Article
Crossmedia Flows of
Documentary Images and
the Transnational
Communicative Figuration
Surrounding Gestational
Surrogacy in India
BioScope
9(2) 1–24
© 2019 Screen South Asia Trust
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0974927618813477
journals.sagepub.com/home/bio
Nadja-Christina Schneider
Abstract
The article is based on the assumption that documentary films are an important ‘
channel of mediation’ (Strathern, 2002, Journal of Molecular Biology, 319(4), 985–993)
that helps make visible the changing configurations of family, kinship and social
reproduction. It further assumes that documentary images of egg donors, medical
procedures, fertility clinics, delivery or labouring bodies of surrogates, and handing
over of a ‘commodified’ newborn baby to the commissioning parents effectively convey the repercussions that gestational surrogacy has for all the medicalised bodies
which are involved in the transnational processes of reproduction. Widely circulated
and received documentaries such as Google Baby (2009), House of Surrogates (2013), Ma
Na Sapna: A Mother’s Dream (2013) or Can We See the Baby Bump Please? (2013) often
function as a starting point and major reference for the debate about this complex
issue. But while academic or journalistic articles mostly refer to individual films and
on the theme in focus, the different context(s) of the medium itself are less reflected
upon. Documentary filmmaking is of course always situated in a specific sociopolitical context, and this in turn shapes the way in which the visual medium make us, as
non-experts, see and learn. It also forms the basis of our quest for more knowledge
and better understanding, that is, in this case of the transnational entanglements in the
field of assisted reproductive technologies. In addition to that, like any other medium
or media-related practice today, documentary filmmaking is also embedded in profoundly transformed media environments, networks and communicative practices.
In order to understand how information and knowledge about split parenthood and
gestational surrogacy is mediated to transnational audiences and framed in public
discussions, it is thus necessary to shed light on the interconnectedness of different
media forms and framings through which the communication around this complex
topic has formed. Instead of a close reading of selected documentaries, the article
Nadja-Christina Schneider, Gender and Media Studies for the South Asian Region, Humboldt-Universität
zu Berlin, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Invalidenstr. 118, D-10115 Berlin.
E-mail: nadja-christina.schneider@hu-berlin.de
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therefore attempts to trace and contextualise the crossmedial and translocal itineraries
of three key images and central tropes that have influenced the framing of transnational reproduction and gestational surrogacy in India significantly: (a) the medical
authority-cum-media actor (i.e., internationally well-known fertility expert and doctor
in charge, Dr Nayana Patel), (b) the surrogacy hostels and dormitories (i.e., the central
symbol of constant surveillance and control of surrogates) and (c) the metaphor of
‘rented/hired wombs’ (i.e., the notion of a passive provision of body parts and understanding of gestational surrogacy as active labour).
Keywords
Documentary mediations, gestational surrogacy in India, communicative figurations,
transnational reproduction
Introduction
Changes in the ethical terrain with which science operates have been going on all the time, until we
suddenly seem to find ourselves on a ‘new’ social map that needs interpretation. We are already
there, the social innovation has already happened. It is the commentary that lags behind. […] What
is involved is a process of translation across different domains of knowledge: society interrogating
itself. (Strathern, 2002, p. 985)
As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (2002) argues in her article, the interlocking of
technological innovations and societal changes is a question our attention is usually
only drawn to after this interrelationship has been made visible by the media or other
‘channels of mediation’. Which means that at the time of its becoming a public matter
of comment and discussion, the actual innovation is already something which happened in the past and we as non-experts are literally not able to ‘see that prior process
of change’ independently (Strathern, 2002, p. 985).
The bio-technological1 innovation definitely marked a watershed moment in the
recent history of technologically assisted reproduction. The moment and procedure,
which is made visible here in the RT documentary Wombs for Rent in India (2015) is
called the intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). The transvaginal retrieval of oocytes
allows for the direct injection of sperm into the ova and hence for a fertilisation outside
the body. This procedure exists since 1992 and has since then become the standard
procedure of technologically assisted reproduction, thereby developing further and
increasingly replacing the conventional in vitro fertilisation in which the egg and sperm
are manually combined in a laboratory dish. As a result of this repro-technological
innovation, up to five persons can now be involved in the process of creating a new
baby. The procedure can be done using the so-called intended mother’s own egg cells
and her partner’s sperm. Or it may involve eggs, sperm or embryos from a known or
anonymous donor. Moreover, in many cases, a surrogate mother or so-called ‘gestational carrier’ is used, who has an embryo implanted in her uterus. As a consequence,
the presence and increasingly important role of the sperm donor and surrogate
mother—and since the 1990s also the third figure of the egg donor—for the social
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reproduction of biological and genetically related families all over the world are now
hard to ignore. While the altruistic language and terms such as ‘donors’ and ‘surrogates’ conceal the rapid worldwide commercialisation of gametes, it is important to
keep in mind that many different forms of non-commercial actual donations of sperms,
eggs as well as gestation and delivery of a baby are currently also increasingly practiced in many parts of the world.2 Besides the growing commercialisation, another
important aspect which is concealed by the altruistic language of ‘donation’ is the
social inequality and hierarchy which has become a defining moment of technologically assisted reproduction since the beginning of the era of commercial surrogacy in
the late 1970s (Bernard, 2014, pp. 278ff.). Over a period of two decades, the ‘surrogate
mother’ used to be a woman who agreed to carry her own genetic child for another
couple. Since the end of the 1990s, however, the new form of gestational surrogacy, in
which the surrogate mother has no genetic relationship to the child that she agrees to
carry and deliver for the intended parents, has become more and more prominent. As
cultural historian, Andreas Bernard (2014, pp. 278ff.) argues that the social inequality
and hierarchy between commissioning parents and surrogate mothers increased significantly from the moment when the surrogate was no longer necessarily genetically
related to the baby, and the colour of her skin was hence no longer of relevance to the
intending parents.
It is indeed interesting to note the time gap between the beginning of the era of commercial surrogacy around the end of the 1970s, and the enhanced public visibility as
well as debate about the repercussions of the repro-technological innovations that
have led to a new phenomenon called split mother- and parenthood. This holds especially true for the so-called Global South. Together with Thailand, India came to be
known as one of the surrogacy hubs in Asia and for more than 10 years, transnational
surrogacy was indeed a thriving business in this country. Despite the legal ban on
commercial surrogacy in 2015, it has not been terminated completely according to
press reports.3 The assisted reproduction sector in India has been reported as being
worth several hundred million dollars or even more than two billion dollars in recent
years, depending upon the source. It is rather difficult to measure the commercial
value of an industry that had been legal in India since 2002 but never regulated, in
spite of repeated attempts to draft and pass a comprehensive ART legislation.
