The Globalization of Motherhood

Deconstructions and reconstructions of biology and care

Wendy Chavkin, JaneMaree Maher, Wendy Chavkin, JaneMaree Maher

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781138874282
• eBook ISBN: 9781136962882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The convergence of dramatic declines in birth rates worldwide, aside from sub-Saharan Africa, the rise of untrammelled global movement of capital, people and information, and the rapid-fire dissemination of a host of new medical technologies has led to the "globalization of motherhood".

This book brings together research from the Global North and the Global South to illuminate how contemporary motherhood is being changed by the processes of globalization. It locates declining fertility and desire for motherhood in the context of female employment, the development of the global market in reproductive technologies, the rising transnational labour market demand for feminized carework, and changing family forms. Focusing on the impacts on women who mother- and enable others to do so- across diverse contexts, the book examines the way in which conception, gestation mothering labor and care are being mobilized across national boundaries.

Bringing together demographers, sociologists, lawyers, public health and social theorists, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization studies, development studies, gender studies, feminist politics, political economy, human rights, and social policy.

Part I
Introduction

1
The globalization of motherhood

Wendy Chavkin

Debby lives on Manhattan’s upper West side. She is the 41-year-old mother of 4-month-old twins conceived via a Hungarian IVF clinic and of 3-year-old Lindsay, adopted from a Chinese orphanage at 11 months of age.

Basha lost her job in Poland when she became pregnant and could not find another. So she left her 7-month-old son with her grandmother and left Poland. She now works under the table as a nanny in London for Gemma and Erik who have a 2 year old.

Gita lives outside of Bangalore and is the married mother of two. She has never had a Pap test. She is undergoing hormonal stimulation of ovulation so that she can donate ova to her sister who has not become pregnant in five years of marriage.

What do these stories signify? They suggest a world in flux about the most intimate of human connections, a world wide open to a host of possibilities for reconfiguring family and parenthood, and perhaps of liberating women from the constraints of reproductive biology. Some of these possibilities arise from the fragmentation of biology, care and relationship that we discuss in this volume— fragmentation that renders transformed social rearrangements into the biologically tangible. There are, of course, no guarantees that these options will prove liberating—they could be adapted and co-opted instead to perpetuate long-term inequities of opportunity and hierarchies of power in new guises.

The convergence of dramatic declines in birth rates worldwide (aside from sub-Saharan Africa), the rise of the untrammeled global movement of capital, people and information, and the rapid-fire dissemination of a host of new medical technologies has fuelled the disaggregation of the biologic and care-giving components of motherhood that we term “the globalization of motherhood.” We focus in this volume on the associated transnational movements of people to perform or obtain childcare work (nannies), to relinquish or obtain babies (adoption), or to use associated reproductive technologies (ARTs) (“reproductive tourism” for treatment, gametes or uteri). While adoption and domestic labor are not new phenomena, the degree to which these are transnationally negotiated has reached unprecedented levels and this, together with the new technological possibilities for biologic reproduction, distinguishes this moment from previous ones.

We offer this book in an effort to call attention to the interconnection between these phenomena. Through specific examples, the chapters offer texture and specificity to the documentation and analysis of the nature and impact of the transnational disaggregation of motherhood (biologic) and motherwork (care). Why do we even formulate this as a problem? Two answers come readily: motherhood is one of the most intimate and essential of human connections and therefore of concern to all; and female biologic reproductive capacity and social assignment for childrearing and the maintenance of domestic life have been centrally connected with women’s subordinate status across many cultures and historic eras. The association of women with biologic and social reproduction remains the determinative factor underlying job segregation by gender and the gender wage gap in developed economies; and is still associated with female mortality and deprivation in developing ones. In this volume we bring together researchers from varied parts of the world to consider conception, gestation, and mothering care together in the globalized moment. It is a complicated story which does not reduce to reprising obvious inequities—these certainly continue, but so do contradictions and seeming inconsistencies.

The backdrop

There is extensive scholarship and critique of each of the components under scrutiny here. Rather than reprise these, we will focus on the commonalities, contradictions, and intersections between these strands that together comprise our construct of globalized motherhood and will include the often-missing medical and public health concerns. First, let us locate these trends historically and put the spotlight on three overlapping developments of the late twentieth–early twenty-first centuries—the second demographic transition, globalization and the development of ARTs.

The second demographic transition and delayed childbearing

In the last third of the twentieth century in the developed world, dramatic changes happened quietly in the ways people live their most intimate lives. Many women entered the labour force and deferred marriage and childbearing. Divorce rates rose as did single parenthood. Birthrates dropped below the level needed to replace the population, death rates declined and people lived longer. While the details vary between and within countries, the general patterns hold true for highly developed countries. Similar changes are taking place in many developing countries as well (Lochhead 2000), with 20 countries already having birthrates below replacement levels (UN 2003).

Demographers call this whole constellation of changes the “second demographic transition.” The decline in birth rates has led to a host of positive changes on both societal and individual levels—economic growth resulting from women’s increased employment, improved health and education of children, benefits for women’s health and life opportunities. However, once birthrates dipped below the level needed to replace the population, the decline also resulted in shrinking the size of the working-age population whose labour supports the social and economic needs of both children and older, retired people.

