The suffering of surrogacy: A veteran feminist spells it out
by Selena Ewing, MercatorNet:
What do Jimmy Fallon, Lucy Liu, Sarah Jessica Parker, Neil Patrick Harris, and Ricky Martin have in common? They all bought babies via surrogacy. You might have seen them in glossy women’s magazines.
Of course the women who bore the babies are nowhere to be seen; they would have received but a small cut of the money, while IVF clinics, surrogacy brokers and lawyers took the lion’s share. Surrogacy is a rapidly growing industry, bolstered by glowing photographs of celebrities beaming over cute babies. Who could begrudge them their happiness?
In Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation Dr Renate Klein dares to take on the surrogacy industry without begrudging but with plenty of sass and hard evidence. A dogged feminist academic and publisher for over thirty years, her critique of neoliberal capitalism is always underpinned by an authentic concern for women’s wellbeing and a focus on patriarchal structures.
She never fails to point out the power differentials. She completely rejects surrogacy in all its forms.
Notice, for example, that she obstinately uses inverted commas around the terms “surrogate”, “donor” (of eggs), the “right” to a baby, “altruistic” surrogacy, and (surrogacy as) “work” for the entire book. This is because she believes that there are no such things.
There is no such thing, she says, as a “surrogate” for the process of growing a baby in the womb. And this is not “work”. She refuses to endorse the modern vocabulary, which long ago capitulated to the commercialisation of women and reproduction.
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