A number of widely circulated and viewed documentary films—such as Google
Baby (Frank, 2009), Can We See the Baby Bump Please? (Sama & Sharma, 2013) or House
of Surrogates (Rudge, 2013)—have clearly functioned as a starting and major reference
point for the debate about the complex issue of assisted reproductive medicine and
transnational surrogacy in India. These films can also be said to have co-created ‘iconic’
images and narratives which were subsequently taken up or developed further in various other formats and media, for instance in documentary theatre, journalistic reportages, fictional films or novels. Despite this observation, little attention has been paid to
the existing body of documentary films, particularly with regard to the remarkable
intertextual and intermedial references—as well as reiterations—which, as this article
would like to show, have added significantly to the establishment of a number of more
or less ‘standardised’ stories and visual representations in documentary mediations of
the topic.4 The article also argues for the need to pay more attention to the specific
political-economic situatedness of documentary films, as these mediations not only
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make us see and learn, in Strathern’s sense, but to a large extent also shape our quest
for more knowledge and deeper understanding of the transnational entanglements in
the field of assisted reproductive technologies. A contextualised analysis and comparison of documentary mediations can also shed light on interconnectedness of different
media forms, formats and communicative practices, and hence their contribution to an
emerging communicative figuration.5 However, it should be mentioned that this
applies primarily to transnational communicative spaces and contexts in which commissioning parents from the so-called Global North are involved (who may sometimes
also happen to be of Indian origin). But in order to understand how the procedures
and societal repercussions of assisted reproductive technologies are mediated to audiences in India, it seems rather obvious that the focus would have to be laid first of all
on a number of famous actors or directors and their important role in facilitating an
understanding that surrogacy can be seen as a legitimate means of obtaining a child.
Most notably, Aamir Khan—the so-called ‘poster boy’ for the surrogacy industry in
India (Majumdar, 2014a, p. 120)—and his wife Kiran Rao were one of the first celebrity
couples to declare that their son Azad was born through a surrogate mother (see, e.g.,
India Today, 2013).
Whether a direct link between increasing surrogacy and decreasing adoption can be
established or not has also been a matter of debate recently. In any case, there can be
no doubt about the fact that celebrity endorsement was especially conducive for the
surrogacy industry in India. An article from the Daily Mail which was published in
June last year quotes an IVF specialist from Delhi who describes how surrogacy
requests from Indian parents have doubled in her clinic since Aamir Khan and Kiran
Rao went in for it:
‘The celebrity endorsement of surrogacy has given it an aura of aspiration. Suddenly, surrogacy is not just acceptable—it’s cool. It’s what the rich and famous do,’ said Dr Shivani
Sachdev Gour, a Delhi-based IVF Specialist. ‘Interest in this particular assisted reproductive
technology shot up soon after Aamir Khan had his surrogate baby. Surrogacy requests from
Indian parents have doubled since Aamir Khan went in for it. Couples just land up and say
“Aamir Khan ne kiya, hamey bhi karna hai!” (Aamir Khan has done it we also want to do it),’
she added. (Sharma 2016)
Much more controversy surrounded the surrogacy which was commissioned by Shah
Rukh Khan and his wife Gauri because of the alleged prenatal sex determination for
their third child and second son, AbRam. Interestingly, the coverage and discussion
was, once again, very different when actor Tusshar Kapoor became the single father of
a son by an Indian surrogate in 2016 (and half a year later, film producer and director
Karan Johar became a father of twins through surrogacy), as at least the Englishlanguage press reacted with enthusiastic approval lauding the actor’s ‘bold step’ and
his ‘new age fatherhood’ repeatedly. In particular, since the incumbent Minister of
External Affairs of India, Sushma Swaraj, sharply criticised members of the Hindi film
industry for abusing the possibilities of surrogacy—and in the same breath immediately declared that the new surrogacy bill would unequivocally bar couples in live-in
relationships, as well as same-sex couples and single parents from accessing the prospectively solely legal form of, so-called altruistic, surrogacy (DailyO, 2016)—the
question of who and what family is allowed to be in India has been discussed in a
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5
remarkably lively and public manner.6 It might hence appear exceptionally ironic that
ever since the proclamation of the ban on commercial surrogacy in India in October
2015, of all things, entirely new ways of thinking and living family and kinship have
become as strongly visible in Indian media as hardly ever before. Which is of course
precisely what the Indian state had tried to prevent by banning foreign same-sex couples and single parents from obtaining a child through surrogacy in India in 2013
already. Nevertheless, what hardly seems to have changed is the ongoing fundamental invisibility and erasure of the surrogates themselves, as sociologist Anindita
Majumdar has called it in her analysis of the coverage on commercial surrogacy in
Indian print media (Majumdar, 2014a). And this ‘fazing her out of the narrative altogether’ (Majumdar, 2014a, p. 109) is reiterated every time a celebrity publicly and eloquently thanks the doctors at fertility clinics—or even ‘the universe’, as did Karan
Johar on the occasion of his children’s first birthday in February 2017—for their
surrogacy-born children, but hardly ever bother to even mention the surrogate and her
labour. So even if there were scattered reports on protesting surrogates in the aftermath of the ban, and some of them were occasionally even permitted fleeting appearances on talk shows, the central person of interest for interviewers was always an
‘expert’, or rather the medical director of the respective clinic. Nonetheless, in the
course of the current debate, the critical interventions of academics and activists have
increased in numbers, with strong appeals for the recognition of surrogacy as labour,
in consideration of the long history and various forms of surrogacy. This article is part
of a larger research project that investigates the visualisation of different forms of intimate and emotional labour in documentary and fictional films as well as their interrelationship with changing figurations of family. Intimate labour is a concept which
was first introduced in a co-edited volume by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
who consider various occupations under this category as sharing common attributes
that are ‘usually subsumed under the often discretely examined categories of care,
domestic, and sex work’:
Each of these labors forges interdependent relations, represents work assumed to be the
unpaid responsibility of women, and consequently, is usually considered to be a non-market
activity or an activity of low economic value that should be done by lower classes or racial
outsiders. (Boris & Parreñas, 2010, p. 3)
The term emotional labour was famously coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild
in her study on gender-typed jobs in the US economy and the specifically required
training, professionalisation and constant manipulation of one’s own affects in order
to induce particular feelings in the client or customer (Hochschild, 1983). Hochschild’s
two well-known case studies for her book centred on flight attendants and debt collectors who were working for the same airlines, but with very different and deeply gendered registers of emotions. She also argued aptly that similar forms of emotional
labour would become more and more common with the global expansion of service
industries (see also Connell, 2009, p. 83). Alienated relationships based on commercialised affects and gender stereotypes would hence become a defining characteristic of
contemporary work worlds, and accordingly, many more examples can be found in
seemingly diverse sectors such as call centres, care work, beauty parlours, domestic
labour as well as in the field of outsourced reproductive labour. For the analysis of
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documentary films, it is especially conducive to apply both concepts and to explore
how different forms and intersections between emotional and intimate labour are visualised or may be even intentionally used by directors to convey an understanding of
the specific labour in focus. As sociologist Amrita Pande convincingly argues in her
long-term ethnographic study of commercial surrogacy in India, specifically focusing
on Nayana Patel’s famous (and visually much overrepresented) fertility clinic in
Anand in Gujarat, the clinic aims at producing so-called ‘perfect mother-workers’.
