Review Of Markens, Surrogate Motherhood And The Politics Of Reproduction

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 4099–4103. ISSN 1048–4876, eISSN 1556–486X. © 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. Reprint information can be found at https://caesar.sheridan.com/reprints/redir.php?pub=10089&acro=AMET.

Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction. Susan Markens. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 277 pp. ELLY TEMAN University of California, Berkeley In this engaging and well-written book, Susan Markens offers a feminist sociological analysis of U.S. policy on surrogate motherhood. Markens looks at the symbolic emergence of surrogate motherhood as a social problem during the years 1980–92. To demonstrate, she focuses on two divergent legislative efforts in 1992 that she views as representative of the debates and public attitudes toward surrogacy more widely at this particular historical moment. The first bill, in California, proposed regulation of surrogacy arrangements (later vetoed, it never became law). The second, in New York, led to a ban on commercial surrogacy there. The introduction raises the question of why U.S. policy on surrogacy has lagged behind other countries, which have either banned or regulated surrogacy. The slow legislative response among U.S. states has led to “lack of regulation” being the most common policy. Markens sets the wider context by connecting the emergence of surrogacy as a publicly perceived social problem to other social issues and controversies of the time: the social construction of an “infertility epidemic” and changes in family structure. Using a comparative approach, Markens examines policy debates, media representations, task forces, and interest groups in each legislative arena. Her work is based on detailed content analysis of hundreds of newspaper articles on surrogacy, government documents, and interviews

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with nearly a dozen key actors in the relevant legislative debates. The book also includes many tables that are useful for assessing differences among various legislative approaches. Throughout, Markens portrays the different feminist approaches to surrogacy in a balanced manner and shows how the politics of reproduction are enmeshed in politics of gender and race, and in ideologies of motherhood and family. After introducing the useful concept of “discursive framing,” Markens applies it to her analysis of the various ways pro-and antisurrogacy camps formed their central arguments. It is fascinating to read how those wishing to ban surrogacy and those wishing to regulate it both employed the same discursive frames to reach different policy conclusions. For instance, both camps were concerned about “the best interests of children” but disagreed over what those interests were. Similarly, both camps used the discursive frame of “choice” borrowed from U.S. abortion politics but toward opposite ends. Markens even finds that both camps are surprisingly in ideological agreement over the sanctity of the family. Markens’s observations on media representations are well worth bearing in mind today as surrogacy has again arisen in the news. In chapter 4, she focuses on media coverage of two contested surrogacy cases wherein the surrogate and contracting couple engaged in court battles over custody of the child: the infamous “Baby M” case in New Jersey, and the case of Anna Johnson, an African American surrogate in California who gestated the genetic child of a white– Filipino contracting couple. Markens views the Baby M case as a “key critical discourse moment,” a dramatic event constructed as a “horror story” in the media that focused political and public attention on surrogacy and helped to define it as a social problem. She suggests that both contested surrogacy cases had strong influence on the subsequent ban on surrogacy in several states, including New York, and on the proposed regulation of the practice in California. She

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discusses “baby selling” and cultural anxiety over ambiguous kinship as the main discursive frames evident in news coverage of these cases and notes that media coverage of surrogacy subsided significantly after this period. Now two decades after the Baby M case went to trial, a new wave of media attention to surrogacy has focused on the growing surrogacy industry in India and the reported prevalence of surrogacy among American military wives. Markens’s discursive frames can be easily applied to critically reading these depictions: the Indian surrogate mothers are paternalistically depicted as desperately poor, confined to hostels, and doing surrogacy “just for the money.” The U.S. military wives are implicitly and explicitly accused of greedily using military health benefits to finance their for-profit pregnancies. All of these would concur with Markens’s frames for understanding the underlying cultural anxieties and moral concerns over baby selling and commodification, as well as issues of women’s choice and freedom. Yet this current media attention also expresses contemporary concerns over globalization —the Indian surrogacy industry is routinely referred to as a type of “outsourcing” of reproductive labor. The coverage of military wives ties surrogacy to current U.S. concerns over the war in Iraq by calling particular attention to surrogates whose husbands are serving overseas. Thus, the reproductive politics surrounding surrogacy are linked not only with the gender and racial ideologies that Markens discusses but also with nationalist ideologies. The stories on India exhibit cultural anxieties about white American children being gestated abroad in the wombs of dark-skinned women with suspiciously viewed foreign diets and pregnancy practices. Likewise, the stories about military wives illuminate how these women construct surrogacy as a way of contributing to the nation, differently from but equivalent to their husband’s military contribution. National ideologies, largely absent in the particular historical moment that Markens

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discusses, are central to the reproductive politics surrounding surrogacy in contemporary Israel as well, where my own work on surrogacy is concentrated (see Teman in press). Markens’s clear and jargon-free writing style will make the book accessible to a wide readership. In undergraduate courses in gender studies and in sociology it can be used to discuss how social problems are constructed and to exemplify how reproductive politics are intertwined with ideologies of gender, family, race, and motherhood. It might also be used in methodology courses to demonstrate the use of textual analysis as an ethnographic method because each chapter demonstrates how a constructionist approach can be applied to media, policy debates, and government documents. For graduate courses in the anthropology of reproduction, the volume should be discussed in conjunction with comparative ethnographies of the politics of reproduction from other countries. This could help students realize the uniqueness, from a cultural perspective, of some of the social issues and discourses that they may otherwise take for granted if reading Markens’s volume on its own. For instance, Markens discusses the strong influence on U.S. surrogacy policy of cultural discourses on abortion, women’s right to “choose,” fetal rights, the “best interests of children,” commodification, the right to privacy, and concerns about the state’s involvement in women’s reproductive decision-making. When read in conjunction with Gail Kligman’s (1998) discussion of the politics of reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania, for instance, important discussions about the role of the state in controlling reproduction can be raised. I recommend this volume for its clarity of style and for the important issues it raises. References cited Kligman, Gail

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1998 The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press. Teman, Elly In press Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Birthing a Mother The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self Elly Teman Birthing a Mother is the first ethnography to probe the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. In this beautifully written and insightful book, Elly Teman shows how surrogates and intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavor. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork among Jewish Israeli women, interspersed with cross-cultural perspectives of surrogacy in the global context, Teman traces the processes by which surrogates relinquish any maternal claim to the baby even as intended mothers accomplish a complicated transition to motherhood. Teman’s groundbreaking analysis reveals that as surrogates psychologically and emotionally disengage from the fetus they carry, they develop a profound and lasting bond with the intended mother. Elly Teman is a Research Fellow at the Penn Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies at the University of Pennsylvania. Forthcoming in FEBRUARY 368 pages, 6 x 9”, 11 b/w photographs, 1 line illustration $55.00 cloth 978-0-520-25963-8 $21.95 paper 978-0-520-25964-5

To order online: www.ucpress.edu/9780520259645 For a 20% discount use this source code: 10M9071 (please enter this code in the special instructions box.)

Illustration from Yedioth Aharonot newspaper. Courtesy of the artist, Rutu Modan.