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I have been a radical feminist all my life (I realize now), but it’s only in the past couple of years that I have developed a specific political consciousness that has allowed me to better contextualize my views within a feminist analysis. Lately,  influenced in particular by the ideas of writer and activist Kajsa Ekis Ekman, I have been thinking about, and reading about, surrogacy. In the many interviews and articles by and about Ekman, she points out that surrogacy is essentially the flip-side of prostitution. While prostitution is the commodification of bodies for sex, surrogacy is the commodification of bodies for reproduction—the renting of wombs.   In addition to the trade in women’s bodies as incubators, surrogacy amounts to the objectification of children, and in many cases, the actual purchase and sale of infants.

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Like prostitution, surrogacy is frequently, (overwhelmingly) framed as a “choice” that women make.  But the purpose of feminism, as I see it, is as a political movement that seeks to liberate women as a class, from oppression.  In order to do this, we must first be able to identify female oppression as a phenomenon that is supported and perpetuated by a system (gender) that shapes and limits the experiences of a class of people—female people—and which is rooted in sex, and in the exploitation of our reproductive potential.

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No “choice” is ever made outside of the potent and unseen forces of socialization that we are all subject to, whether we recognize this or not.  I’m much less interested in the reasons and rationalizations for why individuals make the decisions that we do, in favour looking at choices as political and systemic.  I hope that everyone can recognize that while it is never necessary or appropriate to judge individual women for their “choices”, it is in fact essential to make judgements about the cultural mores and expectations that underpin individual choices—this is, after all, the purpose of feminism as a political movement.

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Surrogacy, like prostitution, has been adopted by the left as a mark of progressiveness and liberation for groups that have historically been discriminated against—like gay couples for example.  To be sure, it is deeply wrong and unfair that gay men have been (and probably are  still today, in many areas) denied the option to adopt.  But the oppression of one group, does not legitimize a responsive oppression towards another marginalized group.  And surrogacy does involve abuse, oppression, and harm, to a horrifying degree.

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The women whose wombs are used—rented—in order to gestate babies created from the genetic material of the privileged, are subjected to an often terrible ordeal which may involve various medications, multiple injections, tests, poking and prodding, etc., during the implantation rigamarole.  Then, throughout the 10 months of pregnancy, these women are monitored and supervised and tested and scrutinized while carrying someone else’s child inside their womb.  The children that they give birth to are subsequently taken away, to be handed over to the families who have purchased or acquired them.

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I shared this article on my Facebook page recently, and someone commented that they understand the pitfalls of paid surrogacy, but that they feel that altruistic surrogacy is a different story.  I would agree that there are important distinctions between paid and volunteer surrogacy, but I still cannot support the latter.  There may well be women who have a genuine desire to become a surrogate for a friend or a family member.  But I can’t help but think that the numbers of volunteer surrogates would be far fewer, if women were given a clear and honest picture of the terrible pain involved, and the risk of death, injury, not to mention possible permanent infertility involved in surrogacy. Furthermore, while volunteer surrogacy may not technically commercialize pregnancy, it does, as Ekman points out, “functionalize” pregnancy, changing the dynamic from one that is personal, and private, to one in which the woman’s body is a contested space; semi-public terrain.

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Few people understand the degree to which pregnancy is a holistic process, involving a physiological and hormonal cascade of effects which creates for many women a deep, biologically-based attachment to their babies.  Partly because of the widespread misunderstanding that pregnancy simply involves a baby (a separate entity) that grows in a womb and is then expelled, the emotional costs of surrogacy are tragically minimized.  The bond that so many women feel for their babies which for many becomes established during pregnancy, cannot often simply be turned off, or ignored, or sublimated once the child is born and must legally be given to someone else.  For many women, this is heartbreaking, and there are scores of stories (like this one  ,and this one) from women who go into surrogacy thinking that they will be able to shut off their emotional reactions, or who believe that their surrogate pregnancies will be as straightforward as their own spontaneous pregnancies (because many surrogates have had previous children of their own—they are proven “breeders” after all) when it is often quite the opposite.