Mother-workers or surrogates constantly have to manipulate and discipline their own
emotions and affects, she argues, in order to care for the unborn child as if it was their
own. At the same time, they are told repeatedly to think of the baby as the genetic child
of others that does not belong to them and to keep the contractual relationship between
them and the commissioning parents as well as the clinic constantly in mind.
Furthermore, their sense of guilt and obligation towards their own children is also
systematically deployed by the clinic as an additional disciplinary tool to shape and
produce the targeted perfect mother-workers (Pande, 2014).
The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2016
Salient features of the bill are:
• To allow altruistic ethical surrogacy to intending infertile couple between the
age of 23–50 years and 26–55 years for female and male, respectively.
• The intending couples should be legally married for at least five years and
should be Indian citizens.
• The child born through surrogacy will have the same rights as are available
for the biological child.
• The surrogate mother should be a close relative of the intending couple and
should be between the age of 25–35 years. She can act as surrogate mother only
once.
• The surrogate mother will carry a child which is genetically related to the
Intending Couple.
Source: Department of Health Research (2016) [emphasis my own, NCS].
Transnational reproduction and especially the three hitherto peripheral figures of
the biological family—that is, the sperm donor, the egg cell donor or the surrogate
mother—are certainly no longer under-researched or under-represented topics in current academic as well as non-academic debates. Quite on the contrary, there is a growing number of excellent ethnographic studies and elaborate theoretical discussions as
well as an abundance of fictional and non-fictional films, TV series, documentary theatre productions or novels that all focus on the complex reconfigurations of family,
kinship and parenthood in a global age of increasingly bio-technologised and medicalised bodies. However, precisely the aspect of labour is often neglected or even concealed in this context, especially with regard to surrogate workers. What we encounter
instead is the much-overused metaphor of the ‘rented womb’ or ‘womb for rent’ in far
too many titles and visualisations, as will be shown further.
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Documentary Films as ‘Channels of Mediation’
The body of documentaries on commercial surrogacy in India can be roughly divided
into two categories, first of all the largest group of documentary films which were
produced for trans/national television networks (mainly in the United States, Russia
and Great Britain) and second, a much smaller and less easily accessible group of independently produced documentary films. The latter category can be further divided
into a subgroup of films by directors who predominantly live and work in the socalled Global North and those who live and work mostly in India. Examples for the
first category would be the aforementioned films Wombs for Rent in India by RT
Documentary (2015, 26 min); House of Surrogates by Matt Rudge (BBC 4; 2013, 90 min);
Made in India by Rebecca Haimowitz and Vaishali Sinha (PBS/USA; 2010, 95 min) and
Google Baby by Zippi Brand Frank (HBO/USA; 2009, 69 min). Examples for the second
category would be Ma Na Sapna: A Mother’s Dream by Valerie Gudenus (2013, 86 min);
Can We See the Baby Bump Please? by Surabhi Sharma (produced by SAMA: Resource
Group for Women and Health in Delhi; 2013, 49 min); Womb on Rent by Ishani Dutta
(2013, 49 min) and Mother Anonymous by Rahul Ranadive (as part of Sheela Saravanan’s
research on surrogacy in Mumbai; 2011, 10 min).
The documentaries or rather documentary mediations that I will mainly focus on in
this article belong mostly to the first category, as they were either commissioned by
transnational television channels, by national commercial TV production companies
or non-commercial services such as PBS. I consider these documentaries as the internationally most visible and widely circulated films and some of them are also quite
often referred to in journalistic articles as well as in discussions in various other media.
I would like to distinguish these films, which were all made by professional documentary filmmakers, from a much larger number of reportages that are also sometimes
done in a documentary-style format but often involve much less context-related
research and generally only very short stays in India. These reportages may also be
watched and commented upon by large numbers of viewers on YouTube (such as the
number of videos and reports which were produced for VICE). But unlike the documentaries in focus here, they mostly do not seem to travel across the different societal
domains of knowledge and debate that Strathern talks about in her aforementioned
article and, accordingly, can only be partly considered as ‘channels of mediation’
(Strathern, 2002).
Following James Bennett and Nikki Strange’s elaborate discussion of Television as
Digital Media (2011), documentary films can no longer be seen in isolation as they
are increasingly embedded in a new, digital (and social) media context (Bennett &
Strange, 2011, p. 1). They are hence no longer just ‘televisual or cinematic’, but take on
a variety of forms as they move or are distributed across multiple platforms. However,
it is important to bear in mind that older forms still co-exist with new forms, and this also
pertains to the pluralisation of viewing practices as every service or platform brings
its own ‘viewing protocols to bear on the experience of content’ (Bennett & Strange,
2011, p. 1):
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Documentary films are still viewed on TV in real time by audiences sitting on their sofas,
but they are also viewed on iPads, laptops and phones, downloaded months or even
years after their original release and transmission, and interacted with through two-screen
programming. (Sorensen, 2013, p. 52)
Translocal Circuits and Connectivities of Technologically Assisted
Reproduction: Google Baby (2009)
One of the internationally best-known documentaries about transnational surrogacy
and reproductive tourism in India is Google Baby. The film, which was directed by
Zippi Brand Frank, a former TV journalist from Israel, is exemplary in the way in
which it visualises and contextualises all the new global connectivities, actors and
technologies as well as the practices which together bring forth the transnational
reproductive market. Google Baby is centred around Doron Mamet, the founder and
CEO of Tammuz—a transnational agency catering to intended parents from Israel and
providing them with egg cells from donors in the United States, which are then fertilised and taken to India where they are implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother,
somewhere ‘in the suburbs of Mumbai or Delhi’ as it says on an older version of the
website of the agency, or they are selected ‘from Tammuz’s pool’ and then ‘relocated
with their families to accommodation provided in Kathmandu’. The film was produced
by Sheila Nevins and Yona Wiesenthal and made its debut in Israel in 2009, it was later
purchased by the US American cable network HBO. Google Baby won several awards,
among them the first prize at Docaviv (Tel Aviv), the Magnolia Golden Award in
Shanghai for best documentary as well as an Emmy Award in the United States in 2011.
The film, produced and directed by the Tel Aviv filmmaker Zippi Brand Frank, examines
the ways in which globalization has further complicated and diffused the fertility industry.
