The term “collateral damage” is used in military contexts with reference to the immunity of non-combatants, in terms of the principle of distinction between civilian and military targets. . . . Since at least the time of the Iraq war, the term no longer commonly refers to the consideration of “unintended damage” — such as in traditional Catholic moral reasoning — but rather to “intended damage” that is calculated and factored into the planning of a military mission. And everyone knows this, even if we don’t always say it out loud.
The international surrogacy industry too is calculated in the damage it inflicts to women’s lives. This is, in part, because the surrogacy system works on a franchise model — in other words, it doesn’t look like a part of global late-capitalism; it looks like the creation of happy families. And these “families” are not presented as what they are: part of the damage and exploitation of global capitalism. Instead, the pictures on surrogacy websites are of glossy people who are said to have taken a “journey”: a “surrogacy journey”.
These pretty pictures, and this pretty language, disguise — indeed, we claim, are intended to disguise — a dirty industry which traffics in women’s lives as well as the lives of newborn babies. It runs parallel to other industries that put a price on the bodies of persons, like the trade in bodily organs, parts, and fluids.
Now that the former hubs of India, Nepal, and Thailand have taken steps to outlaw international commercial surrogacy, Ukraine has become a new centre of the industry. Amid the Russian invasion, the logic of profit-maximisation that drives surrogacy has been laid bare.
Women are the collateral damage of the surrogacy industry — not only its unintended damage, but its intended and calculated damage. For the industry and what it calls “clients”, the damage done to the woman who fills the role of “surrogate” is considered as entirely proportionate to the “happy ending” — a new healthy baby — that is the selling point of the industry.
Surrogacy is a human rights violation of the woman who is turned into a breeder of the “product”, an embryo manufactured by the IVF industry and grown in her body into a baby which is then removed (mostly by caesarean). Often, she is not allowed to hold her child, whom she is not likely to see ever again.
Surrogacy is also a human rights violation of the child who never consented to be a take-away baby.
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