Commercial Surrogacy in India: Labor, Kinship & Paradoxes | Amrita Pande

[00:00:09]thank Stephen thank you all for coming I've been instructed to stay in this position so that I can be captured by the camera so I'll try my best to do that but I am a performer so I might go off stage of it okay so what I want to do today is I want to start by transporting you directly to a very different setting than this nice room instead of gosh I'm gonna take you to a surrogacy hostel in a little town in western India where women are involved in arguably one of the most controversial labor market that of producing humans I start by reading two short excerpts from my book homes and labor to take you into my field during the writing of the book that was how the field was the third excerpt I'll read is an updated one from my last visit to the field April 2017 to give you an idea as to how the current situation is okay so let's start with feet note 1 2006 hope maternity clinic India the room is lined with eight beds one next to the other with barely enough space to walk in between a ceiling fan groans above some of the beds are raised on one side with a block so that the women can have their legs elevated after the embryo transfer or any gynecological checkups there's nothing else in the room each bed has a pregnant woman resting on it this is their home for the next few months their husbands can visit but not stay the night it's a reminder that they cannot have sex not for the next few months the women are still in their night clothes and it's nearly evening the day has been planned for them the morning wizard from the doctor 8:00 a.m. breakfast 9:00 a.m. medicine 10:00 a.m. rest hour 12 p.m. injections followed by an afternoon nap the evening nothing different except perhaps the broker will bring in a new member a bed will be added to the room another pregnant woman will join the ranks fill newts 2007 hope maternity clinic in D again it feels strange to be back last year when I went to say goodbye the doctor asked me rather bluntly you're not coming back right and I said no and meant it but here I am back in the clinic the doctor is surprisingly welcoming and waves outer hi through her pink sleeveless t-shirt last year she was always wrapped in a traditional Indian sari and this new of thar is intriguing I wonder if it has anything to do with her starring in Oprah Winfrey segment on infertility on the doctors instruction our NOS leads me to the new wing of the clinic a brand new surrogacy hostel it's there at our but the surrogates agree to talk to me if I sneak in some snacks for them I run down and get some raisins and we gather around the first bed to devour the food still given such little space and absolutely no privacy in the new hustle but I watched a camera oddly i wonder perhaps lying next to each other chatting and laughing there is our pregnancy away feel notes three the updated field note it's from New Hope fertility clinic and this is from this year 2017 April and October got brand new fertility clinic a three-story glass and steel building in the middle of sugar fields sugar cane fields the reception area is straight out of a science fiction novel clean high-tech surroundings almost there are no people except of the clinic very unlike the bustling K or taking slightly groggy clinics I have worked in the past ten years the basement is the domain of the circuits they're home for nine months there are five rules with 12 F in each almost all the pregnancy but most aligned emotional currently does feel everything working in a slow motion a complete contrast to the high-tech efficiency of sense of camaraderie I miss all the pain and hopes of changing their lives this work the underlying mood today is of boredom RTSP seems to speak furthermore when she says I don't even know whether I will be paid anymore the government has told the doctor that this surgery is wrong I don't know if it's right or wrong for them I thought it was right for me but this is waiting this waiting I cannot bear I just want to break these bars on the window and fly away fly away to my family to my life to a life so commercial started to see of paid pregnancy is a multi-billion dollar industry in India alone if they are not the only one to offer commercial services California is still the world leader but before I launch into this does it make sense the word fantasy gestational surrogacy so essentially if a couple from Cape Town wants to for whatever reason cannot conceive naturally they cannot afford or they cannot find a surrogate in South Africa they might want to fly down to India and hire a surrogate what does that mean most probably it will be the sperm of the man they intended father which will be fused with the egg of the intended mother or they could think of using a donor then these should be fused to make an embryo and the embryo will be implanted into the wound of a waiting Indian so the sorry mother India has absolutely no genetic connections to the baby she's merely birthing it she's merely the our image to the bone is being baked and that's why the kind of inappropriate name surrogate or substitute mother and although this might not be the notable conversation for all of us here actually conversations around surrogacy is not restricted to medical circles and has been generating feminist ethical legal and social debates for over three decades now this scholarship I would loosely classify into four frames liberal feminist defense the practice that emphasizes the womb a woman's right to do what she wants with her body works that debate on the ethics or morality of the practice feminist and other literature that focuses on the multiple systems of inequality and exploitation that are potentially reinforced by such practices and finally the ethnographic turn or the more recent ethnographic work which tap into the lived experiences of