Recent Developments in the Marketing and Promotion of International Surrogacy

The past few years have seen rapid and highly unsettling developments in the promotional and marketing tactics of international surrogacy brokers.  I will discuss how this has occurred on two levels, which are closely related in their commercial motivations. This first deals with rhetoric, descriptions and imagery used to represent surrogates to a consumer public largely based in the US and UK.  Brokers, most often in direct partnership with overseas clinics, are going to great lengths to present an appealing image of surrogates.  To a shocking degree, this has involved manipulating images of race/ethnicity and wealth, as well as fabricating and “selling” notions that Indian woman are honored to provide these services, due to local cultural (and, in some cases, religious) values that revere family and motherhood.  Surrogacy profiteers continue to openly promote the “fact” that relationships between parents and genetically-related children are objectively healthier and more valuable than adoptive and other non-genetically related familial connections.  In many cases, it seems that the commercial strategy of many surrogacy marketers is to promulgate ignorance among clients with regard to surrogates’ cultural, social and economic situations.  Most often, this depends on maintaining maximum distance between clients and surrogates.

A second dimension of these marketing practices involves novel medical and quasi-legal techniques, which are being pioneered to ramp up buyer appeal.  One major Los Angeles-based broker markets a package formerly known as the “India bundle,” which offers clients the opportunity to have embryos implanted in two surrogates simultaneously.  The selling point is that this effectively doubles the chances of a successful pregnancy, thus saving clients’ time and money.  The same broker-clinic partnership uses contracts that deny surrogates a role in decisions about abortions or fetal reductions, and bars them from seeing doctors outside of the contracted clinic for the duration of the pregnancy. 

Ethnographic work and public scholarship examining and illustrating surrogates’ experiences, especially the often coercive contexts in which they are driven to “choose” to enter into these agreements, is essential.  A strong pro-choice, pro-human rights voice is needed to offset widespread messages of medical marketers and commercial lawyers, who are playing an increasing role in shaping public understanding of international surrogacy. Furthermore, medical and bioethical communities need to be engaged in exposing and rectifying blatant conflicts of interest that worsen as surrogate medical care is increasingly influenced by profit-driven third parties.