The in/visible wombs of the market: the dialectics of waged and unwaged reproductive labour in the global surrogacy industry

Abstract

Since the early 2000s transnational surrogacy has emerged as a new capitalist frontier founded on the intensification of the commodification of women's reproductive labours, bodies and biologies. This has resulted in academic and policy debates on whether to outlaw surrogacy altogether or to ban commercial surrogacy in favour of altruistic forms of surrogacy. Rather than tackling surrogacy in moralising terms of 'altruistic' gift-giving versus 'greedy' money-making, in this article we draw on feminist political economy literature on social reproduction to propose an integrative reproductive labour perspective that looks at the dialectics of waged and unwaged work involved in the process of (re)producing people. Drawing on empirical research data on commercial surrogacy in Georgia, we analyse how this dialectical relation between exploitation of waged work (surrogate) and appropriation of unwaged work (mother) operates on the workfloor. We explore Maria Mies' concept of 'housewifization' to argue that processes of exploitation are deepened in the Georgian surrogacy industry, partially because surrogates refrain/are refrained from identifying as workers and as such are not afforded labour rights nor considered to produce value.

Global Fertility Chains: An Integrative Political Economy Approach to Understanding the Reproductive Bioeconomy

“…Yet, when sold as "Caucasian Ivy League eggs" by fertility agencies, or turned into patentable stem cell lines by biotech companies, their value increases. The mode of accumulation in the global fertility industry is a dialectic of direct exploitation of waged labor and indirect appropriation of unwaged labor/natures (Federici 2004;Moore 2015;Vertommen and Barbagallo 2021) A final element to be taken into account in the territorial embeddedness of global fertility chains is their variegated border and mobility regimes. Depending on their ontological and geopolitical status, reproductive tissues, workers, and consumers are subjected to very different mobility and migration regulations (Schurr 2018).…”

“…With a focus on assisted reproduction, these scholars have conceptualized the reproductive bioeconomy as a deeply technological capitalist project that incorporates the preexisting processes of exploitation of women's reproductive bodies, services, and work. Bringing the labor of biological reproduction into the debates on social reproduction under capitalism, they have proposed concepts such as reproductive labor (power; Dickenson 2007;Pande 2014;Rudrappa 2015;Namberger 2019;Newman and Nahman 2020;Vertommen and Barbagallo 2021), gestational labor (Vora 2015;Lewis 2019), or clinical/regenerative labor (Cooper and Waldby 2014) to understand women's indispensable role within the reproductive bioeconomy. By framing surrogacy, egg cell provision, or tissue donations as labor that is precarious, un(der)valued, and unrecognized, this perspective looks at the gendered nature of value creation and labor within capitalist economies.…”

“…Under capitalist modes of accumulation, processes of ovulation, gestation, and parturition are not valued as labor, neither in their unpaid form as motherhood and "natural" pregnancy nor in their commodified form as commercial surrogacy or egg cell provision. In the surrogacy and egg-providing industries we have researched, where reproductive labor is one of the obvious sources of profit, we witnessed how fertility brokers still use the language of donation, gift-giving, or altruism to promote their services (Ragone 1994;Vertommen and Barbagallo 2021).…”

“…7. This argument on the "housewifization" of surrogates and egg cell providers, who consider themselves as "mere" mothers or housewives despite their full incorporation into capitalist markets, has been further developed in Vertommen and Barbagallo (2021). 8.…”

Social reproduction and pandemic neoliberalism: Planetary crises and the reorganisation of life, work and death

“… 2. These chains also increasingly include processes of commodification of biological life and its ‘products’ along novel ‘fertility frontiers’ (e.g. Newman and Nahman, 2020; Vertommen and Barbagallo, 2021). …”