surrogacy and this ethnographic turn has in some sense diluted the moral certainty about the need to reject cerebral she practices but still the overwhelming response to surrogacy is one of intense anxiety and this anxiety of course increases multifold when it involves women in the global South or the third world or the developing world whatever you want to call it and one of the world leaders for surrogacy is of course India until recently the entire focused about I just said to you that it the debate has been going on for three decades now but the entire debating was by and about women in Europe and North America which is not surprising since commercial surrogacy the very recent phenomenon outside of the euro American context but the complete absence of any empirical data had not prevented scholars from making alarming predictions as to what would happen when these technologies cross borders and moved to the global south for instance feminist Andrea Dworkin predicted in 1978 while sexual prostitutes sell vagina rectum and mouth reproductive prostitutes would sell other body parts wounds ovaries and eggs and sociologist Barbara Rothman in 1988 asked can we look forward to baby forms with white embryos grown in young and third world women but over the past 10 years that I have studied this industry I have come to realize that my textbook and your eccentric understanding of commercial surrogacy was going to be entirely inadequate and inappropriate for this new and unusual setting of surrogacy in india it would be a complete mistake to think of surrogacy as simply a synergy of needs of two classes of women one group that flew to India or abroad needing a healthy moon and the other needing money this kind of formulation ignores the dynamics of surrogacy outside the sphere of reproduction surrogates in India are navigating much more than the identity as mothers they are grappling with the new identity as participants in a fledgling market in India that is morally contentious and constructed as deviant and unnatural and while yes it is true that many of these women are cost into surrogacy by their family often their mother-in-laws many others are negotiating with their families to gain control over their own bodies and their fertility in order to take part in this process as surrogates they suddenly find themselves in a very unfamiliar and pay attention to this a very unfamiliar relationship with a hypo medicalized system of reproduction a system a medical system that was previously completely inaccessible to them as lower-class women in an anti natural state and I'll come to that in a minute finally as women hired by clients from within and across borders these women are straddling complex relationships that often cross borders of race class and nationality so a linear emphasis on just a reproduction or the mothering component of commercial surrogacy completely will ignore these intricacies instead of bearing bearing surrogacy within the Eurocentric debates of motherhood and reproduction what I have done in all my previous works is to analyze commercial surrogacy has a form of labor that challenges the socially constructed dichotomy between production and and argued that commercial surrogacy in india is a new kind of reproductive way by emerging with globalization for you is to dig in deeper and complicate the story by arguing that there is a fundamental paradox of this new market we're in a market that literally can you read that a market that literally produces humans and human relationships is critically dependent on the maintenance of a global racial reproductive hierarchy that privileges certain relationships while completely denying others but before I get to my data let me give you a quick sketch of my field ok so sorry Cassie is estimated to be a dollar two billion so that's a lot of zeros dollar two billion market in India alone and India has about three thousand clinics which office are busy services with but thirty thousand which have the potential so the technology the Indian case has got immense media attention because the market up till last year was flourishing without any formal regulations in fact initially fertility clinics got a lot of state support because they were contributing to reproductive tourism for the country and the primary marketing tool that these clinics often with the help of global brokerage is used was packaged jeans so one of my favorite quotes is by the light while your embryo grows in a petri dish and all that of course they're getting for a third of the cost or in California so there's several interrelated reasons why India has become the what is called the mother destination of commercial surrogacy Mexico Thailand Cambodia Nepal are the other ones coming up no no Kenya it's been recently banned in Mexico and Thailand but what makes India so attractive it's not just the sheer economics of it but also the immense structural inequality between the clients and the circuits which can be extremely convenient for the clients during and after the contract period there's not too many places in the world where surrogates can be kept under constant surveillance fearing the nine months of their pregnancy without creating a lot of human rights records is a working-class Indian woman with no education with little understanding of the medical and legal procedures around surrogacy likely to fight for custody over the baby that she gave birth to for flying from California no and this is what makes India such an attractive destination when I started my fieldwork 10 years ago this industry was booming in pretty much a legal vacuum with minimal state interference and very few laws regulating the contract as a consequence Indian in the international parent the International parents were extremely happy and could actually get services which are banned in most parts of the world but this job started