The Billion Dollar Babies
By Vandy Muong and Will Jackson | The Phnom Penh Post | Jan. 2, 2016
With commercial surrogacy banned in India, Nepal, and Thailand, this article takes a closer look at Cambodia as the next destination. It explores the legal and ethical status of the practice, concluding on a message of “buyer beware” as people considering surrogacy are warned about the risks of not being able to take children home or being charged with human trafficking.
What’s Love Got to Do With It? The Politics of Renting Wombs
Michele Goodwin | June 14, 2016
In a talk delivered at the Women Deliver 2016 Global Conference, Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, draws on her experience in India to discuss the impact of commercial surrogacy on gestational mothers. Her comments are situated within a broader context – the transnational reach of ARTs, and how these technologies feed on and create global inequity and collide with concepts such as “love” and “sisterhood.”
Goodwin is also the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and author of “Baby Markets: Money and The New Politics of Creating Families.”
The Dwindling Options for Surrogacy Abroad
By Danielle Preiss and Pragati Shahi | The Atlantic | May 31, 2016
This comprehensive article covers international commercial surrogacy laws around the world, with emphasis on and the implications of recent legal changes in India, Thailand, and Nepal. It follows an Australian couple, forbidden from paying gestational mothers in their own country, on a journey that spans Israel (the location of their agency), India (where their gestational mother lives), and Nepal (where she travels for embryo transfer and the birth) — with helpful insights on the effects of such arrangements on the children that are caught in the middle.
Made in India
Directors: Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha | 2010
“Made in India” is a feature length documentary film about an infertile American couple and their journey to India for a baby. The movie’s website describes it as “weaving together personal stories within the context of a growing international industry… [exploring] a complicated clash of families in crisis, reproductive technology, and choice from a global perspective.”
From the filmmakers:
As women deeply interested in issues of reproductive rights, social justice and global issues, the subject of “outsourcing” surrogacy to India captivated us from the moment we first read about the practice.
We aim to create a film that goes beyond sensationalist headlines and uncovers the personal lives and choices of the surrogates and the infertile Americans involved.
The Trouble with Renting a Womb
By Abby Rabinowitz | The Guardian | April 28, 2016
This long article is well worth the read. It follows a group of gestational mothers in India, providing unusually deep insights into their lives, the contexts that frame their decisions, and their experiences within surrogacy arrangements and after. It also features conversations with the clinics and intended parents that hire gestational mothers, and touches upon the controversial effort to ban the practice in India.
Excerpt:
Critics say it is unlikely that banning foreign surrogacy clients will protect poor Indian women or end the practice. For one thing, surrogacy remains legal for heterosexual Indian couples. For another, transnational surrogacy is notorious for its elaborate work-arounds. When the Indian home ministry abruptly banned gay foreign surrogacy clients in 2012, Indian fertility clinics shipped Indian surrogates across the border to Nepal. When Nepal also banned transnational surrogacy in 2015, as did Thailand, industry insiders told me they believed that Indian surrogates were being rerouted to African countries instead. They also said that the ban will merely drive the practice underground.
Birthing a Market: Commercial Surrogacy in India
By Sama – Resource Group for Women and Health | India | 2012
Excerpt from the Introduction:
There is an urgent need to initiate processes for a critical understanding of commercial surrogacy, that has assumed the proportion of a transnational industry towards building a collective, feminist response to it. This requires a strengthening of linkages between academia and activism that builds a perspective on the interaction of market, technology, patriarchy, and hetero-normativity as seen in this practice.
Further, the Draft ART Bill – 2010, prepared by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), necessitates a parallel process of mobilizing a wider response, particularly because this proposed legislation will be the first of its kind in South Asia, and is a step forward in checking the untrammeled commercialization of ARTs. In its current form, the Bill is hugely lacking in addressing this as well as the disadvantaged position of the surrogate.
Being a part of debates on the regulation of ARTs, which currently flourish in India in the absence of any state regulation, Sama has often been confronted with issues concerning citizenship, surrogates’ payments, and the contract between the surrogate and the commissioning parents.
Given this, Sama initiated the present research to gain insights into the lives of those at the heart of these issues—the surrogates—in order to make visible, and to better understand their perspectives, subjective experiences, and lives. The study scrutinizes the existing practices in the selected sites of research. Foregrounding the surrogate’s position in the arrangement and in the industry, the study examines several complexities regarding the terms of the contract, the multiple institutions and actors involved, their expectations and conditionalities regarding the surrogate pregnancy, medical practices and technological interventions.
