[I]n order to believe that renting a woman can be essential to have a baby it first needs to be established that there is indeed such a thing as the right to have a baby. But there is no piece of international law which says that an individual has the right to a child. Still, the surrogacy industry churns a yearly revenue of 14 Billion USD every year through its use of women as raw material.
India is not the only developing country or country of the Global South where the renting of women takes place to feed a global market. Nepal was a market for surrogacy for buyers (a more accurate term for individuals who intend to buy babies through surrogacy) from richer countries like Israel and Australia. However, the Nepalese government banned surrogacy in toto in the year 2015 following a devastating earthquake in the Country. Since then, Indian surrogacy clinics which were established in Nepal have moved to Cambodia where the health system is poor. Additionally, the People’s Republic of China prohibits surrogacy in all its forms. Despite this, there is a base of commissioning buyers who go to the market available in the United States and Ukraine to rent wombs. Chinese women within Chinese provinces act as commercial surrogates as well, to provide for themselves and their families. Surrogacy also exists in other Asian countries such as Thailand, Laos, and Japan. Therefore, countries in the Global South are either prominent source countries, demand countries, or both when it comes to renting the reproductive capabilities of women.
Surrogacy is an extremely harmful process which causes physical, emotional, and mental damage to women, regardless of whether it is done for money or for altruistic motivations. This is because surrogacy is an induced pregnancy that is brought about through the injection of artificial hormones into a woman’s body. These hormones cause a range of problems such as sickness, bloating, mood volatility, and the resultant physical and mental stress for women who are subsequently injected with an externally fertilised embryo. Should the women fail to get pregnant the first time, this process must be repeated. But the women who are rented as vessels are not the only ones harmed in surrogacy. This is because the dominant practice of surrogacy now is to use donated eggs of one woman, which are fertilised and injected into the body of another woman. Unsurprisingly, egg donation has also come up as a predatory and harmful industry in which women are given hormones to extract the maximum number of eggs from them. Indeed, women have died in surrogate pregnancies in developed countries like the United States as an in-vitro fertilisation pregnancy puts women at the risk of, among other things, placental collapse.
Jennifer Lahl, Melinda Tankard Reist, and Renate Klein give voice to scores of testimonies of women who have been used, ruined, and then spat out by the surrogacy industry and its players in the book Broken Bonds.
Surrogacy is a great example of the intersections of the oppressions of sex, class, and caste (especially in the Indian case).
However, so-called intersectional feminism continues to ignore the exploitative nature of surrogacy as it brands surrogacy as an empowering choice for women to earn a livelihood.
[S]urrogacy is touted as a necessity for those who cannot, for a variety of reasons, have their own children. And on who else should the burden then fall to provide children for this cohort, other than women of course? But as Eva Maria Bachinger points out in Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood (Spinifex Press, 2021), a desire for a child does not mean that there is also a right to have one. And as Dr Saravanan also argues, there is no right to use the body of someone else to fulfil one’s own reproductive rights. The mere inability of one to have a child of their own does not give one any claim over the bodies of women. And so the only reason that women are used and then thrown away in surrogacy is because there is a cohort of monied individuals who can pay for the use of women.
I wonder what percentage of users/buyers of surrogates are ‘transwomen’ seeking to ensure their ‘right’ to have a baby as real women do?
And what percentage are male gay couples like Elton John and his husband?
It’s everyone’s rights that are respected and at the end of the ‘rights’ line are the rights for women which, in this are, are really the rights a brood mare has due to the focus on third world women to provide the wombs for hire and the lack of agency that comes when 1st world income is compared to 3rd world income.
Elton John I’m sure purchased his womb from a position of such financial over abundance that there was no real equality of choice for his surrogate.
Elon Musk, a transhumanist used surrogate ‘mothers’ because his partner found ‘motherhood’ offensive/uncomfortable? https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/08/90327/