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Epistemologies of embodiment in the new reproductive technologies: A case study of gestational surrogacy
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Epistemologies of embodiment in the new reproductive technologies: A case study of gestational surrogacy
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EPISTEMOLOGIES OF EMBODIMENT
IN THE MEW REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES s
A CASE STUDY OF GESTATIONAL SURROGACY
by-
Gillian Marie Goslinga
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(Visual Anthropology)
August 1996
Copyright 1996 Gillian Marie Goslinga
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UMI Number: 1381587
Copyright 1996 by
Goslinga, Gillian Marie
All rights reserved.
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE S C HO O L
U N IV E R S IT Y PARK
LO S A N G E LE S. C A L IF O R N IA 1 0 0 0 7
This thesis, •written by
MM'lg <^VSUri6Jr
under the direction of kJSthstcThesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements fo r the degree of
a
cvPouxtV
THESIS COMMITTEE
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For Janet Hoskins
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Acknowledgement s
As David Schneider has said about good informants, they
find you (1980:8) . I am extremely grateful that Pamela
Martin1 "found" me, at a party, where I was able to casually
eavesdrop on her conversation about the "miracle" of "just
getting pregnant with the help of a surrogate" after ten years
of demoralizing infertility. I admit to being immediately
intrigued since my interest for a thesis project was in the
area of gender and reproduction and, more specifically, in an
area which I am defining as the politics of embodiment.
Surrogacy qualified as a politically charged act of embodiment
beyond my wildest dreams, and, very fortunately for me, Pamela
asquiesced on the spot to my curiosity and nosiness. Within a
few weeks, X had met her surrogate, Julie Thayer, and was
interviewing both of them in their respective homes as well as
accompanying them to their fertility clinic visits.
Eventually, they allowed me to videotape these visits and
interview friends and family, and thus began a year and a half
long visual ethnography of their arrangement. I am deeply
thankful to them both for so generously and graciously
inviting me (and my motley video crew) into their lives.
Baines have been fictionalized to protect the identity of the
participants.
i l l
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I also want to thank the many individuals who
contributed to this project. Since I wish to protect the
identity of the persons and institutions who allowed me so
generously to accompany Julie Thayer and the Martins over the
course of the year, I will only say this: thank you all for
your time, your willingness to be interviewed and queried,
your efforts to provide me with material for my video, and
your year-long education of me.
At school, I would like to thank Gelya Frank, my thesis
chair, who was instrumental in keeping me empirically
grounded and focused, yet intellectually flexible. I am
grateful for her perfect blend of humane but exacting
scholarship. Her own work with disability has inspired my
curiosity and respect for radically other forms of
embodiment. I owe a debt of gratitude to my other two
advisors as well, Nancy Lutkehaus, for her insightful
theoretical discussions of my material, and Roger
Christiansen, without whom the video would not have been made
and completed. I am especially thankful to Roger who was a
great support throughout. Janet Hoskins, Peter Biella and
Alexander Moore have been longstanding mentors and friends:
their influence on me can be felt on every page. My personal
friends Marilyn Moore, Deborah Mandel, Soumya Murkherjee,
Alma and Cline Clark, Barbara Kelly, Jean Ann Allen, Sabine
El Shama, and Brett Holler have all given generously to this
iv
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project, too. I want to especially thank Brett Holler who
read two versions of this manuscript and served as the
piece's unofficial but excellent editor, and Deborah Mandel
whose fantastic producing skills helped me make the deadline
with the written thesis. I am also exceptionally grateful to
my now deceased and beloved uncle, Carl Ruys, who helped
finance the video. My colleague and friend Hispano Duron
helped shoot the video and will never be forgotten for his
footage of Paul Martin walking though his hall of mirrors,
a very cinematic sequence. Steve Goldsmith of Avid
Technologies and Kenneth Yas of Digital Storage provided
post-production support. Thank you all.
Last but certainly not least, I wish to thank my friend
and partner, Bann Roy, who shot most of the video for me with
great sensitivity and artistic vision, and who was there for
me through "11th hours" of this project. I could not have
done this without you.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Acknowlegments Hi
I. Cvborq Emboli?
The Changing Politics of Reproduction 1
A. The Project 2
B. Background 3
C. Demographics 4
D. Studying Up 5
E. Reproduction in A Cyborg World 10
F. On Anthropology, Feminism and the New
Reproductive Technologies 19
G. Power, Reproduction and Embodiment 29
II. Biographical Embodimenf c ;
An I-Thou Methodology 35
A. The Methodology 38
B. The Importance of Dialogue and Temporality
in the Construction of Social Discourse 43
C. A Personal Dialogue:
A Gestational Surrogate as the Other 46
D. The Body As Citadel 47
E. The Body As Shared Space 53
F. Negotiating Body Boundaries 55
G. The Body As Property 61
III. Biologic* 1
The Climate of Infertility Consciousness 65
A. The Narrative of Infertility 66
B. New Conceptions: The Discursive
Emergence of the New Reproductive
Technologies 67
C. The Changing Facts of Nature 68
D. "Genes" as the New Facts of Nature 70
E. The Construction of Infertility
as a Fact of the Body 74
F. The Construction of Fertility
as a Matter of the Self 78
G. The Fertility Continuum 81
H.. Gestational Surrogacy
as a Two-Mother Construction 83
I. Surrogate Programs:
Ambiguities in the Exercize of Power 87
vi
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IV. The Play of Biology Biography
in a Surrogacy ArranqMiww t - - 95
A. A Chronology of Events 103
B. The Play of Liminality
in a Two-Mother pregnancy 113
C. An Aside:
Liminality in the Case of the Fathers 121
D. The Discursive Construction of Closeness 123
V. Cyborgs. Slirrooafceg a™* gryiolartt.
Epistemologies of Embodiment
in a Post-Modern World 139
A. Methodological Findings 144
B. Theoretical Implications: Discourse and Agency 147
C. Reflections of Cyborg Politics
in a Re-Embodied World 162
VI. Appendix A: Schedule of Costs 169
VII. Bibliography 172
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Introduction
Cvborq Rmlwl-imoTit- .
The Changing Politics of Reproduction
Developments in reproductive medicine do not just
comprise new procedures; they also embody new knowledge.
Marilyn Strathem1
Breakthroughs in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and
hormonal preparations have made it possible for a woman to
carry a child which is not conceived in her body or
genetically related to her. When such a woman enters into a
contract to carry the genetic child of a third party, she is
called a "gestational surrogate." In contrast with
traditional ideas about procreation and reproduction,
gestational surrogacy is not only a radically "Other"
experience of reproduction, it is also a new form of
embodiment and a new type of social relation. This thesis
explores the ethnographic context of one such arrangement and
theorizes its significance to Euro-American notions of
kinship, embodiment, sociality, and the "problem of women" in
society (Strathem 1988) .
11995:348.
1
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The Project
The research is based on a longitudinal, ethnographic
study of one gestational arrangement from conception through
birth and a six month post-partum follow-up period. Although
the new reproductive technologies have generated a lot of
writing, actual qualitative research has been disturbingly
minimal (Ragone 1994; Snowdon 1994; Hanafin 1984)2. One of
the goals of this study is to contribute to this scant body
of knowledge an anthropological appreciation of the dynamics
of a surrogate arrangement, as it is experienced by the
participants themselves. This embodied perspective is
particularly important for our understanding of the surrogate
position. First person accounts of this position have been
eclipsed in both scholarly and popular discourses by heated
debates around the ethical, political, and social
consequences of the new reproductive technologies at large,
as well as sensationalist custody cases (such as the Baby M
case) , and a morally compelling cultural meta-narrative
constructed around the "desperateness" of the infertile and
2 I am using "ethnographic" loosely here: Ragone is the only
professional anthropologist and her study the only to account for the
cultural context of surrogacy. Snowdon interviewed 12 women (egg donors
and surrogates) on their conceptions of motherhood. Hilary Hanafin is a
psychologist who has had a long history of professional contact with
surrogates. Her dissertation was the first study of surrogates ever and
she now heads the psychological screening and support services for one
of the most established surrogate agencies in the country, where she has
been involved in hundreds of surrogacy arrangements. Her perspectives
on surrogacy are, while very rich, uncritical with respect to the
cultural context of the practice.
2
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their right to a "cure" (Franklin 1990) . As a result, little
is known, in real terms, about surrogates.
BacfcaroMid
The fieldwork for this research was conducted between
March 1995 and June 1996 and motivated by an ethnographic
film project by the title The Child the Stork Brought Home,
in partial fulfillment of the Masters in Visual Anthropology
degree at the University of Southern California. Over the
course of these fifteen months, I followed on video a
gestational surrogate, Julie Thayer, her family, and the
couple, the Martins (in industry parlance, the genetic or
intended parents) who commissioned Julie to surrogate their
child. The arrangement was brokered though the Martins'
fertility clinic of ten years. The surrogate program
provided the standard administrative and psychological
support services offered in most open3 surrogate programs,
since the program at the fertility clinic was new and still
very small. On November 5th, 1995, less than a year after
the contract was signed, Julie Thayer, the surrogate, gave
birth to a healthy if slightly premature 6.4 lbs 19-inch baby
girl, Claire Martin.
30pen surrogate programs encourage direct contact between couples and
their surrogates, in contrast with closed surrogate programs in which
little or no contact is made, except at birth when the baby is handed
over (Ragone 1994:22).
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All personal names in this study have been fictionalized
to protect the identity of the participants. The names of
the institutions and the professionals who were involved in
this arrangement are not used. Rather, I describe them by
their function in the process: "the fertility clinic," the
"surrogate program," the "psychologist." There was a second
surrogate program involved on a consulting basis. The
surrogate attended monthly surrogate meetings at this center
on a regular basis. This facility is represented as the
"surrogate center" to distinguish it from the "surrogate
program" which brokered and administered the arrangement.
Demographics
The surrogacy arrangement I followed between the Martins
and Julie Thayer was demographically typical.4 All parties
were white, heterosexual, and married. Julie is in her mid
twenties, has two years of college education,5 works in the
service sector as a medical assistant, and has one child of
her own, a son, who at the time of the surrogate conception
was a little over a year old. Her household income is above
the norm for married surrogates, which Ragone (1994:54)
calculates at $40,000. The Martins are Caucasian, upper
class income professionals, in their mid-forties” (compare
with Ragone 1994:89) . They have had a ten year history of
4 Demographics are taken from the only existing ethnographic study of
surrogate parenthood by Helena Ragone (1994:51-55 and 87-93) .
^er two fields of interest were child development and, ironically,
anthropology!
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unexplained infertility, including six in-vitro attempts,
which resulted in two early miscarriages.
Studying Pt>
One of the reason for the dearth of studies on embodied
narratives of assisted reproduction might be that studying
the NTRs (New Reproductive Technologies) means "studying up"
since the biomedical institutions and clients of the
technologies are of the professional, upper classes, and are
thus powerholders (Ragone 1994:89) . As Laura Nader has
shown, because of their own class position, the social
sciences at large have favored "studying down" and largely
neglected "studying up" (1974) . "Studying up" presents its
own set of methodological challenges, for example, access and
control over the final product.
In my own case, studying up was a challenge, but making
a video actually helped with gaining access. For example,
Pamela Martin, the gatekeeper to this project, has had a
successful career in the entertainment business and her
private life is on occasion publicized. While I knew her,
she was featured with her newborn baby in an article on
upscale nurseries in the home section of the Daily Times, the
San Fernando Valley equivalent of The Los Angeles Times.
Pamela is also personally acquainted with famous women who
have publicized their experiences with surrogacy (Sheryl
Saban, author of Miracle Child: Genetic Mother, Surrogate
5
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Womb and Deirdre Hall who produced and starred in a
television movie about her experience) . For these reasons,
Pamela was predisposed to the idea of a film about her own
experience of surrogacy6. Her posture towards the project was
part patron, part executive producer. For example, Pamela
introduced me to her surrogate Julie, mediated my film
requests with her busy husband Paul, and helped me arrange
the filming of the birth at the hospital. But she also
required her own personal set of dubs of all the footage of
her and her family7.
Pamela's husband, Paul, heads an "entertainment business
empire," as he ironically refers to his work, which he feels
compelled to micro-manage. Thus, he was too busy to pay much
attention to the film. The surrogacy was largely his wife's
project to manage and the video was a part of that. It was
thus difficult for me to schedule time with him and I was
never able to film him and Pamela together, nor get to know
him very well. In spite of his peripheral involvement in the
6Pamela did have reservations, but these had to do with the fragility of
the pregnancy the first two months of our contact. She categorically
and very understandably did not want a film about yet another 'failure'
in her quest for motherhood.
7To retain the integrity of the data and the confidence of each on
either side of the experience, Pamela was not given copies of any of the
footage of Julie or her family, nor was Julie given copies of Pamela and
hers. Since Pamela requested her own full set of copies, I offered to
do the same for Julie but she declined, preferring to wait for the final
film and requesting at that time the footage that was of interest to
her. The only footage she did request during the filming was of her son
and mother-in-law, as a present to her mother-in-law who had been
hospitalized. Pamela's request for all the footage was more ambiguous:
on the one hand, it was to be a full personal record of the experience;
on the other, it was an opportunity to gauge the progress of the film.
6
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film, he did exercise one final and important "executive"
control. Regarding rights over the finished material, Paul
insisted on retaining commercial broadcast and theatrical
rights for him, his wife, and mother-in-law. This was
allegedly to keep me from exploiting the film commercially.
Although I retained final directorial cut, my entering and
acknowledged working premise had been to involve everyone in
the final editing stages of the film, for reasons of accuracy
and professional ethics. This intention was somewhat
rendered moot by Paul's unwillingness to sign over those
rights.
I initially had a much more difficult time persuading
Julie, the surrogate, to participate in the film even though
she and I were closer in age and in background than Pamela
and I8. This was partly because I came to her via Pamela, but
also because, in her own words, when I first approached her:
"There are already too many people involved in this project
and I don't want to have to consider another person. Things
are complicated enough as they are. Plus this baby is being
filmed every week as it is [the ultrasounds] ." The project,
as presented to her by Pamela Martin, was about the
Martins' story.9
8 Julie is five years my junior and we both come from a middle to upper
class background, while Pamela is a generation older to both of us and
financially well-established.
9 My proposal to the Martins clearly stated that I would follow both
sides of the arrangement simultaneously and equally, although I had
initially understood the story to be about "infertility." This proved to
be only a superficial understanding of the practice.
7
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I did eventually earn Julie's trust. She had hoped for
a close relationship with the mother— this was a condition of
her becoming a surrogate, as stated in her application— and
while she and Pamela were close, Pamela was not as interested
as I in the minutia of her experiences as a surrogate and a
pregnant woman. This gave us a lot to talk about. Julie
also began to see, quite early, from her own esqperience at
the monthly surrogate meetings and in her developing
relationship with Pamela, that the film could serve as a
safeguard of her own true experience and as a possible legal
leverage, say if her integrity "on the job" came to be
questioned or the baby did not come out right10.
The existence of the film also opened doors with the
institutions involved in the arrangement. For example, Santa
Monica Hospital, across the street from the Martins'
fertility clinic and catering, generally, to an upscale
clientele11, welcomed the possible publicity of a film since
they are one of few hospitals in Los Angeles to do surrogate
births, a lucrative market niche. I was allowed, camera and
crew, around the hospital, in the maternity ward, and in the
birthing room. This access was facilitated by Julie's
obstetrician of choice, a wonderfully laid back and funny man
whose own offices had already been the location site for the
10There were, as we shall see, tensions around Julie's weight gain and
then the premature labor.
J1The hospital has a three-room, three-bathroom maternity suite with
elegant furnishings and upholstery. This was the suite the Martins
booked for their overnight stay at the hospital.
8
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Michael Keaton film on parenthood, My Life. As a result, I
had no problem filming any of the doctor’s visits. The
Martins' fertility clinic and the consulting surrogate
center, are both leading agencies in the field of infertility
and were also generous with their resources, granting me
interviews and access to brochures and technical information.
I was, however, not allowed to film any of the monthly
surrogate meetings Julie attended until after the birth, when
Julie’s disappointment and anger at the whole process was at
its strongest12. It was only then that I was invited to film
Julie at a surrogate meeting. The Center counselors
expressed the concern that Julie's birth experience (she
would share this story at this meeting) be represented in the
context of other surrogates' more positive experiences, a
concern I also shared13. This was perhaps the most dramatic
way making a film helped with "studying up:" I might never
have been allowed to film Julie at a surrogate meeting if it
hadn't been for this turn in the story.
12 Ragone (1994:80) similarly notes that many of the surrogates in her
study "reported feeling disappointed in the behavior of their couples
after the baby was bom." Ragone attributes this disappointment to the
loss of the "surrogate role" and the "specialness conferred on her by
this role." Ragone's analysis of surrogates' motivations, as we shall
see, hinges on what Ragone argues is an elevation of the surrogate from
her "somewhat mundane world of fulltime unpaid housework and childcare
or a low-paying job" (80). My findings challenge this analysis quite
forcefully, and this contestation will be taken up in the conclusion,
once I have presented the case.
13 I had wanted to film Julie at surrogate meetings throughout the
surrogacy for this very reason: to portray her story within the context
of other surrogates experiences.
9
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Studying up became challenging while writing this
thesis. As part of my methodology, I presented an earlier
draft of the manuscript to both the Thayers and the Martins.
Both sides had changes they wanted made (for example, adding
more context to their quotes or introducing new data I was
not aware of) . But, while the Thayers simply trusted me to
make their comments and corrections, the Martins, in keeping
with their status and business experience, first threatened
me with a lawsuit. We were eventually able to engage in a
very productive and enriching dialogue, but the tensions were
unfortunately great14.
Reproduction in A Cvborq World
In this thesis, I will argue that gestational surrogacy
and the new reproductive technologies are at once a
manifestation of, and the arena for, cyborg politics. Cyborg
politics— a notion developed by Donna Haraway in her famous
article, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1991) —
are about the dissolution of the organic in late capitalism1 5
and the transgression of boundaries between realms once held
14 This dialogue strengthened the manuscript considerably. For example,
I had failed to understand that the Martins do not self-identify with
"Hollywood," even though most of their careers have been in the
entertainment business in Hollywood.
15David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodemity (1989) provides a
brilliant supporting analysis of the nature of this dissolution. In
postmodemity, he argues, time has been severed from place (in my words,
abstracted from embodiment; see also Braidotti 1994) in order to make
possible the engineering of a virtual realm of space (for example
electronic money)— divorced from real geography and history— where
10
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to be separate, in nature. In late twentieth century, we are
all cyborgs, Haraway argues, "theorized and fabricated
hybrids of machine and organism" as well as "creatures of
social reality [and] of fiction"(150,149). Cyborg ontology
is our present [Euro-American] condition of embodiment.
Haraway explains,
We are living though a movement from organic,
industrial society to a polymorphous information
system— from all work to all play, a deadly
game— . . . from comfortable old hierarchical
dominations to the scary new networks of the
informatics of domination. . . . For liberals
and radicals, the search for social systems
gives way to a new practice called "experimental
ethnography" in which an organic object
dissipates in attention to the play of writing
[representation]. . . . Communication sciences
and modern biologies are constructed by a common
move— the translation of the world into a
problem of coding, a search for a common
language in which all resistance to instrumental
control disappears and all heterogeneity can be
submitted to disassembly, investment and
exchange (1991:161, 163, 164).
The new reproductive technologies emerged in tandem with this
shift in the late 1970s16; they cannot be properly understood
in absentia of this changing epistemology of Euro-American
embodiment or moment in history.
It is not difficult to identify the cyborg nature of
gestational surrogacy or the NTRs. If cyborg embodiment is
capitalism can continue its expansion, having exhausted organic
opportunities for the creation of capital.
16The birth of Baby Louise, the first test-tube baby in 1978, marks the
official entry of the NTRs into popular discourse (Franklin 1995).
11
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about transgression and dissolution of the organic and a play
between fiction and lived experience, my findings, as we
shall see, suggest that these aspects are structurally and
phenomenologically constitutive of the experience. I will
show how the boundary between what I am calling virtuality
[what Haraway perhaps means by "fiction"] and embodied
experience was constantly under negotiation by the
participants. These negotiations occurred on a multitude of
fronts as the practice transgressed the once-organic and
self-evidently "natural” categories of conception, motherhood
and kinship while at the same time upholding their organic
semblance. The surrogacy thus invoked a number of
discourses— on motherhood, on kinship, on the body, on the
self— and at the same time transgressed these. Some of the
transgressions were humorous17; others deadly serious. They
were always more acute for the surrogate and her family,
because, if the Martins could escape her embodied, pregnant
body and hence the materiality of her choice to become a
surrogate, her own family and friends could not. This
phenomenological— and political— contrast between her
embodied reality and the embodied reality of the Martins
directed in many ways the arc of their relationship. It was
17For example, the surrogate's husband tells this very funny story: "My
neighbor stopped me in the hallway to congratulate me on our new family
addition. I looked at her straight in the eye, and said, very
seriously, “the baby isn't mine." [Big belly laugh] She was shocked!
She didn't know what to say or where to look. I told her it was a
surrogate baby— it was too good a joke to pass".
12
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vividly evident in the baby album the Martins put together a
few months after their child's birth. Photographs of "the
surrogate" were not included1 8 . Julie has all but disappeared
from their lives, at their own admission and choice (the
contract, it turned out, stipulated no contact after the
birth1 9 ) . But the Martins continued and still continue to live
in Julie's memory, through the sentiency of her body: for
example, for weeks after the birth, her milk came at the
sound of any child’s whimpering; vaginal surgery for a
collapsed post-partum bladder left a scar she will feel for
the rest of her life. Clearly, the embodied,
phenomenological aspects of each side are disparate20.
1 8 Pamela Martin explained that, while she was extremely grateful to Julie
and would never forget her, she found it personally difficult to have to
explain Claire's beginnings at every showing of the album.
1 9 Julie Thayer saw this clause but attached little importance to it since
in her discussions with the surrogate program staff, Pamela Martin, and in
her application, she had clearly expressed that she wanted a couple with
whom she could grow close. She was represented in this contract by a
lawyer recommended to her by the fertility clinic and the negotiations
were very rushed, since neither she nor Pamela wanted to miss a "cycle."
As we shall see in chapter IV, Julie considers her trusting attitude with
the Martins, her lawyer and the program staff her "first mistake," since,
as it turned out, the Martins were far more ambiguous with respect to the
kind of relationship they wanted with her after the birth. The surrogate
center encourages a Christmas Card relationship between couples and
surrogates, as well as exchanges of photographs and personal greetings.
2 0 The surgery was paid for by the Martins, as part of the expense of the
surrogacy. It actually renewed their contact long after the birth, with
Pamela visiting Julie with the baby while Julie was convalescing. But it
also caused friction: they had to negotiate fair childcare and maidservice
compensation and the Martins were initially unconvinced the Julie's
bladder problem was the direct result of the pregnancy. This type of
negotiation is usually mediated by the surrogate programs, which generally
forbid surrogates and parents from discussing money matters.
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This disparity can be expressed in cyborg terms.
Julie's disappearance from the Martins life has a fictional
quality to it, as though she had always been a fiction.
There are no visible traces of her even in the child she
carried for nine months since the child is genetically
related to the Martins and thus resembles them. The
disparity is between a "material fiction"2 1 and lived
experience, a vivid irony of cyborg embodiment, where
materiality and immateriality play off on one another.
Julie' s disappearance from the Martins' life is in this way a
problem of coding. The Martins are supported in their choice
to neutralize Julie by the discourse of assisted
reproduction. Fertility clinics, surrogacy centers, and
popular representations of infertility (Franklin, 1990) alike
promote the fiction of immaculate conception and miracle
birth, and tend to render in their language and visual
presentation the services and labor that go into the making
of these babies anonymous. For example, the hundreds of
radiant baby snapshots that adorn the walls of the fertility
clinic scream success— brave, new families (most often white,
middle-to-upper class and nuclear)— but they also eerily
silence origins. How did these "cabbage patch" children come
to be? With the help of a surrogate? An egg and/or sperm
21This expression was coined by Catherine MacKinnon and reviewed by
Donna Haraway in her article "'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary: The
Sexual Politics of a Word" in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature 1991:127-148).
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donor? Neither or all? How many surgeries and hormonal
crashes did women have to undergo and at what personal
cost?22 These happy, baby faces cannot share these embodied
truths with us. As representations, they code the experience
of this type of reproduction in very specific ways.
There are class dynamics involved in this coding, too,
since clients of the technologies are typically of the
professional, middle to upper classes while surrogates are
not (Ragone 1994:89) . Ultimately, the decision to honor the
full, embodied truth of the "who, what, how, where" of a
surrogate birth or an otherwise assisted act of reproduction
belongs to the parents. They have the last word, in most
cases23. In this they are favored by the discourse on
assisted reproduction which is postured to help cure their
infertility. The professional literature on the NTRs and
infertility, written often by individuals who themselves have
been clients of the technologies (for example, Cooper and
Glazer 1994; Lauritzen 1993), reflects this bias. In these
texts, the women and men who make this reproduction possible
22The personal costs for women turn out, often, to be high. The most
publicized is actress Deirdre Hall’s brush with death in her sixth in-
vitro try (People Magazine, September 28 1992). While under anesthesia
she went into a comma. Pamela, the intended mother of this study,
underwent 7 in-vitro tries herself over the course of 10 years. She
attributes her loss of thyroid function and eventual surgery to the
hormone treatments which accompanied each try. She has met four other
women in doctors1 waiting rooms who have also lost their thyroids and,
like her, were long term IVF patients.
^Legally, too. For example, in the famous Baby M case, Mary-Beth
Whitehead, the actual biogenetic mother of the child she carried (it was
a traditional surrogacy) was first denied custody rights over her child
by the famed Judge Sorkow, who ruled in favor of the contract (Whitehead
& Nobel, 1989).
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also disappear, this time under the generic headings of
"gestational surrogate," "egg donation," "sperm donation" and
"IVF fertilization." Reproduction is discussed in the
language of consumer choice, as the authors discuss various
“reproductive options" available to the infertile and
describe procedures. This trend is a further reflection of
the fictionalizing force of cyborg ontology, where organic
realities are subsumed by the presentation of information, a
"play of writing."
But while popular representations might persist in
conceptualizing the technologies as a problem of accurate
information, as Strathem has written, "developments in
reproductive medicine do not just comprise new procedures.
They also embody new knowledge" (1995:348). Keeping this
truth in mind as well as the representational politics of a
cyborg world in which nothing is exactly as it seems, this
thesis takes very consciously as its point of departure the
organic experience of a gestational surrogacy arrangement, as
lived from the unique positions of the two mothers, each
woman "imaged, not as an abstraction, but within her total
framework of relationships, economic and health needs, and
desire" (Petchesky, 1987:288). This embodied specificity, I
argue, is both a theoretical and methodological necessity
since "truth" (facticity) is fast becoming an embattled
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struggle over representation (see also Foucault 1980,
Braidotti 1994).
The next chapter is dedicated to the interplay of
methodology and theory in this project for this reason. In
this chapter, I use the term "embodiment" in tandem with the
notion of "biography" to connote the need to re-embody
theory. Petchesky (1987, 1995) and others (Haraway, for
example) have used the notion of "history" (as in "historical
context" or the verb "historicize, "24 i.e.- make explicit
historical origins) to mean a conscious effort to look at
phenomena in its proper cultural and historical contexts. My
feeling is that we need to be more even specific and
particular than this. Drawing from Gelya Frank' s work on
phenomenology and the life history method (1979, 1985, 1986,
1996) as well as the feminist critique of knowledge put forth
by the Personal Narratives Group in Interpreting Women's
Lives (1991) , I have coined the term "biographical
embodiment" to evoke, in addition to historical and social
contexts, the immediate existential and biographical contexts
in which lives unfold. Contextualizing lives in this fashion
means including the researcher in the context, not as a
shadow (Frank, 1979) but as a participant in essentially what
is a collaborative interpretive endeavor. The chapter
includes a narrative of my own change of consciousness over
24This is Haraway's word. Her argument for "situated knowledges"
(1991:183) is an argument for making explicit the historical context in
which these ideas, values, concepts are produced.
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the course of the experience. "Biographical embodiment"
reminds us that life can never be abstracted from the people
who live it (Langness & Frank, 1981:100; Sacks, 1973). It is
another attempt to offset the "play of writing" in cyborg
politics.
In Chapter III, I analyse the symbolics of assisted
reproduction and outline the ways in which this discourse
privileges the "infertile" ideologically. I argue that this
privilege rests on the biological construction of infertility
and consider the Martins' own history with infertility in
this light. Chapter IV contrasts their position with the
expectations of the surrogate, whose embodied experience of
reproduction differed. I argue in this chapter that a "two-
mother pregnancy has built in structural tensions because of
the construction of motherhood in Euro-American culture as
"biology.“
Next, I turn to a review of the anthropological and
feminist literature on reproduction and the new reproductive
technologies. This literature is, as we shall see, beset by
a set of epistemological assumptions which are also at play
in the new cyborg ontology. Foucault's historicizing of the
Euro-American discourse on sexuality (1980) provides the
historical and cultural context for those assumptions.
