Brown Bodies, White Babies

The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy

Laura Harrison

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479873081
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie du mariage et de la famille

Brown Bodies, White Babies focuses on the practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, in which a woman - through in-vitro fertilization using the sperm and egg of intended parents or donors - carries a pregnancy for intended parents of a different race. Focusing on the racial differences between parents and surrogates, this book is interested in how reproductive technologies intersect with race, particularly when brown bodies produce white babies. While the potential of reproductive technologies is far from pre-determined, the ways in which these technologies are currently deployed often serve the interests of dominant groups, through the creation of white, middle-class, heteronormative families. Laura Harrison, providing an important understanding of the work of women of color as surrogates, connects this labor to the history of racialized reproduction in the United States. Cross-racial surrogacy is one end of a continuum in which dominant groups rely on the reproductive potential of nonwhite women, whose own reproductive desires have been historically thwarted and even demonized. Brown Bodies, White Babies provides am interdisciplinary analysis that includes legal cases of contested surrogacy, historical examples of surrogacy as a form of racialized reproductive labor, the role of genetics in the assisted reproduction industry, and the recent turn toward reproductive tourism. Joining the ongoing feminist debates surrounding reproduction, motherhood, race, and the body, Brown Bodies, White Babies ultimately critiques the new potentials for parenthood that put the very contours of kinship into question.

1

The Path to Gestational Surrogacy

Naturalizing the New Normal

Headlines announcing the birth of Louise Brown were both optimistic—“‘Test Tube Baby’ First of Many, Doctors Say”—and discouraging—“Don’t Get Hopes Up, Women Warned.”1 These appeared in the Los Angeles Times just a day apart, on July 27 and 28 of 1978, announcing that England was home to the first baby successfully born through in vitro fertilization. The United States was not far behind; Brown’s birth was followed three years later by that of the first American “test tube baby,” Elizabeth Carr. In vitro fertilization (IVF) involves harvesting a woman’s eggs, fertilizing them in a lab, and then implanting the fertilized embryos into the uterus, thus decoupling procreation from sexual intercourse. This separation between sex and reproduction was disturbing to some; as the term “test tube babies” suggests, at its advent, IVF was viewed by many as cold, unnatural, even monstrous. Less than forty years later, an estimated five million babies have been born using IVF,2 suggesting that the initial stigma surrounding the procedure and the children whom it produces has largely vanished. Indeed, IVF and its corollary, gestational surrogacy, have transformed from a family secret to a celebrity feature story, with actresses like Elizabeth Banks, Mariah Carey, and Nicole Kidman openly sharing their use.

Despite the contemporary assimilation of assisted reproductive technologies into the reproductive norm, IVF has had complicated repercussions, and readers of the aforementioned headlines were left with many questions: Would these technologies lead to a leveling of the reproductive playing field for all women, or did Brown’s birth represent false hope of a “cure” for infertility? Were ARTs an aid to natural, heterosexual reproduction that would produce “beautiful, normal” babies, as Brown’s physician described her, or an unnatural technological invasion that would colonize women’s bodies?3 The answer is far more complicated than these polarized options suggest, despite the fact that extreme characterizations of ARTs largely dominated the popular discourse of the time. Indeed, this moment was framed by many ethicists as “somewhere between a nightmare and unmitigated sin” while simultaneously boosting the hopes of infertile couples who had given up on conceiving a child.4

The advent of IVF marked the initial fragmentation of motherhood into multiple biological and social components, including the potential for a new kind of surrogacy in which the “gestational carrier” is not genetically related to the child she bears. The context in which technologies such as IVF emerged is significant; technologies are not neutral, nor are their uses predetermined.5 Politics and technologies are coproduced, such that the outcome of technological innovation is shaped by the historical and social environment. In addition to mapping this context, this chapter will examine how reproductive technologies and surrogacy have evolved from the first IVF birth, and consider how rapid growth and change impact the type of feminist theorizing that these technologies necessitate. The meanings of these technologies are not set, nor are their implications determined. Rather, the possibilities for kinship have multiplied legally, theoretically, technologically, and commercially, as this chapter will explore.

