Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood

Marie-Josèphe Devillers, Ana-Luana Stoicea Deram

• Publisher: Spinifex Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781925950434
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Surrogacy is not liberty. It is a crime. Women will not settle for junk liberty. We want real freedom – the substance, not just the appearance. We want real nourishment for our spirits. We want human dignity. We want it for all of us. We want it for women in Thailand and Bangladesh and Mexico as well as for the women who have not yet been born. —Gena Corea In this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women's bodies can ever be about the 'choices' women make. They outline a range of harms that follow – to the women who are so-called surrogates, to the children born of surrogacy arrangements, to the 'intending parents' who a delivered of a child through forced separation from its mother. Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, "slicing and dicing biological motherhood" into egg donor, 'gestational' mother and adoptive mother. Laura Nuño Gómez describes the surrogacy paradigm as an ethics-free zone, in which "buying whatever is for sale is possible as long as there is an agreement and that it is legal." And Melissa Farley debunks the myth of 'choice' in surrogacy, arguing that in a male-dominated and racist system, the exploitative sale of women in surrogacy, like in prostitution, is inherently harmful. Rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes. Other contributors to this collection include Renate Klein, Gary Powell, Marie-Josèphe Devillers, Rita Banerji, Laura Isabel Gomez Garcia, Eva Maria Bachinger, Alexandra Clement-Saby and Taina Bien Aimé. Harm cannot be regulated, because this would mean spreading and universalising it

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface. Resistance in Many Voices—Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram
• Chapter 1. Junk Liberty—Gena Corea
• Chapter 2. The Geography of Surrogacy—Marie-Josèphe Devillers
• Chapter 3. A ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ in East Asia: Pregnancy Contracts Pre-dating Modern Surrogacy—Yoshie Yanagihara
• Chapter 4. Surrogacy: A New Version of Patriarchal Myths about Reproduction—Alexandra Clément-Saby
• Chapter 5. How Oprah Promoted India’s Global Surrogacy Market—Rita Banerji
• Chapter 6. On the Legalization of Commercial Surrogacy: I Thought We Had Abolished the Sale of Human Beings—Phyllis Chesler
• Chapter 7. ‘Cuomo’s Handmaids’: New York Legalizes Reproductive Commercial Surrogacy—Taina Bien-Aimé
• Chapter 8. Surrogacy: A Gay Man’s Perspective—Gary Powell
• Chapter 9. Procreation in the Age of Biotechnologies—Silvia Guerini
• Chapter 10. The New Surplus Value: The Reproductive Mode of Production—Laura Nuño Gómez
• Chapter 11. Surrogacy and Prostitution: The Parallels—Melissa Farley
• Chapter 12. Microchimerism: The Mother-Child Bond that Cannot Be Bought—Laura Isabel Gómez García
• Chapter 13. There Is No Right to a Child—Eva Maria Bachinger
• Chapter 14. Putting Children First: What Adoption Can Teach Us about Surrogacy—Catherine Lynch
• Chapter 15. Strategies for Stopping International Surrogacy: Beyond the Compassion Trap—Renate Klein
• Feminist Convention for the Abolition of Surrogacy
• Biographical Notes
• Acknowledgements