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- Convenor:
-
Kim Gutschow
(Goettingen University)
- Location:
- FUL-101
- Start time:
- 10 September, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the causal factors and flows that shape access to and quality of care within the field of surrogacy. It interrogates the dynamic relationship of actors, institutions, and socio-medical norms that produce unequal forms of subjectivity, agency, and clinical outcomes in this field.
Long Abstract:
This panel considers the causal factors and flows that shape access to and quality of reproductive and maternal healthcare within the fragmented, highly deregulated, increasingly commodified landscape of surrogacy in India, the US, and Israel. It will consider the ethical, medical, and socio-cultural issues that arise when a variety of individual and institutional actors--including surrogates, intended parents, fertility specialists, obstetricians, neonatologists, lawyers, and surrogacy agents---negotiate their goals and needs that often coincide or conflict. It is interested in papers that conceptualize surrogacy as a social field or biosocial process with actors, rules, and goals that can be measured through maternal, perinatal, and neonatal outcomes as well as through broader social, economic, and institutional practices and impacts. The panel explores the dynamic social landscape that emerges from the interactions between buyers/sellers, products/services, and medical specialists/laypeople that are engaged in the process of surrogacy. How are social and health inequities, as well as individual agency and subjectivity, reproduced within a climate of largely unregulated ART? Can India and the US continue to promote themselves as global hubs for transnational surrogacy, even as they fail to provide high quality reproductive care for their own citizens and face the predicament of excess of maternal and neonatal mortality? Finally, how might the intersection of obstetric care and surrogacy help illuminate the highly contested issues of access, regulation, and agency within the transnational landscape of surrogacy and CBRC?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Kim Gutschow (Goettingen University)
Paper short abstract:
Why is there such excess maternal and neonatal mortality in India and the US and how might one relate this social fact to the expanding role of surrogacy in both countries? We look at the policies seek to level reproductive inequity even as they may wind up increasing certain forms of social hierarchy.
Paper long abstract:
Why is there such excess maternal and neonatal mortality in India and the US and what happens when one relates these social facts to the expanding role of surrogacy in both countries? In addition, how can an anthropological approach help illuminate the disconnections and discontinuities between global policies and local practices that presume to protect women from unwanted maternal death, even as they promote surrogacy for women in the name of reproductive choice and rights? This paper examines the global push to reduce maternal mortality across the globe and its intersection with the fields of surrogacy. It builds on 15 years of fieldwork in India and the US on reproductive health and rights. It interrogates the local, national, and transnational practices and institutional forces that both constrain and promote women's access to safe delivery and surrogacy in either country. It is especially interested in how regional, national, and global policies promoting safe delivery and fertility intersect to constrain the agency and access to services for the most marginalized women in society even as the rhetoric of surrogacy promotes the idea that surrogacy is a win-win situation of expanding access and choices for women across a variety of social spectrums (incomes, caste, status). In short it seeks to understand the connections between policies seek to level reproductive inequity even as they may wind up increasing certain forms of social hierarchy.
Sayani Mitra (Goerg August Universitaet Göttingen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses various forms of reproductive disruptions causing pregnancy loss during gestational surrogacy in India. It underlines how absolute belief in the supremacy of medical technology enables the actors to envisage high hopes of success; without apprehending any aberrations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to discuss the various forms of reproductive disruptions causing pregnancy loss during gestational surrogacy and its impact upon the key actors. Not all In vitro fertilisations (IVFs) performed during a surrogacy arrangement results in success, as failures in the form of miscarriage, foetal reduction or still birth often brings an end to the much desired pregnancies. Therefore while complete miscarriages and loss of foetal heartbeat during surrogacy leads to a pregnancy loss for the surrogate mother and the intended parents, events of foetal reductions (wherein triplets or twins are reduced to twins or singletons) also makes the surrogate mother and occasionally the intended parents undergo an experience of loss of similar kind. Based on an ethnography conducted in fertility clinics of Delhi and Kolkata, I would like to argue that such events of disruptions to the surrogate pregnancy puts an end to the hopes and imaginations surrounding a newly conceived foetal entity. Further any form of miscarriage being highly stigmatised and foetal reductions being assigned to the best interest of the surviving foetus/es or the intended parents, the rights of the surrogates to medical care or counselling are left unrecognized. By exploring the experiences of loss and the narratives of disruptions surrounding such events, this paper would attempt to underline how absolute belief in the supremacy of medical technology and medical professionals enables the actors in surrogacy to envisage high hopes of success; to the extent that they fail to anticipate or accommodate any aberrations.
