Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood

By Independent Publishers Group

Surrogacy is not liberty. It is a crime. Women will not settle for junk liberty.We want real freedom the substance, not just the appearance. We want real nourishment for our spirits. We want human dignity. We want it for all of us. We want it for women in Thailand and Bangladesh and Mexico as well as for the women who have not yet been born.—Gena CoreaIn this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women's bodies can ever be about the choices' women make.They outline a range of harms that follow to the women who are so-called surrogates, to the children born of surrogacy arrangements, to the intending parents' who a delivered of a child through forced separation from its mother.Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, “slicing and dicing biological motherhood” into egg donor, gestational' mother and adoptive mother. Laura Nuo Gmez describes the surrogacy paradigm as an ethics-free zone, in which “buying whatever is for sale is possible as long as there is an agreement and that it is legal.” And Melissa Farley debunks the myth of choice' in surrogacy, arguing that in a male-dominated and racist system, the exploitative sale of women in surrogacy, like in prostitution, is inherently harmful. Rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes.Other contributors to this collection include Renate Klein, Gary Powell, Marie-Josèphe Devillers, Rita Banerji, Laura Isabel Gomez Garcia, Eva Maria Bachinger, Alexandra Clement-Saby and Taina Bien Aimé.Harm cannot be regulated, because this would mean spreading and universalising it

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781925950434

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Preface: Resistance in Many Voices

Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram

In 1985, two books were published that are essential for understanding the place of women in contemporary democratic society: The Handmaid’s Tale and The Mother Machine. While Margaret Atwood’s novel tells of a dystopian world, Gena Corea’s investigation into reproductive technologies analyses a new reality that she was warning against. Both books show how, in a democracy, women are used for their reproductive functions as ‘surrogate mothers’, and how they are led to believe, at least some of them, that obedience to the commands of those who use them would be to their own advantage. This compliance by some of the women with their own reproductive exploitation supports, in Atwood’s novel, the collapse of democracy and the installation of an authoritarian regime. Writing about reality rather than fiction, Gena Corea described and analysed how in the USA, women’s increasing reproductive abuse is ensured, managed and promoted by the rapidly expanding fertility industry. More efficient than an authoritarian system, the reproductive marketplace—and more specifically the surrogacy industry—tramples on women’s human rights while claiming to be consistent with democracy.

Our function is reproduction … We are two-legged wombs, full stop: sacred vessels, walking chalices, is how June describes her role as the Scarlet Handmaid in Margaret Atwood’s novel. I am a fridge that someone else puts food in, said a Romanian surrogate mother a few years ago (in Stoicea-Deram, 2016). I am a walking-talking incubator, said a smiling American surrogate. What in Atwood’s dystopian vision was a description of forced dehumanisation becomes resignation, and, at times, feigned ‘happiness’, for women being surrogate mothers in twenty-first century democratic countries.

It is surprising that dystopian fiction has managed to be turned into reality and is accepted, while the well-argued warnings of radical feminist critics like Gena Corea and others were – and still largely are – ignored. Yet feminist analysis has meticulously deconstructed the social and discursive mechanisms of women’s subjugation on which this practice is based from its very beginnings.

The first times in the modern era¹ when women acted as surrogate mothers date back to the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States: in 1976, the first woman did it for free, and in 1980, another pioneered what became known as ‘commercial surrogacy’ from that point on. This woman, who used the pseudonym Elizabeth Kane, was the first so-called commercial surrogate mother who gave birth to a son for which she was paid $10,000 – the price of a car, as she later commented. Kane soon regretted the surrogacy and became a prominent spokeswoman for the abolition of the practice, as described in her book Birth Mother: The Story of America’s First Legal Surrogate, published in 1988. Mary Beth Whitehead also had a painful surrogacy experience in 1986 when she gave birth to ‘Baby M’ who was then violently taken from her (see Chesler, this volume, pp. 59–71) in what became a highly publicised case.

