Commercial surrogacy, the practice of paying a woman to carry and birth a child whom she will not parent, is largely unregulated in America. It’s illegal, with rare exceptions, in three states: New York, Louisiana, and Michigan. But, most states have no surrogacy laws at all. Though the technology was invented in 1986, the concept still seems, for many, a bit sci-fi, and support for it does not follow obvious political fault lines. It is typically championed by the gay-rights community, who see it as the only reproductive technology that allows gay men to have biological children, and condemned by some feminists, who see it as yet another business that exploits the female body. In June, when the New York State Assembly considered a bill that would legalize paid surrogacy, Gloria Steinem vigorously opposed it. “Under this bill, women in economic need become commercialized vessels for rent, and the fetuses they carry become the property of others,” Steinem wrote in a statement.
In a new book, “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family,” the author Sophie Lewis makes a forceful argument for legalization. Lewis takes little interest in the parents. It’s the surrogates who concern her. Regulation, she says, is the only way for them to avoid exploitation. Lewis frequently, if reluctantly, compares surrogacy to sex work, another industry that persists despite being illegal. Banning these jobs is pointless, Lewis says, aside from giving privileged feminists something to do, and making the work more dangerous. “Surrogacy bans uproot, isolate, and criminalize gestational workers, driving them underground and often into foreign lands, where they risk prosecution,” she writes. “As with sex work, the question of being for or against surrogacy is largely irrelevant. The question is, why is it assumed that one should be more against surrogacy than other risky jobs.”
Lewis does not offer straightforward policy suggestions. Her approach to the material is theoretical, devious, a mix of manifesto and memoir. Early in the book, she struggles to understand why anyone would want to get pregnant in the first place, and later she questions whether continuing the human race is a good idea. But she is solemn and unsparing in her assessment of the status quo. A portion of the book studies the Akanksha Fertility Clinic, in India, a surrogacy center that, according to Lewis, severely underpays and mistreats its workers. (Nayana Patel, who runs the clinic, has argued that Akanksha pays surrogates more than they would make at other jobs.) All of the Akanksha surrogates are required to have children of their own already, ostensibly because they know how difficult it is to raise a child and are therefore less likely to want to keep the ones they’re carrying.
According to Lewis, Akanksha surrogates have to live at the clinic and leave their children in the care of family. It’s unclear how much money the surrogates take home afterward—especially once the scouts take their cut. What especially frustrates Lewis is that, despite the obvious sacrifices of pregnancy and of being away from family, the Akanksha clinicians and clients are still skittish about referring to surrogacy as “work.” Akanksha offers surrogates classes in embroidery and candle-making, and its promotional literature assures prospective parents that surrogacy is more than a job—it’s a ladder to a new life. According to Lewis, the surrogates usually deliver via C-section when they are thirty-six weeks pregnant, “shaving five weeks or so off production time, delivering the baby just-in-time for collection.” These clinics are factories, Lewis writes—why pretend otherwise?
Lewis’s occasionally blithe humor belies a surprisingly earnest argument. She wants to legitimate surrogacy in order to legitimate a more communal way of raising children. One could say that she’s ready to “cancel” the family unit. “Unabashedly interested in family abolition, I want us to look to waged gestational assistance specifically insofar as it illuminates the possibilities of its imminent destruction by something completely different,” she writes. Gestational surrogacy makes it more difficult to name the “biological mother” with complete certainty, and this sort of murkiness strikes Lewis as the best possible world in which to raise children. The “polymaternal” ideal, Lewis argues, already exists for rich children, whose parents are able to purchase “full surrogacy” by hiring “wet nurses, nannies, ayahs, and mammies.” Lewis thinks that such a childhood should be available to all.
