
tation by pointing to the effects that a birth mother has on the fetus,
including the size and shape of the child’s brain, arguing that “Baby Boy
Johnson is not the same baby that would have emerged from any other
birth mother’s womb.”103 The contention that the gestational period can
have life-altering effects on a child is deeply gendered. As Rayna Rapp
argues, on the surface the discourse of genetics has an “egalitarian na-
ture” in that both the mother and father contribute equally, yet this “is
held in tension with a second popular, pervasive, and nonegalitarian
idea, the highly gendered notion of maternal responsibility.”104 Men are
perceived to be responsible for providing the genetic material, but their

behavior during pregnancy does not affect the development of the fetus;
women are held responsible for “quality control.”105
This focus on gestational environment can become a point of conten-
tion in surrogacy arrangements, with conflicting interpretations of risk
and safety between intended parents and gestational carriers. While the
discourse of genetic determinism suggests that the future of the fetus
is largely predetermined by the contributions of the intended parents,
warnings about gestational environment point to the potential dangers
of the womb. The focus on the supposedly risky behaviors of pregnant
women, when taken to extremes, has led to interventions such as court-
ordered Cesarean sections and prison terms for prenatal drug use. How-
ever, the implications of gestational environment do not end at these
common “external” factors such as drugs and alcohol. Recent publica-
tions also (controversially) contend that severe psychological stress dur-
ing pregnancy correlates with lifelong problems for children, including
welfare dependency, schizophrenia, and generational poverty.106 The
field of epigenetics also demonstrates that “epigenetic processes operate
in pregnancies such that they impact hereditary traits without changing
the genetic code” such that surrogates “are establishing a biological con-
nection with the fetus they are gestating, a connection that appears to
last for decades.”107 Even seemingly innocuous pregnancy cravings for
salty snacks can have supposedly dire consequences for a child’s health.
A recent article in the New York Times that begins with the definitive-
sounding headline “Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb” cites research
that the consumption of junk food during pregnancy (examples include
Cheetos, Nutella, and Froot Loops) results in children’s desensitization
to fatty and sweet foods. A researcher quoted in the article likens this
type of desensitization to “the analogy of someone who is addicted to
drugs,” needing more and more of the offending substance to get their
fix.108 In a social milieu in which the management of weight is routinely
referred to as a “war on obesity,” the bodies of pregnant women are being
placed on the front lines.
This focus on gestational environment has the potential to reconfig-
ure spatially the danger to the fetus from external environmental fac-
tors (largely outside a woman’s control) to the interior of the body, the
uterine environment. As a reflection of this shift, the site of intervention
moves from social-structural factors to individuals, particularly women.

An inherent maternal-fetal conflict is assumed when the womb is pos-
ited as a vector of risk, in which the safety of the fetus is threatened,
not by poverty, pollution, or institutional racism, but by the mother.109
Indeed, the fate of the fetus can be (and is) extrapolated to reflect the fate
of society when conditions such as cancer, obesity, and mental illness
are linked to gestation. As Bernice Hausman argues in Viral Mothers,
“Pregnant and lactating women become the focus of attention within
risk societies because fetuses and infants are seen as the innocent vic-
tims of modernity’s side effects. They become exemplars of humanity
in its most pristine form, and women’s bodies are the vehicles for their
contamination.”110
The discourse of pregnant women as vectors of risk is particularly
significant for surrogacy research because surrogates are engaged in
paid reproductive labor. Because surrogates are compensated, they are
arguably more likely to encounter surveillance during pregnancy than
most women, and they often sign contracts regarding their prenatal be-
havior. Johnson’s lawyers attempted to tap into the less sinister aspect of
gestational environment by contending that her unique contributions
to the baby in utero constituted a claim to kinship that could rival, or at
least parallel, genetics. Given that one of the first studies to contribute to
the field of so-called fetal origins was published in 1989 (positing a link
between low birth weight and adult heart disease), in addition to the
research cited by Johnson’s legal team, this concept would not have been
entirely foreign to the court.111 Again, the assertion that Johnson made a
significant contribution to the development of the fetus was paired with
the argument that she had bonded with the fetus in the later stages of
pregnancy, a contention that had also found popular and scientific sup-
port. The idea that a woman could bond with a fetus prior to its birth
was not merely a popular sentiment celebrating “maternal nature,” but
was grounded in scientific studies that alleged medical evidence of this
connection. Both abortion and infertility discourses of the 1980s pre-
sumed that maternal nature was present at the core of all women, and
was “activated” by gestation.112 These theories contributed to studies on
the effects of ultrasound on maternal bonding.
It was not until the 1970s that the term “bonding” was first adopted in
the United States, and in its initial application “referred quite exclusively
to the relationship between a mother and her infant.”113 Theories of

maternal-infant bonding were first published in the United States begin-
ning in 1972 with an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The
research therein claimed that mothers who are allowed sixteen hours of
postnatal skin-to-skin contact with their baby develop better mothering
skills, and have infants who score higher on developmental tests. The
theory was built on the belief that a sensitive period exists after birth in
which a woman’s body produces hormones that affect her ability to bond
with the infant. Babies who are separated from their mothers during
this sensitive period will allegedly fail to bond, leading to developmental
delays during infancy, emotional problems during childhood, and even
juvenile delinquency and criminal behavior later in life.114
The aforementioned definition of bonding stemmed largely from sci-
entific research led by pediatricians. However, the evidence from which
much research on ultrasound and bonding is based is limited to two
questionable sources. These texts, dating from 1982 and 1983, consist of
a study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology and
a letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The letter, authored by two doctors, suggests that viewing an ultra-
sound might initiate bonding in pregnant women and thus decrease the
likelihood that she will terminate the pregnancy. This hypothesis was
derived from the doctors’ observation of two women who underwent
ultrasound during the first trimester, viewed the image of the fetus, and
subsequently chose not to abort. Despite the limited evidence and lack
of peer review, the letter has been cited in many later articles as a “study”
providing proof of maternal bonding via ultrasound,115 or what Rosa-
lind Petchesky calls the “visual bonding theory.”116 Petchesky argues
that given our visually oriented culture, pictorial representations of the
fetus are a powerful means by which anti-abortion forces propagate the
discourse of fetal personhood.117 Visual bonding theories suggest that
women are dependent upon medical and technological intervention in
order to form emotional attachments with the fetus during pregnancy,
and that while is it natural for women to bond, in the contemporary
culture of legalized abortion, women can no longer be entrusted with
this task.118
Bonding theories were well known at the time of Johnson’s trial,
and not only in academic settings. The New York Times, for example,
published numerous articles on bonding during the years surrounding

the trial, including topics such as the importance of scent in maternal-
infant bonding, the complications of bonding for imprisoned mothers,
and an opinion piece stating that “from the moment a pregnant woman
thinks of herself as a mother, she begins bonding with her unborn
child.”119 The ubiquity of this discourse provided Johnson with a medi-
cal and social justification for her actions, one that could potentially
counter the Calverts’ genetic ties to the child. While gestational surro-
gacy is a nontraditional route to motherhood, Johnson was tapping into
a sacred narrative, that of pregnancy as a transformative journey that
reveals the maternal nature at the heart of all women.120 Indeed, the
courts did not dismiss the significance of Johnson’s role in producing
baby Christopher. Judge Parslow described Johnson’s contribution to
the development of the child as “substantial,” and the California Court
of Appeals stated,
While the woman is pregnant, she shares most of her major bodily func-
tions with the child. For some time after birth the child retains and uses
the woman’s life-preserving tissue, cells, blood, nutrients and antibodies.
The woman protects and nourishes the child during pregnancy, and, for
good or ill, can permanently affect the child by what she ingests. The
contribution to the child’s development by the woman who gave it birth
is indeed . . . profound.121
If Johnson’s contribution was “substantial” and “profound,” then why

were her claims to have bonded with the fetus dismissed? When asked
about Johnson’s bond with the child, a lawyer for the Calverts argued
that Johnson was trying to “steal” the Calverts’ baby, and asked sarcas-
tically, “What miraculous epoxy was used to create a bond?”122 It is
important to note that the Calverts’ legal team did not only dismiss the
possibility of Johnson having bonded with the fetus, but also provided
an alternative explanation for why the baby belonged with the Calverts:
the importance of genes in determining identity. It was this discourse
of genetics that would capture the imagination of the courts and the
media, seemingly at the expense of alternative frameworks. Both nar-
ratives held political, scientific, and cultural currency at the time of the
trial, and they commonly coexist in discourses of maternity (women
visually bond with their own “flesh and blood”). Genetic essentialism
trumped gestation in Johnson’s case not only because of the visual sig-
nifiers of racial difference, but also because the discourse of genetic
essentialism shores up hegemonic definitions of kinship that are insep-
arable from race.
The ultimate decision by the California Supreme Court was that both
women had legitimate claims to motherhood, but that intent would de-
termine final custody. In shifting the narrative from gestation versus
genetics to an intent-based approach, the California judicial system cre-
ated a precedent that could favor “intended parents” (as this appella-
tion suggests) over even traditional surrogates or egg donors who would
have a genetic claim to custody.123 Nonetheless, the previous courts had
both privileged genetics: the trial court had declared the Calverts the
“genetic, biological, and natural” parents (emphasis added) and the trial
court judge even used genetics to position the Calverts’ parental rights
as more secure than those asserted by the intended parents in the Baby
M case (a case of traditional surrogacy), because “in this case [Johnson
v. Calvert] we have a family unit, all biologically related.”124 Parslow em-
phasized the seemingly deterministic nature of genetics, noting that “all
sorts of things develop out of your genes,” from identity, immune sys-
tem, and intelligence to “how you walk, talk, and everything else,” and
added that Johnson and the child were “genetic strangers.”125
The appellate court likewise concluded that genetics influence both
the physiological components of the body and identity, stating that “it is
now thought that genes influence tastes, preferences, personality styles,
manners of speech, and mannerisms.”126 It follows that the judges’ de-
terministic view of genetics also influenced the conclusion that mother-
hood was biological, not social. Although Johnson did not dispute that
she was not the genetic mother of the child, a blood test proving this
was interpreted as conclusive evidence of (non)maternity, such that the
lab report
flatly excluded Anna as “not the mother” of the baby boy. . . . In light of
Anna’s stipulation that Crispina is genetically related to the child and be-
cause of the blood tests excluding Anna from being the natural mother,
there is no reason not to uphold the trial court’s determination that Cri-
spina is the natural mother. She is the only other candidate!127
Both the trial and appeals courts made repeated reference to the im-
portance of protecting the stand-alone family unit from infringement.
This was often framed in terms of an unwavering understanding of
motherhood as singular. As the preceding quote suggests, the courts
insisted that a child could not have two mothers. Judge Parslow also
stated clearly, “It’s not my intention (for the child) to be raised by two
mothers. I find the three natural parents’ contention is really not in the
best interests of the child,” in part because it would be “confusing” for
an infant, “having two people, two mothers feeding, holding, caring for
the child.”128 This argument ignores the proliferation of nontraditional
families in the United States, including the growing number of queer
families in which two women co-parent, or the tradition in many Afri-
can American communities of what Patricia Hill Collins calls “mother-
work,” where “mothering is conceptualized as a form of cultural work
that incorporates the mothering relationships of non-blood relations as
well.”129 This oversight is productive for the courts as part of a larger
project to circumscribe the definition of family in order to maintain
the hegemonic norm of the white, heterosexual, middle-class nuclear
family.130
Moreover, the California Supreme Court reinforced an “either/or”
framework of motherhood by arguing that any parental rights “given” to
Anna Johnson would necessarily be taken away from the Calverts. The
court imagined that adding more kin would subtract from both the legal
rights and exclusive relationship between child and genetic parents, such
that “any parental rights Anna might successfully assert could come only
at Crispina’s expense” and would “detract from or impair the parental
bond enjoyed by Mark and Crispina.”131 The latter statement is of par-
ticular interest because it posits bonding as a “natural” and important
aspect of parental-child relationships. The implicit assertion that the
Calverts would bond with their genetic offspring in a way that Johnson
could not also furthers claims made by the lower courts that passing on
your own genes can create a “profound psychological bond” and that
bonding is the natural purview only of married, heterosexual couples.132
The appellate court even goes so far as to entirely dismiss an opinion by
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) cited
by Johnson’s lawyers, which had found that the genetic link between
intended parent and child held less weight than that between surrogate
and fetus. The court disregarded this claim, contending that the ACOG’s
interpretation of the Uniform Parentage Act “does not depend on what a
group of doctors, however distinguished and learned in their field, think
the law ought to be.”133
This quote is significant because it demonstrates the way scientific
“evidence” was selectively weighed by the courts: the same court took
“evidence at trial” to demonstrate genetic determinism, while dismissing
the significance of the gestational relationship even when proposed by
the leading professional organization in obstetrics. In Johnson v. Calvert,
shoring up the boundaries of the traditional family also meant reconsti-
tuting the color line by ensuring that a black woman could not be recog-
nized as the mother of a white child. Yet in order to reinforce the social
categories of kinship and racial difference, the courts turned to science.
The supposed biological imperative of the Calverts to raise their own
genetic offspring trumped a far more ancient biological marker of kin-
ship, the acts of gestation and childbirth. Moreover, Johnson’s appeal to
“maternal nature” in the form of an essential bond formed in utero was
framed as unnatural for having attached itself to the genetic “property”
of an Other.
Cross-racial gestational surrogacy has the potential to destabilize
categories of kinship and race by creating the possibility of alternative
frameworks; as institutional gatekeepers, these particular courts re-
sponded by producing “tradition.” This is not to suggest that the tech-
nological advancement of ARTs has a predetermined outcome that will
unswervingly enforce hegemonic norms. Because ARTs challenge hege-
mony in unprecedented ways, courts, legislatures, hospitals, the ART in-
dustry, and other institutions do not merely re-create and reproduce, but
rather are forming definitions anew while using overlapping discourses
of science—often in contradictory ways. Marilyn Strathern argues that
the “new actors” of reproductive technologies, including surrogates, in-
tended parents, donors, and medical professionals, “contribute to a field
of what might indeed be called new facts.”134 The agency of ART users
will influence the production of knowledge concerning these technolo-
gies and therefore will also impact the shifting discourse of race and
kinship.
While this suggests that the scientific ideologies that inform ARTs
are necessarily malleable, they are not infinitely so. In Johnson v. Cal-
vert, genetic “likeness” was used to foreclose possibilities of alternative

kinship formations, and the scientific authority of genetic determinism
overshadowed gestation and other social claims to motherhood. In the
more recent case of cross-racial gestational surrogacy discussed below,
a white intended parent introduced the element of race confusion in a
way that bolstered his own claims to legal parentage.
The Adoption of Infants H

In 2005 an African American surrogate from South Carolina named
Zaria Nkoya Huffman gave birth to twin girls, nine weeks premature,
at Marion County Hospital near Indianapolis, Indiana.135 The twins
were routinely visited in the neonatal intensive care unit by fifty-eight-
year-old Stephen Melinger, the man listed as “father” on their birth
certificate.136 Melinger, a single man from New Jersey, had arranged
the surrogacy through Surrogate Mothers, Inc. of Monrovia, Indiana.137
New Jersey was the site of the infamous “Baby M” surrogacy case, and
is thus considered “unfriendly” to surrogacy; that state allows for only
noncommercial surrogacy arrangements (in which the surrogate is
uncompensated), whereas surrogacy contracts in Indiana are neither
illegal nor enforceable by law.138 While Melinger had a temporary res-
idence in Indianapolis, he planned on returning to his home in New
Jersey with the twins once they were well enough to travel. Melinger’s
original adoption of the girls in 2006 went unchallenged based on his
assertion that he was the biological father, and that the adoption was
undisputed by the biological mother, who was alternatively listed as Ms.
Huffman and as a twenty-three-year-old white egg donor.139
The twins received extended care at the hospital, where Melinger’s
unusual behavior and demeanor quickly raised concerns among hos-
pital staff. Employees contacted the Indiana Department of Child Ser-
vices (DCS) after Melinger accidentally entered the neonatal intensive
care unit with a pet dove in his pocket.140 Melinger claimed that he left
the dove in the office area of the hospital and thus did not endanger
the fragile children, but hospital staff reported that he had also visited
the girls with bird feces on his clothing.141 Melinger’s lawyer and surro-
gacy agency founder Steven Litz admitted to the Indianapolis Star that
Melinger was in the wrong, but downplayed the significance of his mis-
take: “Did he make some silly decisions? Of course he did. He is a part-

time magician, and the bird is a pet,” Litz told the paper.142 Hospital staff
also critiqued Melinger’s plan to transport the premature infants without
assistance on the lengthy car trip from Indiana to New Jersey. Aware of
the rising concerns, Litz filed a motion in court describing the twins as
“hard to place” due to their “biracial” status.143 Indiana allows “hard to
place” children, including siblings and those of mixed race, to be eligible
for adoption by out-of-state residents.144
Further investigations by the state disclosed major inconsistencies
in the adoption court records. The investigation revealed that Melinger
had obtained both sperm and eggs from white donors, meaning that he
was not the genetic father, Huffman was not the genetic mother, and the
twins would not be considered “biracial” by contemporary genetic logic.
This information raised questions about the legitimacy of the adoption,
and also about the overall veracity of statements made by Melinger and
the Monrovia surrogacy agency representing him. Litz argued that his
agency was involved merely in “hooking everybody up,” but was not
responsible for changes made to the agreement after the signing of the
contract.145 Litz also claimed that he was unaware that Melinger was
not the biological father until midway through the pregnancy. The trial
court voided the initial adoption but later reinstated it, a decision that
was affirmed by the Indiana Court of Appeals. The case was then sent
on to the Indiana Supreme Court at the behest of DCS; in 2009 the
court concluded that the adoption must be repeated in New Jersey, but
awarded preliminary custody to Melinger.
The case raised several compelling issues regarding questions of race
and kinship in cross-racial gestational surrogacy. Concerns were raised
about Melinger’s nontraditional decision to father, and the twins’ race
became central to the intelligibility of their kinship status in the courts
and the press. The negotiation of gender and race in cross-racial gesta-
tional surrogacy arrangements speaks to how society determines who is
legible as a parent, how kinship is defined, and what role social institu-
tions play in policing challenges to these hegemonic norms. Moreover,
Melinger’s legal team attempted to negotiate the logic of racial heritabil-
ity in order to ensure his claim to the twin girls; the cross-racial compo-
nent of the surrogacy arrangement was seized upon in order to benefit
the white intended parent.
As previously mentioned, Stephen Melinger was fifty-eight years old

and single when he arranged the surrogacy contract in Indiana. His age,
combined with his marital status (his sexuality remained unclear), could
have made it difficult for him to follow traditional avenues for adoption:
as one Indiana adoption agent stated, few young women would choose
to give their child to a man “older than their grandfather.”146 During the
trial initiated by the DCS investigation, witnesses from Marion County,
where the twins were born, “opined the adoption should not be granted
because Melinger was too old and did not know how to comfortably
interact with premature babies,” according to the Indiana Court of Ap-
peals.147 While this statement does not clearly indict Melinger based
on his sex, subsequent statements made by witnesses make clear that
the combination of his age, gender, and marital status warranted careful
observation. A state investigator from the program Children in Need of
Services described Melinger as a “gentle person,” “earnest and well inten-
tioned,” but found him to be “hesitant and unsure” around the twins and
concluded that he lacked “real natural instincts.”148 A DCS caseworker
concurred, suggesting that Melinger undergo a “bonding assessment” to
evaluate his relationship with the twins, despite the fact that at the time
the assessment was called for he had been separated from the girls for
eight months.149
In the minds of the witnesses, Melinger’s insufficient “natural in-
stincts” were exacerbated by the absence of a female partner. When in-
terviewed by investigators, Melinger’s employer and other individuals in
his social network raised concerns about the lack of female “influences
and mentors” for the girls. Intended parents in surrogacy arrangements
are typically framed as desperate infertile couples, taking any measures
necessary to achieve the socially laudable goal of having a child, and
single men fit uneasily within this normative framework. Even during
an era when women are becoming mothers into their sixties through
in vitro fertilization, the specter of a single, older man going to such
lengths exceeds the bounds of normative family formation.150
Unfortunately, the state of Indiana has a precedent for concern over
single fathers who use surrogacy; in 1995, a twenty-six-year-old single
man named James Austin beat to death the infant child he had obtained
through a traditional surrogacy contract arranged in Indianapolis. Aus-
tin was convicted of third-degree murder and was sentenced to up to
twenty years in prison. The traditional surrogate sued Austin and the
agency involved for failure to adequately screen the intended father. A
relative of Austin’s and witness in the case stated that “society, by permit-
ting an untrained, single young man to buy a day-old baby is partly to
blame for this crime.”151 Of course, a far greater percentage of children
are victims of assault and domestic violence in traditional households
than in families created through surrogacy, yet this case arguably cast a
pall on Melinger’s adoption proceedings.
In the end, the Indiana Court of Appeals did not accept the judg-
ments of witnesses that Melinger was too old or lacking in the skills nec-
essary to become a father, and in later hearings in New Jersey, many of
Melinger’s associates spoke favorably of his parenting abilities. Nonethe-
less, the gender and age components of this case reveal how gestational
surrogacy and other permutations of ARTs are opening up avenues
for alternative family formations to individuals who might face insur-
mountable obstacles to more traditional means such as adoption. Just
as the courts in Johnson v. Calvert had a vested interest in curtailing the
possibility of one child with multiple legal mothers, the Indiana courts
were challenged to consider whether sex serves as a legal handicap for a
white, middle-class man. Gestational surrogacy brings to the foreground
the assumptions about sex and gender that undergird the institutional-
ization of kinship.
In cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements in which the in-
tended parents are white and the surrogate is a woman of color, the race
of the surrogate is an implicit advantage to the intended parents. The
surrogate’s race visualizes and concretizes the “difference” between sur-
rogate and fetus that is crucial to maintaining hegemonic kinship struc-
tures, and that can reinforce the primacy of genetic “belonging” when
custody is contested. As Kalindi Vora explains, a “genetics-based model
of parentage . . . creates a connection between the intended parents
and the fetus, and a distance between the surrogate and guest-fetus.”152
This distance is made to seem greater when the surrogate is racially
“Other” to the fetus. In cross-racial gestational surrogacy arrangements,
race serves the purposes of kinship; through racial difference, kinship
boundaries are maintained. According to the anthropologist Jonathan
Marks, “race—in any guise—is a theory of kinship. It tells you who you
are and what you are.”153 Kinship “provides the basic social orientation,”
but it is potentially destabilized and/or threatened by technologically