Outsourcing Embryos
VICE on HBO: Season 3, Episode 4 | 2016
Synopsis:
Vice looks at the boom in one of the world’s newest billion-dollar industries: gestational surrogacy. The cost of surrogacy in the US can be over $100,000, leading many prospective parents to look for affordable options in other countries. Gianna Toboni heads to India, where commercial surrogacy is legal, to investigate this growing industry. By exploring some of the country’s 3,000 surrogacy clinics, watching doctors deliver surrogate babies, and following recruiters who find prospective surrogates in the slums, we see the true cost of outsourcing reproduction.
Plus: Read an interview with Vice correspondent Gianna Toboni at New York Magazine >
Baby Markets and the New Motherhood: Reproducing Hierarchy in Commercial Intimacy
By Michele Goodwin | Huffington Post | May 13, 2015
Excerpt:
In recent weeks, the private reproductive decisions of Elton John and Sofia Vergara have spilled over into prime time news cycles — albeit by the celebrities themselves. Elton John called for a boycott of all Dolce and Gabbana merchandise after the designers regrettably referred to babies born through in vitro fertilization as “synthetic” children. The swift backlash caused the designers to issue statements of clarification and apology. Elton John’s twitter followers accused D&G of being woefully out of touch — not only with contemporary fashion, but also baby-making. In part, they are right.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), tens of thousands of children are born each year in the United States through assisted reproductive technologies (ART). These technologies provide a stunning candy store of options: a spectrum so vast in array, scope, and breadth as to make heads spin: in vitro fertilization, ova selling, cryopreservation of ova, womb renting, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryo transfer, assisted hatching, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of ova, embryo grading, and more. However, these technologies are not just for celebrities.
Michele Goodwin is a law professor at the UC Irvine School of Law. She is also the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and author of “Baby Markets: Money and The New Politics of Creating Families.”
Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life
By Sayantani Dasgupta and Shamita Das Dasgupta | Lanham: Lexington Books | 2014
Buy at Amazon >
From the book description:
From computer support and hotel reservations to laboratory results and radiographic interpretations, it seems everything can be ‘outsourced’ in our globalized world. One would not think so with parenthood, however, especially motherhood, as it is a fundamental activity humans have historically preserved as personal and private. In our modern age, however, the advent and accessibility of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and the ease with which they have traversed global borders, has fundamentally altered the meaning of childbearing and parenting.
In the twenty-first century, parenthood is no longer achieved only through gestation, adoption, or traditional surrogacy, but also via assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), where science and technology play lead roles. Furthermore, in a globalized world economy, where the movement and transfer of people and commodities are increasing to serve the interests of capitalism, gamete donation and surrogate birth can traverse innumerable geographic, socio-economic, racialized, and political borderlands. Thus, reproduction itself can be outsourced.
This edited volume explores one specific aspect of the new assisted reproductive technologies: gestational surrogacy and how its practice is changing the traditional concept of parenthood across the globe. The phenomenon of transnational surrogacy has given rise to a thriving international industry where money is being ‘legally’ exchanged for babies and ‘reproductive labor’ has taken on a lucrative commercial tone. Yet, law, research, and activism are barely aware of this experience and are still playing catch-up with rapidly changing on-the-ground realities. This interdisciplinary collection of essays assuages the dearth of knowledge and addresses significant issues in transnational commercial gestational surrogacy as it takes shape in a peculiar relation between the West (primarily the United States) and India.
Offshore Babies: The Murky World of Transnational Surrogacy
By Amel Ahmad | Al Jazeera | Aug. 11, 2014
Excerpt:
The case of an Australian couple accused of abandoning their child with his Thai surrogate mother after discovering he had Down syndrome — and taking home his healthy twin — has turned global attention to the murky underworld of international surrogacy.
Such cases have raised ethical and legal dilemmas, which experts say are the inevitable consequences of an unregulated multibillion-dollar industry dependent on impoverished women in developing countries providing a “product” — a child — so desperately wanted by would-be parents in wealthier nations.
In Baby Gammy’s case, which made international headlines this month, the boy’s Australian parents are claiming that the Thai surrogate mother, Pattaramon Chanbua, refused to release the child into their custody and that they lacked the legal right to force her to do so.
This article provides a global overview of laws related to international commercial surrogacy, with a focus on Thailand. It delves into issues specific to the rights of children – such as citizenship and legal parentage – and links to the work being done by the Hague Conference on Private International Law, an intergovernmental organization, on the legal challenges posed by the practice.
Read a report, Global Surrogacy Practices, published by Marcy Darnovsky and Diane Beeson, summarizing discussions on global surrogacy at the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy, The Hague, August 2014.
