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While surrogacy practices are on the rise in various countries, the terms used to designate the woman who gets pregnant and carries a baby for another person or couple remain ambiguous and controversial. In this contribution, while not intending to reject the term ‘surrogate mother’ itself, I argue that its usage needs to be rethought and nuanced. Drawing on a total of fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg, Russia, I will demonstrate that—at least in that context—the term ‘surrogacy worker’ more accurately captures the actions and intent of women engaged in this form of work for four main reasons.
Firstly, surrogacy agencies only accept women who can demonstrate that they are financially motivated. Altruism is rejected. Secondly, surrogacy workers themselves perceive carrying a commissioned pregnancy as a complex job. Thirdly, the absence of genetic relatedness with the gestated child is operationalised to suppress feelings of affinity and to present it as care work rather than as ‘mothering’. Finally, the temporality of identifying as a surrogacy worker renders evoking the allegory to ‘mother’ inappropriate.