driven forms of assisted reproduction.154
This is particularly true when reproductive technologies create the
possibility for intimate cross-racial contact, as in cross-racial gestational
surrogacy; this “threat” then necessitates boundary policing, which op-
erates through the discursive privileging of genetic determinism over
environment. The Melinger case in some ways turns this logic on its ear;
here, a white intended parent seems to be defying narratives of genetic
essentialism by insisting that the children born to a black surrogate are
biracial, even after admitting to the courts that the surrogacy was gesta-
tional. Was Melinger radically challenging the social order by rejecting
the geneticization of race? Can this be read as definitive evidence for the
argument that ARTs can be used to unsettle rigid racial classifications?
Without foreclosing the possibility that ARTs are capable of the latter,
the Melinger case does not provide compelling evidence of the emanci-
patory potentials of these technologies.
Contradictory revelations were made about the race of the twins
throughout the proceedings, which were significant because they
could aid in the determination of whether Melinger, as a nonresident
and adoptive (nonbiological) father, fit the legal criteria to adopt the
girls. As noted above, the original adoption petition listed the twins as
“white females” and claimed that, due to concerns about the quality of
Melinger’s sperm, the African American surrogate was inseminated with
both the sperm of Melinger and an anonymous sperm donor. A subse-
quent adoption summary submitted by Melinger’s lawyer identified the
genetic “mother” of the twins as a twenty-three-year-old white woman,
and said that the twins did not fit the legal guidelines defining children
as “hard to place.” After it was clear that Melinger’s adoption proceed-
ings would be investigated, Litz submitted an amendment to the order
declaring that the girls were hard to place because the surrogate “was
African American and that the children were therefore biracial.”155
One could read this flip-flopping on the issue of the girls’ race as an
outright deception motivated by the expediency of having the children
labeled “hard to place.” Indeed, this seems to be how the issue was inter-
preted in media coverage of the case, discussed below. However, Melinger’s
lawyer had already acknowledged in the adoption summary, approved
by the court on April 29, 2009, that the egg donor was a white woman.
The statement that the surrogate was African American and therefore the
children were biracial was submitted several days later, on May 4.156 By
acknowledging that the egg donor was white, but proceeding to argue that
the twins were biracial because the surrogate was black, Melinger’s lawyer
implied that race is not entirely determined by genetic inheritance, but
can rather be influenced by the environment of the womb. While it is im-
possible to ascertain the motivations of Melinger or his lawyer, I am more
interested in the fact that this strategy was attempted and the way it was
received. Whether Melinger and his attorney were purposefully misrep-
resenting the race of the twins or attempting to define race in nongenetic
terms, determining the race of the children was undeniably a central proj-
ect of the media (and to a lesser extent, the courts).
One way that observers addressed the question of the girls’ race was
by “reading” their phenotype. Because Melinger’s narrative concerning
the twins’ origin changed repeatedly, reporters frequently described the
physical appearance of the twins as shorthand for their presumed race.
By doing so, the media shored up the common public perception that
skin color is synonymous with race. At least three articles from the In-
dianapolis Star, a newspaper that covered the case extensively, described
the girls in terms of their hair and/or eye color, repeatedly referencing
them as “blonde haired and blue-eyed.”157 The descriptor “blonde haired
and blue-eyed” is shorthand for whiteness in American culture. When
combined, these traits are meant to represent a singularly white standard
of appearance, and in the context of this trial, to stand in mutual exclu-
sivity to blackness. This is reflected in a quote from the article “New Jer-
sey Man Isn’t Biological Father,” in which the reporter matter-of-factly
remarks that “the surrogate mother is black. Melinger is white. The ba-
bies are white with blonde hair.”158 The blonde hair of the babies is evi-
dence of the racial descriptor “white,” connecting them in this equation
to Melinger and distancing them from the “blackness” of the surrogate.
The same article explains that “the twins do not look biracial, according
to those who have seen them.”159 The reporter conflates color and race
when assuming that the way the twins look can conclusively determine
that they are not “biracial,” a term that could encompass a wide variety
of racial variation, skin tones, hair type, and other racial markers.
The legal scholar Angela P. Harris notes that due to the “seemingly
natural, unmediated quality” of skin color, it “seems to just be there, a
natural fact.”160 The coverage of the twins’ race also intimates that the
elision between skin color and race is not only natural but biological.
Visual cues can reveal what Melinger was attempting to hide: the “truth”
of the girls’ origins, which was inseparable from the “truth” of their race.
Again, the question of race serves to answer the question of kinship: one
cannot identify the biological mother and father of the twins by looking
at the children, but according to this logic one can “know” race through
visual markers. If one could visually identify that the twins were white
(e.g., have blonde hair and blue eyes), then, as this argument goes, Huff-
man could not have been the egg donor.
The mutual exclusivity of whiteness and blackness in the discourse
surrounding the case can also be found in coverage by the New York
Times. In “Building a Baby, with Few Ground Rules,” the reporter Steph-
anie Saul uses the Melinger case as an example of the lack of regulation
in the surrogacy industry. Regarding the issue of race, Saul conclusively
asserts, “it was not true that the girls were biracial. The surrogate mother
was African American, but the babies she had carried grew from eggs
from a white donor. The twins were white.”161 Saul’s statement, while
following the accepted logic of genetics and the ART industry, also rei-
fies the assumption that a black woman cannot be the biological mother
of white children, that these categories are both commonsense and in-
commensurate. According to this argument, race is both biological (the
babies “grew from the eggs of a white donor”) and also a reflection of
kinship (Huffman cannot be the biological mother because the babies
are white).
To return to the questions introduced earlier, were Melinger and his
lawyer making a radical claim that the twins were mixed-race because
they were gestated by a black woman? If so, this would push back against
the overdetermination of genes as the sole influence on race and iden-
tity, while still positing race as something biological, to be transmitted
through gestation in addition to genetics. Charis Thompson makes
the argument that surrogate mothers can be interpellated as biological
mothers, even in gestational surrogacy:
The embryo grows in and out of the substance of another woman’s body;
the fetus is fed by and takes form from the gestational woman’s blood,
oxygen, and placenta. It is not unreasonable to accord the gestational
mother a biological claim to motherhood. Indeed, some have suggested

that shared substance is a much more intimate biological connection than
shared genetics and is more uniquely characteristic of motherhood, as
genes are shared between many different kinds of relations.162
Melinger’s claim could be read as a revision to Thompson’s argument,

suggesting that what is shared between the fetus and surrogate during
the period of gestation is significant enough to affect race as either a
biological or social identity category (or both). Anna Johnson made a
similar claim in Johnson v. Calvert when she attempted to employ the
Indian Child Welfare Act to stop the Calverts from taking legal cus-
tody of baby Christopher. Johnson argued that because she had Native
American ancestry, so did Christopher, making him ineligible for adop-
tion by a white family. Her lawyer claimed that “Indian blood created
this baby; . . . no one can force her to give it up,” whereas Cherokee and
Choctaw officials claimed that tribal recognition is based on “blood,
ancestry” and “isn’t created just by being in the womb for nine months.”
A tribal attorney stated, “I’d think that if the egg and sperm are from
non-Indians, the baby’s blood would be non-Indian too.”163 In that
case, the Calverts’ legal team and Native American officials thoroughly
racialized both genetics and blood, but made a firm distinction between
Johnson’s “Indian blood” and the “non-Indian” sperm and eggs of the
Calverts.164
Like Johnson, Melinger employed what appears to be a counterhe-
gemonic discourse of race and ARTs, providing an example of how
ARTs refigure traditional ideologies of race and kinship. Yet Melinger’s
argument need not be read in this light. Rather, the Melinger case is
an example of how intended parents can employ the racial difference
of cross-racial gestational surrogacy to make an argument for the le-
gitimacy of their own parental rights. This does not necessarily have to
come at the expense of the surrogate, as it did in Johnson v. Calvert, nor
is it bound to be successful—indeed, this particular strategy failed in
Melinger’s case. Regardless, the race of the surrogate functioned as the
catalyst for Melinger’s claim to custody when his own lack of genetic ties
was revealed. The surrogate’s Otherness in a white-dominated society
was cast as a disadvantage to the children, marking them as “hard to
place” through adoption.
Racial difference made a difference in how the kinship claims in

both Johnson v. Calvert and the Melinger case were legitimated socially
and legally. The Calverts were able to tap into the cultural memory of
women of color as caretakers (and not mothers) to white children, while
Melinger attempted to mark the twins with the race of the surrogate in
order to bolster his own kinship claims. In both instances, the white in-
tended parents deployed racial difference, whether successfully or not.
What Melinger failed to take into account were the limitations of the
malleability of race in public discourse. If the media, judicial system,
and other social institutions were unable to pin down the race of the
girls, they would become unintelligible. Because negotiations of gender
and race speak to the legibility of the family, Melinger was not allowed
to be vague or coy about the racial origins of the twins. By making the
argument that the twins were biracial, Melinger implicitly challenged
the conflation of race and genes; by soundly rejecting this argument, the
courts and the media shored up hegemonic narratives of family, race,
and belonging.
***
Throughout this chapter, cross-racial wet nursing and cross-racial
gestational surrogacy have been framed as part of the same history of
racialized reproductive labor. The middle- and upper-class reliance
on the reproductive labor of women of color has remained a relative
constant despite shifting ideologies of race, maternity, gender, and
maternal-fetal subjectivity. These ideologies are often influenced by
science, but scientific theories are not uncritically adopted by the gen-
eral public; rather, communities negotiate their understanding of these
concepts based on their own geographical, historical, and economic
locations. By analyzing practices such as cross-racial wet nursing and
cross-racial gestational surrogacy, one can extrapolate the ways dis-
courses concerning race, gender, and kinship are influenced by the
economic and reproductive imperatives of a given society. Both prac-
tices also reveal how racialized and gendered norms are naturalized in
ways that shore up hegemonic ideologies of race and gender.
The cases of Johnson v. Calvert and Stephen Melinger’s adoption of
“Infants H” reveal that despite claims made by those in the ART indus-
try, the racial “difference” in cross-racial gestational surrogacy is sig-
nificant. The use of a woman of color who is visually “Other” to the

child accentuates the likeness between the child and intended parents
and the difference between child and surrogate (or in the Melinger case,
attempts to appropriate that difference). Just as racial logic proved flex-
ible in neutralizing the intimate interracial contact of cross-racial wet
nursing, so does the construction of surrogates as “genetic strangers”
naturalize this contemporary practice.
NYU Press
Chapter Title: The Woman or the Egg? Comparing Surrogacy and Egg Donation Databases

4
The Woman or the Egg?
Comparing Surrogacy and Egg Donation Databases
“Smart, confident, and gorgeous . . . a real 10!” This attention-grabbing

headline can be found in a database of potential egg donors, positioned
above a picture of a blonde, fair-skinned young woman, along with her
height (5’9”), eye color (green), and hair color. In this database, profiles
of youthful, talented, and beautiful women compete for the attention of
prospective parents searching for the genetic contributor to an imag-
ined child. Should they choose “smart, confident, and gorgeous,” or
“responsible, intelligent, ethical, and good-hearted”? Do they select the
“blonde, Jewish firefighter in Israel” to carry on a religious and cultural
heritage? Will any of these traits surface in their future child through
genetic inheritance?
These are a few of the questions faced by intended parents who seek
an egg donor through a commercial agency. Traits ranging from racial
identity to creativity and compassion are coded as heritable in the con-
temporary United States. Yet there is a contradiction between how race
is commodified in the market for reproductive services and the last sev-
eral decades of scientific research proving that race has no biological
basis. Despite this scientific evidence, Americans remain obsessed with
genetics, as demonstrated in the deployment of race in the reproductive
technology industry. At times, racial difference is made quite explicit in
the ART industry, such as when intended parents select an egg donor
with a racial background that “matches” their own. At other times, espe-
cially when intended parents are choosing a gestational surrogate, racial
difference is dismissed as inconsequential to ART outcomes.
This chapter analyzes databases of egg donors and surrogates com-
piled by agencies that connect intended parents with reproductive ser-
vice providers. Profiles of egg donors showcase each woman’s physical
characteristics, personality traits, and individual talents, while surro-
129
130 | The Woman or the Egg?
gacy databases largely focus on the practical questions of reproductive

history, lifestyle (such as tobacco and alcohol use), and remuneration.
I contend that this difference reflects an understanding of reproduc-
tion that privileges the power of genetics over gestation. Moreover,
the deployment of race in these databases is inconsistent, as is the
fragmented discourse on race in America more generally. The popu-
lar American obsession with geneticization is stoked by revolution-
ary technological and pharmaceutical advancements, as evidenced in
the deployment of race in the reproductive technology industry. The
ways racial difference is selectively foregrounded or dismissed in the
field of ARTs is an example of the ideological work done by intended
parents and the ART industry to shore up traditional notions of race
and family.
Scientific discourses on race and genomics are multivalent arenas of
knowledge production. Following the contributions of feminist science
studies, I view scientific practice as situated, embodied, and culturally
contingent.1 Scientific assertions of the biological meaninglessness of
race largely fail to trickle down into the popular consciousness, and this
failure is abetted by the continued use of race as a meaningful category
of analysis in science and medicine, particularly reproductive medicine.
The United States has a long and entrenched history of the scientific
belief that race refers to measurable physiological differences. Scientific
racism of the nineteenth century was based on the idea that the body
can be read as a text that is coded with racial meanings; accordingly,
scientists measured various parts of the body, including facial angles,
cranial capacity, genitalia, brain mass, and skin color.2 These measure-
ments were then used to predict traits such as intelligence, morality,
sexual behavior, and criminality, and they were adopted to justify the
mistreatment of populations considered deviant.3 Scientific discourses
on race influenced popular sentiment, as Siobhan Somerville argues in
Queering the Color Line:
Although most of the population may not have had direct knowledge of
the texts produced by sexologists and the earlier “experts” of scientific
racism (comparative anatomists), their theories and conclusions increas-
ingly assumed enormous cultural power to organize and pathologize
those marked as sexually deviant or racially “other.”4
The Woman or the Egg? | 131
Moreover, scientific studies that allegedly confirmed the physical, men-

tal, and moral inferiority of black, indigenous, and immigrant groups
justified eugenic policies and fueled the rhetoric of “race suicide,” or the
fear that the future of white supremacy was threatened by the prolific
procreation of inferior groups.5
This history has had a lasting impact on contemporary racial beliefs.
Two parallel hegemonic discourses on race coexist in the United States,
and the various actors involved with ARTs engage with these discourses
in different ways—sometimes subtly, sometimes radically. One is a sci-
entific discourse in which the definition of race and its appropriate use
in research are central matters of professional and ethical debate among
various, competing constituents of the scientific community. In the sec-
ond, more popular discourse, the power of phenotypic (physiological)
visual markers as indicators of biological racial difference, and eventu-
ally genetic distinction, has remained relatively stable. These two dis-
courses overlap—most transparently, in mainstream media coverage of
research in the fields of genetics, biology, and other “hard” sciences. A
recent headline from the popular scientific journal Science, for exam-
ple, reads “Personal Genomics: The Touchy Subject of ‘Race,’” while a
2003 edition of Scientific American led with the cover article “Does Race
Exist?”6 Likewise, in the last decade the New York Times has published
articles such as “Research Center to Study Health-Race Link,” “Race Is
Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease,” and “Is Race Real?”7 This
type of science coverage introduces Americans to new research, scien-
tific theories, and developments on race, even when framed in what can
be highly problematic ways.8
Popular discourse influences scientific discourse through more
opaque channels. As feminist theorists have argued for decades, sci-
ence is a social process, and all knowledge claims are socially situated.
In other words, the questions that scientists ask and the subjects they
choose are products of their specific geographical and historical posi-
tions.9 In addition, research on race and genetics in the United States
increasingly emerges from the corporate sector, and thus researchers
are motivated to create products that are marketable to the mainstream
population.10 Popular discourse inflects scientific discourse in a two-
fold manner: first, doctors and scientists are not immune to the or-
ganizing principles of their own societies, including race; second, the
various industries that fund research do so with profit-driven agendas,

which motivate research design. Thus different actors (scientists, doc-
tors, industry personnel, and consumers) tap in to the discourse on
race in specific ways, and a consensus on the meaning of race can never
be assumed.
It is also important to note that not all scientists who study genetics
or use racial categories in their research are conversant with academic
arguments about race. Doctors and technicians who perform ART pro-
cedures consist of another category of specialists; while their work might
serve to racialize disembodied gametes (for example, by color-labeling
a sperm vial based on the donor’s race), medical professionals them-
selves do not share a consensus on the biological meaning of race. In
contrast, the founder of a company that matches intended parents with
egg donors and surrogates may have a vested interest in crafting race as a
depoliticized set of traits that a consumer can select among endless oth-
ers. When traits such as hair texture and complexion are catalogued as
if they are separable from raced bodies and social identities, phenotype
is decontextualized from its position as a marker of racial hierarchy and
thus sanitized as a value-free consumer choice.
In my analysis of race and surrogacy, I follow Jenny Reardon in
employing a “co-productionist” model, which asserts that “scientific
knowledge and social order are produced simultaneously—or, in a
word, co-produced.”11 What Reardon calls “technoscientific phenom-
ena,” such as the concept of geneticization, for example, require “the si-
multaneous production of scientific ideas and practices and other social
practices—such as the norms of ethical research and credible systems of
governance—that support them.”12 As Reardon and others argue, race
is neither a pure social construction nor a reflection of scientific “truth.”
Race is a concept that has social and political meaning, and thus its use
in scientific research is never neutral.13 Moreover, while I primarily ana-
lyze the hegemonic discourses surrounding racial meaning in the last
half century, this is not to deny the existence of other competing dis-
courses. The construction of race should not be understood as a singular
event, but rather as “ongoing processes of contestation and accumula-
tion.”14 This chapter will examine the intersection between popular and
scientific discourses on race and how they are represented in the rheto-
ric and practice of reproductive technologies.
Shifting Discourses of Race

After the atrocities revealed during World War II, academics and sci-
entists sought alternatives to biological frameworks for understanding
human difference, and to differentiate between a postwar, antiracist
deployment of race as a category in research from the typological con-
cept of race attributed to Nazi ideology.15 Political and social changes
included the rejection of Nazism, support for decolonization, and an
ensuing impetus to present an America in solidarity against the Cold
War Soviet enemy, undivided by race.16 These changes incorporated
moves toward the inclusion of underrepresented minorities into the
mainstream of scientific knowledge production.17 In the words of Nancy
Stepan, “the political valence of race changed, for political reasons.”18
Many accounts mark the end of race as a mainstream scientific con-
cept with the release of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statement in 1950. UNESCO is an
organization established by the United Nations in 1945 with a mission
to “contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sus-
tainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the
sciences, culture, in sociology and anthropology.”19 Tasked with writing
a declaration defining and assessing scientific views on race, a UNESCO
committee of anthropologists and sociologists created a document that
was reviewed by an international group of scientists. The statement
concluded that “for all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much
a biological phenomenon as a social myth,” and that the term “race”
should be replaced in common usage by “ethnic group.”20 These con-
clusions were bolstered in 1972, when the geneticist Richard Lewontin
announced the discovery of more “within-group” than “between-group”
variation in the human gene pool, meaning that more genetic variation
can be found within groups of individuals who identify as white, for ex-
ample, than between groups who identify as white and those who iden-
tify as African American. Many narratives concerning the role of race
in science end here, suggesting that by the 1980s, mainstream academics
had accepted that human difference was primarily cultural, and research
connecting race to biology was largely marginalized.21
This account of the UNESCO statement and its effects is tempered
by other scholars, such as the feminist science scholar Jenny Reardon,
who contends that the UNESCO statement is often misread as an argu-

ment that race is a scientifically meaningless term. In contrast, Rear-
don argues that the UNESCO statement circumscribed the use of race,
condemning its use for the purpose of valuing certain races over oth-
ers or asserting the purity of racial origins.22 The UNESCO statement
was not universally embraced by researchers, though “the notion that
science as a whole had somehow rejected the ‘race’ concept left little
space to acknowledge the differences in perspective that existed within
and across the different disciplines and territories of science.”23 Physi-
cal anthropologists and geneticists resisted the limitations on the use of
race in research set forth by UNESCO, arguing instead that science is
and should be conceptually distinct from society, and thus the scientific
use of race is irrelevant to its more fluid and flexible social meaning. A
scientific consensus regarding race was not reached in the aftermath of
World War II, nor did all practitioners agree that racial typologies did
not belong in science.24
Meanwhile, the question of racial difference was at the forefront of
American politics as civil rights leaders demanded the desegregation of
public schools, leading to the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the African American
plaintiff, determining that segregation caused “significant psychologi-
cal harm to African American children” and violated the Fourteenth
Amendment.25 In making this decision the courts used evidence from
research in the field of psychology, including Kenneth Clark’s famous doll
test in which the self-image of African American children was measured
through their response to questions about dark- and light-skinned dolls.
The inclusion of this study in the case is significant because it suggests
that scientific research is considered a valid form of evidence to justify the
demand for civil rights and legal protection of American citizens.26 What
the struggle over segregation makes clear is that race is deeply imbued
with meaning as a social category in the United States. Although scientific
contestations over racial meaning can at times seem to have little impact
on how race is used popularly and politically, public policy makers employ
scientific discourse to inform their decisions. While mainstream scien-
tific assertions of the biological meaninglessness of race certainly did not
obviate the social unrest concerning desegregation, scientific arguments
authorized one of the most important civil rights victories of the century.
In the late 1980s the Human Genome Project (HGP) (a thirteen-year

endeavor sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S.
Department of Energy) again raised the link between race and genes.
The goals of the HGP included identifying all of the genes in human
DNA, determining the sequences, and storing them in databanks.27 By
the year 2000 the HGP had completed a rough draft of the genome,
followed by an announcement discounting any genetic basis for racial
categories.28 From the data collected, the HGP was able to determine
that 99.9 percent of the human genetic sequence is identical, and of the
.01 percent that differs between individuals, only 3–10 percent is related
to geographic ancestry.29 The findings were heralded by some as a final
nail in the coffin of biologically based racism. The election of Barack
Obama as the first African American president in 2008 also became a
source of debate over whether the United States is moving into a “post-
racial” age. Signs seemed to be pointing toward a massive and monu-
mental shift in scientific and popular thinking about race, yet further
investigation suggests a far less linear trajectory.
The Commodification of Race