changing in 2013 when the government decided that they want to restrict the option of surrogacy to only married clients so in 2013 they decided that gay so the gay surrogacy market is huge and it generates billions of dollars because the only way gay men can have a genetic baby is by using a gestational surrogate but if the Indian government decided to ban gay surrogacy and that's when the banning started and in 2015-2016 it decided to ban surrogacy for all international clients irrespective of their sexuality but I want to keep the discussion about the legal changes or the legal chaos for later let me stick to what was the feel like while I was writing this book and I can talk more much more in the Q&A the biggest attraction for clients is the hostel where women can be under the surveillance of hostel matrons and doctor and I also interviewed there for over nine months and the doctor did not fight me but the circuits in some sense adopted me at that time I was unmarried I didn't have any children so in their view I was there Junior so they adopted me as their little sister so I live in the hostel I played with them during their prey hours I cook for them I attended their compulsory English and computer classes then the beauty training classes that they used to have in the evening I do to the hostel again in 2016 2015 and 2016 and then again in 2017 and this is some form of circuits I organized some participial tree lines even generating workshops for them and multimedia doctrine wrong are the see we were talking about major in India it's based on these participate feel like they were generating workshops plus my research and I won't have time to talk much about it but it's being touring all over the world [Music] and income of about 600 grand per month and if you compare that to the poverty line in India more than half of them were below the poverty line so undoubtedly most of them were doing this out of share financial desperation 50 % of them were hired by Indians in India the other 50% were hired either by non-resident Indian so Indians in the Diaspora or just people from across the world again I can talk more about the fields the topography in the Q&A of their questions about caste and such but let me move on to the ethnographic findings so the fundamental difference between state policies regarding birth control and reproduction in your America and in India is that unlike in the euro where most women at least most white women historically had to struggle to get access to the most basic birth control methods in India the state forced it on them the Indian state became the first in the world to initiate an official population control program in 1952 and while unlike China because of its democratic status it had to have somewhat liberal front front in reality it has continued to promote only methods like sterilization and long term hormonal implants that diminish low-class women's power to choose and this is pretty much the case in South Africa as well but the injured population control program cannot be to discuss just as a nationalist agenda and cannot be understood without reference to the post-world War International population movement dominated by governments and public and private organization like us EAD oompah World Bank which promoted and funded fertility control programs in the global South in general this hegemonic antenatal it's propaganda portrays the fertile bodies of lower-class and black women in the global South as recklessly reproductive and to be blamed for their own poverty the narratives of the star gets revealed the state propaganda thirty-eight-year-old Basha is a mother of three children and as a surrogate for a couple from North India she recalls the many visits by the didi she calls for the didi but she's actually referring to the family planning loss who comes from the big cities and goes from village to village telling these women not to have too many babies so what Shah says I never used any contraceptives just regulated intercourse according to my monthly cycle but the TV would stop at her hugs and her visits and tell me to think about getting sterilization but why do you not get it she would say she showed me pictures of women with one daughter where the daughter and mother would be smiling she sometimes cold me and said that is why your condition is like this the more babies you have the poorer you get do you not understand that perhaps she's right the first two would have been happier supposes but now the tables have turned you see it's my fourth pregnancy this surrogate birth that will make my entire family happy so at some levels commercial surrogacy drives women like Varsha to think of their bodies as a possible source of Valium a valium historically denied by the state itself the money earned through surrogacy often becomes a source of great pride and an indicator of their productivity the Polly is the 24 year old surrogate for a couple from Cape Town South Africa and she's a divorcee with three children who lives with her brother she wants to use the money to buy herself a plot of land so that she can become self-sufficient and she says when I came here the first time I told dr. Madame that I'm ready for all kinds of treatments injections medicines I suffered the pain and reading I almost got paralysis twice because of the side effects of the medicines but I'm not complaining about the pain I worried I cried and I complained when my husband used to beat me up in front of the children that pain is something you do not want this kind of pain to the body I am willing to take it will not be wasted it will give me enough money to make me self-sufficient so in the women's narratives having control over their reproductive lives and bodies is about being able to use their body for work and using the money productively simultaneously it's also about negotiating reproductive