Lewis fantasizes about replacing the modern family with a “classless commune,” where children don’t belong to anyone—a commune that would eventually render commercial surrogacy obsolete. “Another surrogacy is possible,” she writes. India recently banned commercial surrogacy; now all surrogacy in the country must be unpaid, or “altruistic.” Volunteer surrogacy may sound like a perfect way to encourage communal child-rearing, but Lewis says that, in practice, altruistic surrogacy usually has the same dynamic as commercial surrogacy, insofar as a woman still gets pregnant with a wealthier woman’s baby. (She writes that unpaid surrogacy should concern “those who understand how Indian class society works.”) And, for Lewis, even in the most open-minded arrangement, where the surrogate remains in the child’s life, the basic family structure remains the same. The surrogate is an appendage of the nuclear family, relegated to the fringe.
Lewis wants something else, something far more sweeping. “Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively. Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notion of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin,” she writes. In other words, if it “takes a village” to raise a child, then why don’t we will such a village into existence? Why are we so committed to the traditional biological family when so many children feel stymied and exhausted by their parents, and so many parents feel stymied and exhausted by their children? Lewis blames capitalism, a system in which, she argues, everyone needs a home team—people to root for, and to fall back on when things go south. She implores her reader not just to redraw the teams but to reinvent the game entirely: “We are the makers of one another. And we could learn collectively to act like it. It is those truths that I wish to call real surrogacy, full surrogacy.” Nowhere in her book does she mention maternity leave or affordable child care. These are merely concessions to a system—a system that she hopes to uproot.
Lewis rigorously argues for the world she wants to create, but her book is too polemical to rigorously imagine it. That task is handled, in part, by Joanne Ramos’s début novel, “The Farm.” “The Farm” is a largely naturalistic book set in a modern-day New York, where the immigrants live in Flushing and the rich live on Park Avenue. But there’s one speculative twist: surrogacy is legal, and the “Hosts,” as Ramos calls them, have no regulatory protections. The book’s premise appears to be loosely based on Gloria Steinem’s nightmares.
Most of the story takes place at Golden Oaks, an upscale surrogacy clinic in upstate New York where the Hosts, most of them black or Filipina, live in seclusion while they attend to the fetuses growing inside them. Gestation is considered a full-time job; the days at Golden Oaks have the same intense orderliness of a factory floor. Many of the women are former domestic workers or nannies or health aides, and have found that caring for a fetus is more lucrative than caring for a person. They have little, if any, interaction with the clients. A client may be a war lord or a Nobel Prize winner; she may be perfectly capable of getting pregnant but would rather have someone else do it. The Hosts are not allowed to care. They must deliver a healthy baby if they want to receive their bonus—the “big money,” as the women call it.
Like the surrogates at Akanksha, most Hosts at Golden Oaks have only signed on because they need that money to support families of their own, whom they are not allowed to see for the duration of their contract. “The Farm” is an ensemble book, told from the perspective of four different characters, but its hero is Jane, a Filipina-American woman in her early twenties, who turns to Golden Oaks after she’s fired from her baby-nurse job and can find no better way to support her infant daughter.
For a novel about the ruthlessness of capitalism, Ramos demonstrates remarkable tenderness for her characters. In another writer’s hands, Mae, the director of Golden Oaks, would be wholly diabolical, but in Ramos’s depiction she is only moderately so—a perky middle manager obsessed with earning the trust of her bosses and the respect of the rich white kids she met at Harvard Business School, where she was among the minority of students who paid their own tuition. Mae is biracial (her father is Chinese), and she sees the Hosts as co-travellers on her journey of upward mobility. When she describes a job at Golden Oaks as a “gateway to a better life,” she appears to mostly believe what she’s saying. She sees surrogacy as work, but, unlike Lewis, who believes that work is inherently oppressive, Mae thinks that work can set you free. “It’s isn’t like we force our Hosts to be Hosts,” she tells a prospective surrogate in an early scene. “They choose to work for us freely—I’d argue: happily.”