In the introduction to Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, editors Barbara
Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson argue that what they
call “post-genomic science” has revitalized, rather than undermined, the
use of racial categories to stand in for biological difference.30 The end of
the twentieth century witnessed an increase in scientific research explor-
ing a biological basis for race despite the findings of the Human Genome
Project and others.31 The 99.9 percent genetic similarity between humans
was perhaps the most-touted statistic from the HGP because it was
meant to display the commonalities of all humankind, yet Lee contends
that science has since seen a “turn towards difference” that challenges
this figure.32 In the last several years, population geneticists have pub-
lished research arguing that “the genome holds the key to medically and
forensically significant biological differences among human racial and
ethnic populations.”33 In other words, population geneticists claim that
the differences between races, however minute, are pertinent for scien-
tific research because they can reveal such important information as the
etiology of diseases and indicate the most effective type of treatments.34
Prominent geneticists argue that traditional racial categories such

as African, Asian, and Caucasian will continue to serve as proxies for
genetic variations until individual genotyping makes these placehold-
ers irrelevant. While many geneticists would assert that they are by no
means endorsing the origins of these traditional categories, they find
overlap between statistically derived populations, gene frequencies, and
commonly held racial groupings.35 By studying these differences, they
contend, medical researchers can innovate race-based therapies that will
impact racial health disparities, including rates of hypertension among
African Americans.36 Supporters of race-based medicine hold that this
research provides a positive counterbalance to the marginalization of the
unique health issues faced by people of color in the United States.37 Lee
interprets this data differently, arguing that the turn toward difference
is in fact a stubborn refusal to accept the disarticulation of race from
genes.38 By focusing on genetic differences between racially identified
groups and then targeting those groups for medical treatment, research-
ers racialize genetics and reify outdated notions of race. Other critics
suggest that race-based medicine may in fact intensify health disparities
among different racial groups by encouraging doctors to differentiate
and categorize individuals based on their perceived biological differ-
ences, a practice that is a key component of racism.39
Race-specific medical practices raise the issue of how the politics of
race intersect with the demands of a market economy. For example, the
effects of the most well-known race-specific drug, Bidil, were determined
to be limited when it was first introduced to the market as a means to
reduce heart failure in high-risk patients. In analyzing the data, research-
ers discovered that African American patients in the study were faring
better than the white patients on the same medication. The company de-
signed a new study including only African American patients and found
that the combination of Bidil plus standard therapies reduced deaths by
43 percent in comparison to standard therapies alone. Based on these
results, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Bidil
for use by African Americans, making it the first race-specific drug with
such authorization.40 Critics raised multiple concerns: first, participants
in the study self-identified as African American, sidestepping the ques-
tion of how race is defined; second, the study did not include other racial
groups, and thus did not definitively show that the drug is more success-
ful for African Americans than others.41 By marketing Bidil specifically

to African Americans, its makers created a niche market of consumers,
a move that has obvious profit motivations. Most clinical trials of drugs
are tested on largely white populations, yet these medications are not spe-
cifically marketed to whites. If this standard does not apply to clinical
trials that are performed on predominately (or entirely) African Ameri-
can populations, then “the FDA is implying that African-Americans are
somehow less representative of humanity than whites are.”42
This raises the question of how racial categories are defined. Legal and
social practices become embedded into the “commonsense” meaning of
race in medical research.43 For example, since 2001, any research funded
by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is required to report the race
of participants using the five racial categories approved for the U.S. census
by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This is problematic be-
cause as these categorizations become universal, “it thus becomes almost
‘natural’ to use these same variables in the subsequent analysis and framing
of the research, even though there is nothing particularly ‘natural’ about
the census categories.”44 The use of these racial categories in the census has
been a matter of public debate, with particular frustration expressed by
self-identified multiracial or biracial individuals forced to select only one
racial group. Opponents of this practice argue that it harkens back to the
days of the “one-drop rule,” in which individuals with any African ancestry
were legally categorized as black in order to reify the mutual exclusivity of
racial categories.45 Moreover, the statistics on race and ethnicity collected
by the census carry significant weight; their uses include evaluating in-
equalities in employment, housing, health care, and education.46
In 1994 an OMB committee recommended that rather than creat-
ing a “multiracial” option in the census, individuals who identify as
such should be allowed to check multiple boxes to represent their racial
heritage.47 This option garnered additional attention in the 2010 census
when President Barack Obama chose to mark only one box despite his
multiracial background, a sign, according to the political commenta-
tor Melissa Harris-Perry, that Obama “embraced blackness, with all its
disprivilege, tumultuous history and disquieting symbolism.”48 The sig-
nificance that Harris-Perry attaches to Obama’s decision demonstrates
the weight of racial categorizations, and the import of how they are in-
stitutionalized and codified.
The newly popular field of recreational genetics (also known as

direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing) provides another example
of how race is commercialized.49 In one iteration, websites such as An-
cestry.com allow individuals to revolutionize their efforts to construct
a family tree by comparing a sample of their DNA to samples submit-
ted by other users. If the DNA matches, the users have the option to
anonymously contact one another and share information about their
family ancestry.50 Of course, this service is not without a fee (in this
case, around $99),51 which for many consumers is a small price to pay
for the sense that they uncovered hidden “truths” about their lineage or
identity. More commonly, recreational genetics are used to explore one’s
racial ancestry, with the goal of pinpointing the ties between average
Americans and the country, county, or even tribe of origin.
Recreational genetics even found their way onto the Oprah Winfrey
Show, a significant feat considering Winfrey’s capacity to publicize and
popularize a vast array of products during her twenty-five-season reign
as the queen of daytime television. Winfrey took part in Professor Henry
Louis Gates’s PBS documentary African American Lives, in which Win-
frey and others traced their ancestry through DNA, an experience that
Winfrey described as “a path of self-discovery.”52 This interest expressed
by Winfrey, a prominent African American celebrity figure, reflects the
allure of these technologies to black Americans. African Americans are
a group who may have limited access to tracing their own family lin-
eage due to the history of the slave trade, among other reasons.53 Gates
has publicly tested the DNA of other celebrities, including the actress
Eva Longoria, who prior to testing identified as Mexican American.
Yet after test results “revealed” that she is actually 70 percent European,
Longoria admitted, “To know that I have a majority Spanish blood is a
little . . . you know, I’ve been so proud of being Mexican—Mexican from
Mexico. To know that’s not really who I am.”54 This statement speaks to
the concerns of some scientists regarding direct-to-consumer genetics—
not only can this information upset an individual’s sense of identity and
community, there is no clear link between one’s DNA and the contem-
porary social categories of race and ethnicity.
Critics argue that genetic testing may be misleading because results
can be open to interpretation or error, and they access only a fraction of
the genetic contribution from each individual’s many ancestors.55 Con-
sumers may receive entirely different results from different companies,

leaving them with the sense that they are being told only what they want
to hear.56 In essence, the potential for recreational genetics is multiple:
while DNA testing can highlight the shared ancestry of individuals of
different races, and thus demonstrate the constructedness of rigid cat-
egorizations of difference, it can also reify a connection between race
and genes and a belief in racial purity. As the sociologist Alondra Nel-
son argues, such genetic ancestry testing is an example of the “social
life of DNA,” or the potentially problematic ways biomedical or forensic
discourses travel into “private” arenas of family and kinship, as well as
political debates about social justice and the meaning of community.57
As the examples of race-based medicine and recreational genetics sug-
gest, it is a mistake to assume that biological theories of race are no longer
active in the sciences. This myth of consensus may actually downplay
the commodification of race and the tendency for racial science to re-
emerge58 and to be communicated to a broader audience, including a
wide range of consumers. Despite sporadic bursts of popular media at-
tention to the argument that human biodiversity is not explained by race,
the “hegemony of racial thinking” is deeply entrenched in American cul-
ture.59 Through the operations of hegemony, potential challenges to the
dominant racial order are encompassed in ways that shore up the norm.
Race in ARTs
The preceding research suggests that race is no longer posited as bio-
logical in mainstream academic scientific discourse, even while racial
categories continue to be used in scientific research and commercial
markets. The question that remains is, to what extent do these theories
of race translate to the ART industry, in which race is packaged along-
side other physiological and mental traits as a purchasable commodity?
What is clear is that the academic and scientific debates concerning
race and genetics have not deterred cross-racial gestational surrogacy,
even though these debates might complicate the fantasy of inviolable
racial difference.60 Rather, the practice of cross-racial gestational surro-
gacy seemingly rejects the significance of racial boundaries at the level
of gestation at the same time that it affirms the significance of genetic
relatedness, which is thoroughly racialized in the ART industry.
Consumers of reproductive technologies are deeply invested in racial

categories when choosing egg and sperm donors and when negotiat-
ing complicated webs of kinship. The family formations made possi-
ble by reproductive technologies have eclipsed what most Americans
consider to be a traditional kinship structure: two heterosexual par-
ents who equally contribute to the genetic material of a biologically
related child.61 Donor eggs, sperm, IVF, and surrogacy all mean that
a woman can gestate a child, share bodily substances with it, and give
birth without any genetic relation to the child. In Making Parents, Cha-
ris Thompson argues that “as a result of donor-egg in vitro fertilization
and gestational surrogacy, the overlapping biological idioms of shared
bodily substance and genes come apart.”62 While maternal genetic ma-
terial is determined by the woman who provides the egg, the woman
who gestates the fetus nourishes and sustains it. Accordingly, Thomp-
son argues, it is not unreasonable to attribute biological motherhood to
both women.63
Despite Thompson’s claim, this may not be how most prospective par-
ents conceptualize gestational surrogacy—or the relationship between
surrogate and fetus. When prospective parents choose an egg donor or
a surrogate, the genes of that person are often coded for ethnicity as
if genes have the ability to pass on the social construct of race. Social
categories such as race are built in to genes, even when they would not
otherwise make sense.64 It does not mean anything medically to say that
an embryo is “black” or “white,” but in a cultural context in which skin
color is so thoroughly coded for biological race, these constructs have
social meaning for prospective parents.
Similarly, in an ethnology of ART use in Israel, the anthropologist
Susan Kahn found that religious identity and even marital status are
attributed to eggs that are donated for use by Jewish women. Intended
parents privileged donor eggs that they considered to be “genetically”
Jewish (those harvested from a Jewish donor) and eggs that came from
single women, thus dodging religious prohibitions against adultery.65
Again, the idea that a religious identity cannot be transferred through
genetic material is incidental—ideology produces the elision between the
social and the biological, which is then translated into medical “fact”
through practice. This process creates a feedback system in which the
cultural bypasses the scientific (intended parents choose donors who
share their religious/ethnic identity based on the belief that these traits
are genetic). Commercially motivated practices (egg donation and sur-
rogacy) construct a façade of authoritative “evidence” (donor banks
organized by race and religion, for example) to support the socially con-
structed fantasy.
The racialization of genes is a component of kinship construction,
which is a highly negotiated process in fertility clinics. Patients choose
which aspects of kinship they will foreground, and which they will mini-
mize (stressing the importance of genetic kinship and downplaying the
significance of gestation, for example) in order to legitimize the status
of the intended parents as “real parents.”66 Thus prospective parents
often choose egg and sperm donors based on what they consider ge-
netic likeness and/or markers of socially dominant characteristics, but
they choose surrogates using different standards, including the number
of successful pregnancies the surrogate has had, her age and physical
health, and her mental health history.67 Prospective parents using ARTs
are able to negotiate what they consider to be genetic, natural, or shared
in reproduction, but genes are “perceived to have the power to explain
who one is, what one will become, how one is connected to others, and
what might happen to one in the future.”68
Both the consumers and practitioners of reproductive technologies
are deeply invested in “geneticization,” or “the extreme reduction of all
problematic differences to an individual and genetic basis.”69 Genetici-
zation is so thoroughly enmeshed in contemporary understandings of
pregnancy that almost all differences, whether problematic or positive,
are attributed to genes and thus viewed through a “prism of heritabil-
ity.”70 In what Silja Samerski calls “the popular scientific imagination,”
genes are held accountable for a vast array of individual attributes, in-
cluding physical features as well as more amorphous qualities such as
personal likes and dislikes, or drug and alcohol use.71 These qualities
then adhere to gametes that can be bought and sold on the free market,
such that eggs or sperm are perceived to be white, black, Jewish, even
healthy or sick based on the medical history of the donor.72 Participants
in the reproductive technology market correlate traditional racial cat-
egories with genetic difference; some scholars argue that the contempo-
rary obsession with geneticization suggests a return to Lamarckism, the
eighteenth-century theory that organisms transfer acquired characteris-
tics to their offspring.73 Despite scientific contestations over the mean-

ing of race, or rabbinic debates regarding the “Jewishness” of donor eggs,
in practice individuals negotiate the meaning of concepts such as race,
genes, or religion to correspond with their reproductive goals.
The reproductive technology industry is undeniably in the business
of commodifying race through the market for sperm and eggs. As ge-
netic determinism takes on the status of scientific “fact,” despite claims
by scientists to the contrary, “genomic fetishes” are marketed to Ameri-
can consumers.74 In mainstream scientific discourse, race is not under-
stood to be a biological phenomenon but rather a complex historical,
social, political, and scientific construct. In sharp contrast, companies
that profit from the sale of sperm or eggs seamlessly transfer the self-
identification of the donor to the disembodied gamete. Some clinics
literalize this elision by color-coding sperm vials—white for Cauca-
sian, black for African American, and yellow for Asian.75 As Matthew
Schmidt and Lisa Jean Moore argue in “Constructing a ‘Good Catch,’
Picking a Winner,” this practice reifies intergroup racial differences and
downplays intragroup variation—it institutionalizes concrete boundar-
ies between black, white, and Asian, while ignoring the diversity that
exists within categories such as African American. The disembodied
and racialized sperm then stands in for the future, raced embodiment
of a child. Schmidt and Moore argue that sperm banks thus “market
the chance to rematerialize, reconstitute, and reproduce the body of the
donor.”76 The remainder of this chapter examines how this process op-
erates among a different array of body parts/embodiments, namely, egg
donation and surrogacy. I explore how the race of egg donors and the
race of surrogates are differentially framed in terms of their significance
to the intended parents and the genetic makeup of the future child, and
how this meshes with the contemporary scientific and popular dis-
courses on race already established.
To this end, I analyze the websites of select agencies that offer both
egg donation and surrogacy services. When Heléna Ragoné published
her seminal ethnographic research on surrogacy in 1994, she stated that
there were eight “established commercial surrogate mother programs”
as well as “a number of individuals who arrange surrogacy contracts on
a free-lance or occasional basis”; today, surrogacy in the United States
is a multimillion-dollar industry.77 California leads the country in the
sheer number of surrogacy agencies. This state alone produces more

surrogate-born babies than the next two leading nations, Israel and the
United Kingdom, combined.78 Because surrogacy is largely unregulated,
the surrogacy industry is multifaceted—one can find a gestational car-
rier by advertising in local newspapers, the online service forum Craig-
slist, independently operated websites, or through matching processes
at well-established surrogacy brokers that are affiliated with hospitals
or clinics. In addition, agencies are also created by former surrogates
based on their personal experience—recall the USC law professor who
said, “In most U.S. states until recently, nothing would stop you from
opening ‘Sam’s Sperm Bank and Delicatessen.’”79 While most coverage
of surrogacy in the United States focuses on the role of agencies and bro-
kers, estimates suggest that the numbers of independent surrogacy ar-
rangements are growing due to the proliferation of Internet sites where
surrogates and intended parents can meet and contract without going
through an intermediary.80 Without federal requirements for licensing
or direct governmental oversight, there are no comprehensive records
on the number of surrogacy agencies in a given state or their reputability.
In response to these factors, I have limited my analysis of egg dona-
tion and surrogacy agencies in two ways. First, I have narrowed the list
of agencies to those affiliated with the ASRM, the reproductive medi-
cine advocacy group, and RESOLVE. As a professional organization, the
ASRM collaborates with regulatory bodies such as the American Medi-
cal Association and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technolo-
gies (SART) to create ethics reports and lab standards, and to enforce
the 1992 Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act. RESOLVE
describes itself as “a non-profit organization with the only established,
nationwide network mandated to promote reproductive health and to
ensure equal access to all family building options for men and women
experiencing infertility or other reproductive disorders.”81 Founded in
1974, the organization operates on both the local and national levels.
RESOLVE is active in public policy, lobbying, and research, while also
maintaining local chapters that provide support and information to in-
dividuals experiencing infertility.82 The ASRM has been a supporter of
RESOLVE in the latter’s campaign to lobby both insurance companies
and legislators on the importance of providing mandatory insurance
coverage for infertility services.83 Currently, thirteen states require that
insurance company plans cover infertility treatment.84 While the federal

government requires that fertility agencies abide by laws against fraud
and malpractice and report success rates for ARTs to the CDC, fertil-
ity centers are otherwise unfettered in the ways that they advertise, at-
tract clients, or compete. In effect, “the fertility centers themselves set
the rules that guide their conduct, working under the auspices of the
ASRM.”85
I analyze egg donation and surrogacy agencies that are affiliated
with the ASRM and RESOLVE because as a professional agency and
patient advocacy group respectively, these two organizations are well
established and trusted by patients and practitioners. The RESOLVE
website contains a page listing “third party reproduction service pro-
viders” that are professional members of the organization. The AS-
RM’s website includes a list of egg donor agencies that have signed an
agreement with SART to abide by the rules set by the ASRM’s Ethics
and Practice Committee guidelines (guidelines include financial com-
pensation of egg donors, limits on repeated egg donation cycles, and
the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA).
I compared these two lists, and selected only the agencies that were
named on both sites. Inclusion on the RESOLVE and/or the ASRM
website does not guarantee agency quality; while RESOLVE explicitly
warns consumers that it does not screen or endorse providers on its
list, the ASRM notes that the agencies that it mentions pay SART a
registration fee to be listed and that SART has reviewed the contents
of the websites. Despite these differences, the listed sites gain some
measure of legitimacy and valuable “foot traffic” by being linked to the
ASRM or RESOLVE websites.
From this list, I selected commercial agencies that offer both egg do-
nation and surrogacy matching services; I limited my analysis in this
way in order to contrast how certain traits such as race and ethnicity are
deployed in profiles of egg donors and surrogates both within and be-
tween agencies. Of the thirty agencies that met these criteria and had ac-
tive websites, I specifically discuss content from the websites of thirteen
agencies, which have been given pseudonyms of Agencies A to M. My
analysis of the content on these websites is qualitative: I looked at pro-
files of surrogates and donors, when accessible, to compare physical de-
scriptions, including the categorization of race, ethnicity, ancestry, and
phenotype. I also compared the background information gathered about

surrogates and donors such as hobbies, education, and career aspiration
in order to analyze in what instances these traits were cast as heritable. I
further evaluated websites holistically, including visual imagery and the
language used to describe intended parents, surrogates, and donors, as
well as a sampling of the applications that intended parents, egg donors,
and surrogates filled out as the first step in the matching process. Four
themes emerged as particularly salient in this analysis of agency web-
sites: the deployment of the terms “race” and “ethnicity,” the inclusion of
what are considered phenotypic markers of race in donor profiles, the
question of heritable traits, and the differences between profiles of sur-
rogates and egg donors.
Building a Baby: Egg Donation and Surrogacy

According to Charis Thompson, the importance attributed to skin tone
in donor egg infertility treatment makes clear that “the idea of biological
race is both dead by consensus and very much alive.”86 Thompson’s state-
ment neatly sums up the tension between assertions of a “post-racial”
age and the continued racialization of gametes in the ART industry. This
section builds on Thompson’s research on skin tone, exploring how egg
donor profiles geneticize personal characteristics, including race and
ethnicity, and adds to this literature by analyzing the differences between
egg donor and surrogacy databases. The deployment of race in these
databases aligns with the fragmented discourse on race in America, in
which academic assertions of the biological meaninglessness of race,
the practical use of race as a commodified identifying trait in genetic
and medical research, and continued popular investment in race as a
meaningful social category coexist.87 Because reproductive technologies
commodify race, they make explicit what is often assumed concerning
the transference of traits through the genetic material encoded in eggs
and sperm. Race is biologized and cast as heritable through egg dona-
tion differently than it is through surrogacy. This comparison speaks
to the popular meaning of race and how it is transmitted. This negotia-
tion of racial difference is particularly important for understanding the
current and future role of women of color in the reproductive technol-
ogy industry. The privileging of genetics over gestation in determining
racial identity is an extension of the logic that has historically justified

the reproductive labor of women of color in the United States.
Intended parents typically view the profiles of potential egg donors
through online databases. Similar to what other researchers have found
regarding sperm banks, egg donor profiles generally provide three dif-
ferent types of information—phenotypic characteristics (such as race,
ethnicity, skin tone, and eye color), biological characteristics (blood
type, reproductive history, family health history), and social charac-
teristics (including personality, hobbies, and occupation).88 Describing
donors through these categories serves to segment the market, but it
also ranks differences between donors according to socially desirable
characteristics.89 Egg donation agencies do not make any guarantees
about how the characteristics of donors will manifest in a future child;
intended parents are left to make their own assumptions based on their
access to narratives about genetics and heredity. Nonetheless, egg dona-
tion and surrogacy agencies do make claims to scientific and medical
authority through the materials available on their websites, frequently
in ways that naturalize the geneticization of traits such as intelligence,
beauty, and ethnicity.
Agency A, for example, states that “we aim to fill our database with
Egg Donors that possess health, beauty, grace, and intelligence,” along-
side photographs of conventionally attractive donors, while noting that
“there is no guarantee that the egg donor you choose will provide you
with the outcome you desire and in fact you could have an adverse out-
come.” Despite these qualifications, the following paragraph cites a study
hypothesizing that “intelligence genes” are found on the X chromosome,
and thus intelligence in boys may come from the egg, and not the sperm.
Girls, as this argument goes, inherit intelligence from both the egg and
the sperm because they receive an X chromosome from both sources.
This statement is followed by the caveat that “Of course, there is never
any guarantee of any level of intelligence regardless of the quality of the
egg, sperm or the intelligence of either or both donators of the egg or
sperm. Please talk to a geneticist if you have any questions since we are
not genetic experts.” The inclusion of this allegedly scientific data on the
website serves several purposes: it geneticizes intelligence and highlights
the significance of choosing a quality egg donor while implicitly contra-
dicting the multiple caveats about unpredictable outcomes.
A competing website, for agency K, more explicitly links its donors

and “quality genes,” stating that its goal is to “identify responsible Egg
Donors with those ideal genetic characteristics desired by our clients.”
Agencies also use scientific authority to differentiate their “product”
from that available through other websites. Agency M’s website states
that the donor profiles and other digital media available to intended par-
ents mean that “our clients have the power to choose based on genetic af-
finity, rather than an industry-dictated paradigm,” and that “our donors
are highly intelligent, creative and charismatic; attributes that will not
only meet, but surely exceed, your expectations for finding your child’s
genetic contributor.” Agency M also requires that donors complete what
is known as a GAMA IQ test, which compiles four subtests—matching
shapes and colors, sequences of designs moving through space, spatial
analogies, and the construction of spatial designs—to generate a total
score. This score is then translated into an ability classification ranging
from “well below average” to “very superior.”90 The web page includes
this rank alongside the donor’s picture, age, height, blood type, and lo-
cation on the main page of its egg donor database. The compilation of
this information implies that measures such as IQ are valid indicators of
donor intelligence and that intelligence is a genetic (and thus heritable)
trait.91
The donors themselves also echo narratives of genetic determin-
ism. In a testimonial for Agency J, a former donor states, “I am dis-
covering that each recipient has a story that comes from the heart.
That is exactly why this is a science and every procedure is special to
me, more than I could have ever imagined it to be while at the start
of my journey.” Likewise, a donor at Agency E expressly asserts in her
profile that she is donating her eggs in order to pass on her genes;
with no intention of having children of her own, this donor views her
genetic makeup as an asset to be shared for the social good. These
quotes by donors indicate that they too are invested in the rhetoric
of science and genetics as it undergirds the practice of egg donation
and surrogacy. Medicalizing the donation process confers scientific
authority upon a practice that is largely unregulated and thus vulner-
able to charges of exploitation and misconduct. Moreover, by engag-
ing with scientific discourses, these agencies frame their services as
highly personal (dedicated to helping each intended parent or couple
form a family) while also having the medical, technological, and legal
knowledge necessary to aid intended parents in navigating the poten-
tial pitfalls of ARTs.
What Is on the Market, the Donor or the Egg?