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Because I have been so lucky to have had the kind of births that I have, I deeply understand that pregnancy and the birth process creates a chemical physiological reaction in the body and the mind of the mother, engendering a complete and overwhelming adoration of, and connection with, one’s infant.  This  isn’t magical thinking, or biological essentialism—this is biological reality. (This adoration and connection certainly doesn’t occur for everyone, but when it doesn’t it’s most often due to adverse circumstances, like stress or trauma and interference during the birth process.) It seems to me that as a surrogate, one would either have to have one’s heart ripped into pieces, or else go out of one’s way throughout the pregnancy, to distance oneself from the growing baby emotionally.  Both scenarios are horrific to me.  A woman and her infant in utero are in a symbiotic relationship.  We know that stress during pregnancy affects the child negatively.  Entering into a pregnancy knowing that the baby will never be yours, seems to be a cruel and unusual choice to make, on everyone’s part, for everyone involved.

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I believe quite strongly that there is a relationship between extreme forms of so-called “altruism”, or the desire to please other people (which can border on masochism, in my view), and the way that females are socialized to accommodate others, and to subsume our own needs and best interests. Girls are taught that “being good” is of the utmost importance, and that the way to “be good” is to bow and scrape, and to tie ourselves in knots, taking care of others.  Keep in mind too, that the women who “volunteer” to become surrogates, often enter into an agreement with the individuals who want an infant, that involves “donations” and “paid expenses”.  This is a convenient way to avoid laws and regulations that exist in many countries in order to curtail or prevent paid surrogacy.  However, these donations do amount to payment in effect, and certainly involve a great imbalance of power.  It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that the women who “choose” to become surrogates don’t tend to be wealthy privileged women with high-powered careers.

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I have actually been approached twice about surrogacy myself, by friends of mine who were struggling with infertility.  The topic was broached casually, almost jokingly.  At this time (a couple of years ago), I wasn’t at all familiar with either the reality or politics of surrogacy, (and I don’t think these friends were fully aware either) and I was really taken aback by the notion that I might consider using my body to gestate someone else’s child—however beloved these friends were.  I had an immediate, viscerally negative reaction—without being able to articulate why—and I knew immediately that not only would I never do this, but that it was an abhorrent notion, to me.  Abhorrent in part because I feel deeply attached to my babies while they are growing, and I would never be able to bear giving them up, among other reasons.

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Like women who have exited prostitution, many women who were former surrogates, describe the dissociation that is essential to surviving the experience of having their body occupied for such an intimate function, and commodified for the benefit of someone other than herself. But more important than the question of why a woman would ever choose to offer her body for such a purpose, is why, and indeed *how* it is possible for individuals and families to divorce themselves from their humanity to such a degree that they are capable of asking another person to be used in such a fashion. It isn’t simply a lack of compassion or empathy, but a function of capitalism, and classism.  It’s also motivated and promoted by the medical industrial complex, benefitting as the medical industry does, from the concurrent vulnerability of poor women who are led to believe that surrogacy might help them, and pain of individuals and families who desperately want a child–surrogacy is big bucks.

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Globally, the largest numbers of women who are engaged in surrogacy are women of colour who are desperately poor (as is the case with the vast majority of women who are prostituted).  Often these women are pimped out by husbands, or family members.  They may have signed waivers indicating their “consent” to be implanted with an embryo, but their “choice” is as unlikely to be free as is the “choice” of so many women sold or coerced into prostitution.  The argument that surrogacy provides these poor women with money, which grants them opportunities they would not otherwise have, is twisted and cynical: as Ekman again argues, poverty needs to be eradicated by changing the underlying systems that create inequality, not by institutionalizing, condoning, normalizing and regulating that inequality.

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