The prospect, Reagan, is something of a special case. In Golden Oaks parlance, Reagan is a “Premium Host”—college-educated and white. But it doesn’t take much to get her onboard. She could use the money—her father is too conventional to pay for an M.F.A. in photography—and she’s a restless spirit, desperate for moral clarity and “the knowledge that she is doing something inarguably worthwhile.” She’s drawn to the purity of being a Host. “Life, the very act of it, is blindingly, stupendously courageous,” Reagan thinks. Lewis, of course, would disagree with the idea that creating new life is inherently valuable. “The fact that gestation ‘makes an economic contribution’ or ‘makes the world go round’ is nothing much to be proud of, given the state of the world,” she writes. “I’m more impressed by contributions gestating might make to this world’s destruction.”
Reagan is the only character in the book who insists on the sanctity of her job. We never meet her client—or, indeed, any of the clients. We get only their résumés: fashion tycoon, tech giant, the richest woman in China. They could be decent people, and even remarkable parents. Ramos’s richly ambivalent novel leaves the possibility open, even as she details how the Hosts at Golden Oaks are denied basic rights. At one point, a Catholic surrogate is forced to have an abortion after a doctor discovers that the fetus has a possible birth defect. (The reader does not witness the procedure; Ramos is almost too devoted to her characters to linger on their pain, and the novel skips over any childbirth scenes.) What’s apparent at the novel’s end is that, while a life-altering thing—a baby!—has entered the clients’ lives, their surrogates, even after earning the “big money,” are in similar circumstances to those they were in at the story’s beginning. “The Farm” does not take a clear stance on the ethics of surrogacy itself, but, like Lewis’s book, it makes a mockery of Mae’s claim that such a job is “a gateway to a better life.” For the Hosts at Golden Oaks, surrogacy is merely a new way to tread water.
In her 2002 memoir, “Love Works Like This,” the writer and psychologist Lauren Slater discovers that she is pregnant and decides to list the pros and cons of parenthood. Under cons, she writes: “Less time for friends, less time for work, less money, famous women writers who had children?” The list goes on. Under pros, she has just one item: “Learning a new kind of love.” She ends up keeping the baby.
The pull of this mysterious variety of love is not something Lewis contends with in her book. For the sake of her argument, she focusses on the system, rather than the people who compose it. Parental love is many things: devotional, magnificent, demented, myopic. It’s a love that motivates terrific sacrifice and heroism, as well as terrible acts of greed. It drives otherwise prudent people to discard caution, whether by emigrating to another country or by bribing a child’s way into college.
While Lewis would like to replace this inherited love with a more logical kind of affection, one based on earned affinity or “kith and kind,” Ramos’s novel explores the warped devotion of parents. One character in “The Farm,” Ate, tirelessly works as a cook, a maid, and a baby nurse to support her disabled adult son in the Philippines, whom she hasn’t seen for more than twenty years. “Everything Ate did was for him,” Jane observes. Jane is quarantined at Golden Oaks when her one-year-old, Mali, takes her first steps and speaks her first words. She, too, “would do anything for Mali.” And the clients, of course, are willing to “do anything” for their unborn children—that’s why they’ve come to Golden Oaks in the first place.
But the question, for both Ramos and Lewis, isn’t about what we’d do for our children. It’s about what we’d do for other people’s children. At one point in “Full Surrogacy Now,” Lewis recalls a memory from her own childhood. One afternoon, driving in the car with her father, she insouciantly asked how he would feel if it turned out that she wasn’t his—that they weren’t biologically related after all. “There was a stony, awkward silence that made clear to me I was not going to get the answer I needed,” Lewis writes. “I felt so devastated that, for the rest of the drive, I could not speak.” Her father’s love, she realized, was contingent on their shared genetics. This was a profound betrayal. Her book, like Ramos’s, tries to depict a new conception of love—a love freed from structures of biology or circumstance, a love that recognizes that children belong to everyone.
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December 11, 2019 at 06:00PM
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