While the ASRM recommends that compensation of more than $5,000
for an egg donor “requires justification” and that more than $10,000 is
“not appropriate,” compliance with this recommendation is voluntary.
That being said, 85 percent of clinics that offer ARTs and are Society for
Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) member clinics have adopted
these guidelines. Some egg donors have resisted the caps and even filed
a class action lawsuit against the ASRM, arguing that the market should
decide the going rate for eggs, and that the clinics are violating federal
antitrust regulations against price fixing. The ASRM has responded that
the limits are in place because women are being compensated for their
time, not for their actual eggs; to pay for eggs themselves, the organi-
zation argues, would devalue and commodify human life. They also
contend that the limits protect women from exploitation or undue pres-
sure to “donate.”92
Compensation varies between agencies, and even donors within the
same agency receive different levels of remuneration based on their own
level of altruism, past donor experience, and the value placed upon their
characteristics.93 Education level, height, weight, and perceived intel-
ligence can also impact donor fees. One agency famously put out an ad-
vertisement in Ivy League campus newspapers in 1999 offering $50,000
for a donor with an SAT score of 1400, a height of at least 5’10,” and no
family history of medical problems.94 The agency still references this
ad on its website, but notes that it complies with ASRM guidelines and
offers “many intelligent, talented and attractive egg donors who ask for
very reasonable compensation.” Doing so positions the agency as simul-
taneously exclusive and affordable in order to appeal to a wide range of
consumers. Intended parents will arguably be attracted to databases that
are marketed as including the highest-quality eggs, even if they end up
choosing a more reasonably priced donor.
The breadth with which egg donor profiles assess the personality of
a donor varies greatly from agency to agency, yet the vast majority at-
tempt to give intended parents some window into the character of the
woman. This picture may, however, be influenced by the “guidance” of
egg donation agency staff. The sociologist Rene Almeling, who inter-
viewed donation program staff as well as donors themselves, found that
the women are encouraged to create appropriately feminine profiles
through “gendered coaching strategies,” focusing on altruistic motiva-
tions rather than financial ones, for example.95 As other scholars have
noted, recipients of gamete donation are encouraged to “rematerial-
ize” donors through the information provided about their appearance,
lifestyle, and medical history.96 While it is the eggs of the donor that
will be purchased by intended parents, it is the donor as a whole who is
represented through extensive personal histories. The elision between
egg and donor is significant because it gives the impression of a genetic
“package” available for purchase, which biologizes and commodifies a
wide range of complex traits and identities, including race and ethnicity.
On Agency A’s website, egg donors are asked to check the boxes that
apply to them so that intended parents can search by keyword to view
donors who match these characteristics. The boxes include artist, ath-
lete, dancer, animal lover, reader, and traveler, which are listed along-
side geographical areas, nationalities, and religions like Scandinavian,
Middle Eastern, Jewish, and Western European. The confluence of cat-
egories about ancestry with those concerning personal likes and dislikes
implies that all of these characteristics are heritable, and equally so. The
donor profiles available on some databases are even more extensive.
While many profiles include a self-description of the donor’s character
and personality, her hobbies and interests, and why she wants to donate
an egg, others offer long lists of “favorites” (book, movie, food) as well
as philosophical questions such as how one handles adversity or the im-
portance of spirituality. Agency B, which has extensive donor profiles,
also includes a section titled “Just for Fun” that includes questions about
whether the donor sings in the shower, whether she is a good cook, and
what kind of animal she would like to be and why.97
The tenor of these questions is reminiscent of dating websites, which
match singles based on supposedly “scientific” measures of compatibil-
ity. Agency C, for example, formats its donor profiles in the style of a
traditional dating website or personal ad, with each donor’s basic statis-
tics (prior donation, height, eye color, and hair color) listed next to her
picture, and captioned with headlines such as “God’s gift to you,” “Jewish
Blonde in Canada,” “Professional, Athletic, and Gorgeous,” and “Striking
Israeli Loves to Keep Active.” This format is what Lisa Jean Moore and
Matthew Schmidt refer to as a “discourse template,” or a way to organize
novel information in a manner that an audience can understand and
quickly interpret. In a study of sperm banks, Moore and Schmidt found
that sperm donor profiles were organized through formats with which
users were already familiar because they “create comfort zones and miti-
gate the strangeness of the new market.”98 Viewing donors by picture
and caption is remarkably similar to shopping online at retail sites like
Amazon; it allows intended parents to quickly peruse the offerings of
a database before delving more deeply into the specifics of each donor.
There is also a certain heteronormativity to the layout of donor
databases (both sperm and egg) in that the process of judging indi-
viduals based on their proximity to a mythic ideal oddly mimics the
“old-fashioned” method of partner selection and heterosexual repro-
duction. The twist, of course, is that heterosexual sex is made obsolete
through the very disaggregation of reproductive components that such
databases allow. Although I did not gather specific data on sexuality,
overall there is a remarkable lack of attention to the sexual orientation of
egg donors. This could be read as an example of extreme heteronorma-
tivity, but it is complicated by several factors: first, the surge in popular
media attention to the so-called gay gene in recent years would presum-
ably influence those intended parents who aim to select carefully the
genetic profile of their future child. Second, there is a growing niche
market of gay parents in the ART industry who are also invested in the
idea of a gay gene or have other motivations for choosing a gay donor.
Even a well-established egg donation and surrogacy agency that spe-
cifically markets itself to gay parents does not give any indications of
donor sexuality in its sample egg donor profile offered online. While a
full analysis of this omission in egg donor databases is outside the scope
of this project, it would be a valuable avenue for future research.
While agencies do not always explicitly use the personal-ad template,
they nonetheless organize profiles in a manner that allows users to sort
and quickly rank large amounts of data (sometimes hundreds of donor
profiles). This system implies that it is the influence of genetics—the
contribution of the egg donor—more than environment that determines
social characteristics. This perspective is reflected in a quote by Liz

Mundy, the author of numerous publications on ARTs, in a 2006 article
in the Washington Post. The use of ARTs, Mundy argues,
is becoming widespread at precisely the moment when we’ve become ul-

tra aware of how genes run the show in the unfolding of a human being:
controlling everything from physical attributes such as height and hair
color to a predisposition for certain illnesses to a tendency toward shy-
ness or a taste for fine wine.99
For intended parents choosing an egg or sperm donor, this narrative

suggests that parenting begins with the selection of genetic materials—a
selection that will dominate their child’s future.
Race and Ethnicity

Race is one of the characteristics universally noted in donor profiles,
although agencies differ in how they represent this factor. While some
agencies draw from the categories used in the U.S. census, racial catego-
ries are not standardized, and many omit the term “race” altogether in
favor of “ethnicity.”100 Agency D’s database allows intended parents to
narrow their search criteria by selecting race and ethnicity from sepa-
rate drop-down menus. The first menu lists Asian, Black, Caucasian,
East Indian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Native American as pos-
sible options for race, while the ethnicity menu consist of seventy-five
categories, from nationalities (Canadian, Brazilian, Zairian), to the
aforementioned races, to what some would term “ethnic cultures” such
as Creole and Jewish.
While this database differentiates between race and ethnicity (al-
though through a counterintuitive strategy of classification), many sites
in this study rely upon donor self-identification rather than a menu of
racial/ethnic options. As a result, race, ethnicity, nationality, and ances-
try are frequently conflated; the donor’s self-identification reflects her
personal understanding of ethnicity or race, creating variation both
within and between databases. Many donors who identify as Cauca-
sian, for example, describe their ethnicity through reference to ancestral
country of origin; on Agency E’s website, one donor who describes her
skin complexion as “very fair” lists under ethnic origin the descriptors
Italian, English, Irish, and Caucasian. In contrast, within the same data-
base a donor who describes her complexion as “medium” lists African
American as her sole ethnic origin.
The question of how to identify one’s race is not always self-evident
or dependent solely on one’s own understanding of ethnicity or ances-
try, as the sociologist Janet Shim discovered. In interviews, Shim’s in-
formants argued that it was the external social perception of their race
(others identifying them as black or Hispanic) that created pressure to
categorize themselves according to the race that others ascribed to them.
Shim concludes that the comments of her informants “underscore how
race becomes consequential through the social significance that is in-
vested in it and imposed by others, rather than being a self selected at-
tribute by an individual presumably free to choose.”101 These findings
are significant for my study because egg donor and surrogate databases
often rely on donor self-identification; Shim’s research suggests that self-
identification is an “ascribed characteristic,” always in response to the
racializing social gaze.102
While Caucasian is used as a broad racial category in donor data-
bases, it does seem that generic whiteness is being called into question
through these profiles. Because intended parents are using donor pro-
files to create “affinity ties” between themselves and their future chil-
dren, the normative fiction of a monolithic white identity is cast aside
in favor of the specificity of ancestral heritage.103 This desire to trace
the donor’s “roots” for likeness with intended parents is suggestive of
recreational genetics. Both imply an investment in genetic determin-
ism, undergirded by the belief that there is something consequential to
learn from ancestry. Moreover, these affinity ties are about more than
straightforward physical or racial “matching”; the likeness that intended
parents seek concerns “an imagined future connection forged through
shared ancestry, hobbies, and other more cultural attributes.”104
Agency C’s website succinctly captures this motivation, stating that it
“works closely with our Loving Couples and Loving Mothers to achieve
their goals by matching them with desirable egg donors based upon a
variety of considerations: ethnicity, coloring, height, athleticism, intel-
ligence, artistic ability, etc.” Agency F promotes what it calls “ethnic-
specific oocyte donation” as one of its three main services. The focus on
ethnic specificity is reflected in this agency’s egg donor database, where

donors break down their ethnic background by percentages. The data-
base also categorizes donors by race, restricting the options to Cauca-
sian, African American, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or
Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Multi-racial, or Other. In this database, it is
primarily African American donors who list only one ethnicity, whereas
Caucasian and other nonwhite donors catalog heritage or ancestry.105
The idea that an individual’s race or ancestry can be distributed into
discrete percentages reinforces the myth of racial purity; as Dorothy
Roberts argues in Fatal Invention, “we can only imagine someone to be
a quarter European if we have a concept of someone who is 100 percent
European.”106 Listing donor ethnicity in such specific terms reifies race
as a biological reality that will be reproduced through donor eggs.
It is common for agencies to list not only the ethnicity of the donor,
but also that of her mother, father, and both maternal and paternal
grandparents; this tracing of lineage encourages intended parents to
seek out similarities between themselves and various aspects of the do-
nor’s history, thus actively constructing kinship. As Thompson points
out, there are multiple tropes concerning genetics that are accessible to
intended parents. Those using donor eggs might embrace the idea that
“genes code for racial distinctions, group inclusion and exclusion, and
ethnic purity,” while intended parents using their own gametes can ac-
cess the coexisting trope, “that genes function as the thing that provides
the definitive mark of individuality.”107
The former is evidenced in Agency F’s egg donor database, which is
notable for its detailed coverage of each donor’s physical characteris-
tics, medical and reproductive history, donor “risk factors,” and a sec-
tion titled “genetic history.” The genetic history section includes a series
of questions about ancestry, each correlated with a follow-up question
about genetic disease. For example, a question that asks whether do-
nors are of black or “Mexican/Latin American” ancestry is followed by
whether the donor has been tested as a carrier for sickle cell disease. If
donors respond in the affirmative to having Mediterranean, Latin Amer-
ican, Chinese, or Southeast Asian ancestors, they are asked whether they
have been tested as a carrier of thalassemia, a blood disorder found to
occur most commonly in people of these lines of descent. Finally, if a
donor responds that she is of white ancestry, she is asked whether she
has been tested as a carrier of cystic fibrosis. This series of questions

reifies races as discrete categories by linking disease to ancestry, de-
spite findings that even disorders closely associated with racial groups
in public consciousness such as sickle cell anemia are not in actuality
“race-bound.”108 Moreover, the inclusion of questions about ancestry in
a section titled “genetic history” shores up the assumption that there is a
biological basis for race. Genes are indeed “multivocal symbols” whose
meanings are negotiated by the needs of intended parents, but also by
donors and surrogates.109
Phenotypic Markers of Race

Egg donor profiles also address race and ethnicity through descriptions
of physical attributes—complexion, hair texture, or eye color—also
known as phenotype. “Phenotype” refers to “visible physical traits”;
until scientific advancements of the 1960s, geneticists believed that
these physical characteristics corresponded to genetic properties such
that “the phenotype was held to be the realization of the genotype in
the observable world.”110 With the developments of molecular biology,
the belief in a one-to-one correlation between phenotype and geno-
type made way for the theory that visible physical differences hid vast
similarities between groups at the molecular level. This recalculation
corresponded with a political context in which mainstream antiracist
forces argued that the best way to fight racism was by downplaying
racial difference and promoting an ideology of “color blindness.”111 As
critics of this concept have thoroughly demonstrated, the idea of “color
blindness” as a panacea for racism ignores not only the reality of liv-
ing in a white supremacist culture, but also the differential value placed
upon light skin tone within various racial and ethnic groups; even mem-
bers of the same group can be differentially racialized.112 The feminist
theorist Ruth Frankenberg defines color blindness as a way of thinking
about race based on not “seeing,” or not recognizing, racial differences.
Frankenberg argues that many white people use color blindness (or what
she calls color evasion) as a shield, a way to be “polite” about race. Color
evasiveness does not signify a complete lack of attention to difference,
but rather a selective engagement: “while certain kinds of difference
or differentiation can be seen and discussed with abandon, others are
evaded if at all possible.”113 Color blindness or color evasion ignores

the significance attributed to skin color in our culture. Skin color is a
form of symbolic capital; it has been evidenced to impact employment
opportunities, perceptions of attractiveness, and even judgments regard-
ing criminality.114
As Thompson notes, the inclusion of skin tone in egg donor pro-
files suggests a belief that the skin tone of the donor (noting, of course,
that the eggs themselves have no “skin” and thus no “tone”) has the po-
tential to be transmitted to the imagined child.115 Despite the cultural
significance attributed to skin tone, little consensus emerges across vari-
ous egg donor databases as to how this trait should be categorized. The
proliferation of online donor databases nearly guarantees that intended
parents will “shop around” on the Internet, comparing the perceived
quality of donors from site to site. Agencies are clearly aware of this po-
tential; some market the selectivity with which they choose egg donors,
while others promote the large number of donors in their database or a
specific niche (all college-educated donors, or LGBT-friendly services).
Many intended parents do seek out and pay a premium price for the nor-
matively ideal white, thin, college-educated egg donor. Yet what the legal
scholar Dorothy Roberts terms the “racial supply and demand system”
also means that egg donors who are racial minorities may receive higher
compensation than the average white donor because fewer women of
color are represented in most egg donor databases.116 Intended parents
might view the selection of race, ethnicity, and skin tone in a donor as an
expression of their reproductive agency,117 but the diversity with which
databases describe various racialized phenotypic differences complicates
efforts to systematically compare donor offerings.118
The database for Agency G, for example, limits the description of
donor skin tones to fair, medium, or olive, while Agency E’s database
includes fair, medium, slight olive, medium olive, moderate olive, dark
olive, and dark. The skin tone options listed by Agency H include pink
and white in addition to the relatively common fair, medium, dark, and
olive. Agency I, which specializes in the reproductive tourism indus-
try of India, does not offer an online donor profile but instead states
that it “matches the Intended Parent(s) with the egg donor who most
closely physically resembles her in ethnicity, height, body build, skin
type, eye color and hair color and texture.” What this policy ignores is
that “matching” is not always the ultimate goal—some intended parents

select donor gametes based on qualities that they consider favorable or
more socially privileged than their own.119 These are all very disparate
means of categorizing skin tone; it is even possible that the complexion
of one donor could be categorized entirely differently by each of these
databases. Natural hair color, hair texture or body (thick, fine), hair type
(wavy, curly, straight), and skin characteristics (freckles, moles, ability
to tan) are also included in many of the databases, which combine with
skin tone and self-described race and ethnicity to further racialize the
egg and geneticize physical traits.
It is worth noting that the design of online databases allows intended
parents to select for race without explicitly acknowledging the politics of
geneticizing racial belonging. White intended parents who select white
donors are also electing to give their children racial privilege. It is un-
likely that intended parents are consciously seeking out white privilege
rather than selecting for a sense of “likeness.” Nonetheless, the extreme
racialization of gametes, down to donor skin tone and hair texture, com-
plicates the notion of white privilege as something that is not chosen,
but granted at birth. The selection of race in egg donation belies the
aforementioned discourse of color blindness and instead suggests a form
of what Frankenberg calls “power evasion.” Power evasion involves a
selective attention to differences that are deemed positive, but an avoid-
ance of those deemed negative, such as inequality, racism, and power
imbalance.120 In the case of ART use, this appears as the minute ge-
neticization of racial difference in selecting an egg donor, without any
context for what these racialized traits and markers mean in a larger
social context.
Visualizing techniques verify the description of phenotype in the
donor profiles; many databases offer multiple pictures of the donor as
an infant, a child, and an adult. Donors who have children of their own
often include them in online albums as evidence of what their genes are
likely to produce, as well as proof of the donor’s fertility. Intended par-
ents can compare the descriptions of donors to their pictures as a way to
verify the information that the donors present, and also to imagine how
these characteristics could take form in their own potential children. As
Rosalind Petchesky argues in “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Cul-
ture,” photographic images have the capacity “to assume two distinct
meanings, often simultaneously: an empirical (informational) and a

mythical (or magical) meaning.”121 Visual images of egg donors serve
both purposes for intended parents, confirming (or conflicting with) the
detailed physical descriptions elicited in lengthy donor profiles, and also
offering up the potential blueprint of a future child.
What these arrangements mask is that the perception of skin tone is
not homogeneous across racial and ethnic lines, nor is its meaning. A
woman who identifies as white might list her skin tone as “medium” be-
cause she tans easily in the summer—a trait that is currently celebrated
in white beauty culture. For example, a donor in Agency D’s database
lists her race as Caucasian and categorizes her skin type as “tan, not
burn in the sun.” A woman who identifies as African American, in con-
trast, might have a vastly different perception of “medium” skin tone,
influenced in part by a culture that privileges light-skinned women of
color in television, movies, and magazines. Indeed, the interpretation or
“reading” of skin tone (even one’s own) does not occur in a cultural vac-
uum; it is influenced by a variety of “ethnoracial marking systems” such
as hair and fashion style, eye color, gender, language, and age.122 Accord-
ing to a study by Celeste M. Condit et al., laypeople are likely to identify
race by a person’s physical appearance, with skin color as a primary, but
not sufficient, evidence of racial belonging. The researchers conclude
that “lay people tend to believe that race is identified by appearance and
that genes are responsible for appearance; therefore they believe that
race has a genetic basis.”123 This research supports the emphasis placed
on phenotypic markers of race in egg donor profiles. If phenotype is
viewed as largely genetic, and the most significant marker of racial dif-
ference, then intended parents will use multiple metrics (pictures, do-
nors’ statistics such as height and weight, and self-identified ethnicity,
race, and skin tone) to measure a donor’s racial makeup.
Surrogacy Databases
Prior to this analysis, I hypothesized that most websites would offer
online databases through which intended parents could peruse the pro-
files of both donors and surrogates. At the least, I expected that those
agencies with online egg donation databases would also have online
surrogacy databases. This hypothesis was proven false within the given
sample of agencies. Only seven of the thirty agency websites included

profiles of surrogates, and of those, I was granted permission to view
four databases.124 There are multiple reasons that it is less common for
agencies to have surrogacy databases than egg donor databases: first,
because many agencies have fewer surrogates than egg donors, they
often match intended parents with surrogates on a case-by-case level;
and second, the criteria for selecting a surrogate do not fit the aforemen-
tioned discourse templates of personal ads. Agencies match intended
parents with surrogates based on factors such as location, whether the
surrogate is willing to “reduce” (selectively abort) multiple or unhealthy
fetuses, and whether the surrogate is willing to work with certain groups
such as gay couples or singles. Moreover, the contrast between criteria
for choosing a surrogate and criteria for choosing an egg donor reflects
the fetishization of genetics and the compartmentalization of gestation.
It is important to note that not all intended parents who contract with
a gestational surrogate are also purchasing donor eggs and sperm. In-
deed, one reason that many intended parents consider gestational surro-
gacy a preferable alternative to adoption is that at least one of the parents
will be genetically related to the future child. The ethnographer Elly
Teman found that in Israel, gestation is believed to have no influence
on the future child, and that the womb is “denuded of personal traits,”
whereas the egg is vested with a woman’s feminine identity and genetic
inheritance.125 Teman contrasts this to the United States, citing Ragoné’s
classic research on women who served as both traditional and gesta-
tional surrogates to argue that Americans have a more flexible approach
to the division of eggs and wombs. While I agree with Teman that in-
tended parents in the United States place significance on the “environ-
ment” of the womb (with particular attention to alcohol and drug use), I
view this as an extension of the current social and political climate in the
United States that interpolates all pregnant women as potential threats
to fetuses/children. Many surrogacy contracts, for example, require that
surrogates agree not to drink coffee or alcohol, avoid most medications,
and even limit travel to some destinations.126 Gestation is compartmen-
talized such that the surrogate is viewed as capable of affecting the safety
of the womb (in largely negative ways), but, as in Israel, she is incapable
of altering the individual “nature” that is predetermined by genetics. In-
tended parents in the United States might worry that their surrogate will
harm “their” fetus by smoking cigarettes during her pregnancy, but not
that her bad temper or freckles will later materialize in their child-to-be.
Where surrogacy databases do exist in this sample, they differ quite
markedly from the egg donor databases created by the same programs.
The search page for Agency K’s database asks visitors to select whether
they are seeking an egg donor or a surrogate. Intended parents are then
prompted to narrow their search by identification number, race, or loca-
tion, but to select hair color, eye color, and minimum/maximum height
only if they are searching for an egg donor, not a surrogate. Likewise, the
database for Agency H asks surrogates to fill out questions about race
and ethnicity, height and weight, and education, but it does not require
the detailed description of physical characteristics asked of egg donors.
This trend also shows up in the sample profiles of surrogates and egg
donors offered by Agency F. While both egg donors and surrogates list
race and “ethnic history” along with some other physical characteristics,
only donors list complexion and hair type.
These examples indicate that intended parents may find the race of
their surrogate relevant, but not because they believe that her physical
characteristics will manifest in their child. Rather, race (like gender) is a
primary organizing principle in American society, and is thus a central
identity category by which we “know” one another. Without being aware
of the race of a surrogate, intended parents may feel that they are miss-
ing a piece of information that is crucial to their presumed knowledge
of the candidate. Alternatively, while cross-racial surrogacy is a growing
phenomenon, there are undoubtedly intended parents who would not be
willing to use a surrogate of a different race, as well as those who remain
hesitant to intermingle raced bodies at the intimate level of pregnancy.
The same can be said for surrogates: Agency L’s surrogacy application
asks women whether they would be willing to serve as a surrogate for a
family of a different race, religion, or ethnic background, suggesting that
some surrogates would refuse to do so. Even in Teman’s ethnography, in
which intended parents firmly state that the race of the surrogate has
no implications for their future child, Teman finds that parents need
to reaffirm this knowledge after the child is born. One of the ways that
individuals validate their new identity as parents, she contends, is by
confirming their own resemblance to the child: “This preoccupation
with the resemblance of the child to the intended parents seems to voice
a retrospective fear that the baby could have mistakenly been the genetic
offspring of the surrogate or that the surrogate could somehow have
‘shaped’ or affected the baby while it was in her womb.”127
The feminist ethnographer Gillian Goslinga-Roy likewise discovered
that the firm bodily boundary between surrogate and fetus is challenged
by racial difference. The ability to maintain an “ontological distinction”
between self and other potentially dissolves when the fetus is racially
marked as African American (for example), and the surrogate white.
Goslinga-Roy notes that “genetic unrelatedness and assisted reproduc-
tion practices thus ‘naturally safeguarded’ her [the surrogate’s] sexual,
bodily, and personal integrity, but only as long as the child in her was
(coded) white.”128 These findings suggest that despite attempts to natu-
ralize the role of the surrogate as purely custodial, cross-racial surrogacy
may entail certain racialized “risks” for those who bear white privilege
that they are unable to dismiss entirely.
In addition to race and ethnicity, profiles of surrogates generally have
less information about educational history, hobbies, and special skills
than do egg donor profiles. In the sample profiles on Agency F’s web-
site, both egg donors and surrogates are asked to list their education
(both past and future plans), hobbies, and employment history, but only
egg donors are asked about their special achievements and best sub-
jects in school. Likewise, surrogates detail their medical history, but are
not asked to report on their extended family health history and special
achievements of family members.129 In an interesting reversal, surro-
gates are prompted to describe their diet, which in this profile includes
the amount of water they drink as well as their vegetable and lean meat
intake, while this question is not repeated for donors.
Questions about diet, lifestyle, and exercise routine are common in
surrogacy applications, and they are often followed by specific inquiries
into tobacco, drug, and alcohol use. Again, this implies that the surro-
gate has the potential to affect the fetus through the environment of the
womb. Many feminist scholars have drawn connections between repre-
sentations of the womb as an environment and the erasure of the woman
as the primary agent (and patient) in a pregnancy. As Lauren Berlant
argues, “the maternal body has been redefined as a disaster movie wait-
ing to happen, or a technical ‘environment’ that makes the fetus vul-
nerable to toxic invasions via the mother’s mouth, veins or vagina.”130 I
agree with Berlant’s assessment of the effects of visualizing technologies