decisions with their husbands in order to get involved in service II with you as a 30 year old forget for a couple from Toronto Canada she has repeatedly been told about sterilization by Family Planning nurses much like Parvati was but she has been postponing the operation she says because I have two daughters and one son my husband wanted one more son so we decided it must have been God's wish that I do this by that she means become a surrogate if I got the operation done I would have missed this chance to earn money for my children but now that I'm successfully pregnant I don't think I will try for another son anymore I know my husband wants a son very badly but I'm going to try and convince him if I have a baby of my own I will lose the chance to become a surrogate again I want to conserve my body and say my next pregnancy for surrogacy doctor madam does not want surrogates who have more than three babies of their own so you can see what's happening here but they a sponsor realization and not listen to the didi third wife because her husband wants another son now in order to become a surrogate she's willing to forego having that son started upside the pallium Vidya are ostensibly taking control over their bodies by engaging a surrogacy but while at one level these women might be foreseen to fulfill feminist ideals their life stories are not merely heroic Tian's of subversion the decisions they make about their own reproduction ironically conform to the hegemonic agenda of reducing the fertility of lower class women with DES not the only one to forego having her own child - in order for her to have a child for someone else today's circuit poverty is 36 and one of the oldest circuits in the clinic and she says when I came here the first time the doctor said I was too old to have a baby too old to donate eggs but I could try for surrogacy I underwent treatment injections vaginas only checkups the real life that I was pregnant with my own child we have just one child and we have always wanted one more but at that stage we needed the money more than a baby so I put in spam my own baby aborted Parvati's life decisions starkly highlight what feminist anthropologist sherry colin calls stratified reproduction power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce while others are disempowered surrogacy in india is undoubtedly one of the clearest manifestation of stratified reproduction but this label stratified reproduction seems a bit too benign it did not happen by chance or accident but is the consequence of conscious conscious national and global priorities that value the reproduction of only a certain race and class of women on the one hand government expenditure on public health infrastructure is shrinking and poor women are being subjected to population control targets and this is all across the group global South on the other hand Indian scientists are investing in new reproductive technologies new genetic technologies new this and that and the other and medical tourism and reproductive tourism is booming which is yet another paradox of the post liberalisation era and an explicit instance of what I have called neo eugenics in my book the new subtle form of eugenics whereby the new liberal notion of consumer choice justifies promotion of assisted reproductive services for the rich and at the same time by portraying poor people poor black people often in the global south as trains on the world's economy and environment justifies aggressive antenatal policies on this rather depressing note I want to move to the next paradox the surrogates construction of kinship types with the baby why Sanders he creates such intense anxiety is that it allows for the extension of the market into the so-called primus fear of reproduction intensely but of disposability do not go unchallenged calculations were frequently grounded in the domain of nature and genes very often with the patrilineal focus for instance the spatula workers can be seen in the motion of the seed versus the earth where the seed symbolizes the father's contribution and the field represents the role of the mother women I expect you to behave like earth as Mia receptacles of the male seed and give back the food preferably male children in India simultaneously in our understanding in Ayurveda in India semen so being the product of the farmer feed a child inherits the father's group the mother's blood thus becomes significant in not she defeated this identity so we should get that I keep one and didi can keep two after all it's my blood even if it's their genes and who knows whether at my age I'll be able to have more babies so poverty is very creatively interpreting blood tie to make claims on the baby of course she will not be allowed to keep the third baby but that's what she feels she can because she feels that she has a blood tie with the baby Sarika treviño makes a very similar game but pay attention to what she says apart from the blood type she so I I run into Raveena right after her second ultrasound which was to determine the sex of the baby and she says another genetic mother wanted a girl but I told her even before the ultrasound coming from me this would be a boy my first two children were boys this one will be two and see I was right it is a boy after all they just gave thanks but the blood all the sweat all the effort is mine of course it's going after me so she is using the not just the blood type but the substantial Thai a sweat of labour to establish ties with baby so the kinship ties that the scientists watched with the baby resists the hegemonic discourses that portray circuits as disposable and substitute the other kind of is former surrogate and she constantly talks about another woman from Canada from the United States as her sister and she believes that they have a relationship of which is based on mutual reciprocity she says and