‘Google Baby’, though, is also the chronicle of an idea, one belonging to an Israeli entrepreneur named Doron, who gets into the business of using egg donors in the United States and
gestational carriers in India to provide for the childless of the Western world. Logistically,
this involves freezing multiple donor embryos and shipping them to a surrogacy center in
Anand, India, packaged in liquid nitrogen. Emotionally, it requires an enormous amount of
fortitude on the part of childbearers in a culture where some regard surrogacy as a kind of
prostitution. (…) What could easily be rendered as straight-out horrid exploitation is given
an amazingly neutral hand as Ms. Brand Frank deftly avoids the clichés that typically materialize in any journalistic look at atypical reproduction. (Bellafante, 2010)
The film is also available on YouTube in several different versions and has been clicked
or watched more than 100,000 times online (Figure 1). Many press reviews mention,
with some amazement, the ‘striking neutrality’ of the documentary which never seems
to judge the practices that it illuminates or to take a definite stand against commercial
surrogacy and split parenthood. The film’s openness to diverse readings is also clearly
confirmed by some of the highly contrasting comments posted by viewers on YouTube,
ranging from pro-surrogacy statements and sympathetic remarks towards the commissioning parents to expressions of puzzlement or outright shock and disgust about
the outsourcing pregnancies. For instance, user Sarah Godoy posted a comment in
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Schneider
Figure 1. Cover image of the film Google Baby (2009)
Source: Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/
tt1490675/mediaviewer/rm763922688
2017 in which she said: ‘This is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen in my
life’, whereas user Calandra posted a very different comment in December 2017:
I’m watching this documentary for my bioethics class and I must say it’s very detailed and
good to watch. Surrogacy is helping a lot of people with health concerns become parents.
I would go to this same route if I can never have a successful pregnancy. Thumbs up for this
documentary.7
Likewise, comments on widely shared documentaries show that these films may not
only serve as a starting point for critical debate and introspection but sometimes also
primarily as a source of information for potential intending parents, as one comment
posted by ‘r person’ (posted in 2013) indicates:
My partner and I watched this documentary (i.e., Google Baby)—and—decided to go this
route. (…) We are due in April. THANK YOU for drawing so much attention to this. It’s one
thing to fly under the radar, it’s another to become the gay parent capitol of the world! Had
things remained contained, I would not be panicking as to what I will do now that singles
and gays are barred, care to donate some funds to help? (ibid.)
Director Zippi Brand Frank confirmed in press interviews that she does not condemn
the practices of sperm, egg donation and commercial surrogacy entirely, but she
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clearly expressed hopes for her film to support demands for a regulation to avoid the
exploitation or surrogate workers and babies as mere commodities (Leichman, 2011).
As mentioned earlier in this article, even before the Indian government announced
in October 2015 that it would ban foreigners from seeking surrogacy in India, nonheterosexual couples, non-married couples and singles had already been excluded
from the group of foreign nationals that could apply for a ‘Medical Visa’. However,
this was not the case in Nepal so that agencies like Tammuz could use the existing
legal loopholes, hire a surrogate mother in India and ‘relocate’ her across the border.
This cross-border business became only visible in the Indian and international news
media when Israel evacuated babies from Nepal after the earthquake in April 2015,
while the surrogates who had carried and delivered these babies had been left behind
and most of them were actually from India (Green, 2015; Gross, 2015). In the wake of
the negative coverage and massive critique, the government in Nepal announced
shortly afterwards that it would ban foreigners from seeking surrogacy in the country,
as Thailand and India had already announced earlier in the same year. As a consequence, Tammuz is now offering surrogacy programmes or ‘donors’ in the United
States, Ukraine and Albania only, and no longer in Asia, for the time being at least
(see tammuz.com, last accessed Jan 04, 2019).
After the successive bans in Thailand, India and Nepal, many experts expected that
Cambodia (and eventually Laos, too) would become the next surrogacy hub in the
region. Facing losses in what had developed into an extremely lucrative trade, Indian
clinics quickly began moving out to Cambodia, a country with an equally unregulated
surrogacy market and a visa-on-arrival facility for Indian nationals. According to a
report which was published by Aljazeera in June 2016 (Bhowmick, 2016) more than a
dozen Thai and Indian clinics were already operating from Cambodia at that time, and
it was expected that they would primarily hire Indian surrogates, because they are
‘cheaper’. In view of this, many experts in India, including women’s rights and reproductive health advocacy organisations like SAMA, argued that the ban and criminalisation of commercial surrogacy was not really about the protection of poor women but
in fact made them even more vulnerable as the industry would simply go underground. In their view, the long-awaited strict regulation of the surrogacy market in
India would thus have been better than the partial ban (Vora, 2017). However, to the
surprise of many, the government of Cambodia also announced a permanent ban of
commercial surrogacy in the country in November 2016, while the debate about the
draft Surrogacy Regulation Bill in India is still ongoing.
Intermedial References and Intertextual Borrowings:
House of Surrogates (2013)
As briefly indicated earlier in this article, it is particularly interesting to observe that
documentary films create images and tell stories which are often taken up and developed further in various other documentary or fictional formats. Two recent examples
shall serve to illustrate this observation in the following section. The first example is a
novel by British–Indian actress, comedian, screenwriter and novelist Meera Syal which
was published in June 2015, titled The House of Hidden Mothers. The novel was well
received by critics and audiences, especially in the UK. Syal was also willing to play
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her role as an ‘insider’ and ‘authentic expert’ and hence spoke engagingly in television
interviews about the perils of the surrogacy industry in India. This is of course a phenomenon which has been apparent particularly in the ‘packaging’ and marketing of
documentary and fictional films for quite some time now: In view of the competitive
and profoundly changing nature of national and transnational television production,
it is becoming crucial to raise interest in essential issues through credible testimonials,
such as ‘authentic’ actors or other ‘experts’, and to communicate relevant stories which
inform and engage audiences in an equally entertaining and instructive manner.
Against this background, the question regarding the role of the production and knowledge transfer through and ‘around’ the broadcasting of such films (or in this case, the
publication of a novel by a well-known TV actress, comedian and screenwriter) seems
justified. Regarding the transnational communicative figuration which has formed
around the theme of reproductive tourism, split parenthood and commercial surrogacy in India, I found two aspects in the newspaper articles about the novel quite telling. First, that some authors expected the novel to be adapted for a feature film very
soon and also mentioned the fact that Syal already had an eye on the film rights when
her book was published (Elkin, 2015). Second, Syal also mentioned in one interview
that it was in fact a BBC documentary which inspired her to write the book (2015); after
watching this documentary, she says that she knew immediately what her third novel
would be about, and there can be hardly any doubt that Syal was referring to the BBC
documentary House of Surrogates made by director Matt Rudge in 2013.
Like numerous other documentaries and TV reports, Rudge’s film House of Surrogates
(2013) features fertility specialist Dr Nayana Patel very prominently. Patel is surrounded in the aforementioned picture by ‘her surrogates’, as she likes to call them in
interviews. The total number of interviews and documentaries which have been made
about Dr Patel and her clinic would be very difficult to estimate. She became instantly
famous all over the world after the screening of Lisa Ling’s report about her clinic
on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 and was subsequently treated like a spokesperson
of the Indian surrogacy industry by international media. So quite naturally, ever since
the Indian government announced that it would ban foreign couples from seeking surrogacy in India in October 2015, Nayana Patel is once again in the focus of international media and she was also at the forefront of a protest campaign in India, advocating
for strict regulation of commercial surrogacy instead of a ban and criminalisation of
the industry.