such as ultrasound on the maternal-fetal relationship, but would add
that in the case of surrogacy the stakes are slightly different. While sur-
rogates are vulnerable to the policing of their bodies and behavior, the
management of their pregnancies by third-party sources is typically a
prerequisite to entering this highly mediated pregnancy experience. Sur-
rogates are primed to define themselves as vessels, delineating their own
subjectivity from that of the fetus.
This perspective is reflected in how agency websites set up the da-
tabases and search functions for surrogates. In this sample, the format
of surrogacy databases indicated function or practicality as opposed
to the dating site–like layout for egg donors. For example, the search
function for Agency A’s database divides surrogates into groups such
as West Coast/East Coast surrogates, surrogates with insurance, repeat
surrogates, “value” surrogates (those willing to charge $20,000 or less),
and “flexible” surrogates (those open to “reduction or termination for
medical or personal reasons”). Agency D also lists practical questions
like willingness to reduce or terminate, openness to working with gay or
single intended parents, and fees. The more in-depth questions for sur-
rogates are generally related to the level of support they have from their
families (many programs require that the surrogate provide the written
consent of her husband or partner), their birth experiences, lifestyle,
career focus, and motivation for becoming a surrogate.
An additional theme that emerged in this sample was the divergent
visual representations of donors and surrogates. Egg donor profiles gen-
erally contain more than one picture of the donor. If multiple photo-
graphs are posted, it is common to include one of the donor in formal
clothing (at a prom or wedding), as a child, and with any of her own
children. When surrogates are visually represented, they are nearly al-
ways depicted with their families. These include pregnancy pictures and
photos of the donor with her children or partner. It is far less common
to see pictures of egg donors in the frame with others; in fact, many of
the pictures that donors post are clearly cropped to remove friends, rela-
tives, or partners from the images.
Why is it important to represent surrogates with their partners and
children, or in the late stages of pregnancy? Both egg donors and sur-
rogates are being appropriately gendered through these visualization
techniques, but in different ways. Egg donors are valued for their youth,
fertility, beauty, and accomplishments; pictures of donors prove their
femininity and physical attractiveness and often attest to signal mo-
ments of accomplishment such as graduation, prom, or wedding day. It
is not unusual for egg donor pictures to mimic the “head shots” used by
models and actresses (and indeed, a significant number of egg donors
list these occupations in their profiles). In a study of egg and sperm
donor programs, the sociologist Rene Almeling identified two gendered
stereotypes that agencies expect of egg donors: donors could present
as either attractive and well-educated individuals or caring mothers
of their own children. Agencies use these “gendered coaching strate-
gies” to ensure that donors will choose pictures and write profiles that
enhance these qualities, particularly through reference to altruistic
motivations.131
Surrogates are also valued for their altruism, fertility, and physical
health, but photographs of surrogates provide a different type of “evi-
dence” than do photographs of egg donors. Pictures of surrogates in late
pregnancy demonstrate their ability to successfully carry a pregnancy
to term, and they represent a cultural marker of heightened (and non-
sexualized) femininity. Surrogacy poses a potential threat to traditional
notions of femininity by detaching pregnancy from motherhood; these
images rehabilitate surrogates, emphasizing that surrogates are mothers
themselves who are motivated to give the gift of life to another family.
Agency A’s website is an example of this. In lieu of a database, Agency A
offers a web album slideshow of surrogates in their program to the tune
of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” The slideshow streams pictures of
the surrogates on their wedding day, pictures of their bare and pregnant
stomachs, ultrasound images of fetuses, and photographs of the women
with their children and families. Images such as these represent the com-
pleteness of the surrogate’s own family as well as evidence of her fertility.
This is important because surrogates are almost universally required to
have children of their own. Such policies are based on the belief that
surrogates with children are less likely to go back on their contractual
agreement to relinquish the child at birth. Because motherhood is cast
as a sign of maturity and a marker of true womanhood in American
culture, pictures of the surrogate pregnant or with her family reinforce
these gendered values. Images of the surrogate as a good mother support
her claims of altruism because motherhood and self-sacrifice are seen

as a necessary pair. Thus, visual images of surrogates as good, altruistic,
and self-sacrificing mothers shore up the narrative of women helping
women that naturalizes the surrogacy process.
In sum, agencies are less likely to “materialize” surrogates than egg
donors, and when they do, it is clear that the qualities valued in sur-
rogates are not identical to those valued in egg donors. The race and
ethnicity of surrogates are not entirely inconsequential, yet the lack of
detailed attention to phenotype suggests that race has a different mean-
ing when associated with surrogates than with egg donors. While donor
eggs are imbued with the qualities and proclivities of the individual
woman, the influence of the surrogate is limited to the sphere of “nur-
ture” rather than “nature.”
***
The practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy implies that racial dif-
ference does not “matter” (to borrow from Judith Butler)132 at the level
of gestation, but that social categories of race are thoroughly encoded
in popular understandings of genetics. This has major implications for
contemporary racial politics. While academics rightly argue that race
is a social construction, it is one that undeniably and forcefully shapes
the lives of individuals. ARTs reveal the flexibility of racial discourse;
the malleability of race serves the interests of economically and racially
dominant groups such that the reproductive labor of women of color as
surrogates is naturalized and normalized by the geneticization of race.
Not only does this discourse of race downplay the significance of the
intimate interracial contact of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, it also
commodifies race through the sale of human gametes. In turn, the dis-
course reifies racial categories as discrete and biological.
That being said, to interpret the racialization of gametes as a straight-
forward extension of the politics of eugenics forecloses the potential for
ART users to deploy these technologies in ways that subvert racial hi-
erarchies. As Roberts argues, positioning the reproductive interests of
white women and women of color as purely oppositional ignores both
the increased use of ARTs by people of color and their shared relation-
ship to the political and market forces that privatize responsibility for
public health.133 While analyses of ARTs must attend to the potential to
reinforce racial stratification, they must also acknowledge the diverse,

agential, and at times counterhegemonic strategies that individuals em-
ploy to construct families by choice.
Racial discourse in the United States is not determined solely by sci-
entific or academic contributions; rather, popular beliefs about racial
difference are entrenched within social, economic, and political ideolo-
gies that often “speak back” to claims about the biological meaningless-
ness of race. The reproductive technology industry is a prime location
to reveal these inconsistencies because it straddles both the market and
medicine, both technology and consumption. As the overlap between
medicine and the market grows, these sites will continue to serve as
fertile grounds for measuring shifting ideologies of race, gender, and
kinship.
NYU Press
Chapter Title: “I Am the Baby’s Real Mother”: Reproductive Tourism and the Transnational
Construction of Kinship

5
“I Am the Baby’s Real Mother”
Reproductive Tourism and the Transnational

Construction of Kinship
On April 25, 2015, Nepal was rocked by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake,

which killed over eight thousand people and displaced thousands more.
The death toll rose as weeks went by, and powerful aftershocks left
citizens fearful to return indoors.1 As disaster relief organizations strug-
gled to reach remote areas of the country, and aid groups scrambled to
respond, a select number of newborn babies and their caretakers were
plucked from the wreckage and flown to safety in Israel. Left behind
were the women who had given birth—the surrogate mothers. Twenty-
six babies had been born to surrogates in Kathmandu in the weeks
preceding the earthquake, most commissioned by same-sex couples
from Israel, who are banned from using surrogates in their own country.
Some intended parents were also in Nepal at the time of the quake, wait-
ing to fulfill the bureaucratic requirements to bring their children home.
Within a few days of the disaster, the Israeli government had evacu-
ated the children and intended parents to Israel, but left the surrogates
behind in a devastated landscape, which for most of the women was not
their home.2
Most, if not all, of the surrogates were from India, and had traveled
to Nepal because new Indian regulations have banned same-sex couples
from obtaining a surrogate in that country. About a hundred pregnant
surrogates remained in Nepal, carrying babies for Israeli citizens;3 one
Israeli intended father said he worried that the stress his surrogate was
enduring would not be good for the pregnancy.4 Shortly after the evacu-
ation, the Israeli attorney general promised to transport those surrogates
in the advanced stages of pregnancy to Israel, and the interior minister
vowed to remove immigration barriers for the others.5 It is unclear, how-
ever, whether travel to Israel would be preferred by all of the surrogates,
165
166 | “I Am the Baby’s Real Mother”
most of whom were likely tied to Nepal and India through children and
families of their own. Some intended parents had never met the woman
carrying their child; the news network CNN connected one Indian sur-
rogate in Nepal with the intended father in Israel, using a translator to
allow them to speak for the first time. The surrogate told reporters that
she was pleased that the intended father was concerned for her and the
baby, yet she missed her own nine-year-old daughter. Since she was a
single mother, her best option to financially support her daughter was
to leave her with family in India, travel to Nepal, and give birth to what
would be an Israeli child.6
The evacuation of babies, but not surrogates; the concern for the ef-
fects of stress on the fetus, but no mention of the woman; a surrogate
separated from her own child in order to have a baby for someone else—
the aftermath of Nepal’s earthquake reflects many of the concerns raised
by what is known as reproductive tourism. Reproductive tourism—
international travel for fertility and reproductive services—is an in-
creasingly common phenomenon. Also termed “fertility outsourcing,”
“rent-a-womb,” or “procreation vacations,” reproductive tourism encom-
passes a range of practices that occur globally, including egg donation,
in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and commercial
surrogacy. While many service providers and customers build a pseudo-
philanthropic discourse around the practice that focuses on the theme
of “women helping women,” I argue that these processes naturalize and
justify an economic arrangement that is fraught with inequality. Repro-
ductive tourism is often a deeply racialized endeavor that relies on class
disparities between those who provide reproductive services and those
who consume them in order to create a family built around genetic ties.
Cross-racial gestational surrogacy is an illuminating example of this in-
equality in a transnational context. I focus on India, the worldwide leader
in surrogacy provision,7 to analyze the discursive and cultural construc-
tion of this specific form of reproductive tourism in which the surro-
gate has no genetic relationship to the fetus that she carries. This chapter
utilizes sources including feminist ethnographic scholarship, popular
print media coverage of surrogacy, documentary film, and television talk
shows to connect socially constructed notions of race and genetic de-
terminism that travel alongside the reproductive tourist with the more
seemingly benign discursive theme of “women helping women.”
“I Am the Baby’s Real Mother” | 167
As discussed in previous chapters, the role of the surrogate is mini-

mized when DNA is framed as the sole arbiter of the “true self.”8 The
logic of genetic essentialism, in which cultural meanings of the gene
conflate with the scientific or biological, “reduces the self to a molec-
ular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and
moral complexity, with their genes.”9 According to Melinda Cooper and
Catherine Waldby, this logic makes (comparatively) low-cost gestational
surrogacy in India particularly appealing for U.S. clients, “because the
surrogate makes no genetic contribution, hence her ethnicity leaves no
trace on the child.”10 In cross-racial surrogacy arrangements, whiteness
can be “commercially reproduced” at an appealing price.11 Analyzing
the racialization of surrogacy, particularly when racial difference corre-
lates with massive disparities in economic privilege, reveals how ideolo-
gies of race and kinship travel alongside the reproductive tourist. It also
marks the strategies used to naturalize and justify an economic arrange-
ment that is fraught with inequality.
ARTs in a Global Context

Some countries that are now magnets for reproductive services were
already popular destinations for a broader base of medical tourism
such as heart, cosmetic, and joint-replacement surgery, as well as sex
reassignment surgery.12 India, for example, attracts a high volume of
medical tourists because of its advanced medical technologies, low costs,
popular tourist destinations, and highly skilled and trained English-
speaking doctors.13 As in the United States, where intended parents
often “shop around” for the most favorable pricing and regulatory
environment, international consumers also seek out countries that are
conducive to their reproductive goals. Scholars of reproductive tourism
have identified four key motivations for seeking what they call “cross-
border reproductive care”: religious and legal prohibitions; resource
issues, which include long waiting times, cost, and access to treatment
facilities; quality concerns in relation to success rates and safety; and
personal reasons such as privacy concerns or cultural norms.14 Some
countries prohibit specific types of treatment (PGD, for example, is
banned in Italy), while others restrict LGBT people from accessing
IVF (these countries include France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and the
Netherlands), and others do not allow compensated surrogacy, thus

greatly restricting the practice (as in the United Kingdom).15 Some
theorists speculate that the restrictions placed on ARTs by individual
nations do little but further stratify access to such treatments; those who
can afford to travel will seek services outside their home countries.16
For example, after Britain’s Human Fertility and Embryology Authority
banned anonymous egg and sperm donation in the United Kingdom,
the supply of gametes quickly shrank, and the number of British citizens
traveling abroad for these products increased significantly.17
Until recently, India was similar to the United States in that the state
did not place limitations on parents seeking gestational surrogacy. Sur-
rogacy was legalized in India in 2002, and is expected to add an an-
nual $2.3 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product from 2012 on.18
The Indian government even sponsored its own ART industry growth
through advertising and policy. In 2004 the state announced that “treat-
ment of foreign patients is legally an export and deemed eligible for all
fiscal incentives extended to export earnings.”19 The result has been a
booming sector; the Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, an
Indian women’s organization, estimates that about three thousand clin-
ics in India offer surrogacy services.20 As in the United States, India’s
surrogacy industry follows a commercial, for-profit model. This stands
in contrast to other nations such as Israel, in which surrogacy is heavily
regulated and controlled by the state.21 While estimates range and costs
fluctuate due to the variety of necessary procedures and choice of clinic,
surrogacy costs in India are roughly $35,000–$45,000, as compared to
$80,000–$150,000 in the United States.22 The surrogacy industry in India
changed in 2013, when legislation banned gay men, single people, and
those married for less than two years from engaging in surrogacy con-
tracts.23 As a result, many gay clients have taken their business to Nepal,
where surrogacy is not restricted. Indian agencies have followed, export-
ing Indian surrogates to Nepal for the duration of their pregnancies.24
Reports vary on how much of the money that clients pay in India
goes to the surrogates themselves. Dr. Nayna Patel, the owner of the
most well-known surrogacy clinic in India, contends that the women
she employs are paid $6,500 per pregnancy.25 Because of the signifi-
cantly lower prices associated with surrogacy in India, agencies are able
to offer deals and packages that are extremely attractive to intended
parents. The agency Proactive Family Solutions, for example, offers

a “surrogacy guarantee” that promises a full refund to couples whose
surrogate has not become pregnant or given birth within twenty-seven
months.26 As the journalist Henry Chu writes in the Los Angeles Times,
some see surrogacy in India as “a logical outgrowth of India’s fast-paced
economic growth and liberalization of the last 15 years, a perfect meeting
of supply and demand in a globalized marketplace.”27 Others are critical
of what they perceive as abuse of the desperately poor.
A bill meant to regulate surrogacy in India has spent years making its
way through government ministries and departments, yet what is now
titled the Assisted Reproductive Technology Regulation Bill, 2013, con-
tinues to be modified by the Indian government. The bill aims to outline
the roles of all parties involved in surrogacy, provide clear definitions of
parentage, and designate responsibility to appropriate government agen-
cies.28 Existing drafts of the ART Regulation Bill would also implement
some limitations on the potential pool of surrogates, the medical pro-
cedures that they undergo, and also the demographics of intended par-
ents, such as barring gay couples and single people from using surrogacy
services.29 The original drafting of the bill did not include participation
by women’s groups or public health activists and has been critiqued by
these sources, which contend that the bill will protect and benefit the in-
dustry at the expense of Indian women.30 As one health activist claims,
“It [the bill] is like saying we know you are exploited but here is a law
that will ensure that you will be exploited less.”31 Women’s rights activ-
ists with Sama hold that the legislation is particularly lax in its atten-
tion to the multitudes of third-party contractors that play a vital role in
surrogacy arrangements, including legal firms, clinics, tourist agencies,
and managers of surrogacy hostels.32 Other critics similarly contend
that rather than regulating the ART industry, the bill promotes it as part
of a neoliberal shift in development policy, protecting medical tourism
rather than the rights and health of women involved in surrogacy.33
The Surrogate Laborers

While the benefits to surrogacy in India for intended parents may be
clear, why do Indian women become surrogates, given the legislative
ambiguities and lack of legal recourse? In a study in Anand, India, by the
anthropologist Amrita Pande, surrogates ranged in age from twenty-five

to forty-five, with educational levels from illiterate to high school–
educated, and a median household income of $60 a month. Many of
the women were the sole earners in their households, with husbands
who were unemployed or underemployed. Participating in surrogacy
made a vast contribution to the household economy; Pande found that
the amount of money the woman earned in one surrogate pregnancy
was roughly equivalent to five years of total family income. While many
critics of Indian surrogacy assume that the women who participate do so
because they are financially destitute, the sociologist Sharmila Rudrap-
pa’s fieldwork demonstrates that surrogacy agencies do not seek out
desperately poor women. Rather, recruiters find working-class women
to be more suitable candidates because they are more likely to have
permanent housing, good hygiene, and access to clean water and regu-
lar meals.34 The demographics in other ethnographic research studies
have found women who are mostly housewives, or if employed, worked
in factories, domestic work, or the garment industry.35 Thus, gesta-
tional surrogacy is often an extension of the feminized labor in which
women are already engaged.36 Surrogacy may also reflect an appealing
employment alternative to other labor options. A study of surrogates
in Bangalore, India, found that potential surrogates in this region were
most productively recruited from garment manufacturing, where low
pay and repressive working conditions are the norm.37 Many women
saw surrogacy or egg donation as a way to escape garment manufactur-
ing, at least temporarily, and achieve some means of economic stability.38
Unlike in the United States, it is not uncommon for surrogates in
India to spend all or part of their pregnancies in a closely regulated sur-
rogacy hostel (although these requirements vary by agency or clinic)
until the birth.39 Surrogates receive higher pay if they agree to live in the
hostels for all nine months of their pregnancy, and since 2005, most have
done so when the option is made available.40 Indian surrogates almost
always deliver babies via Cesarean section, regardless of whether they
have had a previous vaginal birth. C-sections are typically scheduled
between the thirty-sixth and thirty-eighth week of pregnancy so that
the doctor can time the birth, and international intended parents can
attend.41 Dr. Nayna Patel, the operator of Akanksha Infertility Clinic in
Anand, India, and a frequently cited source in the news media, notes
that the high levels of surveillance in surrogacy hostels are an incentive

for foreigners to choose surrogacy in India over other countries like the
United States. In India, she argues, intended parents can guarantee that
their surrogate will not drink, smoke, or engage in other “vices” during
pregnancy.42 Patel’s clinic controls the “vice” of sexuality by banning sur-
rogates from leaving their quarters without permission, and allowing the
women to visit their families only in crowded rooms; this surveillance
ensures the surrogate’s chastity throughout the pregnancy, thus elimi-
nating the risk of sexually transmitted infection.43 Other clinics frame
maternity homes or agency-provided housing as a benefit to the sur-
rogate, a place where she will be spared household labor and childcare
in order to rest throughout her pregnancy. Even then, some surrogates
express feelings of isolation and boredom due to the limited mobility
and close surveillance imposed by staff that is responsible for ensuring
that surrogates do not harm the developing pregnancy.44 Others missed
their families, but relished the time spent in the dormitories as a unique
respite from serving the needs of their husband and children, and as an
opportunity to create significant bonds with the other women in the
hostel.45
Indian surrogates are explicitly trained to distance themselves from
the fetuses that they carry, but they are also expected to perform the af-
fective labor of “loving” the fetus at the same time. One clinic employee
instructs surrogates that the child is “not your baby” but that “you will
take care of it even more, love it even more than you love your own,
because it is someone else’s.”46 This expectation is reminiscent of the
nostalgia for the mammy figure in the United States, a woman who was
idealized as selflessly devoted to her charges, yet always aware of her
place in the family hierarchy. It is a contradictory demand that is also
placed on women who serve as nannies and other child caretakers in the
United States, a disproportionate number of whom are “Third World”
women of color.
Nannies and surrogates are among the ranks of what Eileen Boris and
Rhacel Parrenas term “intimate laborers,” engaged in what the authors
describe as low-status “women’s work” involving psychic and bodily inti-
macy. Intimate labor, according to these authors, is stigmatized because
of its association with the body and supposedly unclean bodily functions
(such as feeding, bathing, or providing sexual services to others). As
a result, intimate labor is overwhelmingly performed by economically

disadvantaged women and women of color. Moreover, intimate labors
“rely on the maintenance of precise social relations between employers
and employees or customers and providers.”47 Surrogates in India are
performing intimate labor in very institutional settings, with little or
no connection with the couples commissioning their labor. As Vivian
Zelizer notes in The Purchase of Intimacy, intimate care is often senti-
mentalized because of its associations with altruism and personal com-
mitment, yet paid care explicitly intermingles economic transactions
with emotional labor in a way that is often viewed as a threat to social
norms.48 Surrogacy in India has all the hallmarks of intimate labor—
embodied intimacy, the “messiness” of birth, the class and often racial
“Otherness” of the surrogate—resulting in conflicting demands between
the expectations of nurturing and caring about the fetus during preg-
nancy and immediate affective disengagement after the birth.
Beyond the Exploitation/Empowerment Dichotomy

Mainstream media often frame contentious social issues (like abortion
rights or marriage equality) in dichotomous terms, or at least as con-
sisting of two sides that equally merit debate. Surrogacy in India is no
exception, and is often represented in the media as a two-sided issue:
either a powerful symbol of the economic exploitation of Third World
women or an opportunity for their political, social, familial, and eco-
nomic empowerment. A 2007 article in the women’s magazine Marie
Claire, for example, asks of reproductive tourism in India, “Another
example of third world exploitation? Globalization gone mad? Or
is it a mutually beneficial relationship?”49 This quote explicitly situ-
ates exploitation and equal gain as the only available framework for
understanding reproductive tourism. Less common is the suggestion
that surrogacy could be exploitative while simultaneously providing
benefits to Indian women that alternative labor options currently do
not. Reflecting this complexity, an Indian surrogate recovering from
a Cesarean section told Reuters, “I was happy to do it but it was not
really out of choice because we needed the money.”50 A wide variety of
sources including governments, bioethicists, policy makers, and aca-
demics have conceptualized a clean split between commodities that can
be bought and sold, and gifts that are given freely. Within this dichot-
omy, the market for commodities (particularly if that commodity is
a human tissue such as blood, organs, or reproductive material) may
involve exploitation and dehumanization of laborers and producers,
whereas the gift economy consists of altruism and efforts to improve
the social good.51 The previous quote complicates this dichotomy—the
surrogate acknowledges the personal fulfillment she receives for “giv-
ing” an infertile couple a child, while seamlessly integrating her very
limited agency to “choose” whether or not to give it.
A prospective Indian surrogate interviewed by the New York Times
frames surrogacy as a way to cash in on the resources that are already
available to her: “It’s good money. Risks? What risks? Any fool can have
a baby, it takes a smart woman to get paid for it.”52 Rather than viewing
her reproductive capacity as a burden or a biologically determined risk
factor for exploitation, this surrogate embraces her reproductive poten-
tial as a resource not to be squandered solely by traditional mother-
hood. This radical, market-driven reconceptualization of pregnancy can
be read as an expression of bodily autonomy and agency, blurring the
simple dichotomy of exploitation versus opportunity.
Recent academic scholarship also complicates this framework. The
feminist philosopher Amrita Banerjee urges readers to reject the schema
of liberalism versus exploitation often found in ethics-centered and
Western-focused discourse on surrogacy. Banerjee is critical of the lan-
guage of choice because it ignores women’s sociopolitical context. At
the same time, the exploitation framework contributes to perceptions
of “Third World” women as powerless and victimized: “such discursive
ethnocentrism might fuel a certain paternalistic attitude toward ‘Third
World’ women and further reify what [Chandra] Mohanty terms as
‘Third World difference.’”53 Mohanty notes that when feminist analyses
assume a homogeneous oppression of all women, the image of an “aver-
age Third World woman” (who is “sexually constrained,” uneducated,
and victimized) is produced and implicitly contrasted with the individu-
alistic and empowered Western woman.54 In the case of reproductive
tourism, the exploitation framework posits Indian women as univer-
sally devoid of agency and thus at the mercy of economically advantaged
Western women who can afford to pay for the fertility of others—what
Banerjee calls a “powerful/powerless dichotomy.”55
Rather than accepting a clear-cut dichotomy between powerful and

powerless, we should employ a more productive understanding of
power as flowing inescapably and unevenly between intended parents
and surrogates. For example, intended parents who procure surrogacy
services are economically privileged in relation to the women they hire,
but they are also reproductively disadvantaged, in the sense that they
are reliant upon the surrogate to produce what they are physically inca-
pable of.56 Surrogates are cognizant of this; in Pande’s study, surrogates
note that while intended parents contribute the genetic material, it is
through the “blood and sweat” of the surrogate that the child comes
into being. This understanding not only evinces agency by formulating
forbidden kinship ties with the fetus but also acknowledges the limits of
the intended parents’ power.57 The interdependence between surrogate
and intended parents can imply that the playing field between parties
is relatively level: surrogates need money and intended parents need a
child, thus they can engage in an equal exchange of goods (although, of
course, children are described as a gift, a miracle, and a blessing rather
than a commodity). This equivalence is false, and making it ignores the
material and structural chasm between the subject positions of intended
parent and surrogate.
Nonetheless, when a woman’s labor is a matter of survival for herself
and her family, surrogacy may be a more appealing choice than the other
options available. A surrogate in Anand, India, told a reporter for Marie
Claire that “this is not exploitation. Crushing glass for 15 hours a day is
exploitation.”58 For this woman, surrogacy offers a chance to provide a
measure of economic security for her own daughters, and she therefore
selects from the available labor options that which can aid her in achiev-
ing this goal. Yet acting as a surrogate has a limited global effect on a
woman’s social position. As Banerjee writes, “the little financial benefit
the surrogates get is neither sufficient to change their class/economic
status in any real sense, nor capable of addressing larger structures of
inequalities within the Indian context such as caste and gender hierar-
chies.”59 Again, there is no unequivocal dichotomy between work that
empowers women and work that exploits them, even when the labor is
intimately embodied. Though surrogates have some agency, they are not
universally empowered by taking on this form of labor.60
Negotiating Kinship and Race

