‘A Nine-Month Head-Start’: The Maternal Bond and Surrogacy

Abstract

This article considers the significance of maternal bonding in people's perceptions of the ethics of surrogacy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Scotland with people who do not have personal experience of surrogacy, it describes how they used this 'natural' concept to make claims about the ethics of surrogacy and compares these claims with their personal experiences of maternal bonding. Interviewees located the maternal bond in the pregnant woman's body, which means that mothers have a 'nine-month head-start' in bonding with their children. While this valorises it, it also reproduces normative expectations about the nature and ethic of motherhood. While mothers are expected to feel compelled to nurture and care for their child, surrogate mothers are supposed to resist bonding with the children they carry. This article explores how interviewees drew on the polysemous nature of the maternal bond to make nuanced claims about motherhood, bonding and the ethics of surrogacy.

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