Abstract
India is the top provider of surrogacy services in the world, with a multi-million dollar surrogacy industry that continues to grow exponentially. Some scholars have exulted transnational surrogacy for the possibilities it opens for infertile couples, while others have offered bioethical cautionary tales, rebuked exploitative intended parents, or lamented the exploitation of surrogate mothers—but very little is known about the experience of and transaction between surrogate mothers and intended parents outside the lens of the many agencies that control surrogacy in India. Drawing from interviews with surrogate mothers and egg donors in Bangalore, as well as twenty straight and gay couples in the United States and Australia, this book focuses on the processes of social and market exchange in transnational surrogacy. It interrogates the creation and maintenance of reproductive labor markets, the function of agencies and surrogacy brokers, and how women become surrogate mothers. The book argues that this reproductive industry is organized to control and disempower women workers and yet the interviews reveal that, by and large, the surrogate mothers in Bangalore found the experience life affirming. The book explores this tension, and the lived realities of many surrogate mothers whose deepening bodily commodification is paradoxically experienced as a revitalizing life development. Itdelineates 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.
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