came in the eighth month for two months and she stayed with me we live together like a family what kind of in formalities are happening we have been in constant touch even after they left she brought me these earrings this time she says and she shows me her diamond and white gold earrings diksha also believes diksha another surrogate believes that her relationship with her client from japan is based on mutual respect and reciprocity and she says she says jessee's that's the Japanese mother came to visit me during the baby shower the foster matron routine he organizes a baby shower for the surrogates and Jesse showered me with gifts and gifted rupees 1500 for my children which is about it's been three years and today she the baby born out of surrogacy would have been three years old I wished Jesse in the morning on computer via Skype and this is a computer that Jesse has brought for me she says now I can email them using this and they send me pictures by email but these stories of Jesse and Divya and Raveena where the relationships of the stain across contract period are really rare and a matter of fact these are the only two women who are able to live their dream of sustaining the relationship beyond the contract almost all clients are very apprehensive that the surrogate might decide so they want to sever all ties right after the contract period very often when the woman is still recovering from her caesarean section they take the baby away I meets teach nature in 2011 and she recalls the delivery day very bitterly in two days ultimately I got a cesarean section unconscious with the baby away they didn't even show it show the baby to my husband the baby would have been three yesterday but I don't even know what she looks like I used to think they would invite us to America I used to think of her as a sister all of it went to waste forget an invitation they did not even call me to see if I'm dead or alive they just finished the business picked up the baby and left sergeant Mooney has a signature Mooney they delivered twins and she liked teacher is very bewildered by the change in her clients behavior she said it's my party was from America but they used to come here party by party she means clients but they used to come here and visit me often they would call me every day from America and come visit me every two months they even allowed me to breastfeed one of the babies they always said that when the baby grows up they would tell her about me about a second mother in India it's been over a year now she would have been one-year-old last week there have been no phone calls nothing I don't know what has gone wrong money seems surprised by the sudden severing of ties her relationship with her client was unusually friendly while she was carrying the baby but once she completed contract her reproduction became a classic example of alienated labor how clients honored the contract payda and appropriated the surplus so what do we make of this market for producing humans one option is of course to follow the paths that many countries have which is to form to have a formal bank that's an option but not a very effective one bands across the world have not stopped people from demanding genetic babies and with globalization clients continue to cross borders to make use of these technologies and they will cross borders to the countries where it's cheaper I believe that banning surrogacy in india will do two things either it will push the whole industry on the ground like it has done in china and what would that do it would reduce the very little rights that these women have right now imposing a blanket ban on surrogacy in india can do another thing it can't shift the whole koi business to another country in the global south again this is not mere speculation in 2013 when the government of india banned what's called gay surrogacy that is it did not allow any gay clients anymore into India what did that do it shifted the entire gay market to Thailand then Thailand bandit it shifted the woman in the whole industry to Nepal earthquake in Nepal exposed the industry the whole thing moves to Cambodia I have just got back from fieldwork in Phnom Penh in Cambodia and now I believe the government of Cambodia has also banned it and now it's moving to Laos and Kenya what does these kind of want do these kind of bands do it just shifts the morally restrictive morally sticky issue to another country in the global south so instead of restrictive laws like bans in all my talks and all my works I advocate for a carefully thought-out law that regulates the industry and protects the rights of the women workers gets themselves but I strongly believe that a complex and global issues like surrogacy just cannot be resolved by national laws a global issue like surrogacy needs a global dialogue and in collaboration with the nascent circus workers community in India about a year ago I proposed to the Hague an international law around international circus II much like International Adoption that is founded on openness and transparency on three fronts in the structure of payments which is essential in the medical process and your there's a lot of conversation required around what is consent what does consent mean doesn't merely mean a signature or for uneducated women what can it mean and in those relationships and this is very important transparency in the relationship sports within surrogacy and the large one is something which will make us rethink all our assumptions perhaps it's time we start paying close attention to relationships emerging in and through these new markets what Paul Rubino has called bio social relationships in a pursuit of anonymity and courtesy in preserving the involved in the supply chain the providers of essential emotional and bodily services are being made nameless faceless anonymous and for many of the circuits I interacted