Stratified Reproduction, Donor Egg IVF, and Transnational Surrogacy in India

This presentation examines the global surrogacy industry in India, a thriving sub-industry of reproductive tourism, in which intended parents travel from one country to another in order to obtain assisted reproductive technology (ART) procedures. Surrogacy in India is often described by some as a “win-win” situation that simultaneously improves the lives of women who serve as gestational surrogates and provides highly desired children for infertile couples; by others, it is described as the ultimate form of exploitation of India’s most vulnerable women. In this presentation I move beyond these descriptions in order to generate a more complex and nuanced debate based on the actual experiences of those involved in surrogacy arrangements: the surrogates, intended parents, egg donors, caretakers, and doctors who come together to bring new humans and kinship relations into existence. While surrogacy in India clearly evokes the multiple flows of people, technology, capital and reproductive tissues that occur on a global level, what can we learn from the experiences of these global reproductive actors “on-the-ground”? I employ stratified reproduction as a theoretical framework within which to examine the circumstances that determine how certain categories of people are valued and empowered to reproduce while others are not (Colen 1995; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in India, I examine constructions of race and bio-genetic relations in the practice of donor egg IVF with gestational surrogacy. I suggest that in the context of transnational surrogacy, actors rely on varied and fluid notions of race and kinship in order make sense of their relationships with other actors involved. At the same time, however, these notions reflect and reinforce the hierarchies of race, class, and nation that are deeply implicated in transnational surrogacy..