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O n A n fc H r-Q P o lo g y - twn.
t - V i f t New Reproductive Tech^olog-i****
If our experience is of domination,
we will theorize our lives
according to principles of domination.
- Donna Haraway2 5
Since David Schneider's landmark 1968 book American
Kinship: A Cultural Account, in which he established the
cultural primacy for Americans of the biogenetic tie, the
ideology of love, and heterosexual coupling in configuring
Euro-American kinship, reproduction has been tackled,
ethnographically speaking, only a handful of times and most
vigorously, it seems, by feminist anthropologists (Ginsburg
1989; Martin 1987; Rapp 1988, 1990; Ragone 1994, Strathern
1992a, 1992b, 1995). Ginsburg and Rapp (1991) speculate that
"because it was a "woman's topic," the study of reproduction
by anthropologists has never been central to the field" in
general (1991:311). There is also of course anthropology's
bias against studying one's own culture (see Ginsburg
1989:222 for a first-person account of the strength of this
bias).
In addition, anthropology has been conceptually bound by
the consistent and narrow framing of reproduction in terms of
the very biogenetic ideology that Schneider argues to be the
25 Quoted in Harding 1975:232.
1 9
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basis of Euro-American notions of kinship (Yanagisako &
Delaney 1995; Schneider 1984). This conceptual construction
of reproduction has made it difficult for mainstream
anthropology to respond to the cultural magnitude of the
reproductive revolution, since it has tended to see
reproduction in purely instrumental terms. Feminism, on the
other hand, has always taken reproduction as the hub of all
of social life (Firestone 1972; Ortner 1972; Rubin 1975).
This is, of course, the premise of the feminist struggle for
liberation through a politic of "reproductive control." But,
as Franklin has noted (1995) , despite a voluminous feminist
response to advances in reproductive science, there has been
"a notable degree of confusion about feminist strategies for
change"(324).
What might account for this confusion is that much of
feminism, too, has been bound by an uncritical acceptance of
Euro-American biogenetic ideology. This ideology, I will
argue, is part and parcel of a wider discourse on embodiment,
a discourse which is historically specific to Euro-American
cultures and which anthropology and feminism— as historical
products of Euro-American cultures— share, hence the
confluence in their theoretical premises26. For example, most
of anthropology and feminism has imagined social relations to
take place everywhere against the same "background [. . . ] of
26 This discourse has recently come into focus in feminist
anthropological works such as Lavie (1992); Strathem (1988); Lutz
(1988), and Trawick (1992).
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natural difference located in the bodily constitutions of men
and women" (Strathem 1988:35). In this conception, the world
is seen to be naturally gendered into two different, opposing
spheres, the sphere of women (reproductionmature:private:
domesticity:nurturance) and the sphere of men (production:
culture:public:worktechnology:rationality) (Ortner 1972).
Reproduction, in this view, is both constructed in
utilitarian terms (the biological act necessary for the
reproduction of society as a whole) and situated "naturally"
in women's bodies. Thus, the pregnant body emerges as the
key symbol of reproduction around which is constructed a
" women' s sphere"27.
Much of feminism has historically grounded its
theorizing of gender in the facticity of this sexual
difference and this biological "truth", postulating a women's
culture and subjectivity— bom out of a woman's unique and
distinctive reproductive biology, her natural capacity for
nurturance, emotion, etc.. This unique biology has been
alternatively perceived as binding (keeping women locked in
the home) or liberating (for example, women are the only ones
capable of nurturance in a instrumentalist capitalist
society)28. Always women are assumed to be ontologically in
opposition to society, the world of men:patriarchy:
27 Eisenstein (1988) is one (feminist) scholar who has specifically
questioned the naturalness of a sexually different female body as this
construction plays out detrimentally in the representation of women in
law.
^Ginsburg's Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American
21
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technology, etc. For example, Emily Martin’s influential The
Woman in the Body A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction rests
on an a priori acceptance of this opposition. She concludes
her ethnography with the following analysis:
Because their bodily processes go with them
everywhere, forcing them to juxtapose biology
and culture, women glimpse every day a
conception of another sort of social order. At
the very least, since they do not fit into the
ideal division of things (private, bodily
processes belong at home), they are likely to
see that the dominant ideology is partial: it
does not capture their experience.(1987:200)
Martin's analysis hinges on an assumption of "natural"
biological difference: "biology" and "culture" are juxtaposed
in women because women's reproductive bodies make it
difficult for them to escape biology; this implies that in
men, on the other hand, "biology" and "culture" are not so
readily juxtaposed2 9
One of the problem with this construction is that it has
tended to universalize women (as difference) and their
biology (as reproduction) and thus phrase the problem of
women in society only in terms of gender (as sexual
difference). This theoretical paradigm, however, obscures
the discursive and historical influences of class and race in
the construction of women's (not Woman's) experiences, (de
Coimxmity (1987) articulates quite clearly the discursive force of this
opposition in American culture.
^This bias is evident in Martin's title. While the book aims to be a
"cultural analysis of reproduction," her research focuses only on women,
thus uncritically conflating "women" with "reproduction."
22
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Lauretis 1987) . With respect to the new reproductive
technologies, this bias has meant a generally reductive
argument of the technologies as being an attack on women's
reproductive freedom (Corea 1985a, 1987; Rowland 1992;
Steinberg 1990) or a means to greater reproductive freedom
and control (for example, Shalev 1989) . The abstraction
inherent in this either/or position has made it difficult for
feminism to respond to the variation in experience particular
women have with the technologies.
For example, one of the most unexpected and politically
ingenious uses of the technologies has been by single women
and lesbians. These women with the help of IVF are creating
"natural" families without the stigma of or need for
heterosexual sex. For lesbians, becoming "natural" mothers
has been personally and legally empowering, and refreshingly
de-marginalizing (Lewin 1993, Hayden 1995).
Petchesky (1987) has argued that the visual technologies
being deployed in reproductive medicine are promoting an
ontological separation between women and their fetuses (their
bodies), helping conceptualize the fetus as a separate person
from the mother, and, through a "panoptics of the womb"
increasing the surveillance of women's life processes by the
male institutions of science and medicine.
But Petchesky also points out that visualizing the fetus
can be empowering for a woman with a history of infertility,
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repeated miscarriages, or loss of child "allowing her to
visualize the pregnancy and possibly to gain some control
over its outcome" (285) . Thus, there is a need to appreciate
that "the politics of reproduction are constructed
contextually, out of who uses them, how, and for what
purpose" (285) . As we shall see, the visual technologies in
the surrogacy arrangement I followed were experienced
positively by both women but in different ways and with
different emotional outcomes for each.
Debates around surrogacy have also tended to be locked
in an either/or logic of attack on woman's reproductive power
or exercise of greater control over this power by women. For
example, Gena Corea has argued that the technologies turn
women into "breeders" and constitute a "traffic in women's
wombs," devaluing women' s status and physically harming them
in the process (1985a) . Carmel Shalev, on the other hand,
sees in surrogacy an opportunity to transform patriarchal
reproductive consciousness because "the surrogate mother
conceives intentionally; she bears a child outside the bounds
of marriage; she refutes openly the nexus of biological and
social motherhood; and she claims a right to participate in
the market economy" (1989:165). These cultural
transgressions, Shalev argues, account for the enormous
negative reception of commercial surrogacy in ethical and
popular literature.
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An empirical look at the embodied experiences of
surrogates, however, shows that both these positions are
true. Some women have experienced surrogacy as unacceptable
baby selling and trafficking in their wombs and parts. The
most publicized cases have been Elizabeth Kane, the first
ever commercial surrogate, and Mary-Beth Whitehead of the
infamous Baby M case, who in compelling first person accounts
document their change of heart about giving up the baby they
had conceived for another (Kane 1988; Whitehead 1989) . Other
women have found surrogacy empowering. For example,
surrogate Robin G. who has conceived two children for actress
Deirdre Hall and husband Steve Sohmer is now a close friend
of "Dee's" with whom she experienced "real female bonding"
(People Magazine, September 28, 1992). In the surrogacy
I followed, the surrogate intended the experience to be
empowering for everyone involved, but her couple, after all
was said and done, did see her— even though they were
extremely grateful— as primarily contract labor, a "womb."
The Martins' position is compounded by the fact that
gestational surrogacy physiologically and ideologically does
construct a surrogate as just a womb. But Julie Thayer, in
her own self-perception and in the trajectory of her
experience, could not reduce her identity or her experience
of the pregnancy to being a 'womb. ’ Thus surrogacy, while
25
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empowering for Pamela, the genetic mother, was at once
empowering and disempowering for the surrogate Julie.
What these contradictory positions reflect is the
profound complexity of the discourse on reproduction in Euro-
American culture, one that is not naturally rooted in a
determining biology of sexual difference, but rather
culturally and historically constructed as such. Checking
this construction against women's embodied experience,
Petchesky writes:
a true biological perspective does not lead us to
determinism but rather to infinite variation,
which is to say that it is historical.
Particular lives are lived in particular bodies—
not only women's bodies, but just as relevently,
aging, ill, disabled, or infertile ones.(284)
It is as though the feminist response to the NTRs and
surrogacy has been blinded to this variation by the
discursive representation of reproduction as biologically
determined. I see exposing this representation as critical
on a number of fronts. First, it will allow for more honest
and empirically grounded accounts of women's— and men's—
experiences of reproduction. For example, as Ragone (1994)
and Snowdon (1994) have shown, "motherhood" is more elastic
than "we" theoreticians ever imagined: surrogates and egg
donors easily distinguish between, and conceptually separate,
genetic, gestational and social aspects of motherhood30.
•^ost egg donor and surrogate programs require women to have already
26
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Snowdon reports in her study, What Makes a Mother? Interviews
With Women Involved, in Egg Donation and Surrogacy (1994),
"Genetic and gestational connections mean different things to
different women, but the consensus was that the woman who
raises a child should be considered the mother" (83) . She
concludes that it is "procreative intent" of the pregnancy
which decides the emotional investment in a pregnancy and not
"particular biological facts" (84). Julie, the surrogate in
this study, was very clear on this point:
I don't believe in that romantic love women are
supposed to have with their babies in utero. I
chose not to bond with my own son because I
knew that if anything went wrong with him or the
pregnancy, and I would have to terminate, I’d be
devastated. So I didn't allow myself to bond
with him until I knew everything was going to be
okay with him. That was pretty much after he was
bom.
How many women like Julie do not experience the imagined rush
of bonding at the time of pregnancy but rather choose when
and how they will fall in love with their child? How many
variations— in timing, in strength, in process— of this
experience are there? What are the theoretical implications
of such variations in experience? A biologically determined
construction of reproduction renders these questions moot
since all women are constructed as sharing the same biology
and responding to it in the same way.
had a child of their own. These women's prior experience with pregnancy
and mothering might account for their ability to conceptually
distinguish between these aspects of "motherhood."
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On a theoretical front, the narrative of biological
difference— what I call in Chapter III "biological
embodiment"— obscures the historical origins of this
naturalistic discourse and its creation by power31. Analyses
of reproduction have been systematically marginalized as a
problem of gender and a concern for (and of) women alone, as
opposed to an ontological problem of embodiment and thus
power for the whole culture at large. In other words,
biological embodiment not only skews how we imagine
reproduction to ourselves (for example, seeing reproduction
as vested in separate and individuated body parts forming our
"reproductive system" ) but also how we are able to theorize
reproduction (for example, by restricting our vision to
gender, and obscuring class and race as equally constitutive
aspects of the politics of reproduction).
I turn next to the historical work of Laqueur and
Foucault on sexuality because these works make explicit the
historical construction of what I have called "biological
embodiment" and offer insight as to the power politics at
play in this construction. Framing the new reproductive
technologies as a problem of embodiment, not only helps in
countering the disembodying and abstracting effects of cyborg
31Delaney and Yanagisako make a related argument in their introduction
to their recent edited collection of essays Naturalizing Power: Essays
in Feminist Cultural Analysis (1995). They argue that cultural domains
are made to appear "natural' and not human made quite in the same way as
reproduction has been made to appear 'naturally" in the bodies of women,
thus "naturalizing" gender inequalities, which are in fact historical
productions (4-9) .
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politics (reminding us as Petchesky does that women (and men)
live their lives in particular and historically situated
bodies) . It also allows for embodied experiences otherwise
eclipsed by the realism of a biologically constructed
reproduction to come into view, as was the case for example
with the experience of the surrogate in the gestational
arrangement of this study.
Power. Reproduction, and
[Power's] will is not only to negate; it is
also ... to produce reality; to produce
domains of objects and rituals of truth.
— Foucault32
It is beyond the scope of this thesis to carefully
document the historical origins of the present discourse of
embodiment, except to suggest the ways in which the discourse
on reproduction is implicated in a power play over the very
conditions of embodiment. Cyborg politics are the latest
maneuver in this power play; its historical roots date at
least to the 17th century. Laqueur, for example, has shown
"sex" to be "situational; [. . .] explicable only within the
context of battles over gender and power" (1990:11).
Analyzing medical texts and writings from the middle ages and
earlier, he found that men and women were physiologically
construed along a one-sex continuum prior to the 17th
century; gender throughout most of the middle ages was a
321980:194.
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matter of socialization and not what we construe as "sex"
today, a "biology of incommensurability" (14) . For example,
Laqueur notes that in medieval texts "there are numerous
accounts of men who were said to lactate and pictures of the
body Jesus with breasts. Girls could turn into boys, and men
who associated too extensively with women could lose the
hardness and definition of their more perfect bodies and
regress into effiminacy" (1990:7). This (and other evidence)
leads Laqueur to conclude that "sex before the 17th century
was a sociological category and not an ontological one"
(1990:6,8). Laqueur’s findings suggest a fluidity to
embodiment previously unimaginable: biological embodiment is
an historical production and not, as we imagine it, a fixed
fact of nature.
The historical work of Foucault on sexuality politicizes
this historical production, showing its emergence to conflate
with the rise, not only of gendered politics, but also of a
new configuration of power in which racism and classism are
equally immanent. In Foucault's analyses (1977, 1980),
"gender," "race," "class," are the simultaneous faces of this
power. While economic control is an objective (allowing for
the extraction of labor from bodies [1980:141]), another
objective is to control life processes themselves, the very
conditions of embodiment. "Race," "gender" and "class," were
the ontological means to this end; the "biological body" the
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technology of this power, which Foucault theorized as
"biopower:"
... a great bipolar technology— anatomic and
biological, individualizing and specifying—
directed toward the performance of the body,
with attention to the processes of life, . . .
a power whose highest function was perhaps no
longer to kill [as it had been for the feudal
regime it replaced] but to invest life through
and through (139) .
Under the new bourgeois regime, "sex, " Foucault argues,
became the instrument for this "power over life," the "means
of access to both the life of the body and the life of the
species" (146) . For the bourgeoisie, unable to invoke a
"symbolics of blood" to legitimize its class aspirations,
turned, Foucault explains, to the future to find its superior
"origins." Perfecting the species through a careful
management of sexuality became its means to achieve
superiority, as evidenced by the institutionalized management
of "female hysteria" and reproductive power by the late 19th
century, the emergence of an eugenic and evolutionist
science, and the racist, classist politics of nation-states,
particularly evident in Nazism (1980:149-150).
Thus, "sex," "gender," "race" and "class" conflate in
Foucault ’ s analysis and have at their root a particular
codification of embodiment. In this codification, the body
is on the one hand reduced to a "machine, for the
31
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optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its
forces" and on the other to the "species body, the body
imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of
the biological processes, propagation, births and mortality,
the level of health" (1980:139). The "body-as-machine" and
the "body as species" were representational strategies which
fundamentally shifted the way identity, body, self and other
were conceptualized. These strategies were instrumental not
only in giving our exterior spaces their present
institutional character (for example "the carceral
city"[Foucault 1977:293], gynecology, schools) but also in
shaping our interior spaces . Sex— imagined as embodiment,
the "raw force" of the body— "became the stamp of
individuality, what enabled one to analyze the latter and
what made it possible to master it. It was put forward as
the index of a society's strength, revealing both its
political energy and its biological vigor"(Foucault
1980:146). The body, thus, was "brought from the flesh down
to the level of the organism" (116) in a new configuration of
power which invited mastery over this organism by individual
selves (a practice institutionalized in psychiatry for
example) and mastery of the sum-total of organisms organized
into populations by the state and the ruling classes.
Abstracting and framing reproduction in gender terms alone,
as we have seen is the case of much of the debate on modem
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reproduction, is thus ontologically incorrect. The "natural"
realism of "species body" disguises the more complex and
politicized history out of which this body and reproduction
emerge in the first place. Foucault's work has the merit of
demonstrating that this ontology is class-based, part and
parcel of what Haraway has described as "our experience of
domination" (quoted in Harding 1975:232). Third world
feminists and women of color have recently pointed out this
class-based ontological bias as it manifests in mainstream
feminism, arguing that first and second wave feminist
theorizing expresses the ontological experiences of middle to
upper class women, and not the experience of all women, as is
postured (hooks 1984, Mohanty, Russo, & Torres 1991). The
"body as species," the "two-sex world," "reproduction as
sex," "women as a problem of gender," these are all
politicized representations, premised on an abstraction of
bodies from the specifics of their biographical environs.
These abstracted representations have meant that women
continue to be universalized as difference; their biology
continues to be identified with reproduction, and the
"problem of women" continues to be phrased exclusively in
terms of sex and gender, obscuring the discursive influences
of class and race in the construction of individual women1s
embodied experiences, (de Lauretis 1987). As Haraway
observed, "if our experience is of domination, we will
33
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theorize our lives according to principles of domination"
(quoted in Harding 1975:232) . In other words, the scholarly
apparatus does not stand outside of history, either. Both
feminism and anthropology have been bound by epistemological
assumptions which themselves are products of power.
In producing a text about gestational surrogacy within a
scholarly literature on reproduction, then, it is imperative
to make the distinction between how the representation of
reproduction in the scholarly discourse might lead me to
interpret the 'meaning' of surrogacy, and how intimacy with
two embodied positions within the practice of reproduction
challenge— in part— those views. The next chapter theorizes
and exemplifies a methodology for achieving this end.
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Chapter II
B io c fg a P h - i ^ T P w iK rv H n m n t:
An I-Thou33 Methodology
Our bodies, ourselves;
bodies are maps of power and identity.
— Donna Haraway
One afternoon five months into the pregnancy, Julie
Thayer, the surrogate, called me. She had just returned from
her monthly surrogate meeting at the Center. These phone
calls between us were not unusual. Julie and I spoke almost
every week, sometimes several times a day34. We were
constantly engaged in a dialogue about what had happened, was
happening, would happen, and why. That afternoon she called
to tell me about another surrogate at the meeting whom she
had never met before. She said,
"Gillian, I know you're going to think I'm
racist, but I've just got to tell you this, at
the risk of shocking you badly. There was a
woman at the meeting today— she's Hispanic and
33Buber 1978.
34 Pamela and X, too, spent a lot of time on the phone conversing about
her experience. My methods, in practice, were several. I conducted
home-interviews in the beginning of a more formal nature, in person and
then on film. These were followed by more and more informal interviews
and chats. I also attended doctor's visits, an average of one in two to
one in three. Some of these I filmed, others not. I also visited and
then filmed the women in their home environments as well as, in the case
of Julie, the surrogate, in the homes of two sets of close relatives,
her foster family and in-laws. This was not possible with Pamela,
whose very busy schedule and much more compartmentalized life made it
difficult to coordinate filming her with her husband and friends.
Pamela manages several buildings she owns, is the talent agent for three
young actors; and has a rich professional social life with her husband.
Yet most of these activities she undertakes alone. I did film her baby
registry and shower, where I had the opportunity to portray her in her
network of friends and family. Julie's personal life, on the other
hand, is centered around her husband and son, and extended family.
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she's pregnant with the embryos of a black
couple! I couldn’t believe it! You're always
asking me how I feel about my body and carrying
Pamela’s baby— I'm okay with that but I'm not
sure I could carry a black baby. I just can't
imagine little blonde-blue-eyed white me giving
birth to a black child."
Julie was right. I was shocked. I was also offended because
my own partner is dark-skinned (whom Julie had not yet met),
so ostensibly one day I— a white woman— would carry his—
black— children. I explained to Julie about my boyfriend and
told her how I felt. We talked about it. She explained she
didn't exactly think of herself as racist but the idea of
carrying a black baby had never occurred to her and the
thought did disturb her: "It feels foreign to me.
Different. I could carry a Japanese baby or a Chinese baby
because they are white to me. Society sees them as white.
But a black child is more difficult. It just feels very
different." I admitted that I had also acutely felt my
whiteness when doing fieldwork in South Central with African-
American youths, but that the feeling had changed over time.
Julie and I dialogued35. She later explained, after giving
the issue more thought, that:
I'm surrounded by controversy: I married a man 32
years older than me, I work in a late-term
problem-pregnancy abortion facility and I'm a
^bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) brilliantly
articulates 'whiteness' as the true discursive arena on race in America,
and not 'blackness' which is what hooks argues comes to mind when one
thinks ’ ■race." Representing race as 'blackness' serves to render
whiteness as an ontological category invisible.
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surrogate. To give birth to a child of another
race would add one other controversial aspect to
my life and I am not ready to be on the front
page of the National Enquirer. I don't want to
have to educate the public on that, too.
I share this story for two reasons. The first is that
it is a powerful cue to the fact, as Foucault has argued in
The History of Sexaali ty( 1980:149) that race and class always
travel with sexuality (and gender, and identity). Julie's
reaction was a manifestation of this confluence. I wrote in
my field journal the day of our first discussion,
I find it extremely odd (and yet so clear at the
same time) that Julie thinks carrying the black
child of a black couple pushing it, when she
thinks nothing at all of carrying the child of
someone else. About carrying Pamela' baby, she
says that the child is not genetically her own,
that she would be less inclined to be a surrogate
if it had been her own egg. But this genetic
distance between her and the child inside her is
completely meaningless (annulled!) when the child
is black. So carrying the child of someone else
does transgress her body boundaries. It's just
that she doesn't feel it because the child is
like her, white. Pamela and Paul’s child is
coded as "same" while a black child is an
"other.n
The second reason that I share this story is that I would not
have had the insight into how literally and systematically
race maps white bodies and identities if Julie had not been
comfortable— safe— discussing her reaction with me. If she
had not shared this reaction, I might have confidently
continued to see the new reproductive technologies as just as
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an issue of gender rather than, much more accurately, as a
more complex issue of embodiment, of how power maps our very
bodies and worlds.
This story, then, underscores the complicity of theory
and methodology in the production of knowledge. If I had
retained my "objectivity" as a researcher, or if my study had
been based solely on interviews, and maybe even on
participant observation, I would probably have missed this
truth (See Sacks, 1989; Mbilinyi 1989) . The moment required
intimacy between Julie and me, and our discussion, in turn,
generated more intimacy (towards other fruitful insights).
Together, we came to understand a little better the embodied
immediacy of racism in our own selves.
The Methodology
Donna Haraway has written, "If our experience is of
domination we will theorize our lives according to principles
of domination" (quoted in Harding 1975:232) . In my
introduction, I argued that the feminist debate on the new
reproductive technologies (and the absence of a debate in
mainstream anthropology) is the result of a theorizing which
tends to uncritically accept certain premises about the
condition of embodiment, including but not limited to a
premise of sexual difference anchored in biological 'fact'.
In this chapter, I argue that an appreciation of the cultural
and epistemological complexity of the new reproductive
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technologies can only happen if one engages with embodied
experiences of the technologies. Theory must measure up
against embodied, direct experience, and not the other way
around (Personal Narratives Group 1989:261).
One major problem in designing an "embodied" methodology,
however, is that knowledge is sought in the West along an "I-It"
epistemological strategy (Goslinga 1994) . An "I-It" strategy,
essentially positivist, structures the production of knowledge
along a-temporal (surface) lines. The relationship between
"knower" and "known" is panopticized: the knower knows by "seeing"
what the object known cannot, since the object known, as an "It,"
regrettably lacks the privileged remove and altitude of the
panopticized "I" (eye) of the knower (Goslinga 1994) .
Furthermore, the "object known" is given the appearance of natural
facticity. Haraway has expressed this relationship as it plays
out in the natural sciences. She outlines rather clearly the
power dynamic between "knower" (the 'I') and the natural "object"
('It'):
The object both guarantees and refreshes the
power of the knower, but any status of agent in
the production of knowledge must be denied the
object. It— the world— must, in short, be
objectified as thing, not as agent; it must be
matter for the self-formation of the only social
being in the production of knowledge, the human
knower. (1991:198)
In the human sciences, where the world cannot be so easily
objectified as matter since it offends our sense of morality
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to explicitly construe human beings as 'Its, ' the
panopticized objectification is displaced. Marilyn
Strathem, in her brilliant comparative study of Melanesian
and Western socialities, makes this point in the context of
her comparative analysis: "[In the West] the notion that
diverse cultural forms generate multitudinous different
'societies' belongs to a premise of commodity logic, that
what people make are 'things’ (including- abstract things such
as cultures and societies)" (1988:342, emphasis added) Thus
she points to the construction of what social sciences take
as its natural, empirical objects: "cultures" and
"societies". There are other such objects in her analysis,
too, for example " the individual." She elaborates the
'premises' of Western knowledge, comparing them to those of
Melanesians:
Practices in the West assume that things exist as
information before they exist as knowledge. At
the same time, it is the accumulation of
information that produces knowledge— knowing the
reasons for which the material was collected— and
of itself thus yields the classificatory
relations that make sense of it. Consequently
the method is simple: inquiry into the nature of
things. There is a timeless dimension to this
Western exercize, for at issue is the
effectiveness through which inherent
relationships are brought to light. From a
Melanesian perspective, what is missing is real
time.
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Strathem thus identifies "real time" as the mark of
difference between how the West knows and how Melanesians
know. By "real time" she means biographical embodied time,
as it is lived by people:
... .As I would grasp [the Melanesian]
perspective, relations appear only as a
consequence of other relations, forms out of
other forms. Consuming knowledge about one form
means making another form appear. This requires
human effort. People tie the reason for knowing
things to particular sequences of causes and
their effects, for knowledge only makes sense if
it is consumed by the right person at the right
place and time. Otherwise, it is mere surface
phenomena, disembodied (unconsumed) things
(Strathem 1988:344, emphasis added) .
One could describe Melanesian sociality, then, as being
grounded in biography, with events understood as produced by
agents in a time and place. Knowledge for Melanesians
therefore only makes sense within the time-based context in
which it was produced. Whereas in the Western construction
knowledge is about elucidating "things" already out there in
nature, for Melanesians knowledge is immanent and evolving,
and rests on interpretation. My opening example with the
surrogate Julie Thayer illustrates a very similar experience
of knowledge: "whiteness" became apparent to us only in the
moment of our discussion. What brought this "knowledge" into
being were the particular mix of my personal circumstances
with hers. This knowledge evolved, generating a number of
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conversations and attenpts at interpretation, all of which
took place in time.
Strathem's own reifying of the "West" in her analysis
obscures the truth that knowledge can also unfold in time in
the West. This has been the chief theoretical and
methodological insight of proponents of the life history
method in the social sciences (Langness and Frank 1981,
Myerhoff 1978, The Personal Narratives Group 1989) . These
scholars have recognized the political importance of
biographical situatedness in the West's representation of
knowledge. The feminist Personal Narratives Group, for
example, has argued that the representational erasure of
women's personal narratives serves to legitimize power and a
particular construction of knowledge:
Far from encouraging our ability to think
creatively about discovering the truths in
personal narratives, our academic disciplines
have more often discouraged people from taking
people's life stories seriously. Disciplines
have mainly done this by elevating some kinds of
truths - the kinds that conform to established
criteria of validity - over others. This
elevation and generalization serve to control:
control data, control irregularities of human
experiences, and, ultimately, control what
constitutes knowledge. . . . The truths of
personal narratives are the truths revealed from
real positions in the world, through lived
experience in social relationships, in the
context of passionate beliefs and partisan
stands. [...] While insisting that women's
personal narratives reveal truths, we still
retain our responsibility as
interpreters.(1989:263; emphasis added)
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Thus, these researchers articulate the dangers of a knowledge
which eschews "real positions in the world" and place an
interpretive act at the heart of knowledge. Their aim is to
re-einbody knowledge: abstract generalizations ("disembodied
unconsumed things" in Strathem's description of the
Melanesia construct) "elevate certain truths over others,"
upholding a panopticized relationship between "knower" and
"known." Their aim ultimately to restore the scholarly
relation with the world to an "I-Thou" axis.