One striking feature of this body of documentaries and TV reports is that there are
a lot of borrowings and intertextual references between the different films and formats
which add to the establishment and reiteration of more or less ‘standardised’ stories
and framings. The ‘visual overrepresentation’ of Dr Nayana Patel and her Akanksha
fertility clinic in Anand is of course the most obvious evidence for this. In the context
of the discussion of the ban on commercial surrogacy in India, her rhetorical recourse
to the language of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘human rights’ is particularly interesting to
note. Patel repeatedly and very effectively raised the question across media platforms:
‘Why take away the basic human right to have a baby?’ (Doshi, 2016; Dr Patel, personal communication, 3 February, 2016). Financially speaking, there is probably much
at stake for her, especially since the opening of a new and much bigger ‘state-of-the art
hospital’ in December 2015.
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It is not difficult at all to imagine who the model for the renowned fertility specialist
in Meera Syal’s novel must have been:
Then there’s Dr Passi, the internationally respected doctor who convinces herself, and half
convinces the reader, that she is providing a service which overseas couples want while
giving Indian women the chance to improve their lot and educate their children—as she
funds her own Western lifestyle and puts her own three children through medical school.
Is it advantageous for all concerned or is she simply an unscrupulous exploiter? ([Emphasis
added]; Elkin, 2015)
Nayana Patel’s Akanksha infertility clinic has also become the central visual symbol of
a permanent surveillance of surrogate mothers in the so-called surrogacy hostels
in Anand where they have to spend a large part of their pregnancy. This also leads to
the second interesting example which serves to illustrate the role of documentary
films in the emerging communicative figuration on transnational reproduction and
surrogacy.
Living and Labouring Under a Panoptic Gaze
In an article published in August 2017 in The Guardian, the author Ellen E. Jones ponders about the question why infertility, parenthood and surrogacy have become such
prominent features in a number of highly successful TV productions recently, most
notably Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake: The China Girl and a series based on Margaret
Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) which was adapted for television under the
same title in 2017 (Jones, 2017).8
The author assumes that the implicit equation of surrogacy and prostitution in Jane
Campion’s Top of the Lake: The China Girl is rather controversial, but ‘very much in
keeping with TV’s awareness of the global politics of fertility’ (Jones, 2017). Jones
describes in her article how the show’s images of ‘young women waiting out their
forty weeks in the tense boredom of dormitory-style rooms’ is reminiscent of the documentary House of Surrogates and the ‘Akanksha Infertility Clinic in small-town India,
patronized mostly by couples from the UK, the US and Canada, and run by the glamorous matriarch-meets-entrepreneur, Dr Nayana Patel’ (Jones, 2017). This resemblance
prompted her to interview director Matt Rudge for her article. So in spite of the fact
that the article explores television’s most recent ‘obsession with surrogate mothers’
and talks primarily about two fictional TV shows which were both screened in 2017,
a longer section of it is actually about the reception and long-lasting impact of the
before mentioned documentary from 2013. Rudge says in the same interview that
when he first visited Dr Patel’s fertility clinic in Anand, he thought that viewers would
have impulsive reactions: ‘But what I knew the film would do, is slowly take viewers
deeper, to meet those involved, so that their presumptions would ultimately be turned
on their head’. And Jones agrees that House of Surrogates depiction of a vast global
wealth gap, as well as the careless way the bonds of baby and birth mother were severed,
remained upsetting. However, she goes on to explain that Rudge himself believes that
our culture’s fascination with surrogacy has less to do with the sci-fi strangeness of
the procedure and more to do with the emotions involved. As Rudge puts it: ‘Hope,
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disappointment, separation, love, loss, family; in that sense, it’s a story that goes to the
heart of being human. The themes are universal’ (Jones, 2017).
Although this does not apply to all the contexts and cities in India where surrogate
mothers sometimes stay at home during their pregnancy, the first association and
indeed a standard visual representation of surrogate mothers in documentaries—as
well as in feature films—is the dormitory of the surrogacy hostels.9 The constant surveillance and immobilisation of surrogate mothers who are separated from their own
families and children for a long time has been the focus of much critique in the
academic discussions as well as in public debates.10 However, this narrative is also
sometimes complicated by surrogates themselves who talk about the strong bonds of
friendship and solidarity between women who share a lot of similar experiences, or
about the little subversive acts they perform together to undermine the medical control over their bodies (Pande, 2010). Ma Na Sapna: A Mother’s Dream (2013) by Austrian
director Valerie Gudenus has several interesting scenes in this regard in which we see
and hear, on the one hand, how interpersonal conflicts between surrogates may erupt
in the claustrophobic and barrack-like atmosphere of the surrogacy hostel. On the
other hand, we listen to personal stories such as Champa’s (33:18 min) who, four days
after the embryo transfer into her womb, tells the director’s team and interpreter
Reshma Jain how much she hopes that the results will be positive (i.e., that she will be
pregnant), not least because she is visibly enjoying the company of her two roommates
whom she likes a lot. Also, by hearing Champa comment on how much cooler the
house (hostel) is during the hot season, we may be inclined to believe that despite the
constant surveillance, (self-)disciplining and immobilisation, at least for some surrogates, this could indeed be a welcome break from their strenuous and demanding
everyday lives. Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, this ambivalent trope of a
‘welcome holiday’ for the surrogates whose lives outside the hostel might be so much
tougher than inside the clinic is also taken up in fictional firms. Notably when the
doctor in charge explains to a (usually) Western intending couple that the monthslong separation of the surrogates from their families and especially—as is generally
suggested in post-Nirbhaya visualisations of gender relations for German television
screens—often from a very violent husband is assumed to be a preferable condition,
not only presented as a better option for the surrogacy-born baby but also for the surrogate mother herself. A rather clichéd and deeply orientalist visualisation of this everrecurring trope of the victimised Southern woman who is ‘saved’ from her husband,
at least temporarily, by a medical authority and the commissioning couple from
Germany that selects her as ‘their’ surrogate mother can for instance be found in the
TV melodrama Monsoon Baby (Andreas Kleinert, Director), which was released in 2014
and since then successfully screened several times on German public broadcasting
channel ARD.
Another very problematic aspect is the camera’s gaze onto the labouring bodies of
surrogate mothers during childbirth, an ethically questionable visualisation of surrogacy which has nevertheless rarely been discussed nor problematised. Their faces covered with sweat and sometimes tears, the surrogates usually do not speak. In the many
documentary films which were shot in Dr Nayana Patel’s clinic in Anand, it is once
again the doctor in charge or other ‘observing medical experts’ who speak for her,
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interpret and comment on the situation. It is of course a golden opportunity for
the filmmaker: an extremely versatile doctor performing a routine C-section while
responding to a phone call and saying a few friendly words towards the surrogate
mother as well as the camera. Then, very matter-of-factly, Dr Patel announces ‘Now
we send the baby out to the mother’ (Google Baby, 4:35 min). What better opportunity
could there be for a filmmaker than this moment of twofold delivery in order to
convey the complexities of split motherhood and the commodification of bodies
and babies.
