Markets in Life Itself: Transnational Surrogacy in India As Intimate Labor

Are the babies born through commercial surrogacy commodities or are they gifts? Based on interviews with seventy surrogate mothers and thirty-one egg donors who live in Bangalore, India, and twenty families who reside in various parts the U.S. and Australia and have engaged in surrogacy in Anand, Delhi, and Mumbai, I pose three interrelated questions:

1. What meanings do surrogate mothers make of the commodification of their pregnancies? Is pregnancy a part of a gift relationship, or is it a market relationship for which they receive wages?
2. If the newborn baby is a gift to the commissioning family residing in India or elsewhere, then what is the ongoing relationship between surrogate mother as gift-giver and commissioning parents as gift-receivers?
3. Conversely, if pregnancy is wage labor, then how does one make sense of the baby as commodity, a product of market pregnancy?

Beginning with Titmuss’s seminal The Gift Relationship, where he endorses the virtues of blood donation in the U.K. versus the demerits of blood distribution as a commodity in the U.S., the social circulation of bodily fluids, tissues and organs is well examined (Rabinow,1999; Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant, 2003; Waldby and Mitchell, 2006). Reaching back to a much larger treatise on the gift (Mauss, 1923; Levi-Strauss, 1969; Rubin, 1975; Bourdieu, 1977; Appadurai, 1986; Strathern, 1988), and commodification (Polanyi, 1944; Hochschild, 1983, 2003, 2012; Boris and Parrenas, 2010), I ask why the various agents involved in global intimate industries assert that the baby is a commodity, or contest that the baby is a gift. This paper contributes to the growing literature on intimate industries (Parrenas and Silvey, forthcoming) through examining the meanings attached to markets in life itself among both Indian surrogate mothers and commissioning parents from the U.S. and Australia who travel to India for surrogacy purposes.