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feminists@law, Vol  8, No 1 (2018)


A Feminist Discourse  on the Global Indian Surrogacy Bazaar

  Sheela Saravanan*
This is a video of a paper given at the Sexual Contract: 30  Years On conference held in the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University  on 10-11 May 2018. This paper was part of Panel 4: The New Surrogate Mother Contract,  chaired by Julie McCandless. The PowerPoint slides accompanying the paper are  available as a separate file.

The  transnational Indian surrogacy markets are a classic case of how rampant  violations of human and child rights, women’s bodily integrity and medical  ethics thrive on global structural inequalities. In the garb of reproductive  liberty, the surrogacy practice promotes deeply embedded pronatalist, patriarchal,  racial and ableist hegemony. This raises globally relevant questions of  geneticisation, alienation of the gestational role, human and child rights  violations, trafficking and reproductive injustice. In her book, The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman critiques the fact that  patriarchal control prevails in the marriage contract, the prostitution  contract, and the contract for surrogate motherhood. My research, recently also  published as a book titled A Transnational  Feminist View of Surrogacy Biomarkets in India, shows the link between the three  kinds of sexual contracts elaborated in Carole Pateman’s book. India banned  surrogacy on reported deaths of surrogate mothers and egg donors, custody  battles for children, abandonment of disabled and undesired children and exploitation  of women, apart from trafficking for surrogacy. The illegal chain of networks  trafficking young girls from poor localities in India for prostitution and  domestic work has also been used for surrogacy. The surrogacy practice  maintains patriarchy through familial persuasion and contracts that control and  exploit women’s bodies and effect triple-alienation: from the children born,  from their own body and physical alienation. Applying the reproductive  justice framework, I argue that surrogacy is likely to put the surrogate mother  through multiple forms of indignity and injustice along with life risk and  hence cannot be considered the intended parent’s reproductive right. 

 



  
    * Research  Associate, South Asia Institute, Department of Anthropology, University of  Heidelberg, Germany. Email: sheela.saravanan@uni-heidelberg.de

  