While nearly all surrogacy contracts in India are gestational, as opposed
to traditional, research suggests that the majority of surrogacy agree-
ments are not cross-racial—many surrogates are hired by middle- and
upper-class Indians, including those who have moved abroad and
returned for medical services.61 Nonetheless, both research and anec-
dotal evidence suggest that reproductive tourism by foreigners is on
the rise in India. In the 2011 surrogacy documentary Made in India, a
fertility clinic director states that while foreigners once made up 5–10
percent of their clientele, these numbers have risen to 15–20 percent.
The director attributes this growth to the shorter waiting times for IVF
and surrogacy in India compared to other nations, as well as increased
media coverage in recent years.62 As the reproductive tourism industry
expands, cross-racial surrogacy is also likely to increase in frequency.
This is significant because the rights of intended parents are poten-
tially strengthened in cases in which the surrogacy is cross-racial. White
intended parents in India gain an unspoken benefit when the surrogate
is visually marked as Other to the future child, and is thus less likely to
be considered a potential “mother” should a custody dispute arise. That
being said, white intended parents who travel to India are increasingly
coming home with babies of mixed racial and religious ancestry. While
most intended parents use sperm from the intended father, eggs may
come from the intended mother, a racially matched egg donor, or an
Indian woman. While white intended parents do use Indian egg donors,
there remains a strong preference for eggs from light-skinned donors,
and a global market to provide them. When intended parents are non-
resident Indians, caste may also come into play in the selection of an
egg donor. These intended parents are willing to hire a lower-caste sur-
rogate, but pursue “caste-matching” via the egg donor, suggesting an
investment in the belief that caste is genetic and heritable.63 This section
will explore how notions of genetic determinism are both adopted and
challenged by various actors involved in surrogacy in India, how racial
“difference” is played out strategically in the discourse surrounding In-
dian surrogacy, and the ways intended parents and the media naturalize
surrogacy in India.
As previous chapters have demonstrated, scientific ideologies of race

and kinship are highly negotiable, and “commonsense” knowledge about
both can vary widely in different contexts. Medical models of kinship
are explained to surrogates by the staff of fertility clinics, with emphasis
placed on the assertion that the surrogate has no claim to the child be-
cause it is not genetically “hers.”64 Indeed, a selling point of surrogacy in
India for many intended parents is that the surrogates are presumably
in a weak position to make claims to motherhood due to their poverty,
their race and nationality, and the consequent power differential be-
tween surrogate and intended parent. In the 2009 documentary Google
Baby, a staff member at a surrogacy center in India interviews a po-
tential surrogate and her family, who report that they are considering
this form of employment in order to purchase a new home. The staff
member informs them that the clinic will not be held responsible if the
surrogate dies as a result of the pregnancy, stressing to the family that
the surrogate has no rights over the child and must give it away imme-
diately upon birth.65
It is telling that clinic staff emphasize this aspect of surrogacy, because
most of what surrogates understand about the pregnancy is communi-
cated to them orally. Some of the women are illiterate, and contracts
are written in English, which few of the women can read. In one sur-
rogate’s words, “I think the legal contract says that we will have to give
up the child immediately after delivery—we won’t even look at it. Black
or white, normal or deformed, we have to give it away.”66 Surrogates
have reported that they fear asking questions of the doctors or lawyers
regarding contracts or payments lest they be fired; these authority fig-
ures also reference the other women prepared to take a surrogate’s place
should she object.67 In reality, there are far more intended parents wait-
ing to be matched with a surrogate than there are women available to
carry these pregnancies, yet surrogates are taught to view themselves as
disposable laborers.68
A doctor at a clinic in India adds that “for the surrogates it’s mostly
the character of the womb that we are interested in. We make sure the
surrogates know that they are not genetically related to the baby, they are
just the wombs.”69 This quote aligns with Cooper and Waldby’s analysis
of how reproductive technologies disaggregate reproductive biology into
separable and rearrangeable parts and processes, such that “the uterus is
technically and legally isolated as a component that can be contractually

ordered, detached from the selfhood of the surrogate and repositioned
in a production chain at the behest of the clinic and commissioning
couple.”70 In this case, the doctor superimposes a single body part (the
womb) over the personhood of the surrogate as a whole being, effec-
tively eliding her subjectivity.
Despite this, Pande found that the surrogates in her study challenged
narratives of genetic and familial belonging. The surrogates that Pande
interviewed repeatedly referenced their own contributions to the preg-
nancy, at times contrasting the level of effort that they were putting into
the pregnancies to that of the intended mother, who contributed “only
an egg.” The surrogates, according to this narrative, were investing their
own “blood” and “sweat” into the pregnancy, and were thus justified in
making kinship claims to the future child. While the blood supply of the
fetus is separate from that of the surrogate during pregnancy, surrogates
constructed a perceived connection between their own blood and that of
the fetus. When one surrogate was told that she would have to “reduce”
her pregnancy from triplets to twins, she insisted that she would keep
the third baby if the intended parents did not want it because it was her
blood, even if not her genes.
Likewise, a gestational surrogate in Rudrappa’s study argued that the
baby she carried was “part of her” because the child had grown in her
womb, saying, “The egg is not mine. That is true. But I have borne that
baby in my womb for nine months. If something were to happen to my
daughter, then that child I have given up is the only child I have left.
I want her in my life.”71 This quote not only demonstrates the surro-
gate’s longing for the child she relinquished, but also marks a significant
kinship claim. Other surrogates that Rudrappa interviewed likewise
imagine the relinquished babies in relation to their other children, as
potential siblings who have been lost or taken away from their place in
the surrogate’s family. These “everyday forms of kinship,” as Pande calls
them, speak back to notions of genetic determinism and also biomedical
models of maternal-fetal relationality.72
In an article in the American Prospect, a surrogate named Leela in
Mumbai, India, goes one step further, declaring herself to be the au-
thentic mother of a baby she delivered, more so than the Indian in-
tended mother: “I am the baby’s real mother. I carried him. I felt him
kick. I prayed for him. At seven months I held a celebration for him. I
saw his legs and hands on the sonogram. I suffered the pain of birth.”
Leela was allowed to maintain contact with the intended parents and
child after her delivery, and expressed disappointment after seeing the
child that he was “long and fair,” unlike her.73 These comments replace
a genetic model of kinship claiming with an experiential model. For
Leela, what she concretely felt, saw, enacted, and suffered trumps an
abstract genetic tie.
At first glance, it seems that Leela is declaring herself the social
mother, insisting that motherhood is determined by one’s actions rather
than one’s genes. A closer reading suggests otherwise; when Leela ex-
presses surprise and disappointment that the child does not look like
her, she implies that her contribution to the pregnancy was not only
affective, but also biological. Leela dissolves the boundary between ges-
tation and genetic relatedness to conclude that gestation is a sufficient
condition of kinship.74 Surrogates are not necessarily wrong to imagine
a deeper biological connection between themselves and the fetus than
that which is posited by discourses that focus exclusively on genetics.
While blood does not circulate between the pregnant woman and fetus,
the placenta is built from both maternal and fetal blood cells that can
migrate between the two, lingering in various organs of the body and
potentially impacting a variety of future conditions for the child, such as
cancer risk and immune disorders. As mentioned in previous chapters,
avenues of research including the burgeoning field of epigenetics have
the potential to challenge the contemporary treatment of gestational
surrogates as “merely” vessels, and are worthy of further research.75
However, this biological connection is often downplayed because it is
not genetic. In the ART industry, genetics are privileged over gestation,
and thus the role of the surrogate is cast as that of an incubator who will
not affect the appearance, intelligence, or personality of the child. This
strict compartmentalization assures intended parents that their choice
of surrogate will not impact the quality of their carefully selected genetic
material, thus legitimizing cross-racial, cross-class, transnational surro-
gacy arrangements in ways that benefit the consumers of reproductive
technologies. Leela challenges this dominant discourse by situating ges-
tation as just as “real” as genetics and imagining that the child might
look like her.
It is not only surrogates who engage in this slippage; the documentary

Made in India provides an interesting example of how intended parents
may do so as well, even those who are deeply invested in the genetic
tie between themselves and their children. This film follows intended
parents Lisa and Brian Switzer as they travel to India after seven years of
diagnosed infertility. The Switzers make arrangements for the necessary
medical procedures and surrogacy contracts through the agency Planet
Hospital in the United States, a self-described “third party facilitator”
that connects clients to a fertility clinic in Mumbai. The Switzers are
represented throughout the film as culturally insensitive (Brian jokes
that he expects people in India to break out into choreographed song
and dance routines) but also deserving of sympathy as the film’s chosen
representatives of the tragically infertile. Lisa Switzer repeatedly frames
her family through references to the “larger-than-life” stereotypes asso-
ciated with their home state of Texas—she and her husband are outsized
and outspoken in comparison to the people of India.
Lisa elaborates on this running comparison after the birth of her
twins, conceived using her own eggs and her husband’s sperm, but car-
ried by an Indian surrogate. Despite the fact that she had only met their
surrogate, Aasia, briefly in the hospital, Lisa concludes that the quiet
demeanor of the twins must be attributable to the surrogate, because
it could not have come from herself or her husband. This statement
implies that qualities inherent to Aasia were passed on to the children
through gestation, an assumption that flies in the face of genetic deter-
minism, contradicting the assumption that the surrogate is “merely” a
womb. Lisa Switzer does not know Aasia at all; in fact, Aasia speaks fre-
quently and directly to the camera throughout the documentary, reveal-
ing an outgoing personality, and even abandoning the veil she initially
wore to hide her identity. Rather than an accurate portrayal of Aasia the
individual, Lisa is tapping into a mythical stereotype of the submissive,
deferential Asian woman.
Later in the film, Aasia approaches Lisa for help when the surrogacy
agency pays her only a fraction of what she was promised, and far less
than the Switzers were told that she would receive. Although Lisa had
repeatedly referenced the priceless gift that Aasia was giving her, she
backtracks when asked for more money, telling the filmmakers that she
didn’t have an extra $2,000 to hand out to “just anyone who’s asking.”76
Lisa had previously slipped between a genetic and gestational model of

kinship, suggesting that Aasia’s gestational contribution was enough to
affect the demeanor of the Switzers’ biological children. Yet when Li-
sa’s own interests are challenged, her position of privilege as the white,
middle-class, American, biological parent allows her to discount Aasia’s
claim, referring to her as “just anyone” and returning firmly to a genetic
model of familial belonging.
Aasia is forced to haggle over the worth of her reproductive services;
while she has suggested that the Switzers personally reimburse her one
amount, the agency recommended that the Switzers pay half of that,
and Lisa is willing to contribute even less. This situation recalls a scene
earlier in the film in which Lisa was shown shopping for a sari in an
Indian street market. A vendor informs Lisa that in India, it is expected
that the customer will debate the price of an item when making a pur-
chase. When shopping for a souvenir or paying for a surrogate’s services,
Lisa has the power to either negotiate the price or walk away from the
bargaining table altogether. This “choice” reflects the power imbalance
between surrogates and intended parents: while Aasia is not entirely
powerless (she can request more money from Lisa, and does receive
some small form of reimbursement), the Switzers can choose whether
or not to engage in this dialogue at all. The imbalance demonstrates yet
again that the exchange of money for a baby is not clear-cut. While the
Switzers walk away with a baby (in fact, two of them), Aasia is left with
less money than she was promised. As a form of racialized reproductive
labor, cross-racial gestational surrogacy benefits intended parents for
whom the inseparability of race and nationality is a powerful form of
privilege. Race, nationality, and socioeconomic status are compounded
when reproductive tourism occurs in India; in addition to Lisa’s racial
and economic privileges, her passport allows her to leave India with
the babies regardless of the outcome for Aasia. Indeed, the Switzers are
encouraged by American embassy officials to leave the country imme-
diately after sorting out a dispute over the children’s birth certificates,
while Aasia is forced to remain in the hospital until the issue is resolved.
As these examples demonstrate, genetic essentialism and biological
determinism are the norm in the Indian clinics where surrogacy is prac-
ticed, and genetic connection is also paramount in the broader Indian
society, where patrilineage and son preference create intense pressure
on families to produce biologically related children.77 Yet these models

do not go unchallenged by the surrogates themselves. Surrogates may
express agency by negotiating their own understandings of kinship and
relatedness with the medical models to which they are introduced at the
clinics, at times creating hybrid meanings that do not fit neatly within
traditional or technological narratives. Intended parents may even en-
gage in this slippage, imagining that the child has inherited the traits
that they associate with India or Asian women. Nonetheless, intended
parents also have the authority to set the boundaries between themselves
and the surrogates and to cut off relationships that potentially threaten
the supposed sanctity of the biological family.78
Deploying the “Other”

One way intended parents construct boundaries is by situating the sur-
rogate as “Other” to themselves and their families, while emphasizing
the “likeness” between parents and child. Again, racial difference is an
implicit benefit for intended parents who contract cross-racial surro-
gacy arrangements. When a woman of color gives birth to a white child,
she is visually identifiable as “Other” to the baby, weakening her poten-
tial maternal claims and naturalizing the authenticity of the relationship
between child and intended parents. The raced body of the surrogate
can be read as a text that marks her liminality both socially and legally;
when a surrogate’s skin color reflects the lack of genetic tie between her-
self and the child, this serves as “evidence” of the authentic connection
between the child and its biological parent(s).
The Indian surrogate body is also a site of consumption for white in-
tended parents. The rhetoric of tourism as a form of cultural consump-
tion is well documented in feminist theory and tourism studies,79 which
analyze white tourists’ consumption of foreign lands literally (such as
the food and the natural resources), visually, and often sexually. Peo-
ple and places, in addition to goods and services, become signifiers of
Otherness to be acquired through tourism.80 This is exemplified on the
website for Planet Hospital, a medical tourism agency that prides itself
on its “concierge service” approach to international travel. The agency’s
website highlights the beaches and tourist attractions available across
India, and promises that for those seeking IVF and/or surrogacy, India
is “the best possible environment at the best possible cost.”81 Clinics that
advertise reproductive tourism packages often highlight the opportunity
for intended parents to experience an exotic vacation as an added perk,
similar to the popularity of destination weddings in which American
couples travel to tropical locales to be married.
The Planet Hospital website also quotes Mark Twain as saying, “India
is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the
mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grandmother
of tradition. The most valuable and most instructive materials in the
history of man are treasured up in India only.”82 The use of this quote
situates India as traditional and timeless, yet wise. Describing India as a
“birthplace,” as well as a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother
also conveys femininity and fertility, both “treasures” that are highly
prized by those seeking the services of reproductive tourism. Tourists
are primed to view Indian citizens and India as a nation as objects of
consumption; the body of the surrogate becomes a commodity at the
same time that it also produces a commodity (a child).83 This aligns with
the broader commodification of race and ethnicity in consumer culture
in the United States.
The feminist theorist bell hooks contends that an effect of the com-
modification of race is that “the culture of specific groups, as well as
the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative
playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual prac-
tices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other.”84
The dominant group projects onto the Other what hooks refers to as
a sense of bounty or plenty, a “field of dreams.”85 When the body being
Othered is one that has been specifically selected for its fertility, as in
cross-racial gestational surrogacy, these projections are taken to hyper-
bolic extremes. This section will explore how Otherness is consumed
and commodified through cross-racial gestational surrogacy in India,
using evidence from interviews with intended parents in documenta-
ries, television, and print media in which these individuals give voice to
their strategies for negotiating racial difference. Intended parents Other
the nation of India and Indian women’s bodies as exotic, excessive, and
fundamentally different in order to naturalize kinship narratives that
normalize this means of family formation. Moreover, these processes of
naturalization are made invisible in media discourse by virtue of their
framing. As I will demonstrate, surrogates are routinely spoken for by

intended parents, medical professionals, and reporters, largely eliminat-
ing the potential for alternative discourse.
The topic of surrogacy in India was introduced to a wide audience in
2007, when an episode devoted to the issue aired on the Oprah Winfrey
Show. Winfrey’s daytime talk show, which ran for twenty-five seasons
from 1986 to 2011, served as a source of expert opinion as well as a moral
authority for millions of viewers across the nation. As such, the special
entitled “Lisa Ling Investigates: Wombs for Rent” can be read as both a
barometer of popular opinion and a source of knowledge production
capable of shaping the public response to the ethical and moral legiti-
macy of hiring a foreign surrogate. This episode was part of a series of
programs led by the correspondent Lisa Ling, which addressed “hard
news” stories such as bride burning, life in prison, gangs, polygamy, and
the 2007 Virginia Tech University shootings. The inclusion of “wombs
for rent” in this lineup indicates its place as a social problem worthy of
middle-class interest, sympathy, and debate.
Ling follows an American couple, Jennifer West and her husband,
Kendall, who traveled to India to become patients of the aforemen-
tioned Dr. Nayna Patel. The Wests explain their decision to hire an In-
dian surrogate as a last-ditch effort to form a genetically related family
after spending $25,000–$35,000 over a period of three years on infertil-
ity treatments in the United States. Surrogacy in India cost the Wests
roughly $12,000, compared to the $80,000 or more that they could have
spent in the United States. Yet the narrative produced by this program
speaks to more than the potential savings to be had by outsourcing re-
productive labor; it also reifies racial difference through euphemistic
devices that posit India as the excessive, fertile maternal body in contrast
to the deserving but barren Western woman—a comparison that natu-
ralizes the child’s place with his or her white, American parents.
The unruly nature of India is referenced repeatedly in Ling’s inter-
views and travels with Jennifer West, both through the conversation
between the women and the carefully edited visual representations of
the country. Like the Switzers, Jennifer and her husband are framed as
entirely out of place in India, suggesting that their fetus is also a tempo-
rary foreigner in an exotic land (the country as well as the body of the
surrogate) waiting to be rescued by its “real” parents. Ling asks West to
describe her initial reaction when arriving in India, resulting in the fol-
lowing dialogue between West, Ling, and Winfrey:
West: You know, the culture shock at first is just so much that the first
few days were really hard for me. You know, I broke down crying,
like, the first day, I just saw so much and I couldn’t take it all in and I
was afraid.
Ling: I mean, look, just by the way, I mean, cows in the street.
West: Yeah.
Ling: Goats everywhere. It’s just chaos. Did you ever in your wildest
dreams think that you would be doing this?
West: No. I definitely had a lot of those moments where you just kind
of step out of yourself and look at your surroundings and think, how
did I get here?
Winfrey: So like being in another—literally another world.
West: Completely.86
The comments made by Ling and Winfrey can be read as both sym-
pathizing with West and prompting her to express a certain narrative
about her own relationship to India. This dialogue portrays India as cha-
otic, poverty-stricken, boundary-less, and excessive. Visual images of
India reinforce this perspective, focusing on slums, beggars, and animals
in the street. These scenes not only depict an environment that is the
antithesis of the suburban America of the Oprah viewer, but also give
a sense of desperation and a lack of control. India is clearly marked as
“Other” to the Wests, Ling, Winfrey, and the viewer, yet its “Otherness,”
its excess, is also indicative of the ripeness and fertility that such wild-
ness can produce at the behest of the infertile Americans.
In interviews with intended parents contracting surrogacy in India,
the anthropologist Daisy Deomampo found that the intended parents
she interviewed became very attached to the Indian “origin story” of
their children, regardless of whether the child was conceived using In-
dian gametes. Parents returned from India with emblems of the country,
including Indian-inspired clothing, home décor, even names for their
children, “flattening out” the specificity of India and its historical and
political contexts. Deomampo argues that parents “conflated the geo-
graphic space of India—and the attendant orientalist discourses that
construct ‘Indian-ness’ as exotically opposite to Western sensibilities—

with the embodiment of the child’s identity through its gestation by an
Indian surrogate mother in India.”87 One American couple who used an
Indian surrogate told the Wall Street Journal that they gave their child
the middle name Xennon, meaning “from a foreign or faraway land.”88
Such practices and discourses simultaneously Other Indian women’s
bodies while incorporating romanticized and potentially colonizing no-
tions of Indian identity or origins for surrogate-born children.
The idea that reproductive tourists can tap in to the natural resource
of India’s fertility is also raised in the film Made in India. In one scene,
Lisa Switzer expresses concern that bureaucratic holdups could prevent
her from having access to a surrogate during the fertile period of her
menstrual cycle. She is reassured by an agency broker, who insists that
India’s massive population ensures a plentiful pool of surrogates. India’s
birth rate or “fertility surplus” has been deemed a demographic prob-
lem,89 yet the agent’s comment implies that the purported “excessive”
population, bodies, and fertility of India are always an available com-
modity for the foreign tourist. In fact, critics of the commercial ART
industry have noted that an estimated 8 to 10 percent of Indian women
suffer from infertility,90 and most surrogate mothers have been perma-
nently sterilized.91 The vast majority of this infertility is secondary (ex-
perienced after the birth of one or more children), much of which could
be addressed with low-tech solutions like adequate nutrition and disease
treatment/prevention, basic prenatal and postnatal care, and access to
primary care.92 Rather than addressing the health care needs of Indian
citizens, foreign economic pressure and state intervention have aimed
at limiting the fertility of the poor93 at the same time that the image
of fertile Indian surrogates is used to draw in reproductive tourists.94
Critics note the tragic irony that India, with its excessively high rate of
maternal mortality, is focused on providing fertility resources for a for-
eign clientele.95
In the aforementioned Oprah episode, race is primarily discussed in
euphemistic terms: the physical “difference” cited between the Wests
and their surrogate, Sangita, is not that of race but of size. In a tone
of amazement and feigned trepidation, Ling announces that Sangita is
4’6” while Kendall West, the father of the fetus, is 6’5”. Ling says, “Can
we say C-section right about now?” To which Winfrey responds, “Wow.
Wow. Wow. What was that like?” Ling adds, “You asked Kendall what
he was thinking when he saw Sangita. Can you imagine what she was
thinking when she saw this big [unintelligible] man?” to which Winfrey
replies, “She was thinking C, C, C-section.” Although this dialogue is
supposedly in reference to the size of the baby, it implicitly sexualizes
the relationship between Kendall West and Sangita, suggesting that the
two bodies are so different they would not fit together sexually without
harming the tiny Indian woman. Distancing Sangita from any possible
potential sexual partnership with West also distances her from the role
of natural mother to his unborn child. Moreover, using size to stand
in for race suggests that a white baby does not naturally “fit” inside an
Indian woman.96
This exchange is also reminiscent of the aforementioned dialogue in
Made in India in which Lisa Switzer references the size of herself and her
husband as a natural by-product of their “Americanness”; the difference
in size stands in for a discussion of racial difference, with the large, robust
American depicting wealth, health, and white Western dominance. In the
context of this episode, in which Winfrey, Ling, and the Wests repeatedly
downplay and explicitly deny the specter of class- and race-based exploi-
tation, size is a safer measure of difference than skin tone or nationality.
It is important to note that the size difference of Indian surrogates comes
up in ethnographic accounts as well, with American couples expressing
concerns that a physically small Indian woman would not be able to carry
a healthy pregnancy to term.97 Size becomes a form of difference that
intended parents can potentially manage; selecting a larger surrogate is
one way to ostensibly control the environment of the womb.
The only direct comment about race in the Oprah episode is made by
Winfrey, herself a woman of color. Winfrey states, “I think it’s so fasci-
nating that, first of all, this little bitty Indian woman is going to have this
gigantic . . . completely Caucasian child.” A doctor in the documentary
Google Baby likewise marvels at the racial purity of the baby he is deliv-
ering for a white couple, stating, “The baby is white. Totally European.
British. Look at the color and features. This is [intended parent’s name].
Totally [intended parent’s name].”98 The doctor’s comments reinforce
the popular idea that race, ethnicity, even national identity are expressed
through genes and written on the body. By commenting on the child’s
likeness to his or her intended parents, the doctor solidifies the parents’
kinship claims, which are implicitly put into question by the circum-
stances of the birth. This is what the medical anthropologist Gay Becker
and colleagues call “resemblance talk,” or comments about a child’s re-
semblance to family members in a way that confirms the legitimacy of
the relationship.99 While Becker’s research did not include couples using
a surrogate, I would mark the comments made by Winfrey and the doc-
tor as resemblance talk, serving to affirm the legitimacy of the intended
parents through reference to racial likeness and difference.
Interviews with intended parents and surrogates by the news media
also commonly reference the racial difference between the parties, often
as an explanation for why Indian surrogates are allegedly able to avoid
bonding with the fetuses that they carry. In an interview with a reporter,
a British intended mother named Susan Morrison insisted that her sur-
rogate would not have wanted to keep the twins she carried because she
was economically incapable of supporting them, “and in any case they
were going to be white kids, and it would have looked a bit funny.”100 To
say that it would look “funny” of course could have multiple meanings; it
reinforces the exclusiveness of racial groups by suggesting that a woman
of color could not “pass” as the mother of white children, but also that
the surrogate would be suspected of having an affair with a white man.
Again, by raising (and dismissing) the specter of sexualization, the in-
tended mother neutralizes the possibility that her baby could belong
with another family. The intended mother speaks for the surrogate,
situating her own values about what it takes to raise a child (financial
resources) and racial difference in a way that naturalizes her own role as
the legitimate mother.
The complexity of narratives about racial difference is demonstrated
in a Good Morning America segment entitled “Outsourcing Surrogate
Mothers.” The host of the segment seems to have difficulty fathoming
the concept of reproductive tourism, describing it as “hard to believe,
but we can now add surrogate mothers to the ranks of American jobs
going overseas.” The shot is framed by a caption that reads, “Rent a
Womb? Extreme Measure to Get Pregnant,” alongside a graphic of an
Indian woman with the words “For Hire” stamped on her stomach.
After introducing the infertile intended parents, the host announces that
“having this Indian woman give birth to their child is a strange concept,
but the couples who come here [to India] are colorblind. They just want
a baby.”101 Dubbing the intended parents “color-blind” entirely separates