Elly Teman (Ruppin Academic Center)
Paper short abstract:
I compare surrogacy in Israel to gestational surrogacy in India and the US, arguing that this culturally-specific, local and nationally-bounded form of surrogacy may be more ethical .
Paper long abstract:
Today the word surrogacy seems to go hand in hand with the notion of "cross-border reproductive tourism" and much of the scholarly discussion of surrogacy is dominated by a focus on global concerns about this practice. At the center of scholarly discussions of cross-border surrogacy is the understanding that individuals entering these arrangements are at the mercy of uncertain regulatory frameworks and that the relationships between surrogates and intended parents are often shaped by middlemen arbitrating the agreements, language differences and divergent cultural understandings about money, kinship and technology. In this paper, I argue that surrogacy in Israel emerges against the global circuit as a very culturally-specific, local and nationally-bounded form of surrogacy in which all arrangements are legal and closely regulated and monitored directly by the state. In my prior work (Teman 2010), I have critiqued the Israeli surrogacy law of 1996 for its restrictiveness as it prohibits international, inter-religious, single-parent and same-sex surrogacy arrangements on Israeli soil and effectively ensuring that Israeli surrogacy arrangements produce only Jewish-Israeli citizens and hetero-normative, nuclear families. Yet I suggest here that the Israeli surrogacy law, with its myriad prohibitions, centralized provisions for screening the surrogate and intended parents, standardized contractual protections for all parties involved including the baby, and the centralized government approval of each and every contract emerges in a different light when recent global developments in the surrogacy arena are taken into consideration.
Anna Arvidsson Sara Johnsdotter (Malmö University)
Paper short abstract:
With study among Swedish commissioning parents and people in Assam, India, the paper aims to provide a multifaceted and transnational perspective on surrogacy. Conflicting perspectives on legal and socio-cultural issues on surrogacy as a reproduction method will be discussed in this research paper.
Paper long abstract:
Surrogacy is unregulated in Sweden and couples have then used transnational surrogacy in some specific countries e.g. India and the U.S. With legal issues and different competing discourses on surrogacy relating to exploitation and empowerment of poor women being surrogate mothers, how is surrogacy seen as an option to parenthood? Indian women are used as surrogate mothers extensively. Childlessness is highly stigmatized in India, but is surrogacy an option to parenthood for Indians themselves? The chosen study area in India is Assam, it being a fairly new place for surrogacy arrangements in India. This study aims to provide a multifaceted and transnational perspective on the phenomenon that has created many ethical, legal and social dilemmas. Interviews were conducted with Swedish commissioning parents to investigate regarding their experiences of the process of becoming legal parents and their perception regarding the present discourses on surrogacy. Interviews and focus groups discussions were conducted in Assam to analyse the perceptions on surrogacy as an option to childlessness. The study reveals that conflicting perspectives on legal, cultural and social issues complicate surrogacy as assisted reproductive method in both Sweden and India. Among the Swedish commissioning parents the use of surrogacy was ambiguous depending on the surrogate mother's situation, and the road to parenthood was difficult and unpredictable. In Assam, surrogacy was not seen as an option for many because of the socio-cultural factors. Few had real knowledge about this method and even fewer considered it an affordable choice for reproduction.