Framing Surrogacy as Labour Versus a Prevalent Rhetoric of
‘Rented Wombs’
[A] surrogate’s nine-month-long motherhood is often figurative, a simple figure of speech
that is routinized, normalized, and naturalized in media, policy, and clinical discourses.
These stratified reproducers seldom become ‘like a mother’, given the racial, class, and ethnic
differences between the supplanted mother and the other mother. (Bharadwaj, 2012, p. 146)
One standardised narrative which was first introduced to a global audience by the
Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 and has been reiterated since then in many documentary
films and countless other media is the metaphor of the ‘womb for rent’ or ‘rented
womb’ of the surrogate mother. Specifically with regard to the coverage in Indian
news media, Anindita Majumdar notes an important shift taking place between 2007
and 2014 in the way surrogacy was perceived vis-à-vis the infertile couple and their
individual ‘drama of childlessness’, which ultimately led to an almost complete erasure of the surrogate mother from the picture (Majumdar, 2014a). She argues that the
exploitative business of surrogacy, the missing legal regulation and the many risks
involved for surrogate mothers were now increasingly couched in a language of altruism and philanthropy and framed as a ‘win–win situation’ or an act of solidarity
between two women—one woman whose longing for a genetic child would be fulfilled and the other woman whose hopes for a better future for her children would
finally become real. However, this ‘rhetoric of the womb’ is by no means limited to the
framing and coverage in Indian news media, but can equally be regarded as a key
metaphor which is used transnationally in the context of almost every media-related
discussion of commercial surrogacy in India and other countries in the so-called Global
South. In view of this erasure of the surrogate mother from the media coverage, the
increasing use of a rhetoric of the womb as well as a general shift of attention to the
plight of the childless couple, it is particularly relevant to find out that how far documentary filmmakers are motivated and able to ‘step in’ and assume the function of
investigative journalism or if they help enhance the visibility and give voice to the
surrogate workers through their films. There can perhaps be no straightforward
answer to these questions, but there is most certainly a noticeable difference between
the group of documentary films which are made by international filmmakers and
those made by Indian filmmakers, that is, who primarily address Indian audiences.
For instance, I was told by one Indian researcher who tried several times to interview
Nayana Patel that it was next to impossible to meet her, while it was obviously much
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15
easier for Western filmmakers to get access to Dr Patel, or that was at least her impression. So it is perhaps no coincidence at all that we see documentary explorations of
other places, fertility clinics as well as homes of surrogates workers in this smaller
body of films, whereas Patel and her clinic very clearly dominate the visual production
of filmmakers who are located in Western countries, as has already been pointed out.
In these documentaries, however, the surrogates can only be interviewed inside the
fertility clinic or inside the surrogacy hostels, and it is hence no surprise that they often
display a deep gratitude towards the clinic and especially the doctor in charge. They
also tend to reproduce the same rhetoric of altruism and of surrogacy being a ‘life
changing opportunity’ for them which, as the audience is often made to believe, will
allow them to buy a house or invest the money they earn for a better education of their
children. However, it is interesting how a film like Ma Na Sapna brings this into question, rather subtly. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that in many scenes in this
film, Nayana Patel once again knows how to make use of a documentary film for her
tried and tested mode of self-representation. But Ma Na Sapna also manages to qualify
some of the statements which had been made in previous documentaries on
the Akanksha fertility clinic and commercial surrogacy in India in general, such as the
assertion that surrogate mothers will be able to buy a house for their family from the
money they earn for their physical and emotional labour. Some dialogues in Valerie
Gudenus’ film make it very clear, however, that the prices for houses have gone up
very quickly in all the surrounding localities, while the wage Dr Patel’s clinic is willing
to pay to the surrogate mothers has not been increased correspondingly during the last
couple of years. Another example would be the satirical comments made by surrogates on the qualification of the lady who is supposed to teach them some basic
knowledge of the English language. It is an essential element of Nayana Patel’s selfrepresentation as a ‘feminist entrepreneur’ that she wants ‘her’ surrogates to ‘learn
something’, that is, acquire skills, such as embroidery, which would enable them to
earn a living after leaving the clinic or gaining a basic mastery of the English language
that would enable them to communicate with ‘their’ commissioning parents directly,
but also to negotiate with them about a higher ‘compensation’ for their labour.
Excerpt from a dialogue between Amrita Pande and Ditte Maria Bjerg about their collaborative performance Made in India: Sketches from a Baby Farm, based on Pande’s ethnographic
research in Anand (Figure 2).
Embroidery Project
Amrita: Given the anxieties surrounding surrogacy, it is hardly surprising that debates
around surrogacy find it hard to steer away from morality. Surrogacy hostels add to the dystopic vision of baby farms. ‘But is there any point just constantly talking about how immoral
it is that these poor brown women are being forced to sell their wombs? Don’t we need to
move on and realize that these women are workers, workers with workers’ rights? What do
you think?’ I script these lines for European theatre-going audiences and wonder how they
would react. How does one shift the lens away from morality towards labor rights?
Ditte: One of the ‘training’ activities for the women residing at the surrogacy hostel is
embroidery. Twice a week a teacher turns up and the women are taught how to embroider mundane motifs like flowers and leaves. This gendered work seems ‘fitting’ for pregnant women, it does not hurt the baby, and does not challenge the disciplining tactics, the
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Figure 2. Sociologist Amrita Pande performing in Made in India: Sketches from a Baby Farm, a
multi-media theatre performance based on her research in Anand
Source: Berglund, 2015.
medical staff or the clients visiting the hostel. But we came up with a devious plan: Could
we not collaborate with the women and produce some embroideries for the performance and
create motifs about their ‘work’ as surrogates? The women would get paid for their work and
our audiences would get a concrete representation of the women, and understand that these
women are workers, able to produce something else than babies. (…) Our ideas about motifs
like injections, embryo transfers and egg removal are supplemented with their own more
pressing images of surrogacy—airplanes, cellphones and hot chili peppers.
In the context of her own ethnographic research, Pande is cautious not to overinterpret
the ‘everyday resistances’ by surrogates in Anand as something which could really
pose a ‘threat to the fundamentally exploitative structure of transnational surrogacy’.