with real change implies not just an increase in payments but just as critically an affirmation of their dignity and appreciation of the complex and demanding nature of the service and labor provided by each individual circuit the desire that does not go to waste and that plans continue to respect the ties that they have for services even after the task is done and the human has been produced I would end by connecting my labor to the next book that I'm writing currently so since 2016 as I said commercial surrogacy has been banned by almost all countries in the global South including the doctor's clinic that I made my field home for over a decade but instead of closing the industry or my field the band became the reason to expand their industry and so my ex nog Rafi into a global one as cross-border commercial surrogacy is getting pushed around the world and has now become illegal everywhere else except in a few states especially California in the United States countries across the world are pushing and shoving and trying to devise ways to be part of this fertility industry and offer some service at the lowest cost possible and as a task of reproducing a baby is further divided into niche stages and outsource to various service providers across the world the egg providers come from certain hubs or nodes to the bill here's one one of the biggest one is Cape Town which is quite a cheater because eggs Kato mill women the embryos are being made in certain other hubs so wherever be the influence being made in Thailand in India but then they can be fused into the boons of Thai or Indian surveyors anymore because the countries have banned that so what happens then the embryos need to be shipped to another country where there are no guarantees yet countries like Kenya and Laos that's where they are waiting gestation yet for our sealing these embryos killing birth to the children who are then being formed back to California or wherever be so this is the fertility chain that I'm trying to piece together for my next book on global fertility flows and I'm going to talk about in this book the bio niches which are connecting the world in very unexpected ways so just like we had production chains we now have a reproduction chain just that the actors in the [Applause] question about the baby shower good one so it's a decided so emotionally fraught business but it's all about creating a mother worker in the hostel who would think of herself as the mother of the baby till there features is inside her she should think of the fetus as her own nourish it luggage like her own yet as soon as she is on the delivery table going through her c-section she should become a contractual worker and give up the baby right so there's a lot of disciplining that needs to happen so one of the things that the doctor and the matron keep doing is kind of balancing this mother work earnest of the woman and the baby shall all go through either his new version of the baby shower becomes very important and playing this game that it is not the baby is not for you to keep yet it should be more precious to you then even your own babies because of a variety of reasons one is going to help you change the life of your existing babies it's not your property yet it's growing inside you so your responsibilities are even more so the preciousness of the baby and the tenuous connection with the substitute mother is established in various ways and the baby shower or the golden eye becomes pivotal in managing this show of your mother and it happened routinely in the seventh month the surrogate mother would be given a beautiful sari plate full of sweets token money sometimes the intended parents if they were not too far would even come for the gold Mariah which was such a farce but anyhow and when so part of the play that when we shot the documentary what we step to the circus was why don't you take over as the director of this show and tell America what roles should play so what the solder gets decided so sweet I'm telling you the story because the baby shower is pivotal in their head as well because when they were asked to direct to play the row the work day the scenario that they created is a Hindu baby shower for me so I was pregnant at that time when I went into the field to shoot the documentary so they said they're gone are they going to throw a baby shower for me and during that interaction where they dressed me up brought me a sari and brought me sweets and got together some savings to give me the blessings of God so that my own pregnancy is successful there were lots of conversations about alienated labor how ironic it is that in my baby shower I get to keep the baby and in the earth I don't but the baby shower is pivotal and the doctor made sure that every single woman got it irrespective of whether she was a Hindu or Muslim or Christian your question about medical professionals okay so assisted reproduction fertility industry is huge in all parts of the world and the doctors in India one of the reasons why India and Thailand are so big is because a lot of these doctors get trained in the United States or Britain they kept the technology from abroad but then they set up in India at it in rupees which is quite cheap so what sells is what attracts people is their American education their American technology yet their Indian affect right but but then your question I think was hinting at something more than that so these doctors are very often not just doctors but they have huge investments in this industry so one of them it for my second book one of those key figures I'm following is Israeli couple and they are not doctors but now they are trained psychologists and they have invested a lot in this field right and they got a baby through surrogacy that's how they entered the market and now they become big investors and they are not a very atypical example a lot