Th» TmpoT“ fc»wgft of Dialogue and Temporality
in the Construction of Social Discourse
An "I-It" in-going epistemology makes it very difficult
for "knower" and "known" to meet along an "I-Thou" axis
(Buber, 1978). Gelya Frank, a proponent of the life history
method in the social sciences, articulates a useful method
for bracketing the 'I-It' relationship and moving to an "I-
Thou" relationship with subject, although this is not how she
herself puts it. In "Becoming the Other: Empathy and the
Biographical Interpretation, " she suggests that the encounter
with the 'other' is foremost existential and phenomenological
because it involves "a nexus of related modes of relationship
to others (1985:197), a "tree" of meanings, of values,
feelings, which must be explored in full as they color the
way in which one enters another's world or experience.
Because all that fieldwork is the encounter of two human
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beings in daily existence (Langness and Frank 1981:100), how
we chose to enter another's world becomes decisive.
What Frank describes and proposes is a conscious process
of greater insight and understanding— the "conscious
development of empathy" in the ethnographer— which, she
argues, occurs when one brackets the first-order of feelings
— generally narcissistic— evoked in the encounter with an
'other' . To not bracket this first order of feelings is to
run the risk of fabricating the 'other' in one's own image
(Frank 1979) . Thus, Frank points to the embodied ways in
which methodologies can operate according to principles of
domination. Frank suggests that "in a moral world— [in] a
world grounded in human survival— it seems appropriate to
expect social scientists and humanists to clarify the values
with which they approach their subjects and sources" (Frank
1985:205). Clarifying one's values requires time. Such an
endeavor honors the temporal rhythm of human engagement and
its resultant expression in social life.
Frank's lifelong work with a quadrilateral limb
deficient woman exemplifies this methodology. Through
therapy, Frank confronted the "anxious feelings of
helplessness and immobility, and of lack and loss" (Frank
1985:216) she experienced because of Diane deVries' radically
"Other" embodiment. The results were transformative: by
taking into account her own psychology and construction of
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Self, and working on these aspects, Frank came to see deVries
not only as a "limb-deficient" woman - as most of society
perceives her - but also as deVries has seen herself, a
"Venus de Milo."
Such gradual, empathetic awakenings are far more
illuminating and enriching that the imposition of premature
if internally coherent scholarly agendas. These awakenings
bridge the gulf between Self and Other, between the "I" and
the "It." Frank's work has the merit, then, of demonstrating
that relinquishing the epistemological privilege of the
panopticized human knower begins with one's self and a
willingness to bracket one's initial, narcissistic and
ethnocentric emotional responses.
Combining the best of the life history method, a
narrative approach and participant observation, the method of
this study might best be described as biographical
embodiment. "Biographical" conveys the cumulative
temporality of any (social) experience; "embodiment" reminds
us that knowledge is always situated at the specific zero,
zero coordinates of human beings, living within their
biographical contexts. It also reminds us that embodiment—
its discursive representation in "I-It" and/or "I-Thou"
terms— is the battleground of cyborg politics. "Biographical
embodiment" is, therefore, anti-essentialist and anti
rationalist. It honors the temporality of human experience
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and knowledge and the complex embodied networks in which
persons live and negotiate the meaning of their life-
experience. It does not shy away from ambiguity. The
acknowledgment of "biographical situatedness" has,
furthermore, the advantage of including the anthropologist in
the present, not as detachable "knower" but as a "person, "
also implicated biographically in the situation being
studied. Ethnographic fieldwork becomes, then, a two-way
interpretive process, as opposed to the mediation of
piecemeal knowledge believed to be "out there"(information to
be turned into knowledge) .
A Personal Dialogue:
A Gestational Surrogate As the Other
What follows could be construed as my narrative of this
fieldwork project— that is, my "life history" of this
experience. It is also in a way Julie's, or my view of
Julie's narrative since it was observing, talking with and
getting to know her over the year and the half we were
together that challenged my own initial assumptions about a
number of ‘ Objects’ I had assumed were fixed. First, there
was surrogacy itself. I could not imagine wanting to be a
surrogate. Later, my under standing of the relationship
between 'body' and 'self' was challenged. Clarifying the
values which I brought to the fieldwork experience became an
integral part of this ethnography. Not only that, this
conscious process provided me with an interpretative means
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with which I was able to make sense of Julie as she saw
herself and not just as I saw her36.
The Body as Citadel
My "It" and "Other" was Julie, the surrogate. More than
Pamela, the genetic mother, Julie’s choice to be a surrogate
at once fascinated and repelled me. She was as much an
"Other" to me as say Papua New Guinea cannibals were to early
anthropologists. My "emancipation" as a woman had taken
place in college in the early 1980s around the 1970s feminist
slogan, "our bodies, ourselves." During those college years
and after, I fought long and hard to decolonize my body and
reclaim my self. My bodily boundaries were thus politicized
frontlines— ramparts!— to the citadel of my Self, protecting
me from the intrusions of patriarchy. Julie's choice to be a
surrogate seemed to me a dangerous transgression of those
boundaries, in the wrong direction. It read to me as a very
mindless crossing over to the "Enemy. ” This is how much of
feminism has also read this choice. Julie was subjecting
herself to the evils of commodification, of being "turned
into a womb for rent" (Corea 1985a: 17) . As the feminist
Deborah Lynn Steinberg concludes in her analysis of in-vitro
fertilisation procedures and language:
The recombination of women' s bodies through ' IVF'
procedures and the concurrent representational
36The same was true of Pamela and their relationship with each other.
The Martins are the subject of the next chapter, and their relationship
with Julie Thayer the subject of the following chapter.
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erasure of women in 'IVF' [literature] constitute
an unprecedented assault on the privacy, integrity
and autonomy of women. It is this assault that
characterizes 'IVF' and, which, in turn, makes
'IVF' possible to carry out. (1990:85)
I thought this, too, about the new reproductive technologies.
But Julie thought and felt very differently. She
constantly said to me that she was doing "the surrogate
thing" because it was her body and she was free to do with it
as she pleased. In fact, being a gestational surrogate was
thrilling, errpowering: "I'm having a unique experience. I
haven't yet met another surrogate, like walking through the
mall or something. ... I get to excercize my full power as
a woman. I'm choosing everything about this pregnancy."3 7
This sounded like an "our bodies, ourselves" argument, yet
the fact that she found this choice empowering contradicted
what I considered the logical prescription for (non-)action
embedded in that phrase. I couldn’t even argue that Julie,
being one generation younger to me, didn't understand what
"our bodies, ourselves" stood for. She works as a medical
counselor and assistant at a facility which helps women
terminate late-term problem pregnancies and gets very-
sarcastic when pro-lifers picket the clinic: "I'll bet I'll
be counseling their daughters one day when they need to
terminate their problem pregnancies, just wait and see.1 ' 3 8
37 This last statement was made early on in the pregnancy before the
dynamics with her couple made it clear she did not have as much control
as she had imagined and hoped she would over the experience.
38 Julie works at one of a few handfuls of facilities in the country who
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Julie did not experience the technologies as an assault
on her person, not even physically.39 She was, for example,
completely non-plussed by the regimen of daily hormone shots
which left her buttocks looking like a pin-cushion the first
two months of the arrangement. Yes, the shots hurt and left
bumps in her flesh until long after the birth, but these
shots were not an assault on her. When I asked if she feared
the physiological side-effects of these potent hormonal
drugs, she explained that she did and would never take them
over an extended period of time: two months was a safe
limit; luckily she got pregnant the first embryo transfer40.
Julie was also confident that she knew enough about her body,
its rhythms and the pitfalls of reproductive medicine to
"know what was going on and what should and should not be
done." After all, she worked with women who were often
casualties of reproductive medicine. Many of her clients 1
are IVF patients whose usually first-time pregnancies were
do this type of work, which in many cases is life saving for the mother.
39This is in contrast to Pamela, who in a 10 year period underwent 6 IVF
tries, which she says exhausted her emotionally and physically. She
attributes her thyroid dysfunction to the regimen of hormones she was on
for those years. She eventually had to have it removed. She has met 4
other women (in doctors' waiting rooms) who like her had to have their
thyroid removed (they recognized each other's scars, at the base of
their throats) . All four women had undergone long term hormone
therapies for IVF surgeries. What Corea (1985a, 1987) and Rowland
(1992) have contributed in their monographs on the new reproductive
technologies are these physical dangers to women, which are very real
and often scary, and which cannot be ignored.
^This is a very rare occurrence. One in every four embryo transferts
results in a pregnancy. This is why gestational surrogacy is extremely
costly, around $65,000 (See appendix A for a schedule of costs.)
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horror stories such as babies with no brain (anencephaly) or
with water around the brain (hydrocephaly) .
Julie also had no delusions about her role in the
arrangement: she clearly knew that her "reason for being
there" was to gestate. She was contracted because of her
uniquely female capacity to nurture in utero. This was
something she "knew she could do" from her experience with
her first son and her years of working in the gynecological
field. She would often joke about being a "cow," an
"incubator," or an "oven." Her belly-button, towards the end
of the pregnancy, was a "pop-up timer." These jokes made me
uneasy at first: J would not have liked to be identified
with my reproductive function. It took me time— being around
her and seeing the kind of person she was, as well as
discussing this issue with her— to understand that, in
Julie's own self-conception, she and her body were always
more than her reproductive function. Her jokes pointed to
the irony of her position, not to its literal truth.
My own (feminist) fear at being reduced to my biology
kept me from seeing this truth. For Julie, surrendering her
body to a surrogate pregnancy was not what I would have
imagined it to be for me, a passive surrendering of her womb
to patriarchal occupation and control. Rather, paradoxically
for me, this act for her meant to exercise full, active
sovereignty over her self. She chose surrogacy, she
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explained, in part because of her counseling work in the
late-term problem abortion facility, in part because it would
entail very tangible sacrifices for her (of her time, her
energy, her body, even money— surrogates incur many out-of-
pocket expenses which are not automatically reimbursed; and
their fee does not compensate adequately for their labor.
Surrogates receive a total of $12,000 in four installments
for their efforts)41.
41 Surrogate centers usually require this fee up front and hold it in a
trust fund, out of which the surrogate is paid. This set up is intended
to protect the surrogate from defaulting parents and is an important
service the centers provide surrogates. The payment installments
correspond to the confirmation of pregnancy (the heartbeat) , the
confirmation of the viability of the baby at three months (by
amniocentesis or Alpha Fetal Protein, an ultrasound and blood diagnostic
procedure), one payment in the last trimester of the pregnancy and a
final payment right after the birth. Julie's contract was not standard,
apparently. She claims Paul Martin revised several of the stipulations
in the standard template. (An early interview with him would seem to
corroborate this claim. In this interview he describes crafting a
"contract so airtight" that Julie would have no claim whatsoever on
their child.) Notably, in the final contract, Julie was not to receive
her final payment until a full six weeks after the birth. "What?! Did
they think they could return the baby if they didn’t like it?" was her
comment when she realized this delay, but the delay might have had more
to do with the Martins' belief that a surrogate' s motives had to be
primarily financial. Pamela Martin, for example, told me often that she
could not imagine why else a woman would want to put her body through
the hardship of a pregnancy. During the re-write of the thesis, to
illustrate Julie's financial motive, she voluntarily shared how much
they paid Julie for the surrogacy, asking that I include this
information: a total of $16,250 in fees, including a $500 fee for the
transfer of embryos, a maternity clothing allowance, out-of-pocket
childcare and maid service expenses while Julie was on bedrest during
the last month of the pregnancy and after the birth, recovering from
bladder complications, and the difference between her salary and the
maternal leave disability payments. These are all standard
contributions couples are expected to make to their surrogates,
contributions the Thayers see as minimal compensation for the emotional,
personal and physical contributions they jointly made to the pregnancy.
The discrepancy between both parties views of the "surrogate's" motives
will be addressed in the next two chapters.
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This 'material' sacrifice was important to Julie, even
necessary, because, as she shared with me after a shoot half
way through the pregnancy, she feels blessed by many things
she has received by way of her body during her lifetime.
Twice her life was spared by unnerving coincidences. She
impulsively walked off the fated LockerBee Scotland airplane
which blew up over Scotland, killing six of her friends on
board (she and her boyfriend back in the States were having a
fight and she decided to go back home early) and she walked
off a train, again on an impulse, which crashed on the
outskirts of London. She found companionship, love and
fulfillment in a man 32 years her senior (not the love story
she had imagined for herself, as she once joked) . The first
year of their relationship this man had exploratory surgery
for a recurring cancer which appeared to be on its way back;
luckily the alarm was false. She "accidentally" became
pregnant with her son, never thinking she could have children
of her own because of chronic ovarian cysts which a
gynecologist in her youth told her would make her infertile.
Each of these events were "turning points" in Julie's life
(Mandelbaum 1973) . To her, they were "gifts" in the Maussian
sense. Her decision to become a surrogate meant to
reciprocate these "blessings" through a tangible personal
sacrifice she knew she could accomplish.
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Her work as a medical counselor in the late-term
abortion facility brought her in contact with women and
couples whose grief over the forced termination of their
genetically diseased problem babies she found very moving:
We do what are called intact D and Es [Dilitation
And Evacuation] which means the babies come out
whole and intact. We then wash the baby and
dress it and bring it back to the parents. It1 s
like a closure for them. It helps with their
grief. It's very hard— [starts to break down
crying] because the parents hold their babies and
look at you like this was our future— and then we
have to take that baby out of their arms and walk
out...It's very hard. One of the things I told
Pamela that I'm very much looking forward to is
handing her that baby at the birth. This is one
baby she can take home with her.
To give Pamela a baby she could take home would be her
ultimate reward as a surrogate, the act which would reciprocate
the blessings she had received. There were other rewards, too,
"perks:" Full breasts on her small person, the pleasantness of
a pregnancy she could enjoy without worrying about the
responsibilities of motherhood at the other end. These
responsibilities— preparing for the arrival of a new child, the
financial expense, the stress of a newborn infant— were
Pamela’s concerns. Julie's embodied experience of pregnancy
would thus not be weighed by expectations of gender.
The Body as a ghai-ed gp*r;«a
To understand how Julie experienced surrogacy, it was
necessary for me to abandon the individualistic body
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territoriality of my brand of feminism. This came gradually,
over the course of the pregnancy as I got to know Julie
better and witness her willingness to share her body, so
generously, with the Martins. My own biological body was
inextricably and politically bound with my own biographical
self, and it was difficult for me to relinquish the emotional
and intellectual posture that my "body” is this flesh that
"I" live in, which belongs exclusively to me and is "my"
property alone. For Julie, her "body" was no longer her own
individual, private and clearly frontiered property42.
Rather, her body was a collective domain: on the one hand,
of four adults (herself, her husband, and "her" couple as she
once shared with me) and her son. Even physiologically, her
body, especially her pregnant body, belonged to the world.
This last sentiment Julie expressed to me in various
contexts. The most dramatic for me was after she had given
birth. She bound her breasts with ice for days to stop her
milk from coming (she feared breast engorgement, a problem
she had had with her own son's pregnancy) , but her milk would
come anyhow whenever she'd hear a child's whimpering— her
son's at home, someone's baby at the supermarket. She had no
control over this physiological response, and because Paul
and Pamela's abruptly disappeared from her life after the
42 One phenomenological explanation for our different conceptions and
relationships towards are bodies might have to do with Julie's personal
experience with marriage and motherhood, which I do not share. In her
marriage and as a mother, Julie is in mutually dependent relationships
which require that she share her body and self collectively.
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birth43, this response was a painful emotional reminder of her
disappointment at their treatment of her after the birth—
what was supposed to be the apex of her experience.
During the pregnancy, acquaintances, shopkeepers, bank
tellers— the persons who peripherally peopled her world—
extended congratulations over her pregnancy, always reading
it as her own. Explaining that she was a surrogate became
taxing and reactions were not always positive. She often
decided to pass for the "real" mother. This in turn created
problems once she was no longer pregnant. For example, her
manicurist insisted on her bringing in her newborn baby. How
was the birth? Was it a boy or a girl? What did she name
the baby?4 4
Negotiating Body Brwmflayi
Julie hoped to share the embodied experience of the
pregnancy with the couple, very intimately. Part of her
explicit goal was to make them feel like they were the ones
pregnant. She wanted a couple who would be very involved
43 This claim is contested by Pamela, who remembers calling Julie
"everyday for four days right after the birth and twice a week for two
weeks after that." Julie recalls a few strained and awkward phone
calls, followed by a long silence. Julie eventually called Pamela to
see if they could meet so she could discuss her feelings— Pamela had
gifts to give her. This meeting was filmed.
^Because her manicurist is "very religious" and, Julie explained, as a
Filipino very "pro-family," she had hesitated to share the story of the
surrogacy in the first place, failing to anticipate this problem once
the pregnancy was over. Julie ended up bringing in a photo of Pamela
(whom Julie resembles) and the baby at the birth and explained that her
"infertile aunt" would be raising her daughter. "Filipinos understand
about wapping children," Julie explained, and this way she would not
have to explain the real circumstances of the pregnancy.
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with her and the pregnancy: "What the hell, I'm not here just
to be pregnant for nine months and then just hand the baby
over. I want to know the people, see what they are going
through, watch them smile at the ultrasound, feel their baby
kick." Surrogates are at liberty to decide on which doctor
they will see and which hospital they will give birth at
since it is they who are embodying the pregnancy. But Julie
shared these decisions with Pamela (and Paul) in an effort to
make them feel a part of. She insisted during doctors'
visits that, although the pregnant body, she and not Pamela
be treated as the by-stander. She wanted it to be clear that
Pamela was the mother and she wanted Pamela to feel like she
was. Thus, Julie volunteered her body as Pamela's, allowing
Pamela the choice of an amniocentesis and a say in decisions
concerning the baby. This sharing on Julie's part was an
effort to give the Martins' an experience of pregnancy
otherwise denied them by the infertility. She agreed, for
example, to play next to her belly a microcassette tape Paul
prepared of him reading and talking to his daughter. She
sympathized with why he might want the child to hear his
voice.4 5 She made sure she called Pamela when she felt the
baby's first kick, to share the moment with her.
Her consideration of the Martins' wishes was not without
problems. At month four of the pregnancy, around the time of
45 This happened at around month five of the pregnancy since the "baby
would become cognizant" at that point and thus, Paul felt, would need to
know his voice
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the AFP, Julie decided that she wanted to switch from the
high risk specialist the Martins' had asked her to see since
she didn't like him much. He was "patronizing" and
"condescending" to both her and Pamela, she explained, and
she wanted a pleasant birth experience. Pamela resisted the
switch at first: this doctor had flagged a potential weight
problem, "yelling at Julie about her two pound gain in four
months."46 This was a very serious concern for the Martins47.
Pamela and Julie negotiated and reached a compromise,
agreeing not to switch until Julie's weight had stabilized.
On the way to the AFP visit, which Julie's own husband,
Dallas48, and the Martins would attend, Julie shared with me:
I'm tired of doctors who think they're God. A
pregnancy does happen naturally, believe it or
not. I didn't have to think about pregnancy
this much when I was pregnant with my own son.
. . . You've got four people here, all with
their own ideas about what should happen and I' m
trying to bring all these ideas together and
it ’ s hard— especially because what is happening
is happening inside my body.
46 Pamela was frightened by the force of the doctor's reprimand (as a
measure of the seriousness of the issue) and, while she felt badly for
Julie, she was nonetheless willing to subject herself to his "bad
manners" since he was a "top of his field" and a "high risk doctor, "
which is why she and Paul had picked them in the first place.
47I explore in the next chapter how the medical discourse set Pamela up
for this concern by framing the surrogate's "real* contribution to the
growth of the baby only in terms of nutrition.
48 Julie, after reading a first draft of this thesis, aked that I
include a note about how "great Dallas was during the whole experience."
She explained, "He was the stability in all this for me and helped me in
everyway." Surrogate centers screen for women with strong and stable
marriages since the pregnancy will stress not just the surrogate herself
but also her family. There have been no studies nor has anything been
written about these men.
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Her (pregnant) body was no longer her own, then, but a
collective domain, over which more than herself had claim.
She had voluntarily allowed the Martins into this
collectivity, without realizing that the Martins might stake
claim on her body independently of her or her wishes. While
she had hoped to choose to let them share the pregnancy, as
the genetic parents of the child she bore, they took this
sharing for granted as the genetic parents of the child. She
thus found herself in the position of having to negotiate
with them: switching doctors was a must for her. She was
outraged by his bad manners and joked that she would give
birth in the bathroom before letting him touch her at the
birth. However, the Martins had revised the contract to
state that they would chose the doctor, and since Julie had
already agreed with Pamela to see the "high risk" doctor they
wanted her to see before signing of the contract, she did not
question this stipulation, failing to anticipate that she
might not like him and that they might try to hold her to the
contract.. This was a tense negotiation for Julie and
frustrating for her: she wanted to collaborate with the
Martins without relinquishing her power over herself and her
body.
My point, though, is that Julie sought to retain clear
sovereignty over her self even as her body became
"collective." Her body boundaries were not fixed but open to
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negotiation, expansion or retraction, as the situation
required. Hers was a remarkably flexible and fluid approach
to embodiment, far more fluid than my own. Her pregnant body
and this particular pregnancy placed her at the hub of a
nexus of rights and obligations, which she did not resist but
rather embraced and assumed, quite generously and
responsibly.
Watching Julie, it dawned on me that it is really an
illusion to think, as Haraway has put it, that "our bodies
end at the skin" (1991:167) . To conceptualize the body as
only a biological organism, to isolate it in the skin, is a
fallacy of historical discourse. Our bodies exist sentiently
at the intersection of particular, personal histories and
particular social geographies. As Oliver Sacks has said in
the context of his own work with Parkisonian patients and
embodiment, "physiology is embedded in people, and people are
embedded and living in history. [Physiology cannot be
displayed] except by biography" (1973:228-229). To think
otherwise is to commit, according to Sacks, "an
epistemological solecism of the first order" (1973:240).
This solecism I committed intellectually in my approach
to surrogacy. It began with a blind faith in the existence
of the fixed and reifed object of "Body," and my own
privately owned version of it, my body. Thus, like the
Martins, I initially saw Julie only in terms of the
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physiological service she was performing for them and failed
to appreciate the complexity of her motives or the complexity
of the kind of surrogate she hoped to be for the Martins.
Haraway in "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" has
theorized the "body" as part of an ideological "apparatus of
bodily production" in which "'sex' as an object of biological
knowledge appears regularly in the guise of biological
determinism." This production, Haraway argues, allows
patriarchy to "resource 'sex' for its re-presentation as
gender, which 'we' can control. It has seemed all but
impossible to avoid the trap of an appropriationist logic of
domination built into the nature/culture binarism and its
generative lineage, including the sex/gender distinction" (in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 1991:197,198). She calls for a
feminist embodiment which is "not about fixed location in a
reifed body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields,
inflections in orientations, and responsibility for
difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning" (195) .
This was precisely my problem: to have imaged Julie's body
as I imagined my own, as a fixed "resource" for the
appropriation of patriarchy in the re-presentation of gender
and not as Julie imagined her own body, as a domain open to
negotiation, to "inflections in orientations" and shifts in
"material-semiotic fields of meaning."
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The Body as Property
Petchesky in a recent article "The Body as Property: a
Feminist Re-Vision" (1995) adds an important historical and
class perspective to a biologically-determined body, as a
domain which one can "own" and "resource" in different ways.
She argues that the dominant logic of appropriating ownership
has historical roots in the Lockian notions of private
property, "Every Man has a Property in his own Person."
In this notion, property becomes "an instrument of or
evidence justifying the accumulations of things; because I
own "the labor of my body and the works of my hands," the
materials I work and the objects I produce (or my servants
produce) become mine."(394) "This narrow definition [made]
property exclusive, personal and objective," Petchesky shows,
and co-opted an historically anterior and more humane notion
of property as "self-propriety." This notion was practiced by
the Leveller radicals whose defense of property was as "a
shared rather than a private resource"(391). Theirs was a
notion of "ownership of one’s person in order to be a person
(including a citizen)— to "own" one's sensual and sexual
experience and defend oneself against arbitrary bodily abuse
and repression"(394). This was not an idea of private
property vested in "the thing I have (piece of land, car,
factory, uterus) but [in] my right to keep others out."(389)
Their was thus a relational basis of property which "adheres
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despite our culturally induced propensity to translate rights
of access into objects of exchange."(389) Julie's
construction of her embodiment was relational; her rights
over her body-as a mother, a wife, a surrogate— were shared
with her child, her husband, the Martins, and others. Her
embodiment was not a priori an antagonism between Self and
Patriarchy over the territory of her private Body. Rather,
at issue, were the negotiations of the boundaries of this
collective domain, which had grown because of the surrogacy
to include the Martins, and their baby.
Feminists have taken issue with the Lockian formulation
of property, Petchesky argues, but the idea of body as an
object of property of the self persists even in these
analyses, "[imprisoning them] in the conventional (bourgeois)
notion of property that involves exclusivity, isolation,
objectification, and self-interest" (396) . She cites Carol
Pateman (1988) on the issue of surrogacy to illustrate this
point. For Pateman, surrogacy is like prostitution, a
"classic case of men as a 'fraternity' gaining a 'right of
access to women's bodies' through the fictive device of
contract (voluntary consent)." (395). Petchesky explains,
"when a woman enters into a surrogacy contract, [Pateman
argues] she transforms her uterus into an empty vessel and
alienates the unique physiological, emotional and creative
capacity of her body, that is to say, of herself as a woman.
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She stands to her property in exactly the same external
relation as the male owner stands to his labour power or
sperm; there is nothing distinctive about womanhood”
(1988:207; Petchesky's emphasis).
The problem with this logic, Petchesky is quick to point
out, is that "Pateman1 s answer to the ■language of the
individual1 [owner], which she rejects as inherently
masculine, is the language of the ’essential woman1 as a
sexual and reproductive being. [In this language] ... all
prostitutes, all surrogate mothers, all wives become the
same" (386) . In other words, Petchesky is arguing that
Pateman upholds the Lockian notion of property in her
construction of surrogacy, the premise of a Person
("essential woman") vested in a Thing ("the unique
physiological, emotional and creative capacity" of a Woman’s
Body) . From this vantage point, she concludes, how could
"owning the body" not mean "reducing it to a commodity"?
This was my dilemma in approaching Julie. Her body was
clearly a property of her self ("this is my body, I can do with
it what I please; it’s my choice to be a surrogate") but it was
also clearly not just a commodity to her. In becoming and
being a surrogate, Julie did not consider herself robbed of her
body’s "unique physiological, emotional and creative capacity. ’ ’
Rather, this choice was a full exercise of this capacity, which
she hoped would expand further (be enriched) because of her
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choice to become a surrogate. As Petchesky points out, "many
women live in circumstances in which their bodies/selves are
not constructed as autonomous but rather are enmeshed in
obligatory social relations, especially to kin. For them, the
sense of self-ownership is a discovery, a recovery, not a
given" (401; see also Stack 1974) . This is the sense in which
I have argued Julie's body was "collective." My body, on the
other hand, was constructed in an autonomous fashion in
reaction to a rigid biological representation of the body.
Petchesky’s analysis of the body as property is useful in
that she identifies a range of possibility— defined by one's
place in history and biography— for different experiences of
ownership over self and body. She insists that "instead of
discarding the rhetoric of property, persons, and bodies, we
enlarge its frame of reference, to broaden who and what count
as owners and the moral and communal spaces in which [we]
define [our] selves"(1995:400) . What her analysis helped me
articulate was this "largeness of frame of reference" in
Julie's own personal embodied experience as a surrogate. This
awareness, in turn, allowed me to see the narrowness of a frame
of reference which defines the body only in biological terms
and crafts a Lockian relationship of property between self and
body. This construction is the subject of the next chapter and
is instrumental to how assisted reproduction sees itself and
how the Martins’ approached surrogacy.
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Chapter III
Bioloqjyj * 1 - i math; »
The Clixaate of Infertility Consciousness
To be infertile did affect my self-esteem.
Having a child is something
every woman is supposed to be able to do, and I couldn't.
Pamela Martin
Power, as we have seen, is scripted into bodies and
identities, and its expression is not fixed. This is also
true of discourse. Power is scripted into discourse, and
neither is discourse fixed (Foucault 1980). As Franklin has
observed of the discourse of reproduction, "reproduction can
be seen in the midst of a major set of cultural redefinitions
and (literal) reconstructions" (1995:326). This chapter
explores these redefinitions as they are expressed in the
cultural construction of a surrogacy arrangement. The shifts
in the discourse on reproduction— what Franklin has
identified a discursive move to "infertility consciousness"
(1990:214)— are particularly potent in the Martin's
construction of self and their experience of the surrogacy,
understandably since infertility affects not only identity
but also one's place in kinship and social networks at large
(Becker 1994). The climate of "infertility consciousness"
thus seemed the appropriate background against which to set
the Martin' s own narratives.
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This is not to say that Julie, the surrogate, stands
outside the shifting discourse on reproduction: she, too,
participates in this "infertility consciousness," for
example, in her very choice to be a gestational surrogate.
However, "infertility" has not been a part of her personal
experience and while her work does bring her into contact
with infertile women and men and their suffering— a core
motivation for her— this "condition" has not shaped her
consciousness from the embodied perspective of being
infertile. Thus, she personally stands in relation to this
discourse quite differently than do the Martins.