What they do represent to her, however, ‘is a constant process of negotiation and
strategizing at the local level’ (Pande, 2010, 2014, pp. 10–11). Despite these ambivalences and the fact that visualisations of the dormitories have become a standardised
or even stereotypical form of representation of commercial surrogacy in India, it can
be argued that precisely this kind of visual representation of the surrogacy hostels and
dormitories is still crucial as it enables us, the viewers, to see and immediately understand why the rhetoric of rented wombs is so deeply problematic. Not only because it
serves to further erase the surrogate from the picture but also because it suggests that
no active labour is involved in the whole process, as the surrogate seemingly only
‘rents out’ a body part, her uterus and is hence not seen as a worker who is, accordingly, also entitled to labour rights and social security. Exactly, this is the reason why
reproductive health and women’s rights organisations like SAMA have been advocating for a strict regulation of commercial surrogacy in India for many years and calling
for a recognition of surrogacy as labour, but not a legal ban.
Regarding, more specifically, the academic discussion on the two concepts of intimate and emotional labour, Pande’s study as well as many of the documentaries on
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reproductive tourism and commercial surrogacy in India indeed help us understand
that surrogate workers engage in both. They are thus also refuting the notion brought
forward by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas that ‘surrogate mothers do not
engage in emotional labor, though their jobs may involve emotional labor that would
occur in private and not public spaces’:
However, emotional labor is not a prerequisite or requirement in intimate labor. In many
cases, intimate laborers need not regulate their emotions. Sperm donors, (…) and surrogate
mothers do not engage in emotional labor. (Boris & Parreñas, 2010, p. 7)
It is questionable whether the public–private binary can be applied either to the peculiar space of the surrogacy hostel or to the mediated communicative space in which
face-to-face labour is indeed involved and surrogate workers have to display certain
emotions to induce a particular feeling in the client or customer, in this case, the commissioning parents. This is, for instance, aptly illustrated in the opening scene from
Surabhi Sharma’s 2013 documentary Can We See the Baby Bump Please? We get
introduced to the mediated kinning practices of a commissioning couple from the
United States who through their routine Skype calls try hard to ‘connect’ with the
unborn child and also to engage in some small talk with the surrogate mother Haseena.
She does not speak or understand English, hence the help of an ever-smiling interpreter is required not only to translate words but also to provide a connection between
the two distant lifeworlds. Nevertheless, it is Haseena who is expected to ‘perform’
a happy and healthy pregnancy in front of the computer screen to show her growing
belly and also to display an interest in the commissioning parents’ favourite music that
they would like her—or rather, the baby inside her belly—to listen to. In short,
Haseena’s labour goes far beyond providing a body part and caring for herself as well
as for the unborn baby in her womb.
Outlook
Journalistic and academic articles have so far mostly addressed documentary films on
transnational reproduction and commercial surrogacy in India as individual texts,
generally focusing more on the content than on the form of the films and hence, sometimes also neglecting the origin(s) and itineraries of certain images, tropes or recurring
visual representations. This article was based on the assumption that it is not only
interesting but also academically relevant to trace some of these image itineraries to
understand how they might contribute to emerging global imaginaries (Brosius &
Wenzlhuemer, 2011) as well as to a translocal communicative figuration around the
topic of transnational reproduction and commercial surrogacy in India. Looking at a
number of very successful documentaries that were made primarily for transnational
audiences between 2009 and 2013 and by filmmakers who are mostly located outside
India, it sought to shed light specifically on three images and tropes that it considers
central for this communicative figuration: (a) the medical authority-cum-media actor
(i.e., internationally well-known fertility expert and doctor in charge, Dr Nayana
Patel), (b) the image of the surrogacy hostels and dormitories in Anand, Gujarat (i.e.,
the deeply ambivalent trope of a ‘welcome holiday’ for the surrogates versus ‘panoptic
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surveillance and control’ of their bodies, actions and thoughts) and (c) the contested
notion of ‘rented wombs’ (i.e., the passive provision of a body part) versus surrogacy
as labour (including very demanding and complex intimate as well as emotional
labour). The article showed that the flows of these images and tropes are by no means
restricted to intertextual references between the documentaries in focus here, but that
they travel across a wide variety of different media, contexts and formats, including
for instance, television dramas, talk shows, newspaper interviews, documentary theatre, journalistic travel photography and novels. It can thus be argued that conceptualisations of individual media as decisive ‘channels’ of a successful mediation and
subsequent societal debate about technological innovations and related changes of
practices of social reproduction and ‘doing family’ need to be complemented by
approaches which focus more on the ‘patterns of processes of communicative interweaving that exist across various media and have a thematic framing that orients communicative action (Hasebrink & Hepp, 2013, p. 10 as cited in Radde-Antweiler, 2018,
pp. 210–211)’.
In addition to focusing on the emergence of transmedial communicative figurations
and thematic framings that actually define ‘the topic’, however, it is also important to
identify and illuminate the critical absences within these communicative spaces. One
such critical aspect is the underrepresentation of Indian intending parents in documentary films on surrogacy which adds to the notion that most commissioning parents are
from the Global North or Western countries. This is—or at least before the ban on surrogacy in India was—not the case, as Sarojini Nadimpally and Deepa Venkatachalam
from the SAMA: Resource Group for Women and Health in Delhi point out. According
to their research, there is an ‘equally large number of Indians who are “consumers” of
ARTs and surrogacy’ (Nadimpally & Venkatachalam, 2016, p. 91). But while foreign
clients usually access clinics in the metropolitan and bigger cities in India, clinics in small
towns and cities are primarily frequented by so-called local consumers. Documentaries
(both international as well as by Indian filmmakers) which do not focus on Anand are
mostly shot in Mumbai or Delhi, however, so that the dominance of urban-centred representations may have added to the wrong perception that commercial surrogacy and
split parenthood are largely an urban or metropolitan phenomenon in India. As documentaries are an important reference for academic articles and sometimes also an inspiration for future research projects, this also means that in addition to an already rich
theoretical discussion about North–South inequalities and India as an exemplary ‘labor
market primarily for the reproduction of the biological and affective life of other places’
(Vora, 2015, p. 7; emphasis my own), a theoretical inquiry into the socio-spatial dynamics within the ‘same places’ is required.
What many documentaries and subsequent discussions also fail to address is the
biopolitical aspect and specific class politics of a state-supported market of pronatal
technologies which caters primarily to the needs of upper-middle-class families, while
the antinatal policies of the Indian state continue to be directed at the poorer sections
of society. A lot of attention is given to the interconnected problems of technologically
assisted reproduction, changing family and kinning practices as well as the ethical
boundaries and legal definitions of what can or should be regarded and accepted
as labour. In comparison, the persistence of antinatal technologies such as statesponsored mass sterilisation of women receives much less attention and was only
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19
scandalised in the wake of massive suffering and fatalities caused by botched surgeries
in mobile sterilisation camps in Bihar and Chhatisgarh.11 In her ethnographic study on
reproductive choices and family practices among middle-class families in South India,
anthropologist Minna Saavala (2010, p. 32) found that:
[T]he unfortunate, even socially disastrous, situation in which a couple is unable to conceive
at all creates particular complications for middle-class couples; they will struggle with this
aspect of controlled procreation to the full and if they are unable to succeed even with the
help of New Reproductive Technologies (which only very few can afford), they generally find
it very difficult to accept the situation. (Emphasis added)
Even if she refers primarily to (lower) middle-class families, Saavala’s quote also indicates that many more people than the privileged few who are usually represented in
public discussions and media articles may be faced with involuntary childlessness and
would like to have access to IVF methods and fertility treatments, including an increasing number of poor married couples.12
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Dr Salma Siddique and the anonymous reviewer for their work and suggestions on the submitted manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
1.
