Lauren Fritts/Flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 (cropped)
Commercial surrogacy, the practice of bearing a child for another for payment, has recently been described as ‘the new frontline in human trafficking’. Such claims reflect concerns not merely about babies being produced, on order, for sale across a market, but also about poor women being coerced or deceived into a trade in which they are reduced to mere vessels or wombs. Members of the judiciary in Australia and India have recently demanded the imposition of complete bans on the practice of international or cross border commercial surrogacy. The justifications for doing so may seem obvious, but, in fact, benefit from some careful scrutiny.
What such analyses reveal is that commercial surrogacy is not a singular phenomenon, but rather a complex, highly variegated set of practices shaped by the social and cultural values and economic environments in which they are practiced. Invocations to ban appeal to a set of moral norms that are assumed to be universally shared, but which often prove exceptionally complicated to enact in specific contexts. To explain why this is so, I have invited leading researchers in the field to unpack some of the taken for granted assumptions around surrogacy: to demonstrate how and in what ways lived experiences of surrogacy around the globe complicate and undermine comfortable, at times sanctimonious accounts of why this ‘abject’ practice needs to be regulated out of existence.
