Translation of the 2017 article: Maternidad subrogada: vosotrasparís, nosotros decidimos.
Patricia Merino author of Maternity, Equality and Fraternity
In a TV
program about surrogacy in Ukraine [1],
we watch the interview of a young Spanish couple who are to become parents
thanks to an Ukrainian surrogate mother. The very competitive prices of
surrogacy in this country have put this means of reproduction within the reach
of the middle class (of the total 40-50,000 euros paid by intended parents, the
program's researchers are unable to find out the exact amount the surrogate
woman receives, but it is considerably less than the 8,000 euros per child
advertised in the Ukrainian press as bait for women). The young 26-year-old
Spanish intended mother who has a congenital condition that impedes her
pregnancy, shows to the camera a tiny soccer team t shirt for the baby, and says,
"when you start a process like this you always feel like buying
things".
Matt and Chad, an American gay couple give in their blog a detailed account of the
surrogacy process of their two children in India: during gestation they post:
"we are X weeks pregnant" and describe in detail the fetal
development and the sensations of pregnancy in first person. The Indian woman
actually pregnant, mother of their children, is hardly ever mentioned in the
huge blog: "we have met our surrogate, talked to her and her husband, and
have been to ultrasounds with her. I am confident that there is no coercion,
and that she has freely entered this arrangement. I have no doubt that the
benefits that her family will gain from this contract will be phenomenally
positive"[2].
Once their two sons were born, Matt and Chad had the services of two women
(cook and nanny) 6 days a week. In this family of four men, a patriarchal dream
becomes a reality: women, all of them subordinate and at their disposal through
legal contracts, offer the men a variety of services: gestation, cleaning,
caring, cooking, giving birth, washing, ironing, etc.; and all this without the
need to relate directly to them or to mingle them into a social life that is reserved for those who
live in the superior spheres of those who manage the world.
We are
getting closer to the realization of the patriarchal utopia: a happy world
without a war of the sexes in which women -one third dedicated to sexual
services, one third in the precariat and one third of privileged women who have
political power and are the allies of masculinist rule-- would finally have,
all of them, fixed and consented positions at the service of the present patriarchal
structures, that is, late-capitalism, and in which misogyny -now shared and
spurred by women themselves- would be as basic an element of social life as the
air we breathe.
The rapid
advent and normalization of surrogate motherhood has four causes:
The main driving force behind this phenomenon is, no wonder, business: it is an
activity with enormous growth potential, a promise of spectacular net profits.
The second driving force is the desire for babies in a society where reproduction
has become a privilege and a biological difficulty, as women invest their youth
in the labor market. This desire, transformed into narcissistic consumption,
generates a postmodern demand for creatures deconstructed from their original
bond and turned into merchandise.
The third
and fourth causes are not driving forces but foundations. One is technology:
the triumphant power of human rationality, once again, extracting a product
from nature and putting it in the market to give it an added value. And the
fourth is the backbone on which this business stands, the substratum where it
is rooted and from which it feeds: the millenary subjugation of women and the
objectification of their bodies at the service of patriarchal interests. It is
important not to lose sight of the fact that surrogacy is baby trafficking. But
to dodge the inconvenience that in our societies it is illegal to trade in
human beings, the buying and selling is disguised as contract: in this case renting
of wombs. For most of us clearly an abusive, exploitative contract that objectifies
people, but being women the objectified subject, and after millennia of
normalized prostitution, this renting of wombs is something we are much more
accustomed to and prone to tolerate, because while slavery has long been
eradicated in our societies, patriarchy is still in good health.
Since this exploitative
practice started being regulated, narratives and theories presenting surrogacy
as an "altruistic" act on the part of the surrogate mothers have been
promoted. That such portrayal may be even credible in cases of commercial surrogacy
can only be explained as an anomaly of judgment
typical of the current general spirit of post-truth and cynicism, and has its empirical basis in the
statements made by some surrogates forgetting that their words, --as the saleswomen
of a service that they are, and in a weak position-- respond to the maxim
"the client is always right".
Surrogate mothers must accomplish the wishes of the clients and comply with all
the terms of their contract, and if the phantasmatic story of altruism, as well
as satisfying the client, has the advantage of providing them with a more
acceptable self-image, so much the better.
As for
"authentic" "altruistic" surrogacy, in the United Kingdom
there are about 10 - 20 cases per year. To give an example of what the
psychological underpinnings of this "altruism" consist of, let's
listen to the story of a British surrogate mother: "I always wanted to
have children, but I never had the chance"; tells Amanda Benson, who explains
that she never had the financial means to become a single mother, so, she decided
to become a mother for others. She chose a gay couple because she thought that
"they would be more accepting of a woman being part of their family"
and had two children for them[3].
This
testimony highlights how surrogacy (whether commercial or not) always makes use
of the two basic structural oppressions of patriarchy: precariousness and the
internalized subjugation of women. The depth of this subjugation creates
"reproductive labor force" ready to be exploited; and in our
post-capitalist societies patriarchy has become so sophisticated and efficient that
sometimes it is even possible to consummate expropriation without even noticing
the fact of an appropriation. There have been many court cases - not as visible
in the media as the happy intended parents with their appropriated babies - of
surrogate mothers who after pregnancy decide to claim rights on the babies they have given birth to;
but even in the United Kingdom, where there is regulation of "altruistic
surrogacy" supposedly guaranteeing and respectful for mothers, a judge can
finally force the mother to hand over the baby that she altruistically conceived
to a couple of intended parents[4].