The Narrative of "infertility"
Popular representations of childlessness throughout the
1980s have shifted from portraying this condition as a social
problem to presenting it as a medical condition, as evidenced
by the replacement of the term "childlessness" with its
medical counterpart, "infertility" (Becker 1994:384).
Franklin (1990) has problematized the discourse on
"infertility" showing how popular representations of
infertile couples as "desperate" legitimizes scientific
intervention in the form of "medical" cures. This
construction fosters a new discourse, Franklin argues,
promoting a consciousness of infertility (1990:214). As we
shall see, in addition to constructing infertility as a
medical problem and thus legitimizing medical intervention as
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Franklin suggests, the discourse on infertility has emerged
in tandem with a new language on the (revised) "facts of
reproduction" (Franklin 1995). What I pursue in this chapter
is how this discourse and these new facts of nature
ideologically define the parameters for relations between the
”infertile" and their "cures."
Mew Conceptions;
The Discurgrre Emergence of
the Mew Reproductive Technologies
The year 1978 marks the dramatic entrance of the new
reproductive technologies into popular discourse (Franklin
1995) . That year Baby Louise, the first "test-tube" baby,
was bom, a "miracle" of modem science, made possible by the
team efforts of scientists Robert Edwards and Patrick
Steptoe, innovators of the In-Vitro Fertilization technique
(Crowe 1990:29). "Test-Tube Baby!" screamed the headlines,
but in reality Baby Louise was not a " test-tube" baby, only
her conception took place under laboratory conditions. This
was shocking enough: rather than being conceived in the
privacy of her parents' lovemaking, she was conceived in a
petri-dish outside of her mother's womb (in public view), and
then promptly returned to that intimate, interior space. The
miracle was that she "took" to her mother's womb at all after
the intervention.
The successful outcome of this intervention— a live
birth for an otherwise infertile couple— was more powerful
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as a symbolic break-through than it was as a technological
one. "Baby Louise" was potent evidence that a break through
the boundary between Nature and Culture, as symbolized by a
woman's womb and the technologies respectively, could result
in creation, in moral goodness. Baby Louise's healthy body
and her parents' joy were evidence that such interventions
could work. Origins could take place outside of Nature in a
new, re-visioned and broader Nature, which now enjoined
technology. Thus, Baby Louise's "live" existence paved the
way for a thriving industry specializing in biomedical
interventions of reproduction.
The fliMtring Facts of Nature;
N a t u r e . BmhcxH m e rit a n d Culture
Strathem has argued that what the reproductive
technologies have thrown into crisis "is the symbolic order,
the conceptualization of the relationship between nature and
culture such that one can talk about the one through the
other. Nature as a ground for meaning can no longer be taken
for granted if Nature itself is regarded as having to be
protected and promoted" (1992b) . What Strathem is
articulating with this observation is the "death" of Nature,
what Haraway articulated in her Cyborg Manifesto as the
"dissolution of the organic." Haraway defines the emergent
relationship between nature and culture in the figure of the
cyborg:
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No longer structured by the politarity of public
and private, the cyborg defines a technological
polis based partly on a revolution of social
relations in the oikos, the household. Nature
and culture are reworked; the one can no longer
be the resource for appropriation or
incorporation by the other." (1991:151)
The symbolic and material relationship between "Nature" and
"Culture," domains which were conceptually held in
opposition,49 is being reconfigured in the new technologies.
These domains now interpenetrate morally, organically
andfiguratively. The body of the gestational surrogate is a
new fact in a new Nature: her original organic unity is
dissolved as her body quite literally becomes a new organic
space, shared by two beings of different genetic
constitutions, herself and the child of her couple.
In the old configuration of Nature, this embodiment was
unimaginable. A mother was always the same organic unity as
her child and especially while in utero. This organic unity
was the primal unity, the one certain fact about our origins
in life. There might be uncertainty about paternity but
there was never uncertainty about who one' s mother is. But
these "facts of nature" are being displaced by a new set of
"facts," described in the language of genetics. One is
reminded here of David Schneider's perceptive remark in his
49A vivid example of this shifting relationship between nature and
culture is in agra-forest business, where old forests, a "natural"
resource, are being replanted for future harvesting: are these new,
replanted forests "Nature"?
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landmark American Kinship: A Cultural Account: "American
kinship is whatever the biogenetic relationship is. If
science discovers new facts about the biogenetic
relationship, then this is what kinship is and was all along,
although it may not have been known at the time." (1968:23,
emphasis added)
"fictiefl* as the New Facts of Nature
The emerging symbolic language of genetic reproduction
is facilitating the new discourse on reproduction as well as
making the transgressions occurring between nature and
culture possible and symbolically acceptable.
Franklin (1995) has shown how the language of genetics
enhances the climate of infertility consciousness by
replacing the old narrative of conception (of the "journey of
the gametes" inside a woman’s body) with a new narrative, of
the "genetic processes of replication, recombination, and
expression" (331). These processes, Franklin writes,
are seen to be the determinants of the genetic
code, which provides the "blue print" for all the
other events. . . . Everything that might
possibly go wrong with them constitutes one of
the most important features of emergent
conception narratives. . . . Successful
reproduction comes to resemble an obstacle course
[in need] to be assisted or achieved because it
is so prone to error by itself. (1995:331)
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The genetic reconceptualization of the facts of nature not
only predisposes reproduction to medical intervention, it
also:
removes the conceptive process from the
protected realm of naturalness . . . Whereas the
"birds and bees" described a natural process,
inaccessible to human intervention, occurring
deep inside the woman's body, and unfolding
according to the laws of nature, the new
narrative of assisted or achieved reproduction
tells a different story. This world becomes
visible and knowable through technological
means, creating new forms of accessibility to
and improvement of reproduction (1995:333)
Franklin's analysis articulates the disembodying effect of
the technologies very clearly.
Genes exist outside of embodied time, as "a blueprint"
which can be read by science and even improved. As feminist
philosopher Braidotti puts it,
Our age as a whole is characterized by the
calculating and rational management of all living
matter. . . . Multifunctional lidless eyes
watching, outside-in and inside-out; our
technology has produced the vision of microscopic
giants and intergalactic midgets, freezing time
out of the picture, contracting space to a
spasm.(1994:43)
This "freezing time out of the picture" also freezes
biographical bodies out of the picture. The freezing out of
biographical bodie accounts, Franklin argues, for the
privileging of the embryo over the body of the mother in the
new genetic formulation of reproduction, since the embryo now
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carries his/her own genetic blueprint and does not need the
body of its mother to "replicate, recombine, and express.”
These new facts are what make the logic of gestational
surrogacy symbolically possible: from the point of view of
the embryo and its well-being, the body of the surrogate is
equivalent to the body of the genetic mother, both are just a
"host.” Since a fetus’ personhood is scripted into its
genes, the personhood of an embryo remains unaffected by the
personhood (biography) of the gestational mother. The two do
not touch in the symbolic construction of genetics, even
though they share the same embodied location. Physiological
processes stand more independently from biographical ones
than ever. But, as we shall see, biographical realities do
impinge on physiology because, while we may imagine we can
abstract life from time, time does not abstract us from life!
The new facts of genetics, Strathem has argued, are
having a transformative effect on how kinship— and thus
social relations— at large are reckoned. She explains:
Genetics is not only about blood ties and thus
about ancestry; it is also about the unique
constellation of characteristics that make up
individuals. In the case of blood ties, [social]
relationships were evident as ties between
specific persons; in the case of the
constellation of characteristics, relationships
contribute the components of the individual
person's makeup. It would seem that the more we
know about this constellation, the less we shall
in fact need to know about the
relationships.(1995:357)
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Thus, what once would be construed as "blood" ties no longer
are. Egg-donors, sperm-donors, gestational surrogates do not
automatically become kin of the individuals who seek to
reproduce by using their body parts. The relationship is
more like a generic "species kinship" (Haraway, quoted in
Franklin 1995:337) where body parts are equivalent to each
other because they are part of the "human" species.
Procreation, reproduction and the family are displaced in
this construction, Strathem points out: "The technologies
are, so to speak, indifferent to social origins of egg and
sperm. ... If finally what remains intact is the intention
to have a child, then that desire is what the child
'reproduces"' (1995:355)
In the surrogate arrangement of this study, the language
of genetics was invoked by all parties, and not without
irony. For example, Paul, anxious to continue his
"bloodline," was indifferent that his child was a daughter
and not a son. What mattered to him more than anything else
was that his genes be carried on— his contribution to the
"mapping of the human genome."5 0 For this purpose, a girl
would do just as well as a boy. Julie, the surrogate,
invoked the genetic arrangement of the surrogacy whenever she
came under moral attack: this was not "baby-selling" because
^In my first interview with Paul, he explained to me that his only
regret in life was not to live out the mapping of the human genome,
because of all the knowledge we then would have. He also did not want
his genes to be lost to future generations, which helps explain his
general enthusiasm for gestational surrogacy as a modem technology.
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she was helping bring a child into the world which was not
her own. Genetically, she would retort, it already belonged-
-even prior to her entry on the scene— to the parents. "Who
are we to say this is wrong? However this baby can get here
is fine by me." For Pamela, the new facts of nature helped
reassure her that she would have a baby at the other end
which could not be taken from her.5 1 But, perhaps because she
was a generation older than Julie, a genetic contribution
alone, as we shall see, was not enough for her to feel that
she had met her obligations as a mother. For motherhood in
the culture at large is not only about "being transformed
into the genetrix" as Schneider explained about American
kinship (1968:23); it is also about the very gendered
expectation of nurture.
The Construction of Infertility
as A Fact of the Body
Pamela and Paul Martin were married in their early
thirties after they had established their respective careers
in the entertainment business. They waited a few more years
before trying to have family; they were both only children
and knew that eventually they would want to have a "great big
51 Pamela invoked the recent California Supreme Court ruling in the Anna
Johnson vs. Mark and Crispins Calvert gestational surrogacy custody case
to make the point that the "surrogate has no claim over this baby
because the courts are ruling in favor of the biology." This legal
backing provided emotional reassurance for Pamela. Most parents,
already familiar with loss, fear surrogacy on this ground. In this
precedent-setting case, the court denied Anna Johnson, first time
gestational surrogate, shared custody of the child she nourished to life
in her own body. As Ragone points out this ruling potentially
undermines all women's gestational rights (1994:114).
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brood around them"52. For Paul, this was particularly
important "because, again although I can't be sure, I think
that one of the driving forces that eventually invested in me
a desire to be a father was the Darwinian impulse of
perpetuating the species. ... I didn't want my gene pool to
die with me."
The infertility was for years "unexplained." There was
first a concern with the quality of Paul's sperm, but this
was corrected through nutrition. When they still could not
conceive naturally, Pamela felt it was her and felt very
betrayed by her body. She had been pregnant once in her
early twenties and had had an abortion. This had given her
no reason to doubt "that her plumbing worked." She wondered
if they had been wise to wait as long as they did53, but the
doctors could find nothing wrong with her body:
I never thought in a million years that I would
be infertile . . . The doctors don't even know
that I am. We have what is called unexplained
infertility, which means that my tubes are clear.
As far as the doctors are concerned there is
nothing wrong with my uterus, my tubes or
anything; and there is nothing wrong with my
husband either, which is the most frustrating. I
aPaul Martin, 2nd interview.
Pamela and I would often discuss possible causes of infertility. I
myself suffer from endometriosis and could very well be infertile. We
speculated about environmental causes, generational factors (women
entering the work force), and gender relations. Pamela once
insightfully pointed out that women of her generation were more
conflicted in their relationship with men. The uncertainty around
causes and origins of infertility was not only a source of self-doubt
but also a source of doubt of the medical establishment which failed to
identify the causes of her infertility.
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went through six In-Vitro tries. I got pregnant
for two and a half months once. The thing about
IVF pregnancies is that you know right away that
you are pregnant, because they test you. I was so
excited. Two and a half months to someone who
doesn't know they're pregnant is no big deal, but
to me . . .1 had even started to buy baby
things. My hormones were completely raging
because they keep you on massive doses of
hormones to help the baby hold. I even had
morning sickness. We went in for the heartbeat
and not only was there no heartbeat, there was no
embryo. It had fizzled away. I had a horrible
hormonal crash that lasted for six weeks and I
went into a very deep depression. That's when I
told Paul that I couldn’t go through this again
anymore. My body just couldn’t do it.
What her narrative suggests is that infertility was a fact of
her body54. It was a fact that pitted her self against her
body, to the point of putting her body through six difficult
IVF procedures in an eight year period55. These "treatments"
were not only emotionally difficult, because of the hormones,
they were also physically dangerous. Pamela attributes her
loss of thyroid function, and its eventual removal, to the
hormone treatments that accompanied the IVF attempts56.
^In one informal discussion after an interview had ended, Pamela
speculated that her infertility might have also been tied to her
generation's conflicted relations with men. She grew up, she said, with
an anger towards men, having witnessed her own mother's cruel
abandonment by a man. This prompted her to pursue a career at the
expense of marriage and a family, and secure a good measure of
independence. When she met and fell in love with Paul, she was in her
early thirties, "already late to have children."
^According to the fertility clinic, women try IVF on average four times
before giving up. Pamela explained that the doctor's "pregnant"
diagnosis gave her hope, which got her to keep on going with the
treatments. "If they had said there was no hope of Paul and I getting
pregnant, we would have pursued adoption much earlier." (See also
Becker 1994).
^The surgery left a thin scar at the bottom of her throat. She
recognized this same scar at the base of another woman's throat while in
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The separation of "self" from "body" is not unusual for
women of Pamela' class background. Emily Martin found in her
analysis of reproduction in America that middle to upper
class women's concepts of their bodies and selves are
constructed on such a separation, a separation Martin traces
to the medical construction of women's bodies along a
mechanical imagery of production and failed production
(1987)57. In this construction, women most often imagine
their bodies as "something your self has to adjust to or cope
with" or "needs to be controlled by your self" (77) . For
Pamela, the anxiety of her infertility lay precisely in that
she could not exercise this expected control over her body.
Her body could not be willed to produce, not even by science.
During the fieldwork, Pamela had a chance to make peace
with her body's failure. Not only was she now going to be a
mother ("I don't think the means to the end matter; it's
going to be my baby in the end. I'm going to be its mother"),
but new scientific breakthroughs pointed to immunological
origins for unexplained infertility. This was a relief to
her, since these breakthroughs resolved whatever doubts in
doctors' waiting rooms on three separate occasions and in the
conversations that ensued, it came out that all of them had done more
than four XVF surgeries and been on hormone treatments for years. She
is angry with her fertility doctors for never making the connection.
would say that all women in Euro-American experience this
opposition, as Emily Martin has suggested (1987:200), regardless of the
class. Julie certainly did, too. The question is which other body-
self-concepts co-exist with this opposition and which of those is
foregrounded, when and how often.
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her mind that it might not have been her body, but her self
which was responsible for the failure to get pregnant:
I firmly believe now that that’s what I had, an
immunological disorder. My body was attacking
the fetus as a foreign object. That’s why I
would get pregnant but the pregnancies would
fizzle away.
Thus, the science of infertility helped reaffirm that
infertility is a matter of the body. Fertility, on the
other hand, is a matter of the private self.
The Construction of Fertility
as a Matter of the Self
Gay Becker in her study of metaphors of continuity among
the infertile has pointed out:
In the ideology of U.S. individualism, concern is
with continuity of the self rather than with
cultural continuity; society is not
conceptualized as providing the vehicle for
continuity but, instead, the individual has
responsibility for attempting to create that
continuity and permanence (1994:401)
This reliance on the individual as responsible for his/her
own continuity (fertility) is tied, she shows, to a
biological construction of infertility, as vested inside
people's bodies. Becker explains:
The potential for biological reproduction is a
basis expectation of life, an expectation that is
embodied. Infertility thus strikes at one of the
most basic expectations women and men have for
themselves - their biological potential to
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reproduce. When this expectation is not
realized, not only do the assumptions around
which they have structured their lives suddenly
collapse, but their assumptions about the body
collapse, as well. The discovery of infertility
was an assault on embodied knowledge and core
sense of self. (1994:394, emphasis added)
This construction of reproduction as an embodied "expectation
of life" was, as we have seen, central to Pamela' perception
of her own body as infertile. Her failure lay in the
biological constitution of her body, where reproduction is
supposed to occur. She herself, however, was not infertile.5 8
Her desire to have a child was a matter for her whole self,
and not just of her body:
I really wanted to be a mother, to be pregnant,
to feel everything a pregnant woman is supposed
to feel. I wanted people to come up to me in the
street and tell me how good I look with the
pregnancy glow, you know, to congratulate me, all
those things that pregnant women go through.
Thus, for Pamela, being pregnant would involve almost a
spiritual transformation in which both body and soul would be
affected. This consciousness Pamela identified as "maternal"
feelings she already had but could not direct towards a child
of her own flesh:
^Ragone has titled her ethnography of surrogate parenthood, Conception
in the Heart, a phrase she lifted from one of her interviews with a
surrogate, actually. She does not deconstruct embodiment as I do here
but this idea of a person being fertile (in desire) even though
infertile in body is a common perception among surrogates and couples,
and a core rationalization, as Franklin has argued (1990, 1995) for the
intervention of science in reproduction.
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I'm a very maternal person. I have cats. I take
care of all my friends— I've got a lot of needy
friends [Laughs] and I was the only one left
without a child! And I was the one who most
wanted to be a mother! It didn't seem fair.
It is this desire which hooked her on the reproductive
technologies; the hope that this desire would bear fruits,
some day if enough effort was applied. The American ideology
of individual responsibility for fertility and continuity has
meant, Becker observes, a willful response to infertility,
"the idea that hope and determination will change the course
of [the] illness" (24) . This was true of both Pamela and Paul
in their quest for children and a family, but the expression
was gendered59:
Paul: I certainly didn't stop to feel sorry for
myself when it turned out we had difficulties
conceiving naturally; like every other seemingly
insurmountable obstacle that I have confronted in
my life it just — I just assumed that I, in this
case we, would find a way to achieve what we
wanted to achieve. I don't know the word defeat.
I don' t know the words give up. They are not in
my vocabulary, either in business or in my
personal life.
59 Paul is a patriarch in the classic sense and, although Pamela has had
a very successful career in the music recording business— where she met
Paul— working for example as the record executive with the Beatles and
the Bee-Gees, her marriage with Paul is very conventionally gendered.
Paul is the provider, the patriarch; Pamela a "home-maker, " although she
does run her own side housing management company and freelances as a
talent agent. Their partnership is a complex one, and their lives very
physically independent from each other, because of the time demands of
Paul’s business. (They speak often together over the intercom or the
phone when Paul in on trips) . I was never able to film them together
except at one doctor’s visit and the birth, and in an exit interview
where I insisted on having them together to portray their new family.
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Pamela: Of course, I wanted to do this for my
husband and my marriage . . . I think I would
have been just as happy adopting. I mean, I just
wanted a baby. It didn't have to be mine. Paul is
an only child, as am I, but his parents have died
and it was much more important for him to have a
child genetically related to him to continue his
bloodline60.
Thus, Paul wanted to reproduce his lineage (his self) while
Pamela wanted to reproduce herself as a mother, a social and
gendered role. She wanted to reproduce her capacity to
nurture, a capacity she naturally exercised in her life at
large.
The Fertility Crmt-i nmim
When Paul proposed the idea of a gestational surrogate
to Pamela, she resisted the idea first on the ground that
"she wanted to be the one pregnant. [She] wanted to nurture
her child in utero. [She] wanted to be the one in control of
the pregnancy." The idea of trusting someone else to carry
her child was a difficult as well as a painful reminder that
she couldn't be her child's "real” mother. Surrogacy would
have to be, then, a last resort. They consulted an adoption
lawyer. Adoption law in California allows a biological
mother to reclaim her child up to three years after the
adoption and this terrified both Paul and her, since they
60 What is remarkable about Paul's wanting to perpetuate his
"bloodline," as we have seen, is that it did not matter to him that the
baby turned out to be a girl. This was because, in the new language of
genetics, what mattered was that his genes be continued. Genes, not
last names, are the new symbols of continuity. This throws yet another
spin on the construction of gender and patriarchal continuity!
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didn’t think they could cope with another loss. She grew
willing to re-consider a surrogate, but it would have to be a
gestational surrogate, since a gestational surrogate could
have no custody claim on her child.
Ragone (1994) has identified different stages in
couples' response to infertility, which she terms the
"fertility continuum:" "from not having been able to conceive
a child after one year of unprotected intercourse (the
medical definition of infertility) to have attempted many of
the available reproductive technologies without success,"
(1994:95) and considered adoption. Surrogacy is always a
final resort, the end of the road. For Pamela and Paul, it
was a 10 years journey. Until recently61, the only available
option for infertile women was traditional surrogacy, where
the surrogate donates her own egg and is thus the genetrix of
the child, in the Euro-American view of procreation. Pamela
never would have considered this type of surrogacy for the
same reason she decided against adoption. Ragone suggests
another dimension in a couple's resistance to traditional
surrogacy, which gestational surrogacy resolves. The
resistance to traditional surrogacy, she explains, can be
traced to "at least in part, to the belief that a family is
created through the process in which the wife is transformed
61 These breakthroughs involve the careful synchronizing of two women's
disparate cycles with the help of hormones, in order that the body of
the surrogate believe it is the body of the mother, having just
conceived (Dr. Peters, fertility clinic, personal communication, January
1996).
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into the genetrix and the husband into the genitor, as each
makes her or his equal genetic contribution to the
child"(1994:98) . While traditional surrogacy would have made
Paul the genitor, it would not have made Pamela the genetrix.
Gestational surrogacy does resolve this conflict62.
Gestafciftwa'l f i nrroqacv
as a Two-Mother Consfcrtietion
Pamela had another reservation about gestational
surrogacy, which was trusting another woman— virtually a
stranger— with her child. What changed her mind were
conversations she had with Cheryl Saban, a two-time mother
through surrogacy and author of Miracle Child: Genetic
Mother, Surrogate Womb (1982) . Saban told her the experience
could be quite wonderful if one had a surrogate with whom one
could communicate. Trust would follow naturally from that
communication. Pamela would be able to get a sense of "what
[the surrogate] was eating, if she was jogging in the first
trimester" or generally doing anything that would harm the
baby. "This is why," Pamela explained, "it was extremely
important for me to have a relationship with the surrogate
and I was extremely lucky to get Julie, who also wanted a
relationship with the mother."
62Gestational surrogacy allows a "genetrix" to provide half of the
genetic material, although egg donors are often used in gestational
surrogacy, too, as a means to avoid the emotional and legal
complications of a traditional surrogacy in which the surrogate is also
the mother of the child.
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What is interesting about Pamela’ desire for a
relationship with her surrogate is that it is essentially
constructed along the same premise of her (culturally and
personally experienced) control over her own body, had it
been pregnant. Since the child was hers genetically, and
belonged to her "biologically," she remained its primary
custodian, even though it was not her body that was pregnant.
Trusting her surrogate Julie did not mean trusting Julie, it
meant trusting that Julie would do right by her child as she
would have done right by the child if it had been in her.
Her feelings were thus completely in line with the
construction of motherhood in America: women not only
provide half of the genetic material; they are also
responsible for nurturing the child to life. In this sense
they are their child's custodian. The title of Cheryl
Saban's book captures the conceptual and emotional projection
of what would have been Pamela's own embodied relationship to
her child (had she been pregnant) onto Julie's body. The
title reads Genetic Mother, Surrogate Womb. In this
construction, the (gestational) surrogate is the "womb" of
the genetic mother; the mother's relationship to the
surrogate is symbolically and emotionally construction the
same as her would-be relationship to her own womb and
pregnant body. She is the surrogate's custodian. The person
of the surrogate is displaced. This displacement will be
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further analyzed in the next chapter as it was an important
aspect of Pamela' relationship with her surrogate Julie, who
considered herself more than a "womb" as we have seen.
Pamela' feeling is entirely in keeping with middle class
(and Western) values which posit that mothers alone "make
babies" in their own biological bodies and thus are the "sole
agents of childbirth" (Strathem 1988:315) . Imaging Julie as
a "womb" allowed Pamela to retain this notion of motherhood
in her own person. If she could not make a baby in her own
body, she would be at least able to nurture this child by
proxy in the same way as if it had been in her own body: by
making sure that Julie ate enough, did not "jog in the first
trimester, " or was in the care of a high risk doctor, even
though she was not a "high-risk" patient63. This
custodianship was not always easy to enforce. She often
butted up against Julie's person, which she felt she had to
"manage."6 4 But in the beginning, when their relationship was
still new, the sense of an equal partnership held: "Even
though I am the mother and it's my baby, it's her pregnancy.
This is why— I can't stress this enough— it is really
important to have good communication with your surrogate.
^Because of Pamela is in her mid-forties, she would have been a high-
risk pregnancy.
^Petchesky (1987:282) has suggested that women who are "products of a
middle-class culture" are more likely to value "planning, control, and
predictability in the interests of a "quality" baby"" and thus be
"predisposed to visual technologies" in the management of that
pregnancy. This predisposition extends to their own bodies, as
evidenced by Pamela' concerns.
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Luckily, Julie and I talk about everything and we are able to
resolve our differences."
In Julie, Pamela felt she found a gestational surrogate
with whom she could be a "full" mother, that is nurture her
child in utero and be its genetrix. This apparently perfect
match was brokered through her fertility clinic, where Julie
had signed up to be a gestational surrogate. The fertility
had kept Pamela' best interests in mind:
Getting Julie was a miracle. When we signed up
we were told there was a six month waiting list
for a surrogate. We were crushed. And then Edna
called [the clinic's chief administrator] three
days later and said they had a young woman who
was threatening to leave the program if she
wasn't matched with a couple immediately. This
woman had certain conditions: she wanted a couple
in Los Angeles and she wanted a relationship with
the mother, and that was I wanted, so I
immediately agreed to meet her. It was perfect.6 5
^Pamela expressed this sentiment throughout the first three months.
This statement was made before the AFP (Alfa Fetal Protein) testing,
when Pamela grew very worried about Julie's lack of weight gain. Later
in the pregnancy, Julie became more and more like an encumbrance in
Pamela's relationship with her child, especially during negotiations
that occurred when Julie went into labor. This was the most anxious
time for Pamela who felt she would be "devastated" if her baby was born
premature because this would mean she wouldn' t be able to love and
nurture this baby ("hold it" and "take her home") even after she bom.
This delay in being able to express her love for her child in person was
emotionally wrenching for her. Thus, she and Paul wanted Julie to stay
on brethine (an anti-contraction drug) as long as possible. Julie had
her own major life-crises going on at the time and staying at home on
bedrest for more weeks was not an option for her, especially because the
doctor had said everything with the baby was fine. They compromised at
two weeks. This illustrates the Martins' need to control the surrogate
for what they perceived was the benefit of the child.
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Surrogate proq*-a«ng»
Anih^qnHfcieg in the Exercize of Power
"Perfect" matches are the bread and butter of surrogate
broker agencies. Although they do protect the interests of
surrogates, for example, protecting her from aggressive
couples or securing the surrogate’s fee up front in a trust
fund out of which she is paid, the agencies' main aim
remains, nonetheless, to "shift whatever potential there is
for a surrogate to bond with the child away from the child
and onto the couple" (Ragone, 1994:38). This is to ensure
that the surrogate will not want to keep the baby and turn
it over to the couple without "an overriding sense of loss."
(38). The consulting surrogate center in the arrangement of
this study sends out literature to prospective parents which
presents the following ”fact:"
The actual number of [surrogacy] cases in
the entire country that have gone to court
are less than 17. None of these come from
our program.
This is a round about way of saying that this center brokers
arrangements which are always successful, from the perspective
of the intended couple. What is inplied is that the surrogates
will always fulfill the terms of the contract.
Ragone, whose study of surrogate parenthood was conducted
through the intermediary of agencies, claims agencies achieve
this 'promise' by altering "prevailing cultural norms
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concerning the relationship between the surrogate and the
child and the surrogate and the couple" (1994:38) . Language is
one powerful way programs normalize surrogate motherhood, for
example reserving the term "mother" for the adoptive or
intended mother and always referring to the surrogate as "the
surrogate," even though in traditional surrogacy, the
surrogate is the birth mother66.
In gestational surrogacy, where the surrogate is not the
"birth mother"— although ironically she is the one who gives
birth— calling the surrogate "the surrogate" is a way in
which to image her whole self in the service of helping
"cure" the infertility of the parents and thus alleviate
their perceived desperateness. Her function in the
relationship is to provide the gestational environment the
mother cannot. She is, as we have seen, the "surrogate
womb." Her personhood is displaced. This was reflected in
the language Paul and Pamela used to refer to Julie. She was
occasionally "Julie" but much more often "the surrogate" or
"my surrogate" (as Pamela would refer to her in the context
of her friends and family) . To family and friends, Julie was
always and only "the surrogate, " and not her full person.