Before these well-known cases which led to ongoing community debate and litigation, many feminists, both activists and researchers, had already identified and exposed the trap that surrogacy contained for women and children born from this practice. Resistance began in the early 1980s, when the first surrogacy agencies opened in the United States, with a business plan aimed at recruiting young women who were supposed to be attracted by the ‘glamour’ supposedly inherent in this practice. Noel Keane, the operator of the first surrogacy agency, launched an ‘educational’ video, entitled ‘Special Ladies’, aimed at schoolgirls in order to motivate them to become surrogate mothers.

From the outset, radical feminists raised the question of the exploitation of women for reproductive purposes, denounced the social pressure on women to have children, and showed the risks to women’s health inherent in artificial reproduction techniques. They understood the ethical dilemmas raised by these technologies as well as their eugenic intent, which were directly linked to unequal relations of class, race and sex in a patriarchal society. Andrea Dworkin recognized surrogacy’s exploitative dimension from the outset, calling it reproductive prostitution in her 1983 book Right-Wing Women where she writes: The farming model relates to motherhood, women as a class planted with the male seed and harvested; women used for the fruit they bear, like trees (p. 174).

Gena Corea followed Dworkin in 1985 with her impressive book The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs. In this book she warns of the intensification of patriarchal control over women’s lives, made possible by reproductive technologies through the processes of social and biological selection of mothers and unborn children. The first international anthology on these topics was published in 1984, Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? (Arditti et al) following another collection published in the US in 1981, The Custom-Made Child: Women-Centered Perspectives (Holmes et al).

Renate Klein, a biologist specialising in women’s health issues and a women’s rights activist, remembers how, in 1984, the 500 participants at the session ‘Death of the Female?’ at the 2nd International Interdisciplinary Women’s Congress in Groningen, Netherlands, demanded that an international feminist network be created to counter the threat that these technologies posed to women’s existence, while claiming to bring them ‘liberation’. One year later, in 1985, after a big Congress in Germany against Gene and Reproductive Technologies, the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) was formed at an Emergency Conference in Sweden,

an international women-centred network whose ultimate goal is to stop these dehumanising technologies, rather than regulate them because we believe they are part of women’s oppression and constitute violence against women and other non-human animals and plants (Klein, 2017, pp. 107–108).

In 1987, the Groupe de recherche et d’information féministe de Bruxelles (GRIF) published a Special Issue of its Cahiers entitled ‘De la parenté à l’eugénisme’ (From parenthood to eugenics) which brought together contributions on ‘the challenges of parenthood’ on the one hand, and ‘biotechnologies and eugenics’ on the other. This publication brought together French- and English-speaking authors (whose texts were translated).

One factor that made joint feminist actions against the development of assisted reproductive technologies difficult was the lack of continuous communications between feminist movements depending on the language of expression in which ideas and arguments were developed. While meetings and exchanges were made easier by events such as International Women’s Studies Congresses, mutual readings and translations did not always follow.

It is clear that western feminists have denounced surrogacy continuously since the early 1980s. They have informed public opinion with arguments justifying the necessity of stopping this practice. The basis of these arguments has always been human rights. With the globalisation of trade, and the imposition of the US business model, the surrogacy market has developed in both national and transnational contexts and provides its beneficiaries with increasing profits. It never respects the human rights of women and children, but perverts references to them, thereby hijacking feminist arguments such as ‘free choice’, ‘consent’ or ‘empowerment’.

It is therefore essential that feminist analyses become better known, that they are brought together and are shared across linguistic boundaries. That is the purpose of this volume, which, in the wake of many earlier powerful voices who have spoken out against surrogacy, offers a polyphonic plea to abolish the practice universally.²

Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood opens with a vibrant appeal by Gena Corea which she launched in 1987 against ‘junk liberty’, that is the so-called freedom supposedly inherent in surrogacy and other reproductive technologies which is better described as a crime against women and children.

This practice is carried out today by an industry that spares no continent, no country, and constantly renews itself through bypassing protective measures that progressive states are trying to put in place, as Marie-Josèphe Devillers shows in ‘The Geography of Surrogacy’.