Infertility, Race, and the Growth of ARTs

The birth of Louise Brown was followed by a flurry of media and scientific attention to in vitro fertilization. This interest contributed to the establishment of a burgeoning specialty of endocrinology and infertility medicine, and what are now known as assisted reproductive technologies. ARTs, according to the CDC, consist of “all fertility treatments in which egg and sperm are handled” including IVF, gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT) and zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT).6 Physicians began to use ARTs in the United States in 1981 despite low rates of success, high costs, and the disapproval of groups such as the Catholic Church, which condemned the separation of reproduction from sex.7 As demand for fertility services rose, so too did the realization among doctors and researchers of the money-making potential of the field. In response, the market for infertility procedures expanded from private clinics and universities to larger commercial enterprises, infertility diagnoses increased, and popular awareness of the problem spread.8 The number of fertility clinics and specialists grew exponentially in the 1980s and 1990s, aided by a greater understanding of the biology of human reproduction, growth in the field of endocrinology, and the introduction of medication targeting fertility problems.9 The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) reports that from 1985 (the first year that the organization began collecting these data) to the end of 2006, half a million babies were born in the United States as a result of ART procedures. According to the same organization, ARTs have contributed to the conception of about one in every hundred babies born in the United States since 2002.10

The growth in these industries was also influenced by the public perception of infertility, and of whom it affected. The numbers of individuals seeking fertility services increased due to growing awareness of reproductive technologies and improving success rates.11 In addition, a growing cultural panic emerged in the early 1980s as the American public was inundated with reports of a wave of infertility among married couples.12 These fears were not race-neutral; the mainstream media routinely represented the public face of infertility as a white family seeking a miracle baby through IVF.13 While evidence of growing white infertility was lacking, infertility rates among young black women tripled between 1965 and 1982.14 This time period also saw attacks on the reproductive rights of women of color as part of the government’s War on Poverty, including federal funding in the 1970s for the sterilization of women on Medicaid, welfare, food stamps, and public housing.15

The perceived (yet unsubstantiated) “epidemic” of infertility among middle-class white women fit neatly within a parallel rhetoric that warned of the breakdown of the nuclear family due to women’s increased entry into the workforce, rising divorce rates, and a dearth of adoptable babies.16 By this logic, the United States had a low supply of children available for adoption, when the subtext of this rhetoric reads “adoptable” as a euphemism for white, newborn, and nondisabled.17 The lowered numbers of healthy white infants resulted in part from the decriminalization of abortion and increased access to effective contraceptives.18 Yet the feminist theorist Laura Briggs argues that an overemphasis has been placed on the effect of abortion and contraception on adoption rates, which dropped dramatically in the 1970s, and that the greatest factor was the ability and willingness of single women to raise children on their own.19

While popular media stories frequently cite the lack of adoptable children as a causal link to the use and development of ARTs, this logic deserves interrogation. In reality, the number of children in foster care, many of whom become available for adoption, doubled between 1982 and 1999. Unsurprisingly, the racial demographic of these children is not reflective of cities or states from which they are drawn. As of 2002, black children made up 42 percent of all children in foster care in the United States, even though this minority group represents only 17 percent of the country’s youth.20 These statistics reflect the differential value placed on children available for adoption since World War II. White infants are cast as a precious resource with a clear value for infertile couples, while older children, disabled children, and children of color are perceived to be a drain on the resources (namely, the tax dollars) of the middle class.21 In this cultural context, racial identity is conflated with desirability, such that “in the American market, a Black baby is indisputably an inferior product.”22 As such, the massive for-profit industries that cater to Americans’ reproductive needs have developed along an axis of what Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp term “stratified reproduction,” or a set of power relations in which certain categories of people are encouraged to reproduce while the needs of others are delegitimized.23 Moreover, the linkages between ARTs, abortion politics, adoption, and race make clear that the rise in ARTs must be understood in relation to changing ideologies of family and of beliefs about “good” or “deserving” mothers.

The very definition of infertility, while seemingly neutral, is in actuality a social construct. Infertility is caused by a wide variety of biological, social, and environmental factors including inadequate health care, forced sterilization, hazardous workplace conditions, and environmental pollution, and it is commonly diagnosed using heterosexual parameters that exclude lesbians and single women.24 Accordingly, some scholars differentiate between “medical infertility,” such as blocked fallopian tubes or low sperm count; “structural infertility,” or the absence of a heterosexual partner; and “cultural infertility,” which “refers to the inability to become pregnant because of cost or discrimination or social attitudes.”25 Such distinctions, while rarely recognized, are useful because they effectively mark the supposedly neutral generic term “infertility” as bearing a race, class, and sexual normativity. Despite this, delayed marriage and the postponement of childbearing have overshadowed other issues as the most alarming cause of infertility in the United States, reflecting a hierarchy of racialized and gendered concerns about reproduction.