66Mary Beth Whitehead in her account of the "Baby M“ story has this to
say of her experience: "Looking back , I now believe that the praise
(she was repeated told how wonderful she was for doing this for another
couple] was a form of brainwashing. Over and over, the staff told me
that it was the "couple's baby." . . . They never said that it was Betsy
[Stem]who would actually be the surrogate mother, since she was the one
who wished to substitute for me." (1989:11)
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This linguistic distance is justified by the
construction of the surrogate as a medical solution to the
medical problem of infertility of the parents, a strategy, as
we have seen, of the discourse on infertility. This
construction is also reinforced for the surrogates in how the
centers encourage them to speak about each other amongst
themselves. At monthly surrogate meetings at the surrogate
program center, for example, the facilitators speak of the
surrogates as "colleagues” doing "important reproductive
work." This language has the distinctive advantage of at
once elevating the role of the surrogate (they are
"professionals") and reducing them to the reproductive work
they are performing for the parents. Thus, the full person
of the surrogate appears to be entirely subsumed in her role
of surrogate when in fact it might very well not be.
The illusion is powerful: in open programs, where
couples and surrogates are expected to get to know each
other, Ragone observes that the "couple's indebtedness to the
surrogate and their overwhelming desire for a child" is
emphasized in tandem with "the surrogate's responsibilities
to the couple"(1994:39, emphasis added). While a couple
might be encouraged to give the surrogate gifts (for example,
flowers, jewelry, a personal memento) to express their
gratitude at certain important junctions (for example, the
transfer and, of course, the birth), a surrogate, on the
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other hand, is encouraged to "protect the mother from undue
worry or anxiety," say in the case of "light bleeding" or
pain during the course of the pregnancy. These
considerations are postured as part of her professionalism as
a surrogate. Thus, the surrogate is expected to wholly
attentive to the personal needs of the parents, an
attentiveness which is not institutionally expected of the
parents.
Ragone argues that, by encouraging these intimacies,
open programs make the explicit effort to de-emphasize the
business/contractual aspects of the arrangement and emphasize
the powerful cultural norm that "reproduction is
traditionally undertaken out of "love" and not out of a
desire for [or with the help] of money" (1994:41) . More than
"articulating the experience in culturally palatable ways,"
as Ragone suggests, I would argue that these intimacies
perpetuate the ideology of infertility whereby the surrogate
is constructed only as the justified means to a "noble" end,
in the employ of the parents. Her resources— personal and
physical— are enlisted in the service of "her" couple. She
is expected to always be altruistic.
The problem with this construction is that all
surrogates, irrespective of the variations of their own
personal experiences of the surrogacy, are pressured to
conform to one "stylized and idealized" model of how they
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should be towards the parents (or expect the parents to
behave towards them)67. Thus, if a surrogate should want to
keep the baby or, as we shall see in the next chapter,
misunderstand her couple's intimacies as an invitation to her
person, she is construed as the problem by the discourse, as
the one who deviates from expected behavior. Couples, on the
other hand, are allowed by discourse a much wider range of
behaviors (it is after all a consumer market68) : they can
choose to relate to their surrogate as a person and/or as a
womb as it suits their personal needs or personalities.
By encouraging "open contact" between surrogates and
couples and phrasing this contact exclusively in the language
of "altruism" and "love, "69 centers on one level are hoping
for parents and surrogates to relate to each other as
persons. Success stories which circulate at the center and
among surrogates70 (not among parents, interestingly enough71)
67For many of these women the surrogacy experience is a first: How can
they be expected to know how they will feel about giving up a baby
before the actual experience? Because their allegiance is generally
with the parents, centers work to discourage changes of heart, which are
contractually punishable. Thus a surrogate faces tremendous pressures
to conform her experience to what is expected of her.
^See Strathem 1992a for an analysis of the "enterprise culture" of
the reproductive technologies.
69 For example, most programs handle all financial matters of the
arrangement, stressing the importance to both couples and surrogates
that they should not discuss money. In this arrangement, both women did
discuss money very often and negotiated childcare and maid service
benefits for the surrogate directly. This was because the program, very
small and new, failed to handle the financial and administrative aspects
as was initially agreed.
70Julie and others surrogates she met at the center's meetings exchanged
phone numbers and often shared feelings, thoughts and experiences on a
far more intimate level than they would feel comfortable doing in the
meetings. Julie would, in turn, share some of these conversations with
me.
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always involve parents and surrogates becoming like family to
each other. The information packets the surrogate program
sends out to its prospective clients and surrogates72
includes a reprint of the People Magazine cover story of
actress Deirdre Hall's surrogacy experience with "look-alike
surrogate, Robin B." Both women became deep friends: "The
relationship I developed with Dee was real female bonding,"
explains the surrogate. This relationship is the "ideal
model." As the psychologist mediating the arrangement of
this study explained to me, surrogacy is really about "women
helping women.1 , 7 3 Center counselors, thus, also tend to
idealize the relationship between surrogate and mother-to-be
and work towards facilitating this mutuality.7 4
The problem, however, is that the idealization of
surrogacy as "women helping women" fails to take into account
the serious symbolic and structural imbalances embedded in
the discourse of assisted reproduction and reflected in the
practice of gestational surrogacy, if not also in traditional
^Judging from Pamela, the stories which circulate among parents are
horror stories about surrogates (or birth mothers giving up their child
for adoption) changing their minds and claiming the baby back, or
surrogates not behaving responsibly towards the child while in utero
(i.e. not eating enough, smoking, etc.)
72 A comparison of the materials sent out to the surrogates and those
sent to prospective parents— there are differences— would also be a
fruitful place from which to articulate the difference in how the
discourse on infertility positions the surrogates vs. the parents.
73Ragone notes that one agency “received a considerably larger volume of
response from prospective surrogates" when they changed their
advertisement from "Help an Infertile Couple" to "Give the Gift of
Life." This was a metaphor Julie used very potently during her birth
experience, analyzed in the next chapter.
74The psychologist in fact advised me that most of the surrogacies she
has been involved with have been very positive for both sides.
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surrogacy. These imbalances are the result of biological
embodiment and are primarily, the displacement of the person
of the surrogate in the relationship, and the ideological and
discursive favoring of the infertile. For example, while
"women helping women" evokes a very agreable sense of
mutuality, in a surrogate arrangement it is actually the
surrogates who help the infertile couple, bottomline. While
exchanges of favors and assistance do occurs during the
pregnancy (as it did in this arrangement: Pamela felt she was
a caring and considerate friend to Julie during the
pregnancy) , once the baby is handed over and the arrangement
imagined to "end," the continuation of this engagement is
entirely in the hands of the couple. Post-birth relationships
therefore rest on the integrity of particular couples to
honor pre-birth understandings. Surrogates are notably
disempowered once the baby is turned over.
A vivid (and to me potentially cruel) illustration of
this imbalance is a spreading policy in open arrangements,
which I observed at the surrogate center, of encouraging the
families of surrogates to get involved with the surrogacy, to
make it a "family project.75" The surrogate's own children,
for example, are encouraged to make drawings for the new
family and the baby, after it is bom. This obviously eases
the handing over of the baby, especially if it is a
surrogacy affects the whole family of the surrogate since a woman's
pregnancy is not just a private affair of her self but one which
involves her entire social relations who will see her pregnant.
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traditional surrogacy, since it feels like to everyone in the
surrogate’s family that the baby will remain in the family.
What is indicative of the underlying politics of the
situation, however, is that the parents are not encouraged on
their side to make the surrogate and her family their
family's project (nor are they expected to come in for
monthly therapy meetings for example) . It is left to the
couple’s discretion to reciprocate, even if they are told by
the program psychologists (as they usually are) to agree to
at least send family photos of the baby to the surrogate and
maintain a Christmas card relationship with her family.
One wonders if the structural and symbolic imbalance
between couples and surrogates is class-based, since couples
are the buyers in the arrangement. This imbalance came to
play quite vividly for both parties in the experience of the
surrogacy of this study .
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Chapter XV
The Plav of Biology Biography
in a Gestational Surrogacy Arrangement;
From Virtual to Embodied Reproduction
We tend to speak of the 'eye' of science—
there is something visual and structural about any
edifice of concepts; whereas here we are dealing
with the ear, something essentially musical and tonal
something essentially action, not structure.
Can the 'eye' of science feel the true
character of music, and its unique
power to animate the person?
— Oliver Sacks7 6
The year 1986 marks the first live birth from a
gestational pregnancy and thus, the first ever successful
contractual gestational arrangement. This reproductive
"cure, ”77 however, is not always successful (only one in four
761973:283.
77 Gestational surrogacy is considered a treatment for infertility
cases in which the would-be mother repeatedly miscarries (as was the
case in this arrangement) or has had to have her own womb removed (cf.
Cheryl Saban 1993). I have heard rumors (as for example during
Madonna's efforts to get pregnant) about women (and couples) who might
want to hire a gestational surrogate in order not to have to be bothered
with the pregnancy themselves. Pamela volunteered once that the positive
side to a surrogacy arrangement was that she would have none of the
physical "side-effects" of a pregnancy (such as "weight gain," "swollen
feet," or labor pains etc.), although none of these "side-effects"
would have stopped her from carrying her own child if she could have.
But what her response points to is the profound devaluation of the
pregnancy experience in American culture at large (see also Martin 1987:
139). This devaluation might further account for the way in which the
person of a gestational surrogate and her position as the birth mother
is so easily displaced (and devalued) both in popular representations of
gestational surrogacy (cf. Cheryl Saban's "surrogate womb") and in the
law (cf. the California Supreme Court ruling in the Anna Johnson vs.
Mark and Cristina Calpert court case in which the gestational surrogate
was denied any custody right.)
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transfers of embryos result in a pregnancy78) . For most
couples, it is prohibitively expensive, with fees and out-of-
pockets costs which can total up to $65, 000 (See Appendix A) .
For these reasons, gestational surrogacy arrangements
continue to be the exception rather than the norm in
surrogacy reproductive contracts. The majority of surrogacy
arrangements are "traditional," where the surrogate conceives
the child in her body, inseminated with the intended father’s
sperm, and the intended mother adopts. As a result,
gestational surrogacy arrangements are still uncharted
territory both in scholarly discourse and in social
discourse79.
Gestational surrogacy, thus, involves all of its
participants in a form of embodiment which does not neatly
fit into old conceptualizations of what can "naturally" be
expected of a social arrangement, of a person, a body or a
pregnancy. It straddles, structurally speaking, cultural
domains which are held to be symbolically separate in
American culture. For example, a gestational surrogacy
arrangement is at once a public contract between persons (a
78 And, as Rowland (1992: 64) points out, not every pregnancy results in
a "live birth." Pamela, Paul and Julie were extremely fortunate to get
pregnant at the first transfer.
79 In her study on surrogate parenthood, Ragone (1994) subsumes
gestational surrogacy within her analysis of traditional surrogacy
noting the biogenetic difference in the construction of both surrogacies
but assuming little difference in the experience of either surrogacy.
She does note with respect to the law that the gestational surrogate's
relationship to the child and parents is neither "in nature or the law"
(113) and thus problematic, but brushes over this very important fact.
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market relation) and a very private and personal experience
(a family relation) . The surrogate is not the "mother" of
the child she carries and therefore has no automatic
relationship in "nature" to that child, which might help
define her position vis a vis the parents. Thus, the
embodied experience of gestational surrogacy blurs old
conceptualizations and is very open to negotiation (and
contestation) : it is up to the participants in each
arrangement to define how they will relate to one another,
which cultural domains they will invoke, and what shape their
relationship will take. There are also discursive pressures
at play which complicate this negotiation, foremost, the
institutionalized imbalance in power between the parents and
the surrogate in assisted reproduction.
Because gestational surrogacy is an unknown social
experience— a cultural other of sorts— for all the members of
the arrangement, much about the arrangement of this study
became clear in hindsight, once everyone had lived through
the experience and had time to articulate and reflect on
feelings and behaviors. My presence and interviewing also
prompted more reflection than might have otherwise occurred,
especially for the Martins. For example, I submitted an
earlier draft of this thesis to both participants for their
comments, almost nine months after the birth, and their
reading of the draft triggered a whole new round of
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clarifications, and discussions. Because each side knew less
about each other than I knew about each of them, the
inclusion of each other's narrative in a same text was at
times eye opening, at others painful.
Pamela Martin, for example, felt misrepresented in
places in the earlier draft and we spent several hours
clarifying her feelings and position. This included a
discussion of my thesis and reflections about how she now
felt about the surrogacy and her surrogate' s disappointment
Her comments have been incorporated in this version. Since
divergences did emerge in places between Pamela's and Julie's
versions of what happened, both have been included in the
text in a counterpuntual fashion. The footnotes, especially
from the chronology onward, are important in order to
understand these divergences and appreciate the emotional
complexity of a gestational surrogacy arrangement.
Most of the negotiations in the relationship emerged
directly from the tensions between the discursive imperatives
of biological embodiment (the symbolic displacement of the
person of the surrogate, the epistemological and class
privileging of the infertile couple) and the expectations of
the surrogate. The surrogate was especially sensitive to any
imbalance in power (although not always able to articulate
these clearly during the surrogacy experience) because, as
she had detailed in her application, she expected a "close
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relationship with the couple" along the line of the idealized
relationship Deirdre Hall had with her surrogate.80 Thus, the
Martins had to measure up to the surrogate's in-going
expectations and she experienced any deviation acutely. As
it turned out, the Martins' own expectations and
understandings of what a "close relationship" with a
surrogate would be diverged from Julie's,8 1 and even from each
other within the couple. For Paul, Julie was, bottom line,
providing a contracted service, albeit of a personal nature,
but a "business" service nonetheless"82. Any courtesies on
^oth Deirdre Hall and her surrogate are very good friends and very
close. A clipping of their story as reported in People Magazine
(September 28, 1992) in included in the packet the surrogate program
sends to both prospective parents and prospective surrogates. It is an
appropriately idealized relationship, since it is both humane and very
enriching for both parties. For Pamela Martin, the fact that Hall's
surrogate was a traditional surrogate and thus the •true" mother of the
child Hall is raising, explained why both women had to develop a clsoe
relationship. Gestational surrogacy was not binding in this same way
and thus a matter of choice and not obligation.
81 These expectations were discussed in the first and what turned out
to be the only four-way meeting both couples had with the psychologist
assigned to the arrangement. The differences in expectations were not
clear then. A four-way exit meeting with the psychologist, in which
every one would have discussed and reconciled their expectations of what
would happen at the birth and after, never did take place because of
scheduling conflicts and then the premature labor. The psychologist,
who from experience knows how important this meeting is to make explicit
expectations and clarify intentions, deeply regretted that it did not
take place. She generally felt she had been underutilized, especially
by the Martins, who, it turns out, were under the impression her role
was only to help the surrogate work through her "surrogacy" problems.
Thus, they did not voluntarily solicit her help with their “surrogacy"
problems.
82 Julie says she had an intuition about Paul's all business attitude
when she met him in the program psychologist’s office when both couples
first came together to discuss the terms of the arrangement. By that
point she had already met with Pamela several times and had told her she
would be her surrogate: "I know I should have followed my gut, but I
felt bad for Pamela since I'd told her I'd do it and I really liked
her. Pamela was so excited, how could I say no to her? It would have
been like another miscarriage for her and I thought maybe Paul would
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Paul's part were just that, courtesies one would extend a
"business associate" during an important negotiation. Once
she had fulfilled her service, she would be dismissed. This
happened immediately after the birth and handing over of the
baby. Paul hugged her a thanks in the birthing room and has
never spoken to her since, leaving the hospital without
saying goodbye. Pamela who had had a "close" relationship
with Julie also saw Julie as having fulfilled her goal of
helping her become a mother, but she was also more conflicted
about what their relationship would be. She nonetheless also
distanced, partly because of Julie's intense disappointment,
which she found difficult to understand, partly because she
was now a mother and the surrogacy was a thing of the past. .
She describes their relationship now as that of "distant
friends" although it is still ambiguous.
Because of the biological reality of the surrogate
having no biogenetic ties to their child, it was ultimately
very difficult for the Martins to see past the construction
of a gestational surrogate as a "womb" to the full person of
Julie, as she wished to be seen. Julie's expectations, which
became clear to them only after the birth when Julie
expressed her disappointment and anger at their treatment of
her first at her surrogate meeting (which was filmed) and to
turn out to be different." She also trusted the program and the
psychologist to represent her wishes as she had outlined in her
application. In hindsight, she wonders if the program administrators
and staff knew the match was not as perfect as they told her it was.
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the surrogate program (which Pamela heard about) and then to
Pamela in person, were perplexing to Paul, and difficult for
Pamela to comprehend, since she felt she had gone beyond the
contract to please Julie during the pregnancy and following
the birth83. Pamela had done the most she could do within the
boundaries of her own worldview. Julie's expectation of a
Deirdre Hall type relationship with her was flawed she
thought. As she explained it to me, Deirdre Hall's surrogate
was a traditional surrogate and, thus. Hall would of course
be obligated to have a relationship with her, since her
surrogate was actually the "true" mother of Hall's children.
Julie, on the other hand, was a gestational surrogate and
thus had no ties to her child. Pamela, as a result, was not
at all clear what her relationship with Julie ought to be,
especially after the birth. Julie, who had not expected a
shift in the closeness they had shared during the pregnancy,
was crushed. She considered her contributions to the
Martin's family not "just the work of the pregnancy" and a
"biological contribution" but, rather, a labor of love,
personal commitment and integrity.
83 Pamela explained she had nurtured Julie as she would a close friend
during the pregnancy (“ninety percent of our conversations were gossip
girlfriends might share with each other"). After the birth, she made
efforts to call Julie for a few weeks even though the contract
stipulated ns contact and most of her family and friends were pressuring
her to stop having any contact with the surrogate. From Julie's
perspective, this contact was strained and felt forced. While she
appreciated the gifts Pamela gave her when they eventually met at her
insistence, she felt the Martins' related with her through money and
that was not why she had chosen to become a surrogate.
1 0 1
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These differences were not at all clear in the
beginning. They were masked by the representational force of
biological embodiment and the discursive privileging of the
couple, by the structural positionings of surrogate and
mother-to-be (as "women helping women") and by the
imperatives of each woman’s own personal histories: Pamela
to be the best mother she could in spite of not being able to
carry her child; Julie to help make up for the grief she
witnessed in her job and shared with her patients over their
broken pregnancies and dreams. The arc of Julie and
Pamela’s relationship was a descent from a place of
virtuality, where everything was idea and possibility, to a
place of embodied biography, where the realities of
biological and biographical embodiment were felt very
concretely by each woman, impinging on what had been their
original imagings of the experience. In other words, life
took shape, just as Claire Martin was taking shape in Julie's
belly, and the forces which were involved in the shaping were
not always within the control or even grasp of the
participants.
What follows is a chronology of the surrogacy, outlining
key events and major negotiations, followed by an analysis of
the play of biology and biography in both women's
construction of the experience and an examination of the very
sentient institutional pressures which participated in these
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constructions and at once caused and masked many of the
dissonances both women experienced. For example, ultrasound
technology played a profound role in facilitating the two-
mother pregnancy. As Petchesky (1987) has shown, ultrasound
imaging is reconfiguring the way women relate to their babies
in-utero, shifting maternal bonding from "feel" to "sight."
In the practice of gestational surrogacy, this shift allows
both mothers to concomitantly share the pregnancy.
A Chronology of Events
M Q 1 L L H BYSKI
December 1994 The Martins and Julie Thayer are introduced.
Pamela and Julie meet at Marco's Deli, in the
vicinity of the fertility clinic. They show
each other photographs of their respective
families, discuss motivations. Agree they
like each other and want to proceed.
January 1995 Both couples meet in the psychologist's
office8 4 before the signing of the contract to
discuss general expectations. This is the
first time Julie meets Paul85.
Move ahead with contract negotiations.
84 Surrogate programs typically assign psychologists (paid by the couple)
to mediate between the couple and the surrogate and help both parties
navigate through the experience. In this arrangement the role of the
psychologist was not clear to the Martins who were under the impression
the psychologist would be working with the surrogate's needs alone.
KSee footnote 7 of this chapter for Julie's first impressions of Paul.
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Februaxy Contract negotiations get rushed because
Julie has her period and everyone agrees they
don’t want to delay by one cycle (one month) .
Contract is signed. Julie begins hormone
treatments to synchronize her cycle with
Pamela's.
March March 10th: Four embryos are transferred
into Julie. She is paid a $500 fee. Julie
takes early pregnancy test (at her place of
work) a few days later to see if she is
pregnant. She is. Calls Pamela. Pamela waits
for blood tests to be sure. Pregnancy is
confirmed. Three of the embryos have taken
(there are three sacs on the ultrasound) .
(I meet Pamela. She agrees to be interviewed.
Talks to Julie about me and my proj ect. )
Pamela and Paul invite Julie and Dallas8 6
for a dinner at the House of Blues87to
celebrate confirmation of pregnancy. Julie
receives her first payment out of an escrow
account the Martins have set up for her.
^Her husband.
87 The House of Blues is also a place of business for Paul, since many
of his clients and friends perform there. Julie tells the amusing and
also poignant story of their visit. "The guy at the door walkie-
talkied upstairs to tell Pamela and Paul we were there— it was like
[mimics walkie talkie] “Blonde woman and bald guy here to see Paul" and
they sent us upstairs. I felt a little silly because here I was
carrying a teddy bear for the baby and there were all these celebrities
around— I mean the elevator door opened and there was Suzanne Sommers
and God knows who else. And then Pamela got a little upset because I had
told the elevator guy we were celebrating their pregnancy and he
congratulated her. They apparently go there a lot and she felt
conscious they would see that she wasn' t the one pregnant. I felt kind
of bad about that."
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April (I meet Julie. In-home interviews with
Pamela and Julie. They are reserved about
filming.)
Julie and Pamela go to the fertility clinic
every week to monitor the pregnancy. Julie
continues to be on hormones.
Julie starts bleeding. Panics. Dallas returns
from business trip to be with her. Julie
spends the week-end lying down with her feet
up, praying the embryos are not flushing out
with the blood. She holds off on telling
Pamela until the lab results show she is
still pregnant. Two of the three sacs
spontaneously aborted and apparently caused
the bleeding88.
First heartbeat. Paul attends following
visit89. (I attend the one after that.
Filming of interviews begins and I start
going to visits regularly.)
88 Since up to six embryos are transferred into a gestational surrogate
at any time, multiple sacs (and multiple births) are not uncommon.
Julie was prepared to carry twins for the Martins but not multiples. If
all three sacs had remained viable, the Martins would have had to
selectively abort at least one. (That is if Julie had her lawyer
stipulate no multiples, a detail I do not know. If such a stipulation
was not made, and the three sacs had held, a confrontation would have
possibly ensued. Paul, as an avid supporter of surrogacy, is very keen
on the idea of multiples since it "allows one to avoid having to have
one' s family in 9 month increments. "
89 This was one of four visits Paul made during the process. During
this visit, according to Julie, Paul spent most of the time on business
calls on his cellular phone, coming into the room just to hear the
heartbeat. Julie was very angered by this behavior because it showed
that Paul clearly never intended to have a relationship with her, as she
had made known she wanted. In hindsight Julie wonders if she might have
been mislead— she wasn' t sure by whom, the Martins or the program— on
two counts: first, on the issue of a close relationship with the
couple, and secondly, on the issue of not wanting to have a "Hollywood"
couple. Paul immediately seemed like a "Hollywood* type to her, from
what she saw of him at the House of Blues and conducting business at the
heartbeat visit. Very interestingly, the Martins do not self-identify
as Hollywood types, since, as explained to me by Pamela, “Hollywood
types" are the "shallow, uncaring, elitist, famous, snotty, prejudiced
multimillionaire celebrities" which they are not. Both Pamela and Paul
are "self-made," coming from middle class and humble backgrounds.
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May Pamela gives Julie a ruby and diamond heart
shaped gold pendant in gratitude for her
help. She also brings small gifts for Dallas
and Kyle, Julie’s son.
Julie comes off hormones.
Pamela and Julie are released from the clinic
and move to a high-risk doctor the Martin
have picked and Julie has agreed to see.
June Julie is unhappy with the high-risk doctor.
Feels he is rude to both her and Pamela, and
wants to switch to another obstetrician.
High-risk doctor scolds Julie for not gaining
enough weight. Pamela is extremely alarmed by
this. This is the first serious conflict.90
Although Julie wants to replace him with a
different obstetrician, she agrees to see
this doctor until the baby is confirmed to be
healthy and her weight is up. She and Pamela
also agree to an AFP91 ultrasound diagnostic
of the baby rather than an amniocentesis,
which would be a greater risk to Julie and
the baby.
Pamela and Paul leave for their annual
vacation.
Pamela herself was raised in a very middle class family (her father was
in construction) and her mother, particularly, instilled in her "very
good values as a child: to care for others and be considerate, love
animals and have a faith in God." Pamela was, in fact, all those things
to Julie during the pregnancy, which only accentuated Julie's confusion
and hurt when after the birth, she shifted the terms of their
relationship, and retreated from her. To Julie and her husband, they
did seem like a wealthy "Hollywood" couple.
90 Pamela and Paul were extremely concerned, understandably, with
Julie’s weight from that point on and, in the later stages of the
pregnancy, with the baby's weight in general. Julie is a very petite
woman, who weighs 95 lbs. She herself was not concerned since she knew
how her own metabolism works, was honest about how much and what she was
eating, and had gained 40 lbs during her son's pregnancy. Despite her
efforts to personally reassure the Martins with her personal testimony,
they continued to be worried. Their long history with infertility and
earlier disappointments fueled this anxiety, especially since they were
not able to directly control Julie's weight gain. In the physiological
construction of gestational surrogacy, the only contribution a
gestational surrogate is understood to make to the baby is through
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July Both couples attend the AFP diagnostic. The
baby— a girl— is confirmed healthy and Julie
weight is up. (This four-way visit marks the
first filming.) Julie receives the second
installment of her fee.
Pamela and Paul start preparing for the
baby's arrival, discussing the nursery
design, investigating baby care classes, etc.
Julie and Pamela switch to a new obstetrician
whom they both like.92
August Julie and Dallas suffer major life crises:
both of their mothers enter into hospitals
and are in critical condition. Julie finds
out that her boss and long-term mentor and
personal friend has a brain tumor.
Pamela and Paul continue their preparations
for the baby's arrival.
Julie visits obstetrician alone with Dallas.
Their mothers' conditions are stabilized and
both are released from the hospital.
nutrition. The baby's growth (and health) depends on the surrogate
eating enough to feed both herself and the child. Thus weight gain
became the index of Julie’s performance for the Martins and a source of
feelings of powerlessness. Since big, heavy babies code healthy and
vigorous in America, the weight of the baby itself was became almost an
index of the Martins' success in producing a healthy baby. This is why
they insisted Julie stay on brethine when she went into labor as long as
possible, even beyond the doctor's recommendation.
91Alpha Fetal Protein.
^Pamela, however, felt more vulnerable with this new doctor,
Dr. Mandel, since this was new territory and he was not a high risk
doctor. I observed one doctor’s visit in which Julie said she needed to
meet with Dr. Mandel alone. Normally both women met with him together.
Julie was extremely tense since Julie did not share with her the
specifics of what she intended to discuss with Dr. Mandel. This again
illustrates the structural tensions of a two-mother pregnancy.
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September Pamela’s preparations intensify. She
registers for her two baby showers, clears
the room that will be the nursery. Decides
on the design and begins shopping for
curtains, etc.
Pamela resumes attending every doctor visit
with Julie. The baby is growing well but is
small. The baby's weight continues to be a
concern.
Julie and Pamela visit hospital to begin
preparations for their stay. They discuss
the birth plan, agree they need to meet with
the psychologist for their exit meeting. The
day of birth is estimated at December 12th.
Julie begins to have Braxton-Hicks
contractions, minor early contractions which
are not uncommon.
October Pamela and Julie have difficulty coordinating
between their schedules the exit interview
with the psychologist where the birth plan
and the after birth relationship will be
discussed.93
Pamela has her first baby shower94.
93See footnote 6 for a description of this process.
94 After long deliberations with her friends and therapist, Pamela
decided not to invite Julie to either of her two baby showers. She was
concerned that Julie would take away attention from her, and this day— a
rite of passage as she described it— would be the only time during the
pregnancy where she would be celebrated as the mother of the child,
without having to share that role with Julie. Julie, while sympathetic,
had understood that she would be invited to at least one of the two
showers from early discussions she had had with Pamela. When
invitations did not come, she was hurt and puzzled. Although she
sympathized with Pamela's perspective, this was a clue to her that her
willingness to share the pregnancy and herself with Pamela as intimately
as she was, was not reciprocated by the Martins.
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Week 35 of the pregnancy (out of 38 to 42) :
Julie's boss and mentor dies. She wants to
attend the funeral, in a wheelchair if she
has to; Pamela and Paul would like her not
to. This is the second major negotiation and
conflict. Obstetrician declares the baby
making good progress and "ready to come out."