A contemporary practice, certainly, but one deeply rooted in patriarchal patterns: in China, Korea and Japan, Yoshie Yanagihara identifies age-old surrogacy arrangements imposed by the Confucian injunction to produce heirs at all costs. Alexandra Clément-Saby, in her chapter, brings to light, one by one, patriarchal myths that feed the contemporary notion of surrogacy.

But how did we get here? To begin answering this question, Rita Banerji analyses the media’s role in promoting surrogacy by describing the involvement of Oprah Winfrey. Phyllis Chesler looks back at the 30-year battles to curb the demand for surrogacy in the US, and Taina Bien-Aimé denounces the latest assault: the introduction of commercial surrogacy in New York State in 2020.

And which way are we going? Gary Powell, a long-time UK activist for gay rights and a strong opponent of surrogacy, points out the growing complicity of institutions in the normalisation of this market-driven practice. Sylvia Guerini shares her fears about the drift of biotechnology, as the line between eugenics and transhumanism becomes increasingly thinner.

Laura Nuño Gomez explores the mercantile dimension of surrogate motherhood supported by neo-liberal ideology that panders to every individual desire to be satisfied even at the cost of neo-colonialist practices that are rarely questioned. Melissa Farley continues this discussion by showing the similarities between sexual and reproductive exploitation: prostitution and surrogacy.

The subject of surrogacy, to be fully explored, must address the issue of the mother-child bond. Laura Isabel Gómez García describes a rarely known dimension of this bond—microchimerism—which, independently of the genetic link, involves exchanges of cells between the pregnant woman and the child she is carrying, an exchange whose scope goes far beyond the nine months of pregnancy.

Eva Maria Bachinger from Austria wisely reminds us that there is no such thing as a right to a child for anyone. Stoppt Leihmutterschaft, of which she is a founder, is a network that opposes surrogacy across the political spectrum. And Catherine Lynch movingly demonstrates that the brutal separation between the newborn child and the woman who gave birth is greatly detrimental to the child’s subsequent development. In her chapter, she draws on the lessons learned from adoption of which she is a victim survivor.

Faced with these comprehensive findings against surrogacy, Renate Klein outlines possible strategies to stop surrogacy. In particular, she is pleading with women everywhere to stop being everyone’s ‘handmaid’ at the cost to their own well-being, sanity and at times even life.

The Feminist Convention for the Abolition of Surrogacy, drawn up and supported by ICASM members—The International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogacy—naturally concludes this book. We hope that it will be widely used whenever we need to show how detrimental for women and children, and what an unethical practice and human rights violation surrogacy is.

If we accept that women without any desire for a(nother) child of their own grow a child in their bodies at the (paid) request of third parties; if we accept that human beings are born as a result of a contract and are objects of eugenic selection; if we accept the sale of newborn babies within a framework of property rights, then we are abdicating the human rights of women and children.

The only way to ensure that human rights are respected is to abolish the instrumentalization and sale of human beings, in other words, do everything we can jointly to abolish surrogacy.

References

Arditti, Rita, Renate Duelli Klein and Shelley Minden (Eds). (1984). Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? London: Pandora Press; Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

Atwood, Margaret. (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Corea, Gena. (1985). The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs. New York: Harper and Row.

Dworkin, Andrea. (1983). Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females. London: The Women’s Press.

Holmes, Helen, B., Betty Hoskins and Michael Gross (Eds). (1981). The Custom-Made Child: Women-Centered Perspectives. Clifton, NJ: The Humana Press Inc.

Kane, Elizabeth. (1988). Birth Mother: The Story of America’s First Legal Surrogate Mother. San Diego: Harcourt; South Melbourne: Macmillan.

Klein, Renate. (2017). Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation. North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press.

Les Cahiers du GRIF. (1987). De la parenté à l’eugénisme. No. 36. <https://www.persee.fr/issue/grif_0770-6081_1987_num_36_1>

Stoicea-Deram, Ana-Luana. (2016). Confronted with a silent practice, feminism is mute. Surrogate Motherhood in Eastern Europe. In Analize: Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies, No. 6, pp. 32–49.

1 See Yoshie Yanagihara’s piece this volume in which she points out that in South East Asia, some forms of surrogacy have been practiced for hundreds of years until the 1950s, long before the ‘new’ US imported surrogacy practices started in 1976.