“color” from class, ignoring the fact that it is their nationality, ethnicity,
and associated economic status that make Indian women an appealing
alternative to American surrogates at a fraction of the cost.
Surrogates also make reference to race, using racial difference to ex-
plain their relationship to the fetus. Najima Vohra, a surrogate, tells a
Marie Claire reporter that she is not concerned about relinquishing the
baby: “It won’t even have the same skin color as me, so it won’t be hard to
think of it as Jessica’s [the intended mother].”102 When asked about her
potential bond with the child, another surrogate with the pseudonym
Geeta tells the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in an article for the Ameri-
can Prospect that the intended parents are “from far away. I don’t know
where,” and “they’re Caucasian, so the baby will come out white.”103 In
this quote, both geographical distance and racial difference separate
Geeta from the twins. While some surrogates may construct kinship
connections based on “blood and sweat,”104 others employ strategies to
differentiate their own identities from that of the fetus, a practice of sur-
rogates that ethnographers have found in other contexts as well.105
Despite the assurances made by surrogacy agency staff that surro-
gates will not attach or bond during pregnancy, this too varies with
women’s experiences of gestation. When Lisa Ling asks a group of sur-
rogates whether it will be difficult to give up the baby, one responds,
“Definitely. And the end of it when we give the baby away it is their
choice to remember us or not. But we will be remembering the child to
the end of our life.”106 While differences of race, class, or nationality do
not guarantee a woman’s reaction to the experience of surrogate preg-
nancy, or prevent her from forming an attachment with the fetus, differ-
ence does symbolically naturalize the transaction between surrogate and
intended parent. Discourses of genetic essentialism and determinism
suggest that the surrogate is giving back to the intended parents what
was already theirs (their own genetic material) rather than contributing
to the formation of a child through gestation.
Women Helping Women

While focusing on the “Otherness” of the surrogate to the family unit
is one way that cross-racial surrogacy in India is naturalized, another
taps into the theme of “women helping women.” The women-helping-

women narrative is one in which surrogacy is framed as the ultimate
leveling device between women, regardless of their socioeconomic sta-
tus, race, nationality, or sexuality. According to this logic, surrogacy
involves an equal exchange between women whereby intended parents
(in this case, mothers) receive the priceless gift of a child and surrogates
are financially compensated for their time, as well as psychically and
emotionally compensated by the knowledge that they have altruisti-
cally fulfilled a woman’s natural desire to be a mother. Any differences
between the women are overshadowed by the mutual benefit that only
they can provide to one another. The ideological work done through this
discursive framing of surrogacy decommodifies the exchange of a child
for money and appropriately genders both the surrogate (as the selfless,
altruistic giver of life) and the intended mother (who obtains the social
rewards of motherhood).
One might imagine that the women-helping-women narrative would
falter in the context of cross-racial gestational surrogacy in India, where
the economic disparity between intended parents and surrogates is far
more glaring. How can two women who often have minimal contact
throughout the pregnancy, do not even speak the same language, and
come from radically disparate backgrounds possibly fit into a frame-
work of equal partnership? Ethnographic fieldwork in India has found
that the rhetoric of the surrogate as altruistic gift-giver differs mark-
edly from common narratives in the United States, yet the discourse
of altruism continues to surface in unexpected ways.107 Rather than
framing themselves as the independent givers of the gift, surrogates in
India discuss the gift of the child through reference to God: surrogates
are grateful to God for the opportunity to support their families,108 or
the surrogate is making possible what typically can be provided only by
God.109 Nonetheless, “much like their global counterparts, surrogates
at the Indian clinic negotiate the anomaly of surrogacy by emphasizing
their altruistic motivations” such as providing an education for children
and economic support for their families.110 Intended parents, on the
other hand, note that the sacrifices made by the surrogate are paralleled
by the motivations of the contracting party to improve the lives of poor
Indian families. As one mother in a study by Amrita Pande noted, “she
[the surrogate] is, after all, doing a lot for us. But we are doing a lot for
her as well. My husband is buying Mansi’s man a motorcycle, on top of

all the cash, of course.”111
This framework emerges in the aforementioned Oprah episode, ex-
pressed by the intended mother Jennifer West and encouraged by Win-
frey and Ling. Ling asks West to respond to critics who might view
surrogacy in India as an example of the wealthy exploiting the poor, to
which West forcefully replies,
What I would say to these people is, who are you to judge? You have not
walked in my shoes as someone who cannot have a child, and you don’t
know how that feels. And you have not walked in her shoes and you don’t
know how it feels not to be able to pay for your children to go to school,
to not be able to afford a decent place to live and take care of your fam-
ily and to provide for your family. You don’t know how that feels. And
we were able to come together, she and I, and give each other a life that
neither of us could achieve on our own. And I just don’t—I just don’t see
what’s wrong with that. I don’t.112
West makes this speech while sitting next to Sangita, whose face is
entirely covered by a shawl in order to protect her identity. The visual
effect is quite striking: West speaks for the surrogate, in a language that
Sangita likely does not understand, while Sangita is literally and figura-
tively invisible. The camera then cuts from this prerecorded interview
to the talk show set where West sits with Winfrey. Winfrey concurs
with West, saying, “Wow, yeah. I thought you made your point. What’s
wrong with that? What’s wrong with that?” She adds, “And—you know,
these women around the world—women around the world are help-
ing other women. I just think that’s beautiful. I think that’s a beautiful
thing.”113
West’s impassioned speech suggests that Sangita is not alone in la-
boring to produce the Wests’ child—Jennifer West’s words are meant to
evoke a certain type of emotional response from a sympathetic audience
that can recognize her affective labor. West justifies her assertion that
she is deserving of a baby by citing her emotional pain, a pain that is
undeniably significant and real. Motherhood is posited as the ultimate
symbol of womanhood and source of fulfillment for American women,
making infertility an often unbearable burden for those who long to
conceive. Yet this passage, and the program as a whole, is not just argu-
ing that West labored in some way to produce a child, but arguing that
her labor and struggles are equivalent in value to Sangita’s, and that the
exchange of money and a baby are also equivalent exchanges. When
West urges viewers to step into each woman’s shoes, she implies that
while they tread different paths, they share a common connection as
women or a shared essence of female experience that unites them in
struggle.
Yet many indicators suggest that the experiences of Jennifer West and
Sangita are not at all equivalent. There are structural, institutional, and
global forces impacting Sangita’s poverty and that of millions of other
Indian women. Even the metaphor of “outsourcing” mentioned in the
program situates the Wests in the place of powerful multinational cor-
porations, with Sangita as the cheap and disposable labor. When Win-
frey lauds cross-racial gestational surrogacy as “a beautiful thing” and
“women around the world . . . helping other women,” she erases the mas-
sive power differential between the two parties. Ling picks up on this
theme later in the episode during a discussion of how much surrogacy
can change the lives of women in India:
Ling: It has a huge, huge impact. And I love what you [Winfrey] said,
that women in this country are helping women in India . . .
Winfrey: Those women are helping?
Ling: Absolutely.114
It is notable that this discussion leaves Kendall West out of the frame-
work, gendering the transaction as “women helping women” rather
than “people helping people.” There are several possible explanations:
childbirth and childrearing are culturally designated as “women’s work,”
the concept of “helping” suggests affective labor, which is commonly
relegated to women, and the daytime talk show format is aimed at a
largely female audience. I would add, however, that this rhetoric also
appropriates the feminist language of empowerment, solidarity, and sis-
terhood.115 The Oprah program taps into the problematic rhetoric of
global sisterhood by decontextualizing Jennifer West from the politi-
cal and economic power of the United States, and Sangita from the
rich and ongoing history of Indian women’s groups that have fought
institutionalized barriers to women’s autonomy.116 Indeed, Ling refers

to the Wests as “cultural ambassadors” whose experiences demonstrate
the potential for a stronger relationship between India and the United
States. This statement extrapolates from the individual to the political
in a gravely misleading way. Sangita and her family will likely ben-
efit economically from an infusion of cash far greater than they could
achieve through other means. Yet this transaction does not alter the lives
of Indian women at the macro level, and if anything, demonstrates a
cultural exchange between Americans and Indians that is enmeshed in
systemically uneven power relations.
The larger issue of the transnational globalization of women’s work
has been interpreted by some as a convenient overlap between the in-
terests of poor and affluent women. As educated, professional women
spend more time in the workforce, they rely on the labor of poor women
as nannies, domestic servants, and care workers for the elderly. Barbara
Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild warn against viewing these arrange-
ments as a seamless synergy between the needs of each group, contend-
ing that while
the globalization of child care and housework brings the ambitious and
independent women of the world together, . . . it does not bring them
together in the way that second-wave feminists in affluent countries once
liked to imagine—as sisters and allies struggling to achieve common
goals. Instead, they come together as mistress and maid, employer and
employee, across a great divide of privilege and opportunity.117
Surrogacy is also often uncritically cast in the same light, as a mutual

benefit between equal parties. Because the discourse of surrogacy is
so deeply enmeshed in the language of altruism, the “women-helping-
women” narrative further endangers the weak bargaining power that
is granted to surrogates. Other scholars of domestic labor have noted
that intimate labor lends itself to rhetorics of care or love, wherein
employers argue that their maid or nanny is like a friend or a member
of the family.118 By doing so, employers bind the employee more closely
to the family, or burden her with additional responsibilities without
an increase in pay.119 The rhetoric of “women helping women” serves
a similar purpose. This language elevates the contractual transaction
beyond the sphere of services rendered and into the loftier arena of a
gift to be exchanged between women who are “helping” one another.
While intended parents may be hesitant to discuss surrogacy in terms
of financial loss or gain, the economic benefit to surrogates is commonly
cited by the medical staff who run surrogacy centers in India, perform
the procedures such as IVF, and deliver the babies. Kalindi Vora writes
that surrogates in India are conceptualized as beneficiaries in their rela-
tionship to intended parents and medical staff, whereby the discourse of
altruism in surrogacy clinics “took the form of a general narrative of the
clinic’s project of social work: rehabilitating women who take on surro-
gacy into more disciplined, self-sufficient and professionalized workers,
and helping childless couples from around the world build their fami-
lies.”120 Dr. Anita Soni, a physician in Mumbai who routinely delivers
surrogate babies for Western couples, told the London Evening Standard
that “for these surrogate mothers that amount of money is life-changing.
It helps them set up a home, get their daughters married or something
like that. There is absolutely no exploitation of these women. It is re-
ally big money. It is a jackpot.” She adds, “They go through a little bit
of emotional trauma, but then they go back home and they realize they
have done it for a good cause.”121 Another Mumbai doctor (whose clinic
does not allow any contact between surrogates and intended parents)
likewise recites the opportunities that surrogacy makes available to the
women, saying, “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe
three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel
it is two people who are helping out each other.”122 The context of India
is not incidental to the way these observers frame the benefits of sur-
rogacy to Indian women. Indian workers in a variety of occupations are
cast as cheap laborers with a “lower cost of living”;123 surrogates are then
framed as particularly lucky (“hitting the jackpot”) for making higher-
than-average wages while doing what is cast as the most unskilled of
labor.
Dr. Nayna Patel, the physician used by Kendall and Jennifer West,
also regularly cites the mutuality of surrogates and intended parents in
her frequent interviews promoting surrogacy in India. Patel described
surrogacy to a New York Times reporter as “sisterly,” and as “one woman
helping another.” She tells surrogates that the intended mother “cannot
have a child which she longs for, which you are going to give, and you
cannot have a house.”124 Patel has likewise been quoted as saying, “A

childless couple gains a child. A poor woman earns money. What could
be the problem?” and “There is this one woman who desperately needs
a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate.
And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her
[own] family. If this female wants to help the other one . . . why not
allow that?”125 Patel goes even further, managing to combine the femi-
nist language of agency and empowerment with the rhetoric of altruism
and gift-giving when she says, “The surrogates in Anand have become
empowered through giving this beautiful gift to others. With the money,
they are able to buy a house, educate their children, and even start a
small business. These are things they could only dream before. It’s a win-
win situation.”126
Patel’s quotes in particular stress the notion that an equal exchange
is taking place between surrogates and intended parents, where money
and a baby are given equivalent value. She also emphasizes what she calls
the sisterly aspect of surrogacy—this term, of course, evokes not only
the aforementioned notion of sisterhood, but also altruism. A tension is
raised, but left unaccounted for, between the fantasy that Indian women
become surrogates out of altruism, and the acknowledged reality that
surrogates will spend the money on needs such as children’s education
or dowry, medical bills, housing, and debt. Dr. Soni’s statement also
reveals this unacknowledged contradiction when she simultaneously
states that surrogacy involves no exploitation of Indian women, but that
surrogates experience emotional trauma. The tension reflects a desire
to hold on to the traditional unity between childbirth, femininity, and
maternity that is challenged by surrogacy, while also acknowledging the
economic benefits that surrogacy provides for Indian women.
Why is this so difficult to reconcile? First, commercial surrogacy de-
taches pregnancy from social motherhood while also commodifying
gestation. This is troubling to the traditional social order because it puts
into question the “natural,” in which womanhood is inextricably bound
to maternity, and maternity is cast as the antithesis of commodifica-
tion. Yet the inescapable economic disparities between surrogates and
intended parents in India result in more explicit acknowledgment of the
monetary exchange than in the United States, where brokers, surrogates,
and intended parents often refrain from discussing this aspect of the
arrangement. One effect of this greater transparency in India is that the

actors involved in surrogacy ideologically and rhetorically distance this
form of labor from other highly stigmatized ways women (and men)
rely on their bodies for income. The focus on women helping women is
a way to differentiate surrogacy from prostitution, to which it is often
compared.127
Surrogacy is also paralleled to organ selling; Patel differentiates be-
tween the two by situating surrogacy as “natural” (what one reporter
calls “harnessing the natural maternal cycle”)128 and organ harvesting as
“pathological,” saying, “This [surrogacy] is physiological, pregnancy and
delivery. When you remove a kidney, it becomes pathological.”129 Like-
wise, in the documentary Made in India, a representative of an Ameri-
can surrogacy agency argues that surrogacy is more benign than organ
selling because it involves the donation of a “life cycle” rather than an
organ, and is thus akin to a favor.130 Surrogacy challenges the dichotomy
between altruism and work, where altruism is “good,” and financial mo-
tivations are suspect. In effect, surrogacy in India necessarily reveals the
uneven points of contact between ideology and lived experience that
are more easily naturalized in the context of the United States. Even in
India, where surrogacy is openly acknowledged to be a type of labor, it
is mediated by reference to altruism.
Cross-racial gestational surrogacy is a form of racialized reproductive
labor that reveals, and at times challenges, hegemonic ideologies of race,
gender, and kinship. Racial difference and genetic determinism are mul-
tivalent concepts in cross-racial surrogacy arrangements in India; while
surrogates are aware that biological and genetic relatedness is privileged
in their own culture and by most intended parents, some challenge these
models by forming their own everyday knowledge about the significance
of gestation. Other surrogates use racial difference to downplay their
connection to the fetus, thus maintaining their own bodily integrity and
sense of self. While these negotiations are significant to the surrogates
and demonstrate that ideologies of race and genetics cannot be imposed
from the top down, intended parents and those responsible for arrang-
ing surrogacy contracts continue to benefit from the racial Otherness of
the surrogate. The surrogate’s racial difference from the fetus (and her
attendant class difference) evidences her status as a temporary caregiver,
a reproductive laborer without a valid claim to kinship.
At the same time that surrogates are cast as mere vessels for preg-
nancy, an interchangeable and replaceable resource akin to other forms
of outsourced labor, the discourse of women helping women also situ-
ates surrogates as altruistic givers on an equal playing field with intended
parents. This rhetoric depoliticizes the massive inequalities between sur-
rogates and intended parents in India by constructing a false analogy
between the needs (or desires) of both parties, while also positing babies
and money as an equal exchange. The theme of women helping women
is particularly troubling in the context of transnational reproductive
tourism, not least because it relies upon problematic, essentialist, and
apolitical notions of “sisterhood” between women.
While this chapter largely focuses on reproductive tourism from the
United States to India, the United States is also a destination for a sig-
nificant number of reproductive tourists. These include gay and straight
couples, as well as single men and women traveling from around the
world to take advantage of the lax regulatory environment in the United
States. While a growing number of Americans choose to leave the coun-
try in order to seek out more affordable ART packages, many more
find surrogates within the United States, some with women of differ-
ent races, and almost universally with women of a lower socioeconomic
background. The disparities between intended parents and surrogates in
the United States, while generally less stark than in India, are often still
remarkable. This raises the question of whether reproductive tourism is
happening within the United States, as well as across national borders.
To consider surrogacy within the United States as a form of repro-
ductive tourism would mean to take seriously the economic and social
disparities between contracting parties, imbalances that increasingly
intersect with racial privilege on the part of intended parents. The dif-
ference between surrogates and intended parents reflects what Gus-
tavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash call social minorities and social
majorities, or what Chandra Mohanty labels “One-Third/Two-Thirds
Worlds.”131 According to Mohanty, the latter term “draws attention to
the continuities as well as discontinuities between the haves and have-
nots” both within and between national boundaries.132 If reproductive
tourism is about traveling away from one’s home to seek out an eco-
nomic and regulatory environment conducive to one’s reproductive
goals, including the supply and demand for gametes and gestational
carriers, then tourism of this type is possible without renewing one’s

passport.
A recent first-person account of surrogacy in the New York Times
by the reporter Alex Kuczynski raised many of the same concerns and
critiques leveled against reproductive tourism abroad. Upon marrying a
wealthy investor, Kuczynski transitioned from writing about the social
elite of New York City to becoming one of them. The article details her
personal struggles with infertility, and eventual decision to use a ges-
tational surrogate from Pennsylvania to carry an embryo made from
her own egg and her husband’s sperm.133 While the basic template of
Kuczynski’s story matches up with countless narratives of infertility, the
article quickly came under fire from readers and other journalists.134
Kuczynski’s article sparked accusations of elitism and exploitation,
stemming in part from her frank discussion of what she saw as the ben-
efits of using a surrogate, including the maintenance of her luxurious
lifestyle and the privilege of bypassing the physical inconveniences of
pregnancy. Kuczynski prides herself on choosing a surrogate with whom
she feels she can relate (namely, a woman with college-educated children
who can use a computer and play the piano), but this attempt to parallel
their cultural capital does more to highlight the massive economic gulf
between them. Perhaps most damning are the photographs that accom-
panied the article. In one, Kuczynski stands holding her baby while a
black nanny waits at the ready, posed in front of an impressive, white-
pillared home. In another, the surrogate reclines, barefoot and pregnant,
on the run-down front porch of her own modest house in Pennsylva-
nia.135 Rather than aligning with the accepted narrative of surrogacy as
an equal exchange between women, these images lay bare the power dif-
ferential between employer and employee. The photographs also reso-
nate as belonging to an earlier time; curiously, the cutting-edge modern
technologies used to create this pregnancy seem to be resurrecting an
aristocracy. While Kuczynski and her surrogate live in the same country,
they seem to be connecting from two different worlds.
Despite these concerns, it is not my intention to argue that Indian
women (or any women) should not be allowed to engage in surrogacy.
To acknowledge that surrogacy is potentially exploitative is not to say
that women cannot find agency in using the resources that they have
as survival strategies, and ethnographic research in India supports the
hypothesis that Indian surrogates are doing so.136 What is important is

recognizing that the choice to engage in the reproductive labor of sur-
rogacy is made in the context of economic constraints that are inflected
by race, class, and gender. While both surrogate and intended parents
express agency in constructing kinship narratives and defining differ-
ence, they do so within a power matrix that is uneven and imbalanced.
NYU Press
Chapter Title: Conclusion: From Embryo to “Pre-Born American”

