‘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.

The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 1, 2017). Created by Bruce Miller, based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood

“…Also, the traditional surrogacy portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale, in which both the surrogate's egg and her womb are used is much less common than gestational surrogacy, where a fertilized egg from the woman seen as 'the biological mother' is implanted in the surrogate's womb. What is pertinent, however, are the meeting points between the speculative horror in The Handmaid's Tale and certain aspects of research on 'parenting culture' (see Lee et al, 2014) on the one hand and anxieties about surrogacy and 'the maternal bond' (Dow, 2017) on the other.…”

“…Their experiences diverge because of the class-based differences accentuated by the wife's sumptuous blue (to evoke the Virgin Mary) quarters and the handmaid's fittingly functional room. There are historical precedents of the work of motherhood being 'split' in various ways between women, such as through wet nurses and nannies (see Dow, 2017citing Drummond, 1978. That, in The Handmaid's Tale, wives mimic the labour of the handmaid by 'going into labour' expresses a rather different dynamic.…”

“…Offred and viewers alike worry (with good reason, it turns out) about how Janine/Ofwarren, the woman who has just given birth, will cope with giving up 'her' baby. The idea that a woman will face a great deal of hardship when saying goodbye to a baby whom she has gestated is the hypothetical 'nightmare scenario' that the very thought of surrogacy evokes for some (see Dow, 2017). Janine 'suffers' from her attachment to 'her baby'.…”