Pamela (and Paul) asked Julie to continue
brethine (a drug which stops contractions)
for two more weeks after week 36. Julie
agrees to continue for one more week after
week 36, since the baby is okay.9 5
October/ Pamela and Paul take their baby class; Pamela
November attends her second baby shower (with her
entertainment business friends and
associates).
There is no longer time to meet with the
psychologist for the exit interview.9 6
Julie attends the funeral, sitting down the
whole time.
^Julie described the medication as "each pill being like taking four
cups of coffee" and since she never drinks coffee the sensation was
extremely unpleasant. She also hardly slept, having to take the pills
through the night. Dallas picked up household and childcare
responsibilities. Pamela and Paul paid for childcare and maid service
while Julie was on bedrest, as well as the difference between her
disability payments and her salary while she was on maternity leave from
her job.
96 Everyone regretted this, since expectations about what would happen
at the birth and after the birth were never discussed, understood and
agreed to, thus leaving the surrogate, especially, without a sense of
closure.
109
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November S u n d a y N o v e m b e r 5 t h Julie's water breaks at
5 AM. Pamela and Paul don't appear to be at
home97; they don't respond to beeper calls.
She leaves several anxious (and then angry)
messages for them. Julie and Dallas go to
hospital and drop off their son with friends
on the way. (Camera crew arrives at hospital
shortly after they do.) Julie decides to wait
for Paul and Pamela to get there to be
induced, since she wants them at the birth.
T h e b i r t h i s a t h i r d a r e a o f c o n f l i c t ,
i n v o l v i n g s e v e r a l n e g o t i a t i o n s .
Paul arrives late morning; Pamela early
afternoon. Both are excited but unprepared
and flustered: they were under the impression
they would have two more weeks before the
birth since Julie was on brethine.9 8
Paul resists Julie being induced chemically,
preferring a "natural birth" for his child
and still concerned about the baby being
premature (according to the calendar). Julie
gets annoyed at the interference. Doctor
explains decision and Pamela intervenes: the
Martins concede it's Julie's pregnancy and
birth and will do what she wants but want to
be informed. Inducement begins and Julie is
given an epidural.
97 They were at home but had turned off their phone ringers because Paul
works out of his home and the phones ring through the night. They didn1t
hear me calling for them from outside the gate either. Paul apparently
had been up very late. Pamela then left early in the morning to go her
regular Sunday morning prayer group. Since she did not think Julie
would give birth until she was off brethine (this had been the
experience of several of her friends) she did not think to check her
messages or make sure her beeper was in working order before she left.
Julie's anxiety at their "disappearance" was compounded by the fact that
she had known Pamela had been planning a trip to Las Vegas for the week
end and had specifically asked her not to go.
,sThe Martins were shocked that Julie went into labor while on brethine
since the personal testimonies of several of their friends suggested
labor would begin only after being taken off the drug. The Martins'
faith that brethine would postpone the birth frustrated Julie who as a
medical assistant, knew from her professional experience that this was
not always the case. Pamela's reluctance to trust Julie's own embodied
and professional knowledge reflected her own personal history of
infertility and anxiety with respect to bodily and medical processes.
110
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November Pamela's mother arrives, whom Julie had never
cont'd met or did not know was coming. This is
mildly upsetting, and more so, because Paul
expressed surprise about her wanting to have
two of her own close friends there. She ends
gg
up not having them over for the birth .
The baby is born at 7pm. She is weighed and
surprises everyone at 6.4 lbs. Pamela and
Paul (and Pamela's mother) take her first to
a private room adjacent to the birth room to
begin to bond with her, and then to the
nursery where she is bathed and wrapped. They
retire to their suite to get organized.
Dallas leaves to pick up Kyle and Julie is
taken to her room. On her way she briefly
visits with the grandmother and the baby in
the nursery. Paul and Pamela take the baby
with them for the night. Julie, feeling very
alone and not knowing how the Martin feel
about her since they do not call or visit100,
has a friend to come spend the night
with her.
"This was in part because between the Martins (3 of them) and the camera
crew (3 of us), her husband, the doctor, nurse and anesthiologist the
room was packed. Luckily, the hospital's birthing rooms were very
large.
' “Pamela claims this was a misunderstanding. She was under the
impression, apparently from the psychologist, that Julie had been
clearly told "how Paul and [she] would probably feel the first night
with the baby and that it was important for them to have private bonding
time." Julie does not recall being told that there would be no contact
at all (or that contact the next day would have to be initiated by her)
and the psychologist does not recall having this conversation with
Pamela, as she does not recommend in any of the arrangemens she mediates
that the parents have no contact with the surrogate the day of the
birth. She speculated Pamela might have relied on an early conversation
they had had, at the very beginning of the arrangement, in which she
discussed generally the need of "parents to cocoon with their baby for a
few weeks after the birth."
Ill
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November
cont'd
December
January
November 6th 1996 Pamela tries to breastfeed
her baby with special suction device; Paul
leaves hospital for work. Julie visits once
early in the morning with her own mother who
had brought a plant for Pamela and Paul1 0 1 and
then late morning to say goodbye and have
some more time alone with the baby, which the
psychologist had said she would need.
Pamela and Paul take Claire home later that
day.
Pamela and Julie meet at Marco's Deli to
exchange photographs of the birth. Julie
discusses her feelings about what happened at
the birth and what her expectations are.
Pamela gives Julie lingerie and a diamond and
ruby gold ring matching the heart pendant
gift at the hearbeat.
Six weeks after the birth Julie gets the
final installment of her fee, plus a $500
bonus for the birth.l t E
Julie's bladder drops into her vagina as a
complication of the birth. She contacts
Pamela to negotiate payment for the surgery
and out-of-pocket costs. Pamela visits with
the baby while Julie convalesces.
1 0 1 Julie has a very difficult relationship with her mother which Pamela
knew about. Pamela and Paul apparently stayed on their phones during
their short visit and Julie's mother was so upset that she questioned why
Julie had done this for "people as rude as they." Pamela was later
extremely apologetic and wrote Julie's mother a thank you note.
1 0 2 Pamela provided the total financial sum the Martins had paid Julie to
show that they had fulfilled their terms of the contract and beyond.
Julie, according to their records, was paid $16,250, which included her
initial fee, a monthly expense allowance, a clothing allowance, the $500
embryo transfer fee, loss of wages due to maternity leave and out-of-
pocket costs incurred when Julie was on bedrest (e.g. childcare expenses).
These are standard and expected surrogacy costs.
112
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The Plav T.iiniwal Tfcy
in a Twi-Mother Preonanev
The biological construction of gestational surrogacy
creates a situation in which both "mothers" are symbolically
and structurally liminal, although their liminality is
experienced very differently, at different times, and with
different consequences. Often, the two mothers were
structurally and symbolically in opposition to each other
because both women were "mothers" without being "mothers."
As Pamela would often remind herself, "It's my baby but it is
Julie's pregnancy, and she has to be happy." The three major
conflicts in the surrogacy (Julie's slow weight gain at month
four, her decision, supported by her doctor, to come off
brethine several weeks before the child's due date, and her
doctor's decision at the birth to induce) were the result of
this structural opposition: the Martins wanted to step in
and safeguard the well-being of their child as they saw fit,
but Julie, as the pregnant woman, was not always in agreement
with their thinking or decisions.
The surrogate is not the "mother" of the child she
carries, biogenetically speaking, and yet her gestation of it
and the attentions she must give this child (for example,
eating right, getting enough sleep, removing herself from
situations which could be harmful, etc.) are acts of nurture
which are quintessentially coded as "motherly" actions
113
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because they are "giving."1 03 Thus, the surrogate is in a
position where she must constantly negotiate this ambiguity
with the world at large. In the eyes of those around her (who
do not know her circumstances), she is the mother of the
child104. Julie would alternatively choose to pass for the
mother or choose to explain the circumstances as she thought
appropriate. She refrained, for example, from sharing the
circumstances of her pregnancy when she thought she would
come under attack, although she was never shy of defending
her choice and quite quick with her tongue. If she was
accused of being " unmotherly" because she was going to give
"her" child away, for example, she would retort that "any
idiot can have a baby and it doesn ’ t make that person a
parent. I'm not the parent of a child just because I gave
birth to it."1 0 5
103This contradiction is encapsulated in the following joke Julie and
Dallas shared throughout the pregnancy. The joke speaks to the fact
that a woman's body (as all bodies) cannot be abstracted from biography
and the relational gestures that are biography. Julie would say,
"Honey, the baby wants ice-cream. Why don't you be nice and go get me
some ice-cream?" To which Dallas would retort, laughing: "Call Paul!
He's the Dad!" A pregnancy is not only a matter of nurture for a
woman's self, it is also a matter of nurture for her partner, family,
friends.
104 As for example when her manicurist asked her to bring in the baby
for her to see after she had given birth. This is actually a funny
story told in Chapter II but worth retelling here: Julie, not wanting
to get into the surrogate arrangement with them because she is Filipino
and very religious, never told them the baby was not hers. The
manicurist grew curious why Julie never brought her newborn daughter in
when she did, very regularly, bring in her son. Julie explained to her
that "her" child was with her aunt and uncle who were infertile and
showed them a picture of Pamela and the baby. Since Pamela and Julie
look like they could be related, this was not difficult for the
manicurist to believe!
103 Julie's feelings towards her own biological parents are strong. As
114
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When it came, however, to her relationship with Pamela
(and Paul), Julie was very aware, from the onset, that
Pamela's position would be the one ambiguous in the
reproductive setting during the pregnancy. From her
experience as a medical assistant in the field of
reproduction, Julie intuitively understood that Pamela would
not be seen institutionally as the "real" mother of the child
since she, and not Pamela, would be the pregnant body and
thus the object of everyone's attention. This insight shaped
how she imagined building a "close relationship with the
couple." Julie did not want "to be pregnant and just hand
over a baby at nine months" but to give her couple the
experience of being pregnant parents and share this journey
with them. In other words, she wanted to see the fruits of
her labor, "their joy at the first ultrasound," their emotion
at the birth, the trials and tribulations of parenthood.
This experience was what Julie saw shattered in the
clients she counseled in her own work. These people "whom
she grew to know over the course of the counseling" trusted
they were going to have the child they wanted and then
practicing alcoholics they failed her quite dramatically. She
fortunately was introduced as a little girl to the Connollys, who had
placed an ad in the local paper looking for a companion girl child for
own daughter. They took Julie in and raised her as one of their own.
She considers them her true family and continues to have very close ties
with them, speaking to them at least once a week and visiting, with her
son Kyle, very frequently. To Kyle, they axe “grandpa" and “grandma."
Thus Julie experience of closeness with a non-biological family might
explain why she was willing to be a part of the Martins' extended
family, however peripherally.
1 1 5
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suddenly found themselves terminating the pregnancy because
of serious problems. This was devastating, their grief
difficult to witness (and share) week after week. Thus, it
was very important for Julie that her couple feel as though
they were the pregnant parents and that this experience be a
positive one for them. It mattered to her that they attend
doctors' visits, be in the room when she gave birth, as well
as share in the decisions about the child-in-utero.106 She
wanted to be able to develop "a mother-to-mother”107
relationship with the real mother of the child.
Practically speaking, these intentions meant Julie made
a concerted effort to make Pamela feel as though she was the
mother of this child. She took it upon herself to educate
Pamela, for example, explaining what to expect or what was
involved in which medical procedures or symptoms. She also
made sure that Pamela was known as the mother of the child
wherever they went together. She extended herself to make
the pregnancy a positive and fun experience for them, for
example, sharing stories about their very "active" and
106Julie, for example, as we saw in Chapter II, went so far as allowing
the Martins to pick the obstetrician she would see. She was willing to
undergo the more invasive amniocentesis diagnostic the Martins initially
wanted to do, although the doctor didn't think it necessary. Julie
exnphathized with the Martins' anxiety about the well-being of their
child. The Martins eventually opted for the non-invasive AFP ultrasound
and blood diagnostic.
107Julie expressed this to the other surrogates at the meeting where she
shared her birth story although it had been her hope even before she met
the Martins. Now that Pamela was a mother, it struck her as very sad
that they wouldn't be sharing "mother-to-mother" stories and experiences
with each other.
116
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energetic daughter in her womb. Pamela was very appreciative
of these gestures and loved the openness she shared with
Julie, because her position as the mother of this child was
ambiguous and she had to rely on Julie's willingness to share
the pregnancy with her to be apart of it. Having suffered a
long history of infertility and emotional losses, she felt,
very deeply, her inability to carry her child. The
biogenetic construction of motherhood in which the mother is
understood to naturally and automatically bond with her child
only while she is pregnant compounded this sense of
faiture.1 0 8 It meant that her bonding experience with her
child would severely compromised. But what this construction
also made difficult for her to consider was the possibility
that Julie and she might be able to provide this nurture in
utero together without it affecting her primary bonding with
the child and the primary bonding of the child to her later.
Pamela's personal history of infertility and her faith
in the biogenetic construction of motherhood initially made
her suspicious of the surrogacy arrangement, as we have seen.
108 This was evident in the journal Pamela kept in the beginning of the
pregnancy before the preparations for the baby's arrival overwhelmed
her. She wanted to make sure that her baby knew she was thinking of it
from the moment of the conception on, even though she could not feel or
talk to the child in utero because she was not carrying it herself.
Paul devised a means to have his voice heard by the baby: he taped
recorded children's stories which he then asked Julie to play near her
belly. Pamela and Julie had a bit of a tension over this when Julie
shared she was playing the stories from her boom-box and not the micro
cassette they had given her and that her son Kyle was actually enjoying
Paul's storytelling. Pamela was unclear how their own child would be
able to hear it at a distance from a boombox, a concern which irritated
Julie since she was playing the tape for her child in the first place.
117
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She feared for example that the surrogate would flaunt her
fertility and make her feel more inadequate than she had
already been made to feel by her own "failure" to conceive
"naturally." Forming a "close" relationship with Julie was
thus a personal challenge for her. She was at first sure
that "surrogacy wouldn't work109" and then very self-conscious
when Julie, newly pregnant, would, for example, openly
clarify that she was not the child's mother in the fertility
clinic's waiting room if asked about "her" pregnancy110.
Pamela felt this "exposed” her inadequacy, and it was a while
before she was "able to work through these feelings in
therapy" and accept that Julie was giving her the opportunity
to be the child's mother, even in utero. If she persisted to
work through these feelings of inadecuacy, it was because of
her need to make up for her inability to carry her own child
by making sure the surrogate did carry her child as well as
she would have. A close relationship with the surrogate would
then allow her to exercise some degree of the "control" she
would have had, had she carried the pregnancy. This
"control" over the surrogate was her main motivation for
wanting a relationship with her surrogate.
109 Pamela had little faith the surrogate would get pregnant. That
Pamela measured success on the arrangement's ability to produce a child
reflects again the values of biological embodiment, which displace the
fact that the experience of the pregnancy ought to be just as much a
measure of the success of these kinds of arrangements as the production
of a baby.
110Because Pamela and Julie look like they are related, people often
thought they were "sisters" or "mother and daughter."
118
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The symbolic and material ambiguity inherent in both
Julie's and Pamela’s positions as non-mothers/mothers was
thus experienced very personally by each, within the context
of their histories and expectations, but also differently.
While Julie's emotional focus was on the sharing of the
experience with a couple and being a catalyst and important
part of their experience (what I described in chapter I as a
sharing of her body, physical and emotional), Pamela's
emotional focus was rather on being as much of a "real"
mother as she possibly could. Julie, by allowing her this
proximity, facilitated Pamela's dream, but she did so, as it
turned out, at the expense of her own dream of being a
meaningful personal contributor to this child's life.
The structural and symbolic disparity of the two women's
positions as non-mothers/ mothers runs deeper, I think, than
either could have possibly imagined in the beginning. The
values of biological embodiment and the discursive bias
toward the infertile mask a profound inequality between the
two women's positions. This inequality was, actually, not
fully evident until the birth, and "disguised" during the
pregnancy by the closeness the two women actually experienced
very intensely in the beginning of the arrangement, and then,
on and off, until the birth. This closeness was not,
however, on as firm ground as either of the two women
imagined. For, at the moment of her daughter's birth,
119
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Pamela’s position solidified as this child’s only and 'true'
mother. She expressed this sentiment at the beginning of the
pregnancy: "I don’t think the means to the end matter, really
because in the end, I’ m going to be [this baby's] mother."
Julie's position dissipated at the birth because, in the
construction of biological embodiment, she had no substantive
and "real" tie, in "nature," with the child she gave birth to
and thus no real tie to its parents. As she put it, "this
was my Olympic moment, and I looked around and Pamela and
Paul weren't there to be excited with me."1 1 1 The Martins
were busy bonding with their baby and starting their new life
as a family112. Julie had fulfilled her job and done very
well, the baby was healthy and very beautiful. At that
111 Julie made these statement while reviewing a draft of this
manuscript. The Olympics were going on, hence the metaphor. Pamela
compared the night to the Academy Awards for Julie and was well aware
that this was an important day for her. Because of the traumatic start
(of Pamela being unreachable the morning of the birth and then Paul’s
interference with the inducement— which she partially shared) , she also
felt bad that Julie's experience was disappointing. What was difficult
for her to understand, though, was that Julie's disappointment was more
profound than these events: for Julie, the birth was in one way the
final realization that she had failed to achieve her dream of being a
part of the family she had helped create. It is important to note that
Julie is not alone as a surrogate in her feelings of disappointment.
Ragone (1994:80) in her study of surrogate parenthood documents that
many surrogates experience a loss of contact with their couples. Ragone
argues that the surrogate loose the "specialness" conferred on her by
the program and the couple once the baby is delivered, and while this
may be due, my own data and analysis suggests that these feelings really
originate in the structural imbalance of the relationship, in which the
surrogate's power was in a sense fabricated by the institutionalized
setting and not in the least binding to the parents (as long as she
turns over the child, which most programs guarantee will happen) .
112 Pamela feels that she made a genuine effort not to abandon Julie
right after the birth, but she is still— almost nine months after the
birth now— unresolved as to what her relationship with Julie ought to
be. On the one hand, she is extremely grateful to Julie for what she
did and “will always care for her." On the other, she and Paul are now
the "mom and dad,* and she is unsure how Julie features in this picture.
120
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moment, the divergence in how each side had imagined the
relationship became very clear, and poignantly so for the
surrogate.
An Asides
t« h« » r.Tm-inal - i t - . y issue in the Case of the Fathers
Fathers, already marginalized symbolically in the work
of reproduction in American culture, do not have to contend,
directly, with these same tensions. This was especially true
of Paul who removed himself completely from the process
(although continued to exercise a great deal of power from
being the scenes113) , attending the bare minimum of required
events, as it suited him: the initial four-way visit with
the program psychologist, one fertility clinic visit to hear
his child's heartbeat "live114," the AFP obstetrician visit
to do the diagnostic testing and determine the child’s sex,
and, of course, the birth experience115.
113Pamela, as part of her couple, would discuss with Julie "Paul's and
her thoughts or wishes," etc. This both hurt and angered Julie: Paul
seemed to want to call the shots without wanting to know her or consider
her in person.
114 The Martins had never before reached the heartbeat stage and this
was a particularly significant event for them, one more "fact" which
might mean that this time they would get to be parents. It was
important for Pamela that he attend and Julie saw it as an opportunity
to perhaps start a relationship with him as well. Paul, however, spent
most of the visit outside the room on his cellular phone doing business,
coming in only for the heartbeat. This was very upsetting for Julie
since it clearly showed that he had no intentions to form a relationship
with her.
115 Judging from the footage of the birth, this was a peak emotional
experience for him, even though he claims not to feel much for "bipeds".
His first moments with his child are glowing and very reverential (as
well as territorial: Pamela almost immediately passed the baby to him,
right after Julie had given the baby to her, and he held on to Claire
very tightly and protectively, as though he would never let go of her.)
This attests to the complexities of the bond experience.
121
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Dallas, Julie's husband, on the other hand, participated
a great deal in the pregnancy and did not chose to remove
himself at all, although he could have, if he had wanted. He
accompanied Julie to doctors' visits on occasion, attended
all the key decision making meeting and visits to support
Julie (such as the AFP visit where there was concern about
her weight and the doctor had been "rude" earlier), and was
by her side at the birth. In fact, his admiration for his
wife grew as he watched her live through the experience:
"Here's she is, this tiny little thing poofed out to here,
with everything that is going on116, and she still finds time
to teach Kyle his A, B, Cs and care for him. The surrogacy
has only made our relationship stronger. I know what she is
made of now.1 , 1 1 7
The Discursive Construction of Closeness
The representational imperatives of biological
embodiment (e.g. the reification of maternal bonding as
116Dallas was referring to the hospitalizations of their respective
mothers, the illness of Julie's boss— who happened also to be a friend
of her and Dallas' childhood friend, and the pressures Julie was
experiencing in her relationship with the Martins.
117 Dallas shared these comments with me at month 7 of the pregnancy
while I was filming them in the playground where they regularly take
Kyle. I had asked him how the surrogacy had affected their
relationship. I asked Julie the same question later and separately,
without telling her what Dallas's answer had been. She replied exactly
in the same tone and vein: her relationship with Dallas had only
deepened and she admired him all the more for the sensitivity with which
he handled her "project" and supported her through it. Dallas ended up
handling all the billing and administrative paperwork on his own because
the program failed to do so. This was another of his contributions,
contributions for which he was not financially compensated. Other
contributions were taking time off work to take care of Julie and their
son when she was on bedrest in the last month of the pregnancy.
122
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happening exclusively and naturally in the pregnant body)
conflicted with the biographical embodiment of each woman.
For Pamela, whose faith was in the biological model,
surrogacy was a challenging experience because the experience
of surrogacy challenged this model in many ways. For Julie,
Pamela's faith in the facts of biology alone was problematic
because it made Pamela devalue the facts of Julie's
particular and individuated body. Thus the play of biography
and biology gave Pamela and Julie's relationship its tone,
its tempo, and accounted for many of the harmonies and
dissonances in the experience.
In the beginning, the promises of biological discourse—
with its emphasis on the altruism of the surrogate1 1 8 and its
emphasis on "helping desperate infertile couples"— upheld the
mirage that their relationship would be close or at least
could be close, erecting as it were a virtual closeness
118Ragone (1994:68) argues that surrogate programs play upon and
exaggerate the idea that surrogates are "special" people because of
altruim. People Julie encountered in her daily life who knew about the
surrogacy either loved what she was doing and did think her very special
or absolutely condemned her moral character and intentions. Ragone goes
on to argue that this specialness surrogates feel is what attracts
surrogates to surrogacy. Noting that the surrogates in her sample were
mostly working middle class women, in the roles of homemaker, wives and
mothers, Ragone suggests that "surrogacy provides women with the
opportunity to transcend the limitations of their roles as wives/mothers
and homemakers while concomitantly attesting to the satisfaction they
derive from these roles." (1994:63) The fact that they come into contact
with a class of people and institutions usually beyond their means and
get to validate their reproductive power is what allows for this
elevation. This argument may be flawed because it first assumes that
these women imagine their roles as wives and mothers as being limiting
and then assumes further that surrogates know that their experience will
put them in touch with the wealthy before band or that they actually
always get perks from this contact. From what I understand from Julie’s
motives, Ragone’s argument might be simplistic and patronizing.
123
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between them, one which did not solidify as the surrogate
imagined it would119.
The speed with which they got together helped sustain
the initial virtuality of this closeness in potentia. There
was first of all the suddenness of their "match." Julie, who
had been enrolled in the program for seven months already,
was anxious to get a couple (in fact, threatened to leave the
program for another program if she wasn't immediately
matched). She wanted to take advantage of her son's immature
memory and time was running out120. The Martins, on the other
hand, also felt their time was running out1 2 1 and were put on a
six month waiting list for a surrogate, a delay which did not
thrill them.1 2 2 The surrogacy program with which they were
affiliated is small and a decision was made to introduce
them, since both parties were anxious to quickly move ahead.
1 1 9 This is part of what was tragic about this arrangement. Pamela
thought she was close with Julie but her closeness was partial: for
example, she was worried about giving Julie her home address (although
eventually did), would not want Julie to visit at her home nor would
want Julie to be a part of her circle of friends. I pointed out this
partiality to Pamela when we reviewed a draft of this thesis. She was
not critically aware of these withholdings first and wasn't able to
explain these withholdings or own them fully as her decision, as was the
case for Paul Martin who never intended to know Julie or want her in his
life after she had delivered the baby.
1 2 0 Julie did not want her son to suffer through the trauma of seeing his
mother give away what in his young mind might be, regardless of what she
told him, his "sister." At the time of the embryo transfer, her son
was 13 months.
mBoth are in their mid 40s and wanted to spend as much time as possible
with their child. Pamela expressed to me once after the birth the
concern that Claire would be orphaned in her twenties. They are now
considering another surrogacy (they have ten frozen embryos in storage)
so that Claire can have siblings and not be alone.
m I speculate the Martins were moved up the list because none of the
other couples were ready or able to move ahead as quickly as they. A
surrogacy requires a substantial upfront financial commitment.
124
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Pamela and Julie met1 2 3 , liked each other very much, and in
less than three weeks after the contract was signed, Julie
was "miraculously1 2 4 " pregnant, against the odds of gestational
surrogate pregnancies. The match seemed perfect, "meant to
be," as both women respectively told me.
The successful transfer of Paul's and Pamela's embryos
to Julie's uterus was a major emotional turning point for
both women and responsible for promoting a sense of closeness
and intimacy which was in fact not what it seemed to be, for
reasons that were structural as well as personal. Julie’s
account of the transfer conveys the vivid goodness of the
day, which she felt was the reason for the success of the
procedure:
It was such a special day. Everybody was so
nice, the nurses, everybody. When Dr. Peters
transferred the embryos into me, I joked that
this was more thrilling than when my husband
knocked me up with Kyle, and he blushed. That
was fun. Afterwards Pamela and I were left
alone and she prepared the sandwich they had
brought for me and I thought that was very
sweet of her. I don't know why but a feeling
1 2 3 They showed each other pictures of their respective families at this
first meeting. Julie in hindsight wishes she had insisted on meeting Paul
before agreeing to go ahead. After discussing a draft of this thesis, she
made a very revealing comment about how Pamela had made her think of her
mother. Not only did Pamela look like her mother; she also was in need
of help. She immediately felt protective towards her.
I 2 ' 1 Pamela and her mother both repeatedly described the conception of
Claire "a miracle." Pamela attends a prayer group every week and for her
both finding the "perfect surrogate" and conceiving at the first transfer
were "miracles" brought about by her desire and her prayer group "praying
for [her ] for five years." Paul, on the other hand, believes (in his own
words) "that one would have to go to the far reaches of the universe to
find someone as secular as [he] . The empirical laws of the universe are
[his] religion."
125
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overcame me [Julie started to cry, this was 2
months after the transfer] - I am not
religious or anything and Pamela and I never
did discuss religion, but the feeling came
over me to say a prayer. Since I don ■ t pray
very often I thought it would be a little
sacrilegious if I did, so I asked her if she
would and she did,1 2 5 asking God if it was in
His heart to make it possible for her to get
pregnant, that would be great. Everything
was so wonderful, so special that day, that I
would have found it hard to believe if I
hadn't gotten pregnant.
This "specialness"— an existential, embodied quality—
confirmed for Julie the rightness of her actions. Since the
desire for the child was so strong, so vivid, so tangibly
expressed in the actions of the day, and since she knew her
motives to be sincere, goodness had to follow in the shape of
the fulfillment of Pamela's and her joint wish, "maybe not at
the first transfer but it had to happen, eventually." This
"desire" brought the two women together, momentarily blurring
the fact that theirs was in actuality a contractual
arrangement and that the conception and pregnancy had been
mechanically (medically) engineered, even if as a result of
their own wills.
The force of this joint "desire" to achieve a pregnancy
misrepresented the material conditions of the experience. In
the passionate confluence of their desire for this pregnancy,
Julie and Pamela actually experienced the intimacy reserved
125 Pamela, whose prayer group had been praying for her to have a child
for five years, had been thinking too of saying a prayer but would have
done so in private if Julie hadn't brought it out in the open.
126
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for kin or close friends in Euro-American culture. And yet
they were neither kin nor close friends, nor would the
pregnancy make them kin, even with Julie growing within her
own flesh Pamela and Paul’s child. The Euro-American rules
of kinship mandate that "kinship is whatever the biogenetic
relationship is” (Schneider 1968:23). Julie would never be
"true" kin to it or Pamela and Paul. And yet Julie and
Pamela together experienced the moment of this child's
conception.
Conception is symbolically coded in American culture,
Schneider explains, as "the spiritual union [between husband
and wife and] it is a union of the flesh, that is a personal
union, and that out of that union a new person is formed.
The word for such a spiritual union is love"(1968:49). It
could be said then that Julie and Pamela experienced an
intimacy usually reserved for husband and wife. The events
of the transfer upheld this symbolic intimacy in all but one
important aspect: Julie and Pamela's union was obviously not
sexual, even if it was "of the flesh" since Julie would take
into her body Pamela's and Paul's embryo. Through the sharing
of a prayer and Pamela's kindnesses they did experience a
spiritual-like union out of which a new person was formed.