Therefore, the decline in birthrates is of social concern because of the resulting skewed age distribution of the population and the consequences for the proportion of the population working, the ensuing tax base and economic productivity. Many governments are thus actively concerned about national birth rates. Moreover, this contemporary decline in birthrates often does not stem from a happy choice for women but reflects economic and social insecurity, with a large dollop of gender inequity. Now that the majority of women are employed, but generally still responsible for the lion’s share of domestic care taking, they are voting with their feet, so to speak, to delay and limit childbearing. In fact, women whose incomes are necessary but insecure, and who simultaneously receive low levels of support for childrearing responsibilities from mates or the state have especially low birthrates. McDonald (2000), Castles (2003) and others have theorized that this phenomenon reflects the increased “opportunity costs” of having children together with the increased burdens for women who now carry the load of employment on top of the longstanding one of domestic care, in the face of stagnant low levels of support for social reproduction from men or the state.

These empirical observations confirm feminist insights of the past 30 years about the reciprocal relationships between the gender wage gap, family responsibilities and services (or lack thereof) to support working parents. These data have led many European (and increasingly East Asian) policy analysts to conclude that policies most likely to support birth rates at levels close to population replacement are those that enable both women and men to participate in both paid employment and childrearing responsibilities. In fact, the data have persuaded such mainstream players as the European Union (EU), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations (UN) to support work–family reconciliation measures that provide financial compensation for the costs associated with childrearing (cash grants, tax credits, subsidized child care, access to housing, loans), and work conditions that enable employees to perform their domestic responsibilities (maternity and paternity leave, flexible work hours, subsidized child care, tax structures that value “second” lesser income and so forth) and thus promote paternal involvement in childrearing.

However, even the most generous of the work–family supports fail to address the structural forces leading to delayed childbearing: the pressure on women in advanced economies to obtain education and secure employment first; the shortage of housing and social supports for young couples; the delay, the decline and the precariousness of marriage; and benefit availability being contingent on employment. Delayed childbearing is both emblematic of these social changes and is itself a key pathway to lowered birthrates; witness the concurrent decrease in fertility rates in 12 European countries as mean age at first birth has risen (Kohler and Kohler 2002; McDonald 2000; Orloff 1996). This is because delayed entry into childbearing leaves women with a truncated period of biological opportunity to become pregnant and successfully carry to term.

The data on the female biological clock are incomplete but sobering as they indicate that women’s ability to become pregnant begins to decline by the late twenties and drops very sharply after the mid thirties (Frank et al. 1994; Dunson et al. 2002). Probabilities of pregnancy for women age 19–25 are about double those of women age 35–39. Spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) rates also significantly increase with age, in substantial part because of age-related increases in genetic abnormalities although age-related maternal medical problems also compromise reproductive success (Frank et al. 1994; Dunson et al. 2002). There is thus a discordance between women’s recently achieved employment trajectories and the female reproductive biological clock that disadvantages women both economically and biologically. A rapidly increasing number are trying to resolve the discordance between employment trajectories and the biological reproductive clock through adoption or the technological fix of ARTs.

Globalization

The period of the second demographic transition overlapped with the rise of globalization, here defined as the increased interconnectedness of production and communication with reduced barriers to trade, the increased movement of people for trade and work, the rise of transnational corporations and of the involvement of supranational actors and economic institutions (International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, etc.) in national social policy formation. Many have written about the impact on women of the consequent imposition of austerity budgets and structural adjustment policies, the resulting reductions in salaries and state services, privatization, the feminization of the labour force, and the reach of commodification into new arenas (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002b; Sassen 2002; Bakker 2003).

From the globalized motherhood vantage point, these “push” factors result in the increased migration of women from the developing world seeking work as nannies, a shifting but ever-available pool of babies for adoption, and the recruitment of women into selling their gametes and bodies as surrogates. These same push factors on the institutional level have fueled the burgeoning businesses (both legal and black market) of competitively priced ART centers and brokerage of nanny and adoption services (Spar 2006).

Pressure on wages and state provisioning in the developed world, in tandem with the forces previously described, align to create reciprocal “pull” factors. Thus we see women from the developed world face the predicament of needing their salaries, inadequate work–family supports and the infertility resulting from delayed childbearing. Some attempt to resolve this dilemma by seeking cheaper and unregulated ARTs and associated body parts, adoptable babies, and caregivers for these babies.

The concurrent rapid and global transfer of technologies and information feed these globalizing markets, often blurring the lines between factual information and consumerist imagery. Would-be purchasers of ART services or gametes, and prospective adoptive parents can find descriptive data online; clearly, the selection of these data reflects and shapes notions of biological and social relationships. These same communication options also enable maintenance of relationships across the globe so that “families bend but do not end.” Herrera (this volume) and Yeoh and Huang (this volume) describe some of these uses by migrant mothers to provide mothering care to children back home, and Yngvesson (this volume) informs us about their use by adoptees who have reconnected with their birth mothers in the sending country of origin.

With increasing globalization, a country’s policy decisions on reproduction are not contained by national borders, as people, products, body parts, technologies and ideas move across borders. However, nationalistic (and religious) stances towards population and control of fertility, and decisions about the allocation of healthcare resources, interact with global economic forces to shape the ways in which individuals resolve the competing demands and constraints of their lives.

Progress towards gender equity in both employment and domestic responsibilities for women from the developed world relies, in part, on economic and gendered inequities confronting other groups of women. This interaction perpetuates gender-associated limitations for both, although neither equally, nor similarly (Chavkin 2008a). As it has become normative for married women and mothers of young children to be employed, and neither men nor states have adequately shouldered social reproductive tasks, working women have turned to other working women to perform domestic “care work.”

The globalized technologies and migratory patterns discussed here add new layers to the construct of “stratified reproduction” (Colen 1995). This is explicit in the Singaporean prohibition of pregnancy for migrant nannies (Yeoh and Huang this volume) but only slightly m...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Comparative Politics
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Cross national care labour
• Part III Transnational adoption
• Part IV ART Across borders
• Part V Conclusion
• References
• Index