Conclusion
From Embryo to “Pre-Born American”
In 2013, Texas Senator Wendy Davis performed a grueling eleven-hour

filibuster to block draconian abortion laws in that state, the rules of
which required that she not sit, eat, drink, stop speaking on the given
subject, or leave the floor for any reason. She did so while wearing a pair
of pink sneakers, which became a viral image and an icon of resistance
to what has been called the Republican War on Women.1 The measure
she fought to block, which institutes requirements that would shut down
most abortion providers, eventually passed and closed about half of the
state’s clinics. Parts of the law that would shutter even more providers
are on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether or not to
hear an appeal.2
U.S. feminists are expending a great deal of energy fighting this “war
on women,” much of it centered on the erosion of abortion rights as well
as recent political maneuvers to limit women’s access to safe and afford-
able contraception.3 Yet as 2015 Republic presidential hopeful (and med-
ical doctor) Ben Carson stated at a campaign event, “There is no war
on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there
is no war on women in this country.”4 Carson’s statement suggests that
women are somehow separable from “what’s inside”—eggs, embryos,
fetuses—to such an extent that a war can be waged on behalf of the
“inside” without concern for or consent from the living, breathing (and
hopefully voting) woman herself. Additional political blows include the
2014 Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which held
that businesses with religious owners are not required to pay for insur-
ance that covers contraception, overruling the contraceptive mandate of
the Affordable Care Act. Some corporations that object to coverage for
contraceptives, such as the Christian-owned arts and crafts supply store
Hobby Lobby, argue that popular devices like the IUD and the “morning
199
200 | Conclusion
after pill” serve as abortifacients, terminating a pregnancy after concep-

tion.5 Such contentions are not scientifically or medically valid; rather,
they reflect cultural concerns about women’s sexuality, bodily autonomy,
and access to public space.
Those most vulnerable to attacks such as these are women whose re-
sources are structurally and institutionally limited: limited financially in
order to travel when facing restricted health services, limited in employ-
ment opportunities that offer generous insurance or family leave, and
limited in their political representation. Young women, poor women,
and women of color are targets in this regard, but are also crucially ac-
tive in organizing against such attempts to restrict women’s bodily au-
tonomy, including groups like the Black Women’s Health Imperative,
Sister Reach, SisterSong, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive
Health, and SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW.6 These groups lobby
for reproductive justice, lead grassroots organizing campaigns, promote
policy change, and provide education for their communities. As this ac-
tivism suggests, robust appeals to reproductive justice through an in-
tersectional feminist framework are active and growing in the United
States. These could include demands for equitable access to fertility ser-
vices that are not stratified by sexuality, race, or class. However, this issue
is likely to stagnate when the limited amount of media attention devoted
to women’s health is diverted to more familiar concerns, such as the ero-
sion of abortion rights or attacks on women’s access to contraception.
Despite remaining on the sidelines of feminist activism, ART use is
undoubtedly entangled in cultural anxieties and political battlefields
over women’s bodily autonomy, gender roles, and perceived threats to
the traditional family. As such, reproductive technologies do intersect
with concerns that are central to contemporary feminist politics, as evi-
denced by the recent debates over fetal personhood legislation. Indeed,
a growing proportion of arguments that limit women’s reproductive
decision making are built upon the rhetoric that life begins at concep-
tion, and even an embryo is a rights-bearing person. This chapter will
consider the evolving influence of fetal personhood, which provides a
fitting conclusion to a book that has focused on surrogacy, in part be-
cause fetal personhood legislation could directly affect access to the re-
productive technologies that make gestational surrogacy possible. On a
broader scale, the fetal personhood debates also demonstrate how ARTs
Conclusion | 201
can be situated within a larger framework of reproductive justice that

foregrounds racial, gender, and economic equity.
Despite the obvious implications for abortion rights, the recent intro-
duction of fetal personhood into the public lexicon would seem at first
glance to have little impact on the field of reproductive technologies.
The personhood agenda is most commonly associated with efforts to
roll back Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed
women’s right to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. Strate-
gically, the recent push to add personhood amendments to state consti-
tutions across the country reflects a splintering of anti-abortion activists
between more traditional pro-life constituencies and those that promote
personhood laws.7 Well-established groups continue their decades-long
strategy of chipping away at legal abortion through gradual state legisla-
tion that constrains practitioners and limits women’s access to abortion
services. These groups favor an incremental approach as opposed to the
more sweeping personhood amendment tack. The reticence of organiza-
tions like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, Americans United for Life, and
the National Right to Life Committee to support personhood legislation
may stem in part from fears that the far-reaching implications of such
amendments could open the door for a Supreme Court challenge that
could uphold, and even strengthen, Roe v. Wade.8
This approach contrasts sharply with that of Personhood USA, an
organization that has led recent gambits for personhood amendments
at the state level. Personhood USA insists that the gradual path is too
slow to protect the lives of “preborn Americans.” Its goal is to define
life constitutionally as beginning at conception, and thus to grant fertil-
ized eggs the status of legal persons. Such initiatives take aim at specific
language in Roe, which essentially states that fetuses would have a “right
to life” if recognized as persons.9 One way Personhood USA has shaped
the rhetoric of the abortion debate is by referring to fetuses as “preborn”
as opposed to “unborn,” with the former denoting a linear trajectory of
life rather than an abrupt shift from fetus to child.10 Yet as I will demon-
strate, this understanding of personhood (or as the organization defines
it, “the cultural and legal recognition of the equal and unalienable rights
of human beings”)11 has implications that reach beyond a comprehen-
sive ban on abortion. They include limits on contraception, medical
treatment, and the creation, storage, and disposal of human embryos.
202 | Conclusion
The first personhood ballot initiative was rebuffed by voters in Colorado

in 2008 (and again in 2010 and 2014);12 since then, similar initiatives
have failed to collect enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot
in Montana, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, California, and Oregon.13 Person-
hood initiatives have also seen setbacks in the legislature and courts in
other states; a constitutional amendment to give fetuses the “inalien-
able right to life” at every stage of development was defeated by voters
in North Dakota in 2014 by a vote of 64 percent against and 36 percent
supporting.14
A milestone defeat also occurred in Mississippi, when that state re-
jected a ballot initiative on personhood in 2011. Activists and commen-
tators on both sides of the issue viewed the Mississippi amendment as a
surefire win for the personhood cause. The many conservative, religious,
and pro-life voters in Mississippi were considered natural supporters of
an amendment that would define life as beginning “from the moment
of fertilization.”15 In a telling indication of the contemporary erosion
of women’s reproductive rights, both the Republican and Democratic
candidates for governor of Mississippi voiced support for the amend-
ment.16 The measure was opposed by pro-choice organizations such as
NARAL Pro-Choice America, as well as the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecolo-
gists (ACOG), and other groups representing medical professionals.
These organizations vocalized their concerns as the election neared,
corresponding with a dramatic drop in public and political support for
the measure.17
The ACOG released a statement contending that the proposition
“substitutes ideology for science and represents a grave threat to wom-
en’s health and reproductive rights that will have long-term negative
outcomes for our patients and society.”18 Critics warned that by defining
life as beginning at fertilization, the amendment could ban IVF as well
as forms of birth control such as intrauterine devices and emergency
contraceptives that prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg into the
uterus.19 Personhood amendments could also have negative implica-
tions for treatment of serious medical problems in pregnant women,
including cancer and ectopic pregnancies. Proponents of the measure
denied the likelihood of these consequences or downplayed their signifi-
cance. A Mississippi obstetrician who supported the amendment stated
Conclusion | 203
that the aforementioned issues were “actually minor concerns when you
look at the thousands of babies dying by woman’s choice,” while a com-
munications director from Personhood USA suggested that women who
need cancer treatment can postpone medical intervention until the fetus
can be safely delivered via Cesarean section.20
In a decisive defeat, 58 percent of votes cast on Election Day rejected
the proposition.21 A retroactive poll of ten thousand residents spon-
sored by Mississippi Personhood USA found that the greatest opposi-
tion stemmed from the potential for the amendment to limit access to
in vitro fertilization, followed by the fear that pregnant women would
be denied medical care that could harm the fetus.22 It is interesting that
despite linkages between personhood and the pro-life agenda, which
Mississippi voters were assumed to support, those polled articulated
threats to IVF access as a main factor in their opposition to the bill.
These poll results also suggest that the public may have greater concerns
about limitations on the creation of a fetus than about women’s health
more broadly, or women’s right to agency over their bodies.
Their concerns about impediments to IVF are warranted, given the
numerous impositions that such amendments could potentially im-
pose upon IVF treatment. In vitro fertilization is both expensive and
emotionally and physically draining; in order to increase the likelihood
that the procedure will succeed, clinicians routinely fertilize multiple
eggs in a single round of IVF. After several days, one or more fertilized
eggs are transferred to a woman’s uterus, with the goal that one embryo
will successfully implant.23 The remaining fertilized eggs that are not
transferred may be frozen for future use by the intended parents.24 It is
not uncommon for more than one embryo to implant when several are
transferred, or for embryos to divide, resulting in the birth of multiples;
indeed, the United States has the highest recorded rate of multiple birth
deliveries per ART treatment cycle, at 34.2 percent.25
Multiples increase the risk of pregnancy complications, leading some
women to “selectively reduce” the numbers to twins or even singletons.26
Because the proposed personhood amendment in Mississippi defined
life as beginning at the moment of fertilization, all abortion—including
selective reduction—would be illegal, as would the disposal, and po-
tentially even the freezing, of unused pre-implantation embryos. Under
current U.S. law, individuals are generally allowed to dispose of unused
204 | Conclusion
embryos if both parents agree, suggesting that based on contemporary

standards governing IVF, embryos are not considered persons.27 Per-
sonhood laws could change this; critics of these laws fear that fertility
doctors could be held responsible for the “lives” of embryos that do not
result in a successful pregnancy, or for the accidental destruction of pre-
embryos. The amendment could also limit human embryonic stem cell
research on unused embryos donated by couples that have undergone
IVF.28
The evidence suggests that the fetal personhood movement in Mis-
sissippi faltered when voters interpreted it as limiting the ability of
individuals to create families. While a relatively stable segment of the
population responds favorably to the notion of personhood as it per-
tains to the right to terminate a pregnancy, it appears that the general
public is far more hesitant to limit the ability of individuals to create
a pregnancy. Similar reluctance emerged when a personhood bill was
proposed in Virginia in 2012, despite the inclusion of language stating
that “nothing in this section shall be interpreted as affecting lawful as-
sisted conception.”29 Infertility rights advocates from RESOLVE: The
National Infertility Association and the American Society for Repro-
ductive Medicine (ASRM) were convinced that this language would not
protect infertility treatment, and rallied unprecedented support to fight
the bill. These objections, and the media attention that they garnered,
led to the eventual tabling of a bill that had been considered a “done
deal” by lawmakers.30 As Susan Crockin and Lee Collins note in their
analysis of this event, infertility advocates were far more successful than
protests by groups fighting for civil liberties and reproductive choice:
The objections of traditional groups, such as Planned Parenthood and the

ACLU, that HB1 would lay the groundwork to outlaw abortion, were both
expected and lacked the potential to peel off pro-life support for HB1.
Battling HB1 on behalf of babies and families was powerful.31
As this quote suggests, fetal personhood amendments threaten the

“right” to have sex without babies and babies without sex.32 To return
to the defeat of personhood legislation in Mississippi, it is notable that
while voters were concerned about access to IVF, census data dem-
onstrate that the median household income in that state in 2013 was
Conclusion | 205
$37,963. This is more than $14,000 lower than the median household
income for the United States as a whole.33 According to the ASRM, the
average cost of an IVF cycle is around $12,400, and Mississippi is not
one of the fourteen states that require insurers to cover or offer coverage
of infertility diagnoses and services.34 A blog post linked to the website
Daily Kos analyzed CDC data on fertility success rates and census data
to assess the per capita IVF use per state. According to this analysis, Mis-
sissippi ranks forty-sixth, with 8.6 IVF users per 100,000 people. States
in the bottom ten also tended to be low density, low population, and
low average household income, leading the blogger, Abbie Waters, to
conclude that because of the high out-of-pocket expense of IVF, people
in the lower-ranking states are unable to afford procedures at the same
rate as those in the highest-ranking states.35
What does it mean that Mississippi’s politically conservative popu-
lation was opposed to restricting a medical procedure that few of its
citizens can afford? Why were Mississippi voters prioritizing their right
to access IVF despite its prohibitive costs? For one, faith in the existence
of a private sphere in which the nuclear family is deservedly immune
to government intervention (unless one is poor, gay, or nonwhite) is a
key feature of a consumer-driven culture that privileges the perceived
freedom of choice and the imperative of privacy. By threatening the le-
gality of reproductive medicine that makes procedures such as IVF and
practices like gestational surrogacy possible, personhood amendments
likewise threaten the sanctity of what the queer theorist Lee Edelman
terms reproductive futurism.36 Reproductive futurism presupposes the
absolute and inherent goodness of heteronormative reproduction by
limiting any discourse that would counter it, rendering dissent unthink-
able. According to Edelman,
We are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the

future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the
Child. The figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled
to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always
at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed.37
Even in a state with lower-than-average usage of IVF, and less dispos-

able income among residents, restricting access to these procedures
206 | Conclusion
may represent an unacceptable interference with the “natural” drive to

family formation.
Indeed, the desire to reproduce within the heterosexual nuclear fam-
ily is so deeply naturalized, and reproductive technologies so thoroughly
integrated into American society, that even many critics argue that the
idealized end result of reproductive technologies and surrogacy (a child)
warrants their continued practice. For example, despite identifying many
pitfalls to surrogacy arrangements, Debora Spar argues that the market
for babies is undeniable and thus must be accepted and regulated. After
a book-length critique of the inequities and moral complexities of sur-
rogacy and reproductive technologies in The Baby Business, Spar con-
cludes with a claim that speaks to the very core of reproductive futurism:
“It’s hard to imagine that we could ever put this particular genie back
in its bottle. Moreover, it’s not at all clear that we should. For the baby
business—unlike, say, the arms race or the heroin trade—produces a
good that is inherently good.”38 By comparing the “baby business” to
things that many people would find inherently bad, such as highly ad-
dictive drugs and global nuclear armament, Spar further reinforces her
claim. Unquestioningly valuing the end result of gestational surrogacy,
for example, neglects the material and historical inequities that exist
within the relationship between surrogate and contracting parties. Fetal
personhood amendments that would extend legal personhood to a zy-
gote threaten access to this unquestioned good, if tangentially.
Like gestational surrogacy, fetal personhood speaks to broader issues
that resonate beyond neat divisions of pro-life or pro-choice. For one,
the ideology of fetal personhood prioritizes the alleged right to life of the
fetus over the bodily autonomy of pregnant women in ways that while
obviously deeply gendered, are also classed and racialized. Women of
color and low-income women are particularly vulnerable to state inter-
vention into reproductive decision making, and are more likely to be
targeted for punitive interventions.39 For example, while white women
and women of color have comparable rates of drug use during preg-
nancy, women of color experience racial discrimination in rates of ar-
rest and prosecution.40 This is due in part to structural and institutional
systems that are more likely to surveil and ensnare low-income women
and women of color. In a study of state legal actions against pregnant
women in the United States between 1973 and 2005—including arrests,
Conclusion | 207
increased jail time, and forced medical interventions—the researchers

Jeanne Flavin and Lynn Paltrow found that women of color made up 59
percent of those targeted.41 A survey of New York hospitals found that
those serving low-income women of color were more likely to test new
mothers for drug use, and more likely to report positive results to the
state.42 As Dorothy Roberts has argued, the racism behind such prosecu-
tions of black mothers is overlooked due to “an institutionalized system
that selects Black women for prosecution and from a deeply embedded
mythology about Black mothers. These two factors make the dispro-
portionate prosecution of Black mothers seem fair and natural, and not
the result of any invidious motivation.”43 Women of color are viewed as
less worthy of protection, and more in need of intensive state interven-
tion on behalf of fetuses and children. This punitive approach to child
protection is galvanized by fetal personhood rhetoric that separates the
priorities of the fetus from the health of the mother.
The case of a Texas woman, Marlise Munoz, is particularly salient
in this regard. Munoz was declared brain dead shortly after suffering a
pulmonary embolism in her home, but was kept alive on a ventilator at a
local hospital. Munoz, a Latina woman who worked as a paramedic, was
fourteen weeks pregnant at the time of her incapacitation; as a result, the
hospital would not remove life support despite the wishes of her family.
Hospital administrators cited the Texas Advance Directives Act, which
states that “a person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treat-
ment” from a patient who is pregnant.44 While the hospital was not
actually prohibited from removing life support, the law protected the
hospital from liability as long as life support was sustained.45 When re-
porters began to investigate the act more closely, its authors confirmed
that such an application was not within the intent of the law, which was
meant to keep a pregnant woman “in a persistent vegetative state” alive
via ventilator until delivery (raising its own deeply problematic con-
cerns), but not a pregnant woman who was legally dead.46
Anti-abortion activists, however, were interested in the personhood
of the fetus, rather than the life or death of Munoz. Pro-life groups were
quick to raise the issue of fetal personhood; a representative from the
group Texas Alliance for Life referred to the fetus as an “unborn child”
and “a separate person.”47 By the time a judge decided that she should
be removed from life support, Munoz had been declared legally dead,
208 | Conclusion
and her pregnancy had advanced to twenty-two weeks.48 Personhood

USA predictably decried the decision, describing the demise of the fetus
as “the first forced abortion documented in Texas.”49 This quote reflects
a rhetorical move on the part of pro-life forces to represent women as
at the mercy of abortion providers. Rather than positing the pregnant
woman and fetus as opponents (an alternative tactic of anti-abortion
groups), this rhetoric suggests that the pregnant woman is also a victim
of forces that would compel her to seek an abortion. If the pregnant
woman is construed as a victim, then pro-life forces can step in as wom-
en’s alleged advocates, not their adversaries.
It is crucial, however, to contrast the funds and energy the pro-life
movement put into keeping “alive” the pregnancy of Marlise Munoz
with the overall resources allocated to Latina women’s reproductive
health and family services in the state of Texas. In 2011 the Texas state
legislature cut funds for family planning by two-thirds, and barred
Planned Parenthood from receiving state money.50 These cuts led to
the closure of seventy-six family planning clinics in the state.51 Latina
women in Texas face significant barriers to reproductive health care,
including cost of contraception and exams, limited access to public
transportation, and immigration status.52 With fewer clinics available,
women have experienced long delays in appointments, diagnoses, and
treatment of reproductive health conditions like cervical, breast, or
uterine cancer.53 After pressure by human rights advocacy campaigns
such as Nuestro Texas, launched by the Center for Reproductive Rights
and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the state leg-
islature increased funding for women’s health in 2015. Nuestro Texas ar-
gues that even with increased funding, only three in ten women receive
the services they need.54 As these data demonstrate, Latina women in
Texas experience limited access to basic reproductive health care at the
same time that the focus on fetal rights and fetal personhood kept Mar-
lise Munoz on life support to “protect” her fetus, a decision that Na-
tional Public Radio compared to “keeping dead bodies ‘alive’ to harvest
their organs.” Perhaps the most important issue that pro-life groups
could support in order to protect fetal health in Texas would be the
repeal of the “affiliate rule” that defunded Planned Parenthood, which
had been the largest source of preventative reproductive health care in
the state.55
Conclusion | 209
As the Munoz case demonstrates, supporters of fetal personhood leg-

islation will not only pursue restrictions on safe, legal abortion, they
also endorse extremist positions to limit women’s bodily autonomy. This
insidious encroachment of fetal rights represents both a strategy and a
consequence of the movement to limit women’s reproductive decision
making. The story of Marlise Munoz, while exceptional in some ways,
is frighteningly mundane in others, in that it is indicative of the restric-
tive and punitive public policy that many elected officials would like to
mandate across the board. Fetal personhood also demonstrates a point
at which the interests of women of disparate socioeconomic statuses in-
tersect: women who for various reasons may be minimally invested in
protecting abortion rights are organizing to block fetal personhood leg-
islation because it threatens their access to reproductive technologies, or
that would take end-of-life decisions out of the hands of their families.
Fetal personhood legislation could motivate a range of women to rec-
ognize their shared interest in what is deceptively cast as a single-issue
debate. The fact that the infertility community has been so central to the
defeat of personhood amendments—at times even more successful than
pro-choice organizing—suggests that reproductive technologies could
galvanize a broader resistance to the political erosion of women’s repro-
ductive autonomy. An issue like personhood has proven the potential
to unite the interests of women across a spectrum of socioeconomic,
educational, and age-related standpoints in opposition to legislative at-
tempts to restrict reproductive autonomy.
The necessary next step is to use this momentum to forge alliances
between infertility rights advocates and pro-choice organizations, with
the goal of politicizing women to think more broadly about reproduc-
tive rights and reproductive justice. This would need to be a movement
with racial justice at its center, and the voices of women of color in its
leadership, a movement that places the concerns of egg donors and sur-
rogates on equal footing with those seeking fertility services, and that
ties the threat of fetal personhood to IVF with the threat of fetal person-
hood to women like Marlise Munoz. In order for this coalition build-
ing to happen, feminists and other supporters of reproductive rights
must continue to make connections between the various locations of
women—particularly women of color—as mothers, as ART users, as
reproductive laborers, as targets of punitive state policies, and as orga-
210 | Conclusion
nizers of resistance. Such a complicated, multifaceted picture has the

potential to bring more women to the table, and to fracture the façade
of a post-racial world that reproductive technologies often reinforce.
While the potential for ARTs to complicate traditional notions of kin-
ship, gender, and race is very real, the contemporary attacks on women’s
reproductive autonomy suggest the challenges that we continue to face.

Brown Bodies White Babies

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NYU Press

Chapter Title: Introduction: Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy

Book Title: Brown Bodies, White Babies

Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy

On the 2007 premiere of the Lifetime television series Army Wives,

Assisted Reproduction and Family Formation

rather, such concepts take form through interaction between scientific

This process is referred to as “gestational surrogacy” because the use

torically been barred by institutionalized heteronormativity and active

Pamela is a cross-racial gestational surrogate. Yet contrary to what the

commissioning couples at the expense of surrogates, it is also a phrase

phenomenon. In a groundbreaking ethnographic study, the anthro-

does the “natural” desire of intended parents to create a biological family

Methods and Overview of the Book

in gestational surrogacy arrangements as inconsequential, particularly

are flattened through the leveling effects of altruism. Another theme is

In chapter 4, I contextualize the shifting popular and scientific dis-

mistreated. Intended parents are also able to naturalize their claims to

consumer or (re)producer within this active market. I hope that this

Chapter Title: Introduction: Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy

Book Title: Brown Bodies, White Babies

Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy

On the 2007 premiere of the Lifetime television series Army Wives,

Assisted Reproduction and Family Formation

rather, such concepts take form through interaction between scientific

This process is referred to as “gestational surrogacy” because the use

torically been barred by institutionalized heteronormativity and active

Pamela is a cross-racial gestational surrogate. Yet contrary to what the

commissioning couples at the expense of surrogates, it is also a phrase

phenomenon. In a groundbreaking ethnographic study, the anthro-

does the “natural” desire of intended parents to create a biological family

Methods and Overview of the Book

in gestational surrogacy arrangements as inconsequential, particularly

are flattened through the leveling effects of altruism. Another theme is

In chapter 4, I contextualize the shifting popular and scientific dis-

mistreated. Intended parents are also able to naturalize their claims to

consumer or (re)producer within this active market. I hope that this

Book Title: Brown Bodies, White Babies

“Mommy’s Tummy Was Broken”

Surrogacy Enters the Mainstream

Being a surrogate is like giving an organ transplant to some-

Kinship is created through love and hospitality, rather than

When they [surrogacy arrangements] go bad, it’s so sad. You

refused to relinquish her biological child to the intended parents. The

the primary database, supplemented by Internet search engines, I nar-

binary nature of the debate was often premised through headlines or

The Baby M case in particular caused surrogacy to transition from a

Women Helping Women

desire for a child. The desperation of the tragically infertile is matched

difference,” while the surrogate Gernisha Myers says, “I know I am doing

Glamour pieces gender military wives in interesting ways—as feminine

The altruistic motivations of surrogates were also the focus of readers

speaks to this bond in an interview with the Washington Post, stating of

The reporter’s language (“struck a chord in your heart”) begins from

clude a post-birth breast lift in their contractual requirements. Howard

The reporter goes on to name only one incidence of such “villainous”

The Call for Regulation

treated more like a business than a form of research, new technologies

guidelines, as well as safeguards to protect low-income women who will

Michigan maintains the harshest penalties for surrogacy: contracts

and agree to state-sponsored home visits. In addition, states can man-

ports “advocacy on behalf of patients, physicians, and affiliated health

of intended parents, gestational surrogates, and donors; a proposal to

as a “business” that is “ripe for exploitation and fraud.”124 From this