The Feminist Response to ARTs

The feminist women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s provided an alternative to the dominant message that infertility could be cured only through recourse to institutionalized medicine. The women’s health movement encouraged women to take control of their bodies and their reproduction with books like Our Bodies, Ourselves and the advent of women-owned health centers.26 Feminist health clinics aimed to reduce the gender-based power differential between medical care providers and women seeking services, often by training community health care workers to learn about their own bodies, perform exams, and then train other women.27 Single women and lesbians were empowered to create families outside male-dominated health care settings, and provided with the education and tools for self-insemination. Although sperm banks routinely turned away unmarried women, donors could be found through friends or extended social networks, and gay men often provided sperm for lesbian couples.28

Despite the do-it-yourself embrace of low-tech, women-centered interventions into fertility within the women’s movement, by the 1980s feminists were deeply divided in their response to rapidly evolving ART innovations. Mainstream liberal feminists broadly supported the advancement of reproductive technologies during the mid-1980s and early 1990s, framing ARTs as tools of reproductive freedom representative of women’s choice to control their bodies.29 Feminists questioned whether women should be required to abide by surrogacy contracts, or be given the chance to reconsider the decision to relinquish the child after giving birth. According to liberal feminists, surrogacy contracts must be enforced; to dissolve them would shore up essentialist and conservative ideologies of femininity and deny women reproductive and democratic freedom.30 To claim that surrogates should not be bound by contract would mean treading on dangerous territory; it would reify assumptions about women’s instinctive maternal “nature,” inability to make rational decisions, and inherent emotionality.31 As this argument went, successful commercial and altruistic surrogacy arrangements were evidence that a woman’s physical ability to gestate did not determine her social role as a mother.

Yet liberal feminists were divided on whether commercial surrogacy (in which the surrogate receives financial compensation) and altruistic or “gift” surrogacy (often arranged between family members or friends) should be handled differently. Some believed that commercial surrogacy contracts should be invalidated because, like consensual slavery, a commercial surrogacy contract “violates the ongoing freedom of the individual,” but that gift surrogacy should be allowed if the surrogate is given the option to reverse her decision after the child is born.32 Others argued that all pregnancies exist under conditions of vulnerability, which are not unique to contract surrogacy.33

While liberal arguments such as these were largely representative of the mainstream feminist position on surrogacy and ARTs during the 1980s, it was (and arguably continues to be) the radical feminist perspective on reproductive technologies that translated into the popular consciousness as the feminist position of the time period. This may be an effect of the mainstream media’s tendency to present debates as hopelessly polarized, or reflect the wider cultural backlash that paints feminism as reactionary and antifamily. As it was, radical and cultural feminist responses to reproductive technologies during the 1970s and 1980s were largely critical. Many cultural feminists claimed that men were alienated from reproduction and therefore desired to locate the power of birth more firmly within the domain of male control.34 Women should celebrate their unique culture and consciousness, the argument went, and embrace natural childbirth and labor while rejecting masculinist technologies.

More “technophobic” radical feminist thinkers, such as Andrea Dworkin, Gena Corea, and Barbara Katz Rothman, expanded upon this cultural feminist concern with male appropriation of reproduction.35 In her 1983 book Right-Wing Women, Dworkin situates surrogacy within what she calls the “farming model,” in which individual men use and exploit women for reproduction.36 Dworkin viewed surrogacy as an aid to patriarchy, arguing that “motherhood is becoming a new branch of female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to the womb for experimentation and for power.”37 Radical feminists feared that reproductive technologies reflected a conspiracy whereby the male “pharmacracy” exercised social dominance through medicalization, seizing control of women’s reproductive power, and ensuring that procreation was just as alienating an experience for women as it was for men.38

The socialist feminist Shulamith Firestone offered an alternative perspective on reproduction before assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization were even a possibility. Firestone’s early second-wave polemic The Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970 prior to...