of people in this industry who have become investors were either clients at one point or they were doctors and they realized the enormous potential of this the other figure that I'm tracking is a woman from I won't name the place somewhere in Eastern Europe and she is huge in the queen of this fertility industry and she set up clinics all over the world but she started off by being a gynecologist should I okay so should I take these big questions right so I'm gonna start shy I'm gonna start the chase before I forget all right so yeah so I cannot not engage with another book in this and I to be to be honest with you I did not and is that much with it with her work in my book but now I i have supervised about 16 students from across the world were walking on surrogacy in india mexico israel and almost all of them i pushed to engage with Ahrens work because you absolutely right sheet there is a conversation going on here which needs to be paid attention to and your second question about the blood type and i'm not the only one to talk about how a lot of medical anthropologists have spoken about how in everyday lives people across cultures have challenged this connection that anthropologists had initially made between kinship and blood and blood being defined solely by genes and many ethnographic studies not around surrogacy of course but many are ethnographic studies whether in adoption in foster parenting in nannies amongst nannies they've talked about how substantial tiles become more important than genetic ties in everyday discourses and how we need to go ground up and take these discourses seriously what is interesting very interesting here is the that you've said in the beginning these are mostly uneducated women they are not tapping into Iowa de they are not stop that tapping into indigenous discourses what they are just trying to defend themselves but in doing so unintentionally they are challenging many things which analytically are performing but there's much to that as well but what I was trying to present it in the talk is the paradox of that that despite the on how you believe these are very challenging subversions but what does it do at the real level does it have any tangible effect of path if the baby still gets taken away they are still being treated as disposable so I think it's it's a loop of but but but and but question about criteria of selection yes I mean they are hostels they are not 3,000 hostels they're 3,000 Phoenix across in the offering services they are about 20-25 hostels in India and they all have a dome-like structure and when you enter it it does seem like a baby factory but the fact the reality is that the demand for service is way more than the supply it is an extremely stigmatized on understood service in India most people think surrogacy is like sex work they do not understand the reproductive technology part of it they think that the woman is going and sleeping with her Canadian all South African client and then having a baby for them so it's an extremely stigmatized occupation Bollywood does not help because almost all the movies that have been made around sorry to see they are three or four or somehow connect the circuit with sex work so the common understanding is that surrogacy is like prostitution in the words of local people in in India in many parts of India so a lot of women still need to be convinced to become surrogates that's why the recruitment system works often through these midwives these diets feed babies who go from village to village and kind of hint to people you can become an egg donor and on some money and when they come to the clinic the clinic nurses tell them you are only 300 runs by donating your eggs but if you become a surrogate you will earn 30,000 ones why don't you do that so this is how women are being recruited right and from villages across India so intensely recruitment is still required precisely because the demand for surrogates is more than the supply is there a criteria there is no psychological test I mean that is a dream if there was a cycle it is actually trying to assess whether they're fit they do her medical tests they do have all the required tests because that's required they cannot have a surrogate who has had genetic diseases or has extreme high history of anemia for instance or have had two cesarean sections already so they are definite medical requirements but otherwise it has to be a blood match and it's extremely informal as long as you're kind of healthy as long as you below the age of 45 and you're willing to sign into the contract you can become a surrogate how much do they get paid it varies from clinic to clinic because as I said there were there are no laws dictating how much the payment should be the contract is very informal it's mostly always written in English which none of the surrogates can read but the informal contract what I have learnt in the last 10 years if the maximum somebody has got is eight thousand dollars so how much of that around eighty thousand Rams yeah 120,000 rands that's the maximum that someone has got but that's for twins and that's from a very generous Canadian couple but as soon as I say generous I'm trying to point to you that is everything is informal it's almost like you are the whims are fancy of the client so the kraang can say I'll give you 20,000 rands cash and I'm value a motorcycle and magnify your husband the motorcycle so things like that have also happened so there is no set rate your question about c-sections yes 100 99 percent of the cases I actually was part of I've done my poverty even in the room where she conducts the c-section and I asked and I asked to talk to the same question why c-sections all across the world people are talking about natural births and how that's Capo for the mother for sure and better for the baby in many cases unless it's required and she says that