There have been numerous attempts over the last decades or so to theorise the relationship between biotechnologies and their capitalisation, notably by scholars working in
the field of Science and Technology Studies. Theoretical approaches and concepts which
have emerged from this academic field include, among others, ‘biovalue’ (Waldby 2002),
‘biocapital’ (Rajan 2006) and ‘life as surplus’ (Cooper 2008). Even though Kaushik Sunder
Rajan did not coin the term, his book Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (2006)
has popularised it worldwide. While most of the cited works mainly focus on the United
States, Rajan’s multi-sited ethnography on genomic research and drug development marketplaces also includes case studies conducted in New Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai, and
he argues that ‘biocapital takes shape in incongruent fashion across the multiple sites of its
global emergence’ (Rajan, 2006, p. 10)’. Ken Birch and David Tyfield, however, criticise what
they perceive as a ‘fetishization of everything “bio”’ and argue for a need to ‘update the
understanding of the bioeconomy in light of the financial and economic restructuring of the
economy’ (Birch & Tyfield, 2012, p. 301). In particular, they argue against ‘the metaphorical
conflation of organisms with workers’ and argue that ‘there is nothing intrinsically valuable
or capitalist about natural or biological materials without a number of supporting economic
and extra-economic processes and institutions’ (Birch & Tyfield, 2012, p. 313). Following
20
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
BioScope 9(2)
Morini and Fumagalli (2010), they further argue that biocapitalism ‘entails a whole series of
new socioeconomic relationships involving the embodiment of intellectual, relational, and
emotional resources and capacities’ (Morini & Fumagalli, 2010, p. 314). It is hence not only
body parts which have become bankable or ‘simply the production of commodities that
creates value; the consumption of goods and services, along with the social and intellectual
relationships this entails, also becomes an asset for companies (Morini & Fumagalli, 2010,
p. 314)’.
Aditya Bharadwaj mentions the various ‘altruistic’ arrangements between family members
in India who would ‘routinely see out specific private clinics to help arrange a quick surrogate pregnancy’. He argues that this ‘mode of non-commercial family forming creates
different but equally important sets of relations of exploitation, piety, kinship, and support’
(Bharadwaj, 2012, pp. 139–140).
For instance, sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa (2017) describes in an interview with U.S.
News how surrogate mothers from Kenya were now flown into Mumbai where the fertilised embryos were implanted into the uterus. After spending 24 weeks of their pregnancy
in India, they were flown back to Nairobi to give birth to the baby in a designated clinic.
According to Rudrappa, the doctor in charge in the Mumbai clinic maintained that ‘he had
not broken the law, because technically, he had not interacted with gay clients within Indian
territory, and all he had provided was in vitro fertilization for Kenyan “health-care” seekers’
(Rudrappa, 2017).
There are only a few academic articles or book chapters which refer to documentaries on
transnational surrogacy, such as Sayani Mitra and Solveig Lena Hansen’s (2015) article—
which includes an interview with director Surabhi Sharma—Madsen (2015) and Sessions
(2012).
Andreas Hepp and the Communicative figurations research network at the University of
Bremen suggest the model of communicative figurations which form around certain themes
and which are generated by a multitude of different media, actors and communicative
practices. See also the working paper series published at http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.
de/en/publikationen/communicative-figurations-working-paper-series.html
It would go beyond the scope of this article, but an elaborate discussion of the question
if this particular form of celebrity endorsement and framing of it in the English language
media in India can be seen as a mode of ‘ethical engineering’, that is, management of (future)
public opinion which is built into the ‘product’ itself (Strathern, 2005, p. 465), would be very
interesting. In order to ‘pre-empt society’s verdict’, the life science industry has to ‘anticipate questions about public consultation and ethical practice (Strathern, 2005, p. 466)’ and,
of course, have their answers ready at hand.
Comments and responses can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQGl
AM0iWFM
Jennifer Lahl (2017), founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network,
explicitly draws a parallel between the story’s fictional plot and the realities of commercial
surrogacy today:
Today, issues with infertility and the rise of non-traditional couples have made surrogacy a popular
topic; one often revered as a positive option for people who are unable to bear children naturally. But
The Handmaid’s Tale shows the side of surrogacy much less talked about—but not the least bit uncommon. In reality, surrogacy is not simply a means to an end. For many surrogates, the process is rooted
in coercion, exploitation, and emotional distress.
9. Dutta’s (2011) documentary film Womb on Rent is one of the few films in which the surrogate completes a large part of the gestational period at home in Delhi with her family.
10. Majumdar (2014b, p. 208) also describes the differences between housing practices in
Anand, Mumbai and Delhi:
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21
Thus, the lack of enthusiasm amongst agents and doctors to house the surrogate with her own family during the period of gestation is based on ideas of hygiene, home atmosphere and proper diet.
In Anand, Gujarat and Mumbai where the practice of surrogate hostels is actively endorsed and followed, surrogates’ families are constructed as ‘dysfunctional spaces’ with non-cooperative husbands
and in-laws. But in Delhi most of the surrogate mothers lived in their own homes with their families
during the pregnancy. A well-known agent remarked how the agency sought women with ‘cooperative families’ to be surrogates.
11. In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that all sterilisation camps in India must be closed within
a period of three years. It is questionable, however, if this will put an end to the many systemic problems or help increase the awareness for reproductive rights and health of poorer
sections of society.
12.
For poor childless couples, IVF’s stiff price tag is a big obstacle. And with only a few government hospitals offering subsidized rates, their hopes of parenthood are stillborn. (…) more non-literate women
were childless than literate women in both rural and urban areas in the 20-year period from 1981 to
2001. Lack of literacy here can be seen as a marker of poverty. ‘Childlessness is also a bigger stigma
for them,’ says Dr Neena Malhotra, a professor at AIIMS’ Assisted Reproductive Techniques (ART)
Centre. At her weekly OPD, Malhotra says that she sees a sizeable number of auto-rickshaw drivers,
vegetable vendors and factory workers who want to undergo fertility treatment. (…) Fertility treatment is obviously not a priority for the resource-strapped government health sector which would
rather prioritize maternal and child health. At present India spends a mere 1% of its GDP on public
health, compared to 3% in China and 8.3% in the US. ‘Besides, these hospitals have been focusing on
reducing the population and helping infertile couples seems to be at variance with their policies and
priorities,’ says Firuza Parikh (a well-known fertility expert). But fertility experts say that the government needs to pay attention to this issue as well. (Dhar, 2015)
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