It was only natural (culturally speaking) that the emotion of
"love" should be invoked in her. Julie’s emotional response
as she retold the events of the day is an expression of this
127
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love, captured in the "specialness" of the day. The person
now in her body was proof that the force of Pamela and her
joint wills and desire was a creative force. "They together
made this baby" insisted Julie over and over the day after
the birth during her very emotional goodbyes.
For Pamela, the intimacy they shared during the transfer
was, however, very strongly mediated by the image of
"Leftie," an embryo she spotted through the microscope in the
petri dish before the transfer. Her most salient memory of
that day was this little 8-cell embryo "wiggling" in the
upper left hand comer of the petri dish and grown way ahead
of the pack. She remembers exclaiming: "Gee, I wonder if
this one in the left comer will get us pregnant!" She
interpreted later the vitality of this embryo as a will to
live commensurate with her own will for a child. A few weeks
after the pregnancy was confirmed, she told me: "I've got to
believe it was "Leftie" that got us pregnant." Julie did not
feature as an agent in Pamela's representation of the
conception of her child.
Ironically, this active, wiggling embryo was, in fact,
an optical illusion, a combination of coincidence and the
microscope's magnifying power. As the director of the
reproductive lab affiliated with the Martins' fertility
clinic explained to me1 2 6 embryos divide slowly over hours and
126 I approached the director of the lab to obtain an image of a
"wiggling* embryo for the film. Although embryos don't wiggle, the shot
I got did make the embryo seem to wiggle because of resolution
128
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not quickly, in a manner visible to the human eye through a
microscope127. This doctor speculated that what Pamela had
probably seen was one of the embryos turning over, which is
visible to the human eye. This movement, however, was imbued
for Pamela with such realism as to connote life, much like
cinematic images mimic reality because they move, making the
images appear three-dimensional on the silver screen.
Pamela bonded with this image at the transfer, and not
with Julie, although Julie bonded with her. It was this
image which gave Pamela hope that perhaps, this time, she
would be pregnant. This image was the fruit of her labor,
this was "her little girl wanting to live." Whereas the
conception happened for Julie in the "specialness" of the day
and the intimacy of their shared prayer, it happened for
Pamela in Leftie, made with "her egg and her husband's sperm,
after they were mixed all together." In this biological
narrative, Julie was absent.
In a very ironic way, because she had wanted a "close
relationship with the parents," Julie allowed herself to
believe the symbolism of her first few weeks with the
Martins. Everything seemed to point her towards a kin-like
closeness with at least Pamela (since Paul was already
absent): they looked like each other, as though they were
difference between the camera speed and the television screen on which
the embryos appeared. This strikes me as a Cyborg irony: I ended up
reproducing Pamela's illusion in the film without in the least bit
honoring organic reality!
xv Embryos are smaller than the head of a pin.
1 2 9
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related; they joked that they could be sisters; Pamela even
went so far as saying Julie was like a sister to her; they
shared together what was for Julie the moment of conception;1 2 8
they hugged hellos and goodbyes; Pamela gave her a ruby and
diamond heart gold necklace to express her gratitude at the
heartbeat, her first heartbeat ever, an experience which
Julie was very happy to be able to give to her129. Everything
communicated kin to Julie, and if not kin, then very close
friends.
For Pamela, however, everything pointed through and past
'Julie, to her child, and this included Julie's own
willingness to enlist the services of her body and her person
in the creation of this child. For Pamela, this arrangement
was, first and foremost, about her dream and, while she tried
to remain sensitive to Julie's wishes and desires as much as
she could, this "fact," expressed in the contract, would
remain. Thus, when made aware of Julie's disappointment at
the birth and after130, Pamela first reached for the contract,
12 8 For Pamela, this moment had already happened in the lab, when they
mixed her egg with Paul's sperm.
1 2 9 That Julie was trying to give Pamela "experiences" was clear from the
first thing she said to Pamela when the doctor confirmed she was in
premature labor: "I wanted to do this right for you!" Pamela was
extremely touched by this, as she was by other thoughtful gestures made
by Julie, such as calling her when the baby first moved, sharing
anecdotes about Claire's activeness in utero, etc. What Julie's comment
suggests, too, is her eagerness to please Pamela was much more personal
than an eagerness to fulfill contract terms.
130 This was during my exit interview with them. If I had not brought it
up, Pamela might not have been ever aware of the depth of Julie's hurt
and feelings of being "used." I have wondered what would have happened
in their relationship if I had not been around. For example, my own
presence might have intensified the mirage of closeness between the two
130
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telling me that she (and Paul) had gone above and beyond its
terms: for example, even though the contract clearly
stipulated no contact after the birth,1 3 1 she still phoned
Julie occasionally132. The surrogacy was, in the larger
scheme her project, initiated for her and ther husband Paul.
This view turned out to be incommensurable with Julie's.
There were other pressures influencing what was already
an incommensurability between Pamela and Julie's world views
and desires, such as cultural expectations speaking without
sound from the collages of happy baby faces and birth notices
hanging from the walls of fertility clinics, or from the
fresh new "New Arrivals" sign replacing the old "Maternity
Ward" at the hospital. These images— the New Arrivals sign,
the "cabbage patch" happy baby faces133— each code, like the
ultrasound machine which fed Pamela month after month perfect
pictures of her daughter (growing in Julie's body), the
women, since they had to look close on camera. This was more true of
Pamela who on a few occasions, when things were not going well between
them at doctors visits, asked me to stop taping (which I did). Julie,
on the other hand, was far less concerned about what or how she came
across.
131 Julie was aware of this clause but did not think it would be binding
since she and Pamela had agreed to develop a close relationship by the
time of the signing.
^Pamela visited Julie with the baby when Julie had her bladder
surgery, a complication of the birth. This was the only time Julie has
seen the baby since the birth. The visit was short, but a very positive
experience for her because she got to see again the being she had helped
bring into the world. She was unsure about how demonstrative she could
be towards the baby. She didn't want Pamela to think she wanted her
child and thus held back some.
133There were many other images and practices which coded the
individuation of mother from fetus. For example, during the birth three
monitors were placed on Julie, one for her contractions, the other for
the baby's movement and another for the baby's heartbeat.
131
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individuation of fetuses from the bodies of their "mothers. ”
(Petchesky 1987; Franklin 1990, 1995; Crowe 1990). Together
and individually, these images speak of embryos and fetus as
though they were autonomous persons on their way here— like a
train pulling into the station134— by means of a womb and a
pregnancy, and no longer as organic parts of women’s bodies
and selves, however women might individually experience this
organic unity.
This construction, part and parcel of biological
embodiment, not only affects a separation between mothers and
fetuses, it also symbolically positions women in the service
of these fetuses, as though enlisting their cooperation in
the challenging task of "getting these babies here.135" These
efforts are part of the management now required in the
creation of an "assisted" family. This epistemological
structuring allowed Julie and Pamela both to perceive their
relationship as a team effort in the production of this
child. The pregnancy was "their joint project" as they both
would often say136. However, this overall discursive
134 Metaphors conveying this same construction were often used by Pamela
and Paul and very rarely by Julie or Dallas who rather joked about Julie
being an "oven" or an "incubator." For example, Pamela, in one of her
interviews, explained to me that the "means to the end" did not matter
much. The point was that her baby was "going to get here." Paul
compared the AFP visit, where the sex of the child and her health were
confirmed, to crossing the midpoint of an airplane journey. He could
start to relax because the destination was closer.
135 We have already seen how Franklin (1995) has shown conception to be
represented as an "obstacle course." Martin (1987) documents the
construction of pregnancy in American modern culture as a liability.
136In one of our first interviews, Pamela explained, for example, that
it was really "the two moms parenting this child."
132
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posturing also helped misrepresent the fundamental structural
and symbolic imbalance in each woman's position. Their
partnership, even if joint, was never equal since from the
birth onward, Pamela alone would have claims on the child, by
virtue of her position as the genetic mother, and Julie would
be legitimately displaced.
Ultrasound imagery also helped mask this inequality.
Rosalind Petchesky has argued that fetal imagery in
reproduction is a double edge sword: on the one hand, it
shows the fetus as a "homonculus in space" autonomous from
the body of the mother. Ultrasound imagery "increasingly
[puts the pregnant woman] in the position of adversary to her
own pregnancy/fetus.. .She now becomes the "maternal
environment," the "site" of the fetus, a passive spectator in
her own pregnancy" (1987:271-277) . On the other hand, this
visualization of the fetus makes possible new forms of
attachment which empower (some) women to relate to their
bodies and fetuses in new ways. This new form of attachment
has particular appeal, Petchesky argues, for women belonging
to a middle class which "values planning, control, and
predictability in the interests of a "quality" baby" (282).
Furthermore, women of this class have been traditionally
the keepers of the "family" album; thus "ultrasonography
is becoming enmeshed in a familiar language of
"private" images"(283).
133
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Petchesky further elaborates that women are taught,
through ultrasound imagery and mass popular representations,
to "recognize the fetus as "real," as "out there,"" and,
thus, to first experience the fetus "as an object [a woman]
can possess". (283) Her attachment to her baby is, thus, both
"erotic and intellectual."(283) This means a "distancing
from the corporeal" (272) . Petchesky notes that this form of
attachment is particularly important for women with a
history of infertility or problem pregnancies since the
techniques "allow [them] to visualize the pregnancy and
possibly to gain some control over its outcome" (285) .
Gestational surrogacy makes a complicated double use of
the ultrasound technologies because the "pregnant woman" is
already an abstraction since she is not the woman who is in
truth "pregnant," the mother-to-be. Thus, both aspects of
the visual technologies are fully deployed in this case— its
power to minimize attachment through "feel", by objectifying
the fetus as separate from the surrogate, and its power to
maximize attachment through "sight," making it possible for
the intended mother to bond with a child she cannot feel
inside her.
Images played an integral role in Pamela’s experience of
the pregnancy. The pregnancy for her was a visual1 3 7
137it
was also a textual experience for her. She was very informed on
the subject of pregnancy and was constantly referring to knowledge she
had read in books. This would irritate Julie, both because it
undermined her own embodied knowledge, but also because, as a medical
assistant in the reproductive field and as a one-time mother herself,
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experience through and through, even though Julie was
encouraging her to share in her own embodied sense of it138.
Pamela religiously carried in her organizer, "her pictures,"
pictures which changed, like the pages in a calendar, over
the course of the pregnancy. These she would pull out to
show me each the stage of the pregnancy. The first picture
she ever showed me was of Julie, her husband, and child.
Then came a small hand pamphlet detailing each stage of fetal
development with "real" pictures. This was replaced by a
sonogram of the first heartbeat, which Pamela dubbed "the
black hole."1 3 9 Then came "flippers," a small-human like
shape without limbs. "Leftie" returned when "flippers" had
grown limbs. Pamela personalized each image. The final
image was of her baby girl: a perfect profile of a girl' s
face with a pug-nose like her own, which the doctor outlined
for her at the AFP140.
This last picture (and the positive diagnosis of the AFP
itself) marked a change in the intensity of her relationship
she knew chat book-knowledge could not substitute for embodied
experience. Julie, we must remember, worked "fixing God's mistakes" as
she once put it herself. That is, working in a late-term abortion
facility she was familiar with every possible imaginable exception to
book-knowledge on the subject of pregnancy. Thus, Pamela's naivete grew
to be irritating. Conversely, Pamela had no other means of knowing and
her reliance on “book knowledge" and the combined experiences of her
friends were honest and sincere attempts at being responsible and
informed, the best way she knew how. Most women of Pamela's background
do get their body knowledge from books (Martin 1987:148)
138 Julie noted that Pamela had little interest in touching or feeling
her stomach, relying rather on the ultrasound images to bond with her
baby.
139pirst heartbeats are black palpitating holes, literally like isolated
heart valves.
140A very photogenic child, even in utero!
135
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with Julie. The "little pug nose" and the baby's apparently
long legs, a feature everyone agreed belonged to Paul,
provided for Pamela and her family with powerful visual
evidence of the "truth" of Euro-American reproduction: they
could "see" themselves in their child. This "little girl"
was irrefutably "theirs” since it had Pamela's pug nose and
Paul's long-legs. The ultrasound images, literally the paper
on which they were printed, came to stand for the body of the
child; these images were the material evidence of the child's
existence, the "object" with which they all bonded. This
marked an enormous displacement of Julie, since the baby now
was a known entity, a person. Julie felt this displacement:
there was a lull in their phone contact; Pamela was not as
"close" or not really "eager to touch her belly."1 4 1 It would
seem that in the Martin's construction of the pregnancy— a
construction shared by the discourse of biological
embodiment— Julie's achievement was in the beginning. She was
the first picture in Pamela’s organizer— her job was almost,
like a man's, to get Pamela pregnant. Once it was confirmed
that the baby was healthy, which by all appearances she was,
then Julie's active role was over (until the birth) . She had
141This was of course Julie's impression. Julie values touch and
physical intimacy as evidenced by her un-self-conscious public displays
of affection with her husband and son. Pamela and Paul, on the other
hand, touch very little and are very private with their affection.
Pamela and Julie thus have, quite literally, very different experiences
and expectations of physicality and touch.
136
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done a "good job" as Paul "jokingly" told her, shaking her
hand right after the AFP visit.
In conclusion, there were a number of discursive,
institutional and personal forces which conspired to create
an image of closeness, which was felt by both Julie and
Pamela but, in the absence of a shared biographical history
and "real" kinship ties, was ambiguous. This ambiguity came
to a head at the birth and after, when the Martin retreated
from Julie. The intensity of the closeness in the beginning
set up for Julie expectations of an on-going and durable
relationship, even after the birth, while, for the Martins,
this initial closeness was not in the least bit permanent or
binding. After all was said and done, Julie was performing a
service for them142. Paul, whose position unlike his wife's
was never ambiguous towards Julie, was very forthright:
[Our relationship with Julie] is obviously a
very personal one, but it is after all a
contractual relationship where you have a
person providing a service and a person paying
for it. And just as we don't necessarily
become lifelong friends with every business
associate that we enter into an arrangement
142 Pamela was perplexed by the fierceness of Julie's disappointment,
which Julie tried to explain at a meeting they had a few months after the
birth at the diner where they first met. Pamela feels that her retreat
from Julie was in part because of the force of Julie's feelings: she felt
that she had failed her. In her own words, 'she didn't do well enough.'
These feelings co-exist with Pamela’s general resistance to allowing
Julie inside her private world, a resistance which was evident throughout
the relationship, for example, in her hesitation about giving Julie her
home address or her decision not to invite Julie to either of her two
showers. These were boundaries Pamela upheld for reasons of her own, and
which Julie noticed, wondering if she did actually want a "close"
relationship with her.
137
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with, that doesn't mean that we think any less
of the business associate nor do we value any
less the service that he or she provided for
us.
For Julie, who had not wanted to be a "business deal,143" this
was a profound personal defeat. She had not wanted her
experience to be about "handing over a baby at nine months"
and, in the end, it felt to her that way. As her husband put
it, " [the Martins] went to the store to pick out the
prettiest box for their toy they could find, wrapped it up
very carefully for Christmas and then threw out the packaging
without a second thought on Christinas day." The experience
was humiliating for both of them.
What this narrative confirms, I think, is that
reproduction cannot be abstracted, as biological discourse
would have us believe, from embodied, biographical realities.
143This was how Julie described she felt at the surrogate meeting where
she shared her birth story. Julie's greatest fear (and greatest
humiliation) would be to bump into the mem she had allowed to "put his
hemds down there to help ease out his child" and have him not recognize
her as the woman who gave birth to this child. She regretted giving him
an experience he completely took for granted, making her feel "used."
138
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Conclusion:
Cvboros, Surrog»*-»« »nd ggholar-g»
Epistemologies of Embodiment
in a Post-Modern World
If one believes that what drives human beings to act
and to create is not some "spiritual" trouble but rather
the material conditions of existence, namely, the need to
subsist and procreate, then one must necessarily reject
all the depth psychologies as irrelevant to the social
sciences. However, if we are willing to admit that
human creative energy greatly surpasses what is required
for the purpose of subsistence and reproduction, that
our creative energy is spent only partly in the service
of strictly material ends and much more
in the pursuance of other kinds of needs, and if we
have observed that less material needs seem often
to be pursued even at the cost of survival itself,
then we may be able to accept as a working
hypothesis that even something as seemingly
utilitarian as a mode of kinship may be created
and maintained by human beings largely
if not entirely for artistic
or existential reasons.
— Margaret Trawick1 4 4
The modem technologies of power take life
as their objective.
— Foucault1 4 5
The purpose of this year-long ethnographic study was to
provide insight into the embodied experiences of the
participants on both sides of a gestational surrogacy
arrangement. My aim, however, was not just to collect the
personal testimonies of each participant (as texts), but to
understand their actions and words within the
1441991:148.
1451980:152.
139
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phenomenological and discursive setting of the arrangement,
in the participants' biographical time. What were the
discursive parameters they had to contend with? How did the
participants negotiate these, and then each other? What was
the play between the available discourses on surrogacy and
the participants' agency to create ?
To answer these questions empirically it became
necessary to develop a methodology which recognizes, as its
premise, the temporality of all life and knowledge. This was
the subject of Chapter II. To develop this methodology
required first a theoretical awareness of the ways in which
Western knowledge has tended to abstract and reduce
principles from life in its search for generalizations and
rules and thus represent the production of knowledge as an
"inquiry into the nature of things" and presuppose that
things "exist as information before they exist as knowledge"
(Strathern 1988:344). This bias, very evident in the natural
sciences, has translated in the social sciences into an
alternatively deliberate (e.g. quantitative studies) or
unconscious (e.g. qualitative studies which depend on
observation or interviews for their data) detemporalization
of the production of knowledge. This detemporalization, I
argued, serves the political agenda of domination by
privileging the position of the "knower" vis a vis the
"object known." (e.g. The inquirer into the nature of things
140
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controls the re-organization and re-presentation of knowledge
about the thing.)
Drawing on recent feminist scholarship about the
revisionist power of the life history and narratives methods,
I articulated a methodology which takes as its premise the
temporality of existence. I named this methodology
"biographical embodiment" because this phrase recognizes (1.)
the enpirical fact that all lives are lived in biography,
i.e., in time; (2.) that life is embodied— emotionally,
intellectually— in particular bodies, each with individual
and particular personal histories; and (3.) that the producer
of knowledge shares in the same temporality as his or her own
research participants, and thus also has an embodied
biography and history which must be considered. Chapter II
explores how my embodied and principled knowledge as a
feminist skewed my perception of the surrogate position
initially and how my biographical involvement with her over
time allowed me to adjust this perception to reflect more
accurately her position and the dynamics of her participation
in the arrangement.
In Chapter III, I analyzed the discourses of the new
reproductive technologies and the context they created for
the embodied position of the infertile couple. I refer to
the sxam of this discursive context as "biological embodiment"
because it uncritically upholds the scientific construction
141
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of reproduction as located in a biological body. This
construction, seen as natural and incontrovertible, underlies
the dominant discourse on assisted reproduction, which is
produced by the medical, social and legal services in the
infertility industry. I also show how this discourse
resonates with existing Euro-American notions of kinship and
personhood(Schneider 1968, Becker 1994) while bringing about
reconceptualisations of what have been the "facts of Nature."
I draw on analyses by Strathem (1992, 1995) and Franklin
(1990, 1995) to show how these new representational
strategies of the new reproductive technologies, particularly
the emerging language of genetics as the new "facts of
nature" account for the way in which assisted reproduction
displaces kinship from reproduction. I conclude the chapter
with a presentation of the personal histories of Paul and
Pamela Martin, who self-identify as members of the infertile
population, and show how the dominant values of biological
embodiment frame each of their worldviews although strongly
mediated by personality, personal history (biography) and,
especially, gender.
Since gestational arrangements represent a new form of
sociality, which could be described as a contractual kinship
which is not kinship, chapter IV charts the ways in which
each party to the contract (the Martins and Julie Thayer)
constructed and negotiated their year-long experience of
142
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gestational surrogacy in the absence of clearly articulated
cultural scripts. The main focus of the analysis is the
relationship between the surrogate and the mother, since this
was the primary relationship in the arrangement.1 4 6 Both
women came to the arrangement with expectations arising out
of their separate personal histories and informed by their
position in discourse (e.g. Pamela as an "infertile" woman;
Julie as a young, working mother). Their expectations seemed
to coincide initially, in what I called a virtual closeness.
They seemed to share the overarching narrative of assisted
reproduction, which is to enlist the services of altruistic
individuals in the creation of the families of the infertile.
However, over the course of time and the pregnancy, as the
virtual qualities of their initial match dissipated, their
divergent and embodied biographical positions began to emerge
in a profound and emotionally painful incommensurability
which they have not yet been able to resolve. The surrogate,
because of her symbolically liminal position as a non-mother
and her position as "provider of service" in the contract,
bore the brunt of this incommensurability.
146 Each woman's respective families also had to negotiate the terms of
the surrogate. These terms were different for each side. For example,
the surrogate' s family needed to detach from her pregnancy since this
was a child not meant for their family. Pamela Martin's mother
experienced a similar type of rupture during the hospital when she
shared with Julie how her own water had broken early when she gave birth
to her daughter, as if to imply that Julie's water breaking early for
the birth of her granddaughter meant a generational tie to her. In
biological terms, this is not possible.
143
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Methodological Findings
Biographical embodiment as a methodology is empirically
sound (and rewarding) but presents its own set of dilemmas.
As it intends, this methodology problematizes the "objective"
remove of the researcher. In practice, this means a level of
personal engagement with the project that is at times
difficult to sustain emotionally, financially and in terms of
the time demands.
My immersion in this project was total. Although I
supposedly share the same culture with the Thayers and the
Martins, much about their worlds was new to me. This
included but is not limited to, the upper class lifestyle of
the Martins,1 4 7 Julie Thayer' s work with women who have to
terminate their babies because of genetic abnormalities, the
interior spaces of the fertility clinic and the birthing and
maternity wings of the hospital, the experiences of a
pregnancy and a birth, none of which my own personal
experience could prepare me for. Everything down to the
spoken and unspoken rules in each household and setting—
their rhythms, their tempos, even their smells and their
sounds— was foreign to me. Familiarizing myself with these
147This lifestyle was riddled with ironies for me. For example, Pamela
Martin would think nothing about going down on all fours and climbing
under their 14-seat dining room table (a table they never use) to
retrieve one of her persian cats so he could say hello to me. Her
husband, whose faith in the surrogacy contract is absolute and thought
Julie should be regarded as providing a service, is an art collector of
historical manuscripts among which is a letter signed by Trotsky!
144
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worlds was at times emotionally taxing, especially when my
own values were threatened, as for example when Julie Thayer
shared with me her reservations about carrying a black baby,
when my own boyfriend (which she hadn't met at that time) is
Indian and dark-skinned.
Another emotional turning point for me was when Julie
invited me to her place of work and I got to watch her
counsel a couple who had just terminated a 28-week pregnancy
because of hydrocephaly (water on the brain). I also got to
see the intact body of a fetus for the first and only time in
my life. This was a transformative experience for me, one
which began an enduring bond between me and Julie Thayer, in
spite of many ideological differences, particularly in the
area of feminism! This anecdote illustrates the power of
biographical embodiment: knowing intellectually that Julie
did this type of work was not the same as seeing her do it
and experiencing it with her.
The demands on my time were the most intense during the
writing of the thesis, when I gave both Pamela and Julie
copies of a near final draft to check facticity and invite
their reactions to my interpretations of their experience.
The reading for both of them was difficult since it involved
descriptions of their own personal lives, and not always ones
they would have written for themselves.1 4 8 I met with each
I4 8 Julie Thayer was in places amused by some of my misrepresentations of
her life in the earlier draft, such as writing that "all of her friends
had died in the LockerBee Scotland airplane crash" when only six had.
145
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woman separately, after having given them a copy of the draft
to read, and we went over their queries, clarifications, and
requests for proper contextual izations149, as well as mine.
The dialogues that ensued were very productive and also
enriching but also pressured, because of my own deadlines and
their strong emotional reactions in places to what I had
written.
The ethical ramifications of analyzing personal
*
biographical data were intensified by the fact that I am
presenting in this work two sides of an experience. Much of
what I knew about each woman and how they each felt, they did
not know about each other. Thus the material was in places
sensitive and also a surprise. The Martins, for example,
were genuinely surprised by the depth of the surrogate's
disillusionment with how the arrangement had turned out. It
was a success story for them, since they were now a family.
Our dialogues were as a result personally challenging.
For the Martins, the first draft was generally a
difficult read because my understanding of the background
details of their experience had been in places superficial
and thus, the Martins felt, misrepresentative.1 5 0 Our
This section (in Chapter II) read like a "Danielle Steele novel" she
told me, a description which was of course not very flattering!
M9For example, it was important that I clarify in the introduction of
Chapter II that Julie's reservations about carrying a black also
included adding one more controversial aspect to her life which she did
not want. The other three were marrying a man 32 years her elder,
working in a late-term abortion facility and being a gestational
surrogate.
1S0There was also a Roshomon effect whereby all three (and sometimes
four, with the psychologist's) versions of what happened did not agree.
146
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discussions were initially charged (we were both sensitive)
but eventually enriching and eye-opening. This experience
nonetheless points to the empirical imperative of engaging
one's research participants in these kinds of collaborative
dialogues when doing biographical work. It also illustrates
a second imperative of biographical work: what Frank (1985)
describes as the bracketing of the researcher’s ego!
Theoretical Tmpijcations: Discourse and Agency
The discourse of biological embodiment would have us
believe that we live our lives in "the service of strictly
material needs," to use Margaret Trawick's phrase from the
opening quote, while biographical embodiment would suggest,
on the other hand, that we live our lives instead "for
artistic and existential reasons."
The theoretical implications which emerge from this case
study of gestational surrogacy revolve around the tensions
This effect was the strongest about the night of the birth and the day
after when the Martins, apparently under the impression by the
psychologist that Julie would not expect them to call or visit with her,
did not make any contact, deeply wounding the surrogate and contributing
to her growing feelings of having been "used." Neither the psychologist
nor the surrogate remember discussing the Martins' apparent wish to be
completely alone with their child. Neither did they remember discussing
any decision that the surrogate should have to take the initiative to
initiate contact for "her final session with the baby" the morning
after. The psychologist does not recommend this in any of the
arrangements she supervises, and regrets very strongly that she was not
allowed to be more involved with the parents, since her role, as she
describes it is to help both the intended parents and the surrogate come
to an experience of surrogacy which is positive for all. Pamela told me
(when we were reviewing an earlier draft of this paper) that they had
hired the psychologist to be "a counselor for the [surrogate] and not
the intended parents" and thus had not understood that they, too, might
need to be specifically counseled with respect to surrogacy.
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between these two forms of embodiments as experienced by the
participants in the arrangement. As I argued was the case
for the Martins (Chapter III), their biographical embodiment
was subsumed by the ideologies of biological embodiment. The
biographical embodiment of the surrogate, on the other hand,
contested in places the values of biological embodiment, for
example, in her willingness to share sovereignty of her body
with an infertile couple. These contestations were not
shared by the Martins, hence the rather tragic
incommensurability between both parties to the experience.
The incommensurability was compounded by the fact that
biological embodiment as it is formulated in Euro-American
sociality is implicated in strategies of domination.
Foucault has shown how biopower and its ideologies of the
nuclear family, biogenetic reproduction, and the satisfaction
of material needs are historical productions which coincide
with the emergence of capitalism in the 17th century and the
creation of new ontological categories such as "class" and
"race"(1980) . Laqueur's historical analysis of medical texts
adds "sex" and "gender" to these hegemonic constructions
(1992). The tensions between biological and biographical
embodiment arise precisely because our existential and
artistic needs are implicated in these constructions of
power. For example, Paul Martin's existential and artistic
needs in the gestational arrangement were mediated by class
148
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(he was the buyer of the service the surrogate provided and
this guaranteed him certain privileges), gender (the
surrogacy was exclusively his wife's project, he just "paid
the bills") and sex (his daughter was exclusively his own
[and also his wife's] because of his [their] genetic
contribution) .
One of my chief arguments in this thesis has been that
the discourse of biological embodiment is the historical
"archive" of assisted reproduction. Foucault describes an
"archive" as the field of discursive practices in which our
subjectivities unfold, explaining that:
It is from within these rules that we speak,
since it is that which gives to what we can
say — and to itself the object of our
discourse — its modes of appearance, its
forms of existence and coexistence, its
system of accumulation, historicity, and
disappearance.(1972:13 0)
Biological embodiment is the field of discursive practices
which gives reproduction and assisted reproduction its "mode
of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its
system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance"
(1972:130). For example, the discourse of biological
embodiment would have us believe that we live our lives "in
the pursuit of material needs," to use Trawick's phrase in
the opening quote. This discourse represents reproduction as
emerging naturally and individualistically out of the
149
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biological body, a template of drives we all presumably
share. The need to reproduce is perhaps the most celebrated
and imperious of Euro-American "material needs" since the
future of the species is imagined to rest on it (See also
Franklin 1990:221). The fulfillment of our biological
destiny (what Paul Martin called the "Darwinian impulse" in
him) and hence our personal happiness as "fulfilled"
biological beings is understood to rest on this "need."