The most
basic drive of patriarchy is its will to appropriate the procreative capacity
of women. There are myths and beliefs in ancient cultures all over the planet that
respond to the same basic story: although women nurture and "cook"
babies in their wombs, it is the seed and the mystical power of men that gives
them human form and identity; motherhood would only provide "raw
material", since it is not women, but men who have the creative power that
makes them superior. Aristotle shared this view, as did many Fathers of the
Church. This patriarchal need to deny and degrade female centrality in
procreation is visible in the fact that Zeus, the personification of Western
patriarchy, accumulates phantasmatic births: Dionysus emerged from his own
thigh, and Athena, from his head. Apollo, son of Zeus and incarnation of a
consolidated patriarchal order, explains thus in The Eumenides, the role of mothers in the generation of creatures:
“.... You
recognize the truth of my reasons. The mother is not the begetter of the one
called her child, but only the wet nurse of the germ sown in her womb. He who
joins her is the one who begets. The woman is like a hostess who receives in
lodging the germ of another and keeps it, if heaven does not provide
otherwise".
It seems
that Apollo already had in mind the renting of wombs. It is obvious the link
between the symbolic pre-eminence given to the magical male intervention in
conception throughout history, and the legal powers that a male can claim today
over a baby by the mere contribution of a spermatozoon. And it is no
coincidence that, surrogate babies in many countries --for instance, all the Ukrainian
babies--, have only paternal filiation when they arrive in this world: they are
children born of the father. The contracting fathers, like postmodern Zeus,
are, upon arrival in the country of destination, the sole creators of their
offspring, and this is possible thanks to the legal force of the male gamete.
The surrogacy business has the advantage of a having emerged in a cultural and
ideological climate in which the public denial of essences, aprioris and
universals, has become an easy and democratic way to gain access to the intellectual
realm of what is supposedly sophisticated and cool. And there is nothing better
than motherhood to deny them all at once.
One of the
milestones in the triumph of hyper-constructivism in the social sciences was
the questioning by the American anthropologist David M. Schneider of the bases
on which the study of kinship had been founded: with his 1972 article "What
is kinship all about?" he turned the world of anthropology upside
down. Schneider criticized the
ethnocentrism of what he called the "doctrine of the genealogical unity of
mankind," which consists in the a priori assumption that the
"biological facts of reproduction" are indeed the principle that
universally establishes kinship and filiation. As evidence that this is not so,
Schneider pointed to the fact that in many cultures the link between people is
explained through principles related to nutrition, mutual care or coexistence,
and not by sharing genetic material as we Westerners do. But Schneider -like
most anthropologists and social analysts- when he thinks of the
"biological facts of reproduction" thinks androcentrically mainly of
coitus and male contribution. What Schneider forgets, and yet it is obvious to
anyone who does not fly permanently in the abstract world of constructs, is
that the main "biological fact of reproduction" is not coitus but
gestation and its outcome, childbirth.
If
Schneider were a woman, she would not have thought of kinship as something
alien to biology. However, Schneider's criticism is valid regarding coitus, paternity,
and its social construction, which, as the cross-cultural comparison shows us,
is varied and not necessarily linked to genetics; whereas, regardless of its
symbolic representation, biological motherhood -understood as gestation and
childbirth- has always automatically led to social motherhood in all known
societies.
Until now.
Surrogacy would not be possible without the supremacy granted to the gametes
when considering the "facts" of reproduction; and this preferential
value is of a clearly patriarchal sign: it is because the gametes are the only thing that the male provides
to the human reproduction that these cells have received such symbolic
reverence and legal power.
This
supremacy explains the impressive faculty of the male gametes to generate rights:
In surrogacy, rights by gestation and parturition are cancelled and the rights due
to male genetic links are emphasized. Genetics is a form of biological relation
that is abstract, no matter how much the genes effectively convey one´s
characteristics, since the transmission of gametes does not necessarily imply
any physical contact or emotional bond with the child that will result from
that particular genetic combination. The function of the gametes in procreation
is insignificant contrasted with the enormity of the long and biologically
costly nine-month gestational process in which an embryo develops into a fetus
to finally bring a child into this world.
Perhaps it is comparable to the role that plays a key in the machinery
of a car that endures a 900 km journey. That such a costly, sometimes risky and
intimate bodily process can be expropriated and commodified gives us the
measure of the dehumanization of our societies. Patriarchal capitalism today
seems to have found a way to turn what we thought were improvements for women
into chains: while demands for equality, transmuted into egalitarianism are now
used in tribunals by revengeful and expropriating fathers, technological progress
in the control of female fertility and reproductive processes has turned into
the most sophisticated instrument of exploitation ever available to patriarchy.
The normalization of surrogate motherhood is a defeat for feminism, a defeat
that is added to others, such as the immense and often arbitrary power of legal
systems to retreat custodies from mothers and to grant them to fathers, and the
global, alarming and unstoppable feminization of poverty. All three directly
related to the experience of motherhood. For decades, hegemonic feminism has
been dragging along a theoretical and strategic error with regard to the
representation of motherhood. And it will be difficult to recover the lost ground
against patriarchy without changing the discourse.
[1] http://www.cuatro.com/enelpuntodemira/a-carta/punto-mira-completo-carta_2_2310030003.html
[2] http://justoneoutofsevenbillion.blogspot.com.es/2011/12/
[3] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28864973
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/may/06/high-court-orders-surrogate-mother-baby-gay-couple
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