Over the last two decades, India has become a popular global destination for reproductive tourism, wherein international clients seek biomedical interventions like surrogacy to have children, due to the country’s lax laws and availability of cheap labor. However, the Indian state has recently criminalized commercial surrogacy, legally recognizing only altruistic surrogacy for heterosexual married couples and single mothers. Altruistic surrogacy is the provision of reproductive services without monetary compensation. My research studies the legal articulations of surrogacy in India and how they render surrogate workers socially and economically vulnerable. The Indian surrogacy industry is built on imbalances of power, with lower-income, oppressed-caste, often migrant women outsourcing their wombs to wealthy, upper-caste clients. The stratified biomedicalization of the process entails that the privileged and wealthy have access to advanced biotechnological forms of reproduction, while the rural poor barely have access to adequate healthcare. This is further complicated by the turn to altruism, wherein the state constructs gendered subjectivities through the figure of the surrogate worker, devaluing and naturalizing women’s (re)productive labor while continuing to commodify their bodies using metaphors of gifting and kindness. To understand this form of reproductive governance better, I juxtapose the criminalization of commercial surrogacy with the neoliberalization and corporatization of healthcare in India, along with the anti-natalist policies of the postcolonial state. My research aims to make visible the labor that constitutes surrogate “motherhood,” and investigate the social and economic implications of such legislation on surrogate workers.