Certainly, the entire field of assisted reproduction
legitimizes its research and its institutions (such as the
fertility clinic or the surrogate program) on the premise of
the naturalness of the urge to reproduce as a biologically
driven "existential" necessity. Franklin puts it thus:
"Infertility having been constructed as a biological problem,
there is no alternative to a biological resolution" (Franklin
1990) .
My ethnographic findings suggest, however, that the
naturalness of the urge to reproduce is exercised in the
field of assisted reproduction within power imbalances which
favor, at times explicitly, at times implicitly, the
narrative of the infertile. The emphasis on the "arrival" of
fetuses, the enlisting of surrogates and other bodies to help
facilitate this "arrival," popular representations of
assisted families as "miracles, " the seemingly empirical fact
that there can be only one "true" mother, these cire the rules
150
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of the archive of biological embodiment, which appear
natural, but are in fact discursive. They serve to privilege
the narrative of the infertile, the "needs" and "rights" of
this population and the science that serves them, at times at
the e^qoense of the "needs" and "rights" of the surrogate when
these do not conform with these rules151.
In the gestational surrogacy I followed, the Martins
reserved for themselves the right to decide how and what
their relationship with Julie Thayer would be. This seemed
natural to them, since the whole surrogacy arrangement was to
help them fulfill their dream of creating their family.
Furthermore, Julie Thayer was not even biogenetically related
to their child (and hence them) . As "buyers of a service" as
Paul Martin explained, it was ultimately their call as to how
they would relate to "the surrogate." His call was to
dismiss her, after her services were rendered. Thus, in his
view, Julie Thayer’s own personal (and existential)
aspirations in the arrangement were not in any way his
concern, even though he imagined their existential
aspirations as naturally Julie's, because of the arrangement.
For example, at month five of the pregnancy, Paul Martin
151Surrogates do challenge this privilege, for example, when they decide
they want to keep the baby they have given birth to. But this is always
from a place of adversity: the surrogate must act against the wishes of
her couple, her surrogate program and the moral responsibility and legal
bindingness of "the" contract. Gestational surrogates have an even more
difficult time, as evidenced by the Anna Johnson vs Mark and Cristina
Calpert case (Case #S0 23721, California Supreme Court, where the
surrogate was denied custody and visitation rights because she was not
biogenetically related to the child she carried.
151
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tape-recorded children stories he read for his daughter-in-
utero ("because at five months her cognitive functions would
be developing") . Pamela then arranged for Julie to play this
tape next to her stomach. Julie agreed because she
understood why this would be important to them and thought
the idea sweet, but was then put off by what she experienced
as "checks" on whether she was doing it or not, and how
often. The expectation that she would respond to their
existential needs as directed, but perhaps more importantly,
without reciprocity on Paul's part, was a "turn off."
Paul Martin's sense of privilege was not only
individually motivated; it was also conferred on him by the
discourse of assisted reproduction. For example, the
surrogate program promotes the view of surrogates as
"professionals" enlisted in the service of infertile couples,
which on the one hand seems to grant the surrogate power (and
probably does in some cases) but on the other hand does not
really affect the structural power imbalance in the
relationship. The surrogate is only powerful during the
pregnancy. Once the baby is born, the power reverts
completely to the couple. At the surrogate monthly meeting
where Julie shared, her birth story very emotionally, the
counselors supported this construction when they said to her
by way of consolation at the Martins' abandonment:
152
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Counselor #1; What I am understanding more
and more is that even if you really like
the couple you're working with, and
hopefully you do, actually every couple
falls off the pedestal at some point.
There's sort of this romance stage. No
couple is perfect all the time. And
frankly no surrogate is perfect all the
time too. As nice as they are sometimes
they're not what you expected. That often
doesn ’ t mean that you don ’ t wish you ’ d had
the baby.
Counselor #2; She [the baby] is still here
and she's here because of you. That was a
great thing that you did.
This exegesis of Julie's experience unintentionally upholds
the privilege of the couple. It stresses the experience in
terms of the good "job" Julie did, as a professional who
"worked" with a couple to bring a child into the world.
Knowing she had brought a child into the world should be
reward enough since this child owed her life to her, even if
her parents should now withdraw from her. Thus, Julie's own
personal aspirations of a "close relationship" with the
couple were subsumed within the moral "specialness" of having
done her "job" well. Her own expectations were, in this way,
rendered besides the point. The parents had no enforcable
moral obligation to her; yet she had a moral responsibility
to them, to do her "job" well. As the counselor explained,
"some parents fall off their pedestal." In other words, it
is up to the surrogate to appreciate this fact and accept her
lot: she might not end up liking the couple she "works" with;
153
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they might not end up liking her, but in the end she can
wrest satisfaction from the good work she has done. The
language of personal achievement thus has the effect of
further isolating the surrogate in her own experience by
eliciting her compassion for her couple (they were not
perfect, and she wasn't, too) . In the case of Julie, this
devalued her in-going existential expectations of a
collaborative sense of achievement with, and not just for,
her couple. "We made this baby" she insisted, over and over
through her tears holding the baby one last time the day
after the birth, when Pamela congratulated her on what a good
job she had done152. Thus, the counselors' language of
"professionalism" upholds the worldview of the couple by
framing the experience of the surrogate in terms of a " job,"
too. For Julie, however, being a surrogate was much more
than a "job."
Pamela Martin's position was more ambiguous: she
recognized that they had collaborated, perhaps more
intimately than in many other mother-surrogate
152Julie' s tears could have easily been misconstrued as a sense of loss
over the baby. Her own husband asked her if this meant she wanted to
keep Claire. "No," explained Julie, "It's just that I set this goal
and here it is." My sense, confirmed by Julie, is that there would not
have been any tears if she had still felt a part of the Martins'
process. Julie was crying because she knew that in Pamela's
understanding of the surrogacy Julie' s contribution was over and this
meeting was really a good-bye as opposed to a new beginning. It marked
the end of their relationship, an end over which she had not control.
Julie, then, was mourning not her child but her demise and the failure
of having an enduring close relationship with "her" couple and share,
even if peripherally, in the life of the child she had brought to life.
154
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relationships ("We were like sisters during the pregnancy"),
and she did make an effort to meet Julie’s expectations of a
"close" relationship. But she nonetheless withheld from her
surrogate several key privileges during the pregnancy and
after the birth, which in essence protected her from having
to engage with the surrogate in ways she reserved for close
friends and family only.
For example, without exactly knowing why, the thought of
inviting Julie to her home to visit with her (and, after the
birth, visit the baby) had never occurred to Pamela even
though earlier she had often expressed that Julie was "like a
sister to her"153. The Martins home was symbolically off
limits for "her" surrogate— as evidenced by her hesitation to
give Julie her home address or to socialize with her outside
of the surrogacy arrangement. All of their non-institutional
visits took place in Julie's home (or at Marco's Deli, where
they first met, in the vicinity of the fertility clinic) .
Thus, Pamela upheld the personal boundaries of her private
world in a way Julie did not, since Julie wanted a real and
practical closeness with the mother154. During the pregnancy
153This was a query I had of her when we were discussing her feelings
for Julie during the rewrite of the thesis. She claimed she was close
with Julie and they had been friends, almost like sisters. I pointed
out to her that she had not extended the same privileges she would a
"sister" to Julie, such as visiting her to her home or socializing with
her. What accounted for the difference? Pamela was unsure about why
she had held back during the pregnancy. Now, Julie was more like a
"distant friend" to her.
154Had Julie not liked Pamela so much, she might not have been hurt so
much by what seemed to her a rejection.
155
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the power to choose how to negotiate these personal
boundaries seemed shared. Then, Pamela was willing to have
some degree of closeness with her surrogate. But in reality
this power was not shared. At the moment of the birth it
would automatically revert to Pamela, over whom Julie would
no longer have any leverage.
This power imbalance is the direct result of the
biogenetic construction of motherhood and reproduction. In
Pamela's mind (and heart) , she was the mother of her daughter
and the surrogate a legitimate and willing "means to this
end." Her gratitude towards Julie was an appreciation of the
surrogate's willingness to help make her a mother. Julie's
mission was fulfilled the moment the surrogate handed her the
baby at the birth. At that moment Pamela became a mother and
Julie's role in the Martin's story ended. Motherhood, for
Pamela, was the biogenetic reality of her tie to the child.
Pamel explained that one of the reasons she did not contact
the surrogate the night of the birth was that Claire was bom
at seven in the evening, then rushed to the nursery for
bathing and testing, and only returned to her an hour and a
half before Pamela's regular ten p.m. bedtime hour. She
wanted to spend this time bonding with her baby alone: "I
had waited ten years for this child and I didn' t want to
share my first few minutes with her with anyone."
156
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Since Pamela had no biological ties to her surrogate
through this child (as she would have if it had been a
traditional surrogate), a personal relationship with Julie
would be a matter of consideration and not oblig-ation for
her.1 5 5 Thus her hesitations as to how close or distant she
would like to be with Julie after the birth (and even during)
reflect the way in which she reserved for herself the right
to decide how she would feel, irrespective of how Julie might
feel about their relationship. The biogenetic construction
of motherhood allowed her to hold this right for herself,
exclusively.156 In this discourse, there was only one mother
and that would be her.
An important finding of this study is, then, that the
biogenetic discourse of reproduction is not representative of
all embodied experiences of reproduction. It did not account
for the experience of the surrogate Julie Thayer, who did not
view herself as just making a baby for her couple, but rather
as sharing an experience and a process with them. In her
comparison of Western and Melanesian construction of
motherhood, Strathem argues that the West imagines that
155Many people who know about this project, for example from seeing me
edit the film, are sympathetic with Pamela's position.
IS^This was evident in Pamela' s decision not to include any pictures of
Julie in her baby photo album. The birth is marked by pictures of a
clock at the time of birth and photos of she and her husband and mother
with the baby. When I queried her about Julie's "erasure," she
explained that she wasn't sure how or when she would share the
circumstances of the birth with her daughter and that it was painful to
be reminded that she had not been able to give birth to her own child.
Paul felt so too, "wishing not to be constantly reminded of the
process."
157
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"women make babies in the same way as a worker makes a
product. .. .The baby is regarded as an extension of the
mother's tissue" (1988:315). In Melanesia, however, "women
are not seen as the sole agents of childbirth. .. .Children are
the outcome of the interactions of multiple others" (316) .
From Julie Thayer’s perspective, the Martins' child was
the outcome of the interactions of "multiple others,"
including, very centrally, herself. For Pamela, biological
embodiment located conception at the moment Pamela's and
Paul's sperm mixed. In Julie's experience of embodiment, the
creative aspect of conception occurred in her body at the
moment during the transfer when she and Pamela shared a
prayer over her body. Claire came into being as the result
of Julie's own efforts as well as Pamela's, the strength of
their spiritual union and their intense effort to coordinate
and synchronize of their cycles157.. Even Julie's own family
collaborated in the making of the child: her mother-in-law
guessed the sex of the child for Pamela; her own foster
family offered to stand in as the child’s grandparents should
the child have none. Making this baby was a collaborative
and creative process. Without the "goodness of her
157Julie gave her all to make the first embryo transfer happen. For
example, she was told (leading up to the transfer) that she and Pamela
would miss the first cycle because her hormone levels were not rising as
they should. Julie calculated the dosage required to boost these levels
and drove to the clinic to insist that she be given the hormones. This
was one of the ways Julie, with the help of her medical knowledge,
sought to protect Pamela's interests and thus nurture the process.
158
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intentions"158, or the "specialness" of the day of the
transfer, Pamela might not have been able to ever be a
mother. Julie would go as far as to share sovereignty over
her body with the Martins to help them experience the
creative and collaborative aspects of a conception,
pregnancy, and reproduction. Allowing "four people to
negotiate over one body"— hers— was what made this project
challenging for her, not the pregnancy itself: the pregnancy
would happen "naturally." Julie's actions were thus framed
by a spiritual and creative imperative that existed alongside
the biological model of reproduction. The "facts of Nature"
were the same for the surrogate and the genetic mother, but
the discourse of biological embodiment was mediated
differently in each because of their respective biographical
experiences.
This is not to say that the conception or the pregnancy
or the birth were not collaborative and spiritual experiences
for Pamela, too. They were, but how these experiences were
collaborative and spiritual was always mediated by the
biogenetic model of reproduction. Perhaps as an infertile
woman whose body would not perform "naturally," she had to
put her faith in this model. In one of our early interviews,
Pamela expressed her approval that, although Julie was an
"excellent mother to her own son," she was not the "maternal,
158For example, as evidenced by her decision to spend the week-end on
her back with her feet up during the bleeding scare to make sure the
embryos did not flush out of her.
159
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bonding type." Pamela gained this understanding from Julie’s
explanation about how she had not bonded with her own son
when he in-utero. What did not come across to Pamela in this
explanation, however, was that Julie chose not to bond with
him (because of her work where she witnessed pregnancies turn
into tragedies for women and couples) . Julie's non-bonding
was not an act of nature but rather an act of sovereignty
over herself and her body. No doubt Julie had wanted to
reassure Pamela that she wouldn't renege on her contractual
agreement when she shared this story. If Pamela missed this
layer to Julie's experience, it might have been because she
held an idealized notion of maternal bonding as an automatic
fact of nature, and indeed often identified herself as the
"maternal bonding-type." Thus she was not able to appreciate
or see the emotional depth of the work Julie was performing
for her. For in Pamela's eyes, since Julie was not
"naturally" a maternal person, carrying a child which was not
her own would be easier emotionally. Julie's actual embodied
experience was displaced.
In conclusion, the biogenetic discourse of reproduction
does not represent "facts" of "nature" but a selective and
politicized version, which does not account for all embodied
experiences of reproduction. The power of biological
embodiment to misrepresent lived experience lies in the
traditions of Western science and epistemologies of
160
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embodiment that disengage knowledge from biography and de-
temporalize life. Julie aspired to a "mother-to-mother"
relationship with Pamela after the birth, a relationship she
imagined would grow in time over the course of the pregnancy
as both women shared this experience because she could
imagine sharing this role communally. As she told me often,
"the more people are involved in the nurturing of my child,
the better it is for him.159" But for Pamela, her
relationship with her child was private and one-on-one.
Julie's help in bringing her daughter into the worlds was a
necessary "delay" in her process of becoming a mother, a
process which had been ontologically suspended for her
because of her body's failure to cooperate with her desire to
become a mother, but which would resume, finally, at the
moment of her daughter's birth. Only at that moment would
she be able to bond with her child directly, intimately.
Until the birth, ultrasound images would have to do, even
though Julie had offered to let her bond with this child in
her womb sentiently over the course of the pregnancy, by
inviting her for example to touch her stomach, feel the baby
move, and talk to it in utero. Pamela rejected these
opportunities, much to Julie’s chagrin. These actions were
simply not the way Pamela chose to bond with her child. In
159 An interview I had with Julie's adoptive parents shed some light on
Julie's feeling that the more people parent her child the better it
would be. The Connollys expressed their belief that a child does not
belong to its parents; a child belongs to the world.
161
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this choice, she was supported by the reproductive
technologies (e.g. ultrasound imaging) and the ideology of
biological embodiment (e.g. the surrogate was a willing means
to the end of making her a mother) .
Reflections an
Cvborg Politics in a Re-embodied World
What this study vividly illustrates is the complexity of
embodiment in Euro-American culture. This complexity is
fueled by an abstracting, reductive and utilitarian
epistemology towards the conditions of life, and also by a
tendency to view "culture" as the fulfillment of "material
needs" alone. This construction has origins in 17th century
class politics: biopower is the embodiment of bourgeois class
values, the representational strategy which allows for the
privileging of some experiences over others, which
naturalizes hierarchies and sets up separations where there
need not be any, normalizing the appearance of life as power
would have it. Biological embodiment is a core strategy of
this power, with profound repercussions for the way Euro-
Americans construe kinship with others (all of life actually)
as well as for our sovereignty over ourselves, our bodies and
our world. For example, Franklin (1995) has insightfully
pointed out that the narrative of assisted reproduction
displaces possible origins of infertility in the "damage done
[to our ecology] by industrial technologies based on fossil
162
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fuels"(334), diverting our attention from the literally
material cultural construction of infertility.
Much of feminism has argued that the new reproductive
technologies are an attack on women's sovereignty over their
selves and bodies, an automatic loss of power. Surrogates
have been described as "rented wombs" (Corea 1985) . Julie
Thayer's position and experience problematizes this
description: for Paul Martin, Julie was a rented womb (he
compared the arrangement to a "real-estate deal") . For his
wife Pamela, Julie was a womb but also a person, but a person
independent from that womb, performing a service for her. In
her own self-perception, Julie was a person who chose to risk
the boundaries of her body (and her self) to share an
exciting existential experience with another woman (couple)
and herself.1 6 0 If she ended up being a "rented womb," it
was only because the Martins did not reciprocate her dream of
a collaborative reproduction and an extended-like sense of
kinship. Otherwise the experience might have been indeed
very empowering for her, too, as it was for Martins who are
now a family.
As we have seen, there were clear discursive pressures
which influenced the outcome of this arrangement as it was.
But these discursive pressures are not fixed in nature or
closed to contestation as a construction of all surrogates as
I60julie felt genuine excitment about being a pioneer in the field of
assisted reproduction.
163
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"rented wombs" implies. There are in this configuration of
embodiment possibilities for empowerment and opportunities
for subversion, even within the most seemingly conventional
arrangement. These opportunities arise out of biopower's
inability to subsume all of life processes and all of life
experiences within the abstractions of biological embodiment.
Making connections where none should be and breaking
connections which lock us into the "experience of domination"
is the manifested task of the politicized Cyborg, argues
Haraway. Cyborgs, as "theorized and fabricated hybrids of
machine and organism" as well as "creatures of social reality
[and] of fiction"(1991:150,149) hold because of their
partiality the power to subvert the old regime of power
through ironic subversion:
My cyborg myth is about transgressed
boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous
possibilities. [.. . ] Cyborg unities are
monstrous and illegitimate; in our present
political circumstances, we could hardly
hope for more potent myths for resistance
and recoupling.(1991:154)
For many people— scholars and lay persons alike—
carrying the child of another couple is a "monstrous and
illegitimate" act, on moral and ethical grounds. But, as
Julie's experience shows, it is can also be the bid for a
"potent fusion," one which transgresses the boundaries power,
in the shape of class, sex and gender (and potentially race,
164
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too161), map onto our bodies. To choose a different form of
embodiment can be transformative, as it is when a woman like
Julie Thayer chooses to share sovereignty over her body with
others through gestational surrogacy, transgressing gender162,
class and maybe even one day race boundaries163, or, even,
when a couple, such as the Martins, can through a "miracle"
of technology have a child that is biogenetically their own.
Gestational surrogacy forces what seems at first an
"unnatural" and symbolically incongruent closeness in the
body and person of the surrogate between herself and another
couple. But, on second look, what might be more "unnatural"
is the distance which this closeness is said to breech.
For example, to imagine women as the "sole agents of
childbirth" or that the spheres of "work" and "home" are
naturally antagonistic or that kinship networks have, for
their sole purpose, material reproduction and the blogenetic
nuclear family— these imagings might be the breeches,
constructed historically as "facts of nature."
161For example, if a white woman would voluntarily carry a black child,
as occurred involuntarily to a white NY couple whose "assisted" child—
supposedly their own— turned out to be black, obviously an error in the
lab (New York Times, 9 March 1990 :B1 in Petscheky 1995:402). This
couple sued for the "tragedy" and "nightmare’ of the experience. But
looked at in another way, life gave them a brilliantly ironic
opportunity to confront their own racism.
162Julie saw her surrogacy as an opportunity to enjoy the physical and
embodied aspects of the pregnancy without the worries (financial,
personal, performative e.g. good mother) that normally accompany a
regular pregnancy.
163I have seen wanted ads for "asian" and "hispanic" surrogates in
parenting magazines. This of course suggests "race to race" surrogacy.
The potential for subversion nonetheless exists.
165
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They uphold a virtuality which masks their historical and
political class origins. The surrogate's own personal
biographical history had weakened the power of these imagings
over her own imagination: she did not see herself as the
sole agent of childbirth, nor were the gendered oppositions
of "work" and "home" a natural given for her; in Dallas, her
husband, she had met a partner willing to work through this
cultural opposition with her; inclusion or exclusion in her
kinship universe was not based on biologic membership, but
rather on one's moral and existential fiber as a person.
Haraway proposes a new configuration for feminist
subjectivity, one in which these fictions are made explicit,
in the person of the Cyborg:
Our bodies, ourselves. Bodies are maps of power
and identity. A cyborg body is not innocent; it
was not bom in the garden; [a cyborg body] does
not seek unitary identity and so generate
antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the
world ends); it takes irony for granted. [...]The
machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped,
and dominated. The machine is us, our processes,
an aspect of our embodiment. [...] We are
responsible for machines; they do not dominate
or threaten us. We are responsible for
boundaries [....] Cyborg imagery...means refusing
an anti-science metaphysics; a demonology of
technology, and so means embracing the skillful
task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily
life, in partial connection with others, in
communication with all of our parts. (1991: 180--
181, emphasis mine).
166
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The task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life
is what I see as the challenge of a conscious epistemology of
biographical embodiment. In her choice to become a
surrogate, Julie was attempting a re-configuration of her
embodiment along these lines. She grasped the irony of being
a surrogate (she joked she was a "cow," an "incubator") . She
was not "bora in the garden;" Paul appeared to her as the
patriarch that he is; she was not naive of the politics of
reproduction from working in a problem-pregnancy, late-term
abortion facility); she was not afraid of the technology.
She experimented with the boundaries of her body, extending
these to encompass the world of another couple. This, in
many ways, was an audacious choice on her part and, as it
turned out, a dangerous one: "her" couple in the end did not
want her as part of their collective body, or, at the very
least, in the case of Pamela, reserved the right to decide
what the relationship would be.
But the task of "reconstructing the boundaries of daily
life" is a continuous one, full of surprises, transformations
and new learnings. For example, Pamela is still unsure about
what kind of relationship she wants with Julie164. Perhaps
she will consider Julie's perspective and they will find a
common ground. Her daughter Claire will grow up to be her
own person. She might one day want to meet the woman who
164 This thesis has been somewhat a catharsis for their relationship.
Pamela and Julie have had more contact after the birth because of our
collaboration than they might have otherwise have had.
167
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gave her life. To hold on to the rigid epistemologies of
embodiment that power offers us— in the shape of its
discourse on biology or reproduction or production— is to
miss the richness and unexpectedness of life as it unfolds
over time.
One thing is certain. The developments of the new
reproductive technologies mean that alternative
epistemologies will arise in opposition to the dominant
discourse of biological embodiment, as long as there are
embodied agents with personal histories who dare to seek to
fulfill their own goals. Biographical embodiment is the
method I propose here for tracking these new epistemologies.
168
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Appendix A:
Schedule o£ Costs of
Gestational Surrogacy
to the Parents
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
ESTIMATED COST SHEET-IN VITRO FERTILIZATION PROGRAM
(b ased on one su ccessfu l cycle)
Center far Surrogate Parenting Fees S16.600.00 non-refundable
$8,300.00 Upon signing Retainer
$5,300.00 Upon signing Surrogate Contract
$3,000.00 Eight weeks after confirmation of pregnancy
TRUST FUNDS: (expenses you will incur regardless of whether you work with a professional program like the
Center, or elect to do surrogacy privately):
$12,000.00 Surrogate Compensation - paid to surrogate in installments over the course of the p reg n an cy-
beginning upon confirmation of pregnancy.
$ 5,250.00 Surrogate exp enses reimbursement
S 500.00 Surrogate transfer fee per transfer (fixed)
S 450.00 Anticipated reimbursements during each m onth of transfer
(numerous doctor visits, mileage, childcare, etc.)
S 1,800.00 Anticipated monthly reimbursements over the 9m ths of pregnancy
(approx. 3 x $300.00 for 1st trimester, thereafter 6 x 5150.00)
S 500.00 Maternity clothing allowance (fixed, paid after 1 s t trimester).
$ 2,000.00 Lost Wages - approximately 6 w eeks
$11,700.00 Medical Expenses (Surrogate Mother only)
$ 6,500.00 Includes d octor's fee for x-fer, fertility drugs, ultrasoun ds, hospital co sts. (Fee is set
by doctor, couple may elect to pay doctor directly)
$ 2,000.00 Initial screening for Surrogate Mother
(includes social diseas e testing, medical screening, criminal background check, etc.)
$ 1,400.00 Medical insurance premiums, if necessary (approximately $140 per month)
$ 1,000.00 Medical insurance deductible, if n ecessary
$ 800.00 Co-payment to Obstetrician and hospital (eg: 20% of an 80/20% policy. I f surrogate
has a 100% policy.this expense is not needed.)
$ 550.00 Miscellaneous Expenses
S300.00 Life Insurance Annual Premium
(face value of term policy: $200,000.00) Beneficiaries: Surrogate’s family.
$250.00 Surrogate's Attorney fees
$ 3,600.00 Anticipated Psychological Counseling fees
$675.00 Upon matching with surrogate mother
$225.00 per month, estimated 13 months needed (4 m ths trying + 9mths pregnancy)
$33.100.00 Estimated deposit to trust acco unt
S 4 9 .7 Q O .O O TOTAL ESTIMATED COST
$ 1,000.00 NON NORTH AMERICAN CLIENT SURCHARGE
$ 3,000.00 Intended Parents independent attorney: Contracts, finalization of parental rights.
FUNDS TO BE PAID DIRECTLY TO THE DOCTOR/HOSPITAL: In Vitro P ro ce ss for Intended Parents -
Approximately $6,000 - $10,000 (Includes hospital costs & doctor's fees for laproscop ic or ultrasound aspiration of
e g g s, egg culturing and fertility drugs, etc.)
Additional costs may be incurred (For Example: high risk pregnancy, multiple births). These will be discussed during the
consultation at our offices.
Medical Costs and other factors affecting c o s ts are not alwavs within our control
COSTS AND FEES SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE
170
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ESTIMATED COST SHEET IN VITRO FERTILIZATION PROGRAM
PAYMENT SCHEDULE:
FIRST PAYMENT UPON RETAINING CENTER:
J 8,300.00 Retainer to Center for Surrogate Parenting, Inc. Upon receipt of retainer an d fees, our
relationship together begins. Center will begin collecting documentation from you that we n e e d
to enable us to begin our search for a surrogate mother for yo u.
FUNDS DUE TO TRUST ACCOUNT AFTER SELECTION OF SURROGATE. PRIOR TO MEDICATION:
S 5,300.00 Center fees due to Center once couple and surrogate have signed contracts
S 3,000.00 Center fees paid eight w eeks after confirmation of p re g n a n c y
S12.000.00 S u rro g ate C om pensation
S 300.00 Transfer fee to Surrogate Mother
S 430.00 Anticipated monthly reimbursement for ex p en ses during m onth transfer o c c u rs .
S 1,800.00 Anticipated monthly reimbursement for exp e n se s incurred o v e r co u rse of pregnancy.
S 500.00 Clothing allowance
S 2,000.00 L o st wages (if n e c e s s a ry )
S 6,500.00 D octor's fees, x-fer fee. fertility medication, etc. Center only p a y s th ose bills that are su b m itted to
u s by the doctor.
If frozen em bryos are used , c o s ts are le s s : approximately S2.500/cycIe.
S 2.000.00 Initial medical screening, criminal background search , e tc .
S 250.00 Surro gate's attorney fee
S 3.600.00 Psychological fees - approximate
S 1.400.00 Medical insurance premiums (if n e c e ssa ry)
S 1,000.00 Insurance deductible (if n e cessary)
S 800.00 OB/Hospital co-paym ent (if n e ce s sa ry)
S 300.00 Life Insurance Prem ium s
S 3,000.00 Intended Parents pay their attorney directly
PAYMENT DUE FOR SECOND XFER
S 450.00 Counseling fees (2 m onths)
X-fer fee to S urro gate
Monthly reimbursement during m onth of transfer
Additional insurance premiums (if n e ce ssa ry)
S 500.00
S 450.00
S 280.00
S variable D octor's fee for x-fer. fertility drugs, ultrasounds, hospital c o s ts .
F e e is s e t by doctor and dep en d s if em b ryo s are fresh or frozen.
Cou ple may elect to pay doctor directly
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
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Creator
Goslinga, Gillian Marie
(author)
Core Title
Epistemologies of embodiment in the new reproductive technologies: A case study of gestational surrogacy
School
Graduate School
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Visual Anthropology
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University of Southern California
(original),
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Tag
anthropology, cultural,biology, genetics,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychology, social
Language
English
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Frank, Gelya (
committee chair
), Christiansen, Roger (
committee member
), Lutkehaus, Nancy (
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Goslinga, Gillian Marie
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anthropology, cultural
biology, genetics
psychology, social