Surrogacy360

Organization: Our Bodies Ourselves

Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS) is a nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts that develops and promotes evidence-based information on girls’ and women’s reproductive health and sexuality.

OBOS addresses the social, economic, and political conditions that affect health care access and quality of care. This contextual information has inspired readers to learn more about and to change laws and policies that affect their own and their family’s well-being.

The OBOS Global Initiative works with women’s organizations around the world that have translated and adapted “Our Bodies, Ourselves” to their country’s unique cultural needs. Many of these groups are addressing assisted reproductive technologies via their own work and in collaboration with OBOS (visit Global Collaborations for more information).

Surrogacy360 is one example of the Global Initiative’s work toward greater transparency and awareness concerning international commercial surrogacy.

Read recent blogs by the organization on the issue and the broader implications of assisted reproductive technologies, including:

Is Surrogacy Always a Win-Win Situation, questioning the oft-touted belief that international commercial surrogacy benefits everyone.
The Ongoing Tale About the Handmaid’s Tale, highlighting parallels with and points of departure from the recent television series, The Handmaid’s Tale.
From In Vitro Babies to Skin Cell Maybes: The Shifting Landscape of Human Reproduction and Family Formation, on conversations and questions about family formation and regulation at the 2017 Baby Markets Roundtable.
Chasing Global Surrogacy, on the trajectory of international commercial surrogacy in Asia.
Bollywood Birds and Bees, on the influence of popular culture on attitudes and use of surrogacy in India.

Learn more and visit the website >

Book: Discounted Life – The Price of Global Surrogacy in India

Discounted Life – The Price of Global Surrogacy in India
By Sharmila Rudrappa | NYU Press | December 2015

Sharmila Rudrappa is a distinguished scholar in the field and her book, Discounted Life, is the winner, American Sociological Association Asia and Asian America Section Best Book on Asia/Transnational Asia.

From the publisher’s website:

Sharmila Rudrappa interrogates the creation and maintenance of reproductive labor markets, the function of agencies and surrogacy brokers, and how women become surrogate mothers. Is surrogacy solely a labor contract for which the surrogate mother receives wages, or do its meanings and import exceed the confines of the market? Rudrappa argues that this reproductive industry is organized to control and disempower women workers and yet her interviews reveal that, by and large, the surrogate mothers in Bangalore found the experience life affirming. Rudrappa explores this tension, and the lived realities of many surrogate mothers whose deepening bodily commodification is paradoxically experienced as a revitalizing life development.

A detailed and moving study, Discounted Life delineates how local labor markets intertwine with global reproduction industries, how Bangalore’s surrogate mothers make sense of their participation in reproductive assembly lines, and the remarkable ways in which they negotiate positions of power for themselves in progressively untenable socio-economic conditions.