2 French and Spanish editions of some of these texts are planned for publication in 2022 by Éditions L’échappée, Paris and Editorial Comares, Granada.

Junk Liberty

¹

Gena Corea

We hear lots of high-minded talk about ‘rights’ and ‘liberty’ from the defenders of the human breeding industry. We are told that legalizing the sale of women protects the freedom our forefathers died for. It’s a woman’s right to sell her body. It’s a man’s right to exercise his constitutionally protected and newly invented ‘procreative liberty’ to hire a woman to breed a child for him.

But this is junk liberty.

We know what junk food is. Nutrients have been processed out of it, leaving it with little substance. It does not nourish. Sometimes it looks and tastes good. But it can make you sick. It can leave you hungering for something real, something that can sustain your life, something that can strengthen you. Junk food has the appearance of food without the reality.

Junk liberty looks and sounds good. Even noble. But human dignity has been processed out of it. Anything of real substance, anything that can nourish and sustain a woman’s Self, her soul, her life, has been processed out, leaving behind only the appearance of liberty.

Junk liberty is full of artificial preservatives, ‘junk rights’. Women have the right to be treated as commodities. We have the right to subject our most intimate feelings and relationships to contract law. We have the right to be sold.

Junk liberty is for the people the patriarchy would like us to be: junk people, junk women. Women without dignity or substance. Women who can’t feel joy or pain or love or hate or anger. Women who act like machines. Women who let themselves be used and then quietly throw themselves on the junk heap.

Junk liberty is a key concept in the marketing strategy of the surrogacy industry. It is a concept used to cover up a crime against humanity.

Junk liberty. (The triple dose of the drug had serious side effects for me [including] … intense pain in my left ovary. I was unable to walk because of the pain.)

Junk liberty. (A surrogate mother would be required to carry with her, at all times after the sixth month of pregnancy, a court paper ordering the hospital to give her baby only to the people who paid for it.)

Junk liberty. (When I refused to give Sarah up, five cops storm-trooped my house to get her … They put me in handcuffs and threw me in the police car …)

Junk liberty. (… I told the sperm donor and his wife of my need not to have them present in the delivery room … They responded that their presence at the birth was part of what they paid for.)

Junk liberty. (You could devastate them [poor Mexican women] with money and things—you know, whatever they need.)

The real question is not whether women have the ‘right’, the ‘liberty’ to sell our bodies or not. The question is not whether surrogacy is forced or voluntary. The question is this: What is surrogacy? As Janice Raymond writes, it is an inherently unequal relationship involving the objectification, sale, and commodification of a woman’s body (Raymond, 1987a).

Kathleen Barry, author of Female Sexual Slavery (1979), demonstrates that prostitution is a crime against women. Following her argument, surrogacy—reproductive prostitution—is also a crime against women. The crime is turning a whole class of people—women—into a commodity exchange and, in so doing, violating our human dignity. The customer and the surrogacy brokers are those who commit this crime against women. The customer is buying time on a women’s body, and the broker is enabling it.

Surrogacy is not liberty. It is a crime.

Women will not settle for junk liberty. We want real freedom—the substance, not just the appearance. We want real nourishment for our spirits. We want human dignity. We want it for all of us. We want it for women in Thailand and Bangladesh and Mexico as well as for the women who have not yet been born. We will struggle for it with all the magnificent strengths of our being.

References

Raymond, Janice. (1987a). Testimony on House Bill Number 4753 before the House Judiciary Committee, State of Michigan, Lansing, October.

Barry, Kathleen. (1979). Female Sexual Slavery. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

1 This is a short excerpt from Gena Corea’s Testimony to the California Assembly Judiciary Committee on April 5, 1988. Junk Liberty was published in full as a chapter in H. Pat Hynes’ 1991 collection Reconstructing Babylon: Essays on Women and Technology, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

The Geography of Surrogacy

Marie-Josèphe Devillers

As surrogacy is a globalised market, it can only be perceived on a worldwide level. But the maps, drawn up based on legislation specific to each country, become obsolete very quickly.