A Thriving Industry of Surrogacy in the Global South Demonstrates its Harms for Women Everywhere

by FiLiA International Network - a group of women from outside the UK who volunteer with FiLiA and are part of the global sisterhood of FiLiA.

In 2022, globally renowned actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas announced on her social media that her husband (Nick Jonas) and she had become parents to a child commissioned via surrogacy. Chopra Jonas responded to the criticism she received for renting a woman’s womb by saying that it was a ‘necessary step’ due to medical reasons. However, in order to believe that renting a woman can be essential to have a baby it first needs to be established that there is indeed such a thing as the right to have a baby. But there is no piece of international law which says that an individual has the right to a child. Still, the surrogacy industry churns a yearly revenue of 14 Billion USD every year through its use of women as raw material.

Chopra Jonas comes from India which has long been a source country for those seeking womb-renting (used interchangeably with surrogacy here). Most Indian surrogates are women from poor and socially disadvantaged households. But the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act of 2021 outlaws commercial surrogacy, allows altruistic surrogacy for a limited cohort, and establishes national level and state level boards to regulate surrogacy. However, due to the pre-existence of a thriving surrogacy industry in India, the extent to which this ban on surrogacy (of only one kind) would be effective in abating the exploitation of women remains to be seen.

But India is not the only developing country or country of the Global South where the renting of women takes place to feed a global market. Nepal was a market for surrogacy for buyers (a more accurate term for individuals who intend to buy babies through surrogacy) from richer countries like Israel and Australia. However, the Nepalese government banned surrogacy in toto in the year 2015 following a devastating earthquake in the Country. Since then, Indian surrogacy clinics which were established in Nepal have moved to Cambodia where the health system is poor. Additionally, the People’s Republic of China prohibits surrogacy in all its forms. Despite this, there is a base of commissioning buyers who go to the market available in the United States and Ukraine to rent wombs. Chinese women within Chinese provinces act as commercial surrogates as well, to provide for themselves and their families. Surrogacy also exists in other Asian countries such as Thailand, Laos, and Japan. Therefore, countries in the Global South are either prominent source countries, demand countries, or both when it comes to renting the reproductive capabilities of women.

Surrogacy is an extremely harmful process which causes physical, emotional, and mental damage to women, regardless of whether it is done for money or for altruistic motivations. This is because surrogacy is an induced pregnancy that is brought about through the injection of artificial hormones into a woman’s body. These hormones cause a range of problems such as sickness, bloating, mood volatility, and the resultant physical and mental stress for women who are subsequently injected with an externally fertilised embryo. Should the women fail to get pregnant the first time, this process must be repeated. But the women who are rented as vessels are not the only ones harmed in surrogacy. This is because the dominant practice of surrogacy now is to use donated eggs of one woman, which are fertilised and injected into the body of another woman. Unsurprisingly, egg donation has also come up as a predatory and harmful industry in which women are given hormones to extract the maximum number of eggs from them. Indeed, women have died in surrogate pregnancies in developed countries like the United States as an in-vitro fertilisation pregnancy puts women at the risk of, among other things, placental collapse. 

But the physical damage of surrogacy aside, women who are used as surrogates suffer from tremendous mental and emotional trauma. Jennifer Lahl, Melinda Tankard Reist, and Renate Klein give voice to scores of testimonies of women who have been used, ruined, and then spat out by the surrogacy industry and its players in the book Broken Bonds. These are stories of women from various countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Russia, and India. In the book, Dr Sheela Saravanan, an Indian academic and researcher whose work highlights the harms of surrogacy, describes the living conditions of pregnant commercial surrogates who are housed like inmates at an Indian clinic. Saravanan writes that the women are allowed to meet with their families only once a week and are given meals of bad quality. Furthermore, all the three women that Saravanan studies wanted to have a relationship with the child and were heartbroken as they were denied access to the child by the intended parents once the use of the women was over. The book has similar stories from around the world of women who entered surrogacy by trusting the doctors to look after their interests and, in some cases, in the hope that they would be allowed to have some connection with the child they carried. Instead, these women were left with long-term trauma, physical illness, financial ruin, and any connection with the child they had carried was ripped away from them.. These testimonies demonstrate the material harms of surrogacy upon the lives of the women who are necessary to provide for the entitlement of the privileged and the greed of a cruel industry which does not bother to study the impacts of its practices on the health of women.

Surrogacy is a great example of the intersections of the oppressions of sex, class, and caste (especially in the Indian case). It is poor and vulnerable women within developing or poor countries like India, Nepal, China, and Ukraine who are rented in numbers to provide for the profits of a billion-dollar industry. Surrogacy allows economically well-off, upper caste Indian families to use the bodies of poor, Dalit women. Women in the Chinese province of Hubei find themselves compelled to act as surrogates because of financial desperation. As the war broke out in Ukraine in early 2022, the concern was to get babies to their buyers, while the mothers who carried these babies were left behind in a war-ravaged country. However, so-called intersectional feminism continues to ignore the exploitative nature of surrogacy as it brands surrogacy as an empowering choice for women to earn a livelihood. But there is a difference between earning a livelihood which allows one to lead a comfortable and healthy life and an exploitative transaction which women find themselves compelled to enter into so that they can provide for basic needs. Surrogacy falls squarely in the latter category because it only provides for short-lived financial respite instead of a stable, secure, and safe way of earning a livelihood to women who are used as vessels and then abandoned. Hence, surrogacy shares the elements of exploitation based on sex, class, and caste for women in the Global South.

An oft-cited justification for the use of women and their bodies is the claim that an individual has the right to a child. Thus surrogacy is touted as a necessity for those who cannot, for a variety of reasons, have their own children. And on who else should the burden then fall to provide children for this cohort, other than women of course? But as Eva Maria Bachinger points out in Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood (Spinifex Press, 2021), a desire for a child does not mean that there is also a right to have one. And as Dr Saravanan also argues, there is no right to use the body of someone else to fulfil one’s own reproductive rights. The mere inability of one to have a child of their own does not give one any claim over the bodies of women. And so the only reason that women are used and then thrown away in surrogacy is because there is a cohort of monied individuals who can pay for the use of women.

The opposition to surrogacy does not intend to suggest that surrogacy harms some women more in relation to others and so is bad. The argument here is that no one is entitled to use the reproductive capabilities of women for their own reasons. Once it is accepted that women’s lives, energies, and bodies can be sequestered for a particular purpose, it becomes possible to exploit women anywhere, as is visible in the surrogacy industry of the Global South. That is why surrogacy, whether conducted in developed or developing countries, remains an exploitative process. A key idea of the women’s liberation movement is to win a human status for women which is based on integrity and wholeness. So the idea that a member, or some members, of this sex class can be sequestered, injected with hormones, made pregnant, and then have their babies taken away from them is incompatible with the goal of the feminist movement to liberate all women everywhere from having to service men reproductively. When it comes to surrogacy, governments around the world have a lesson to learn with regards to the equality of women in their countries.