three reasons she gives one is that it's convenient for the clients you can set a date if you're going to travel from Toronto it's fantastic if you know the date when your baby is coming a baby that you paid for second is that it's convenient for the clinic c-sections take 13 minutes natural birth can take two days so it's convenient for the doctor the third one is the most interesting to me she says she feels that the surrogate is more likely to get connected to have some connection with the baby if she gives birth vaginally so she believes that relationships would come through on labor laboring with the baby and that's something she wants to sever so she wants them to have a c-section so that they don't start finding a connection with the baby during the labor process so three reasons as to why she almost always make sure that circuits have c-sections and that's all across almost all the clinics have c-sections the baby is precious is what they say so at the first chance they got a mother I have written ban out here yes so at the moment as I said if you want if you are not if you are not the only place you can go and get any kind of there are in South Africa you can only hire the world and show me actually criminalization starts so if there are regulations like you cannot like Britain see it you cannot put any more than two Umbria at the same time so only doctor put in up to five because you see the chances that will fix is one is four so she feels that if I put in five but at least one perhaps one would be successful but I think about what that means so what does that mean this very often they are multiple pregnancies so the woman it has triplets and that's why your future reduction surgery is so common so you try your best as you can in a woman and then hey she's got pregnant with three what you do and you have reduction surgery complications because there's just no regulations around things like these which are banned we okay let's let's take it okay so let's take it in reverse order and let's take the most important question about husbands visiting at a certain time they are there just like in a hospital they are visiting us so their husbands have visiting us when they can come and visit those hours cannot be at night they're always in the morning sometimes the husbands are allowed to bring in the children as long as the children don't make too much noise so it's all very regulated the activities during the day are very regulated and husbands and children and family can visit only during certain hours okay so the question about disposability it's a very interesting question and ok so should I start empirically or yeah so forth so the women why do the circuits get into this why do the women want to get into surrogacy a couple of reasons when I asked them why they got into surrogacy of course it's the money they hope that the money that they make out of surrogacy would allow them to change their lives and the lives of their children so the desire is that they're rather forgettable disposable life would somehow completely change with this entrance into surrogacy business in almost all the cases that doesn't happen the money is actually too little for anything to change there was if a woman went in from being a maid to become a surrogate she came out and became a maid again the money is almost always because of the extensive kyndra's in India almost always the money taken away by the father-in-law who needed surgery the cousin whose funeral you needed to finance so many things happen you need to make up on the roof to your heart all the money goes you come back to becoming a surrogate yet you remain a maid so this dream that the lies would change did not happen it happened for me three women out of the 112 that I have interacted with extensively over the past ten years three women have been actually been able to live this desire of changing their lives through surrogacy but they also get in with another dream that a lot of them are not just means a lot of them are textile factory workers so they are used to putting bottles after bottles in our chain on shirts a completely disposable dispensable task and here are they are for the first time producing a baby for keeps for someone and that may be something that they know is very precious for the person that they give in to and that is another thing that when when I tried to so-called forge a union of surrogates that's the thing that we kept talking about how they Gordon to start we see the second time not the first time the first time we get in because they want the money a lot of them came in the second time because they felt like this was something which was worth while they were bringing out they were producing a baby not a church not a button not a bangle so for them it was a not not just not just the money but the the product was something which was far more worthwhile and hence the kind of indignity of it all that they are still forgotten the relationships are not sustained they don't get to see the baby after one year they all think we will get a ticket to California they'll call me on the my son's birthday this never happens so I think it's it's combining what you're saying I mean it's it's it's resonating with what you saying they think that this will make them less disposable but the irony is that it makes them even more disposable it need performs to them that whatever happens they are disposable in the bigger scheme of things question about East Asian I that's a good good point to point out that you can't always make these kind of contrast between the global south and global not there are many connections within the global south and global North East Asia has an interesting one I don't talk about in East Asia at all in my book but for my second book it's a lot of a lot of the clans come from East Asia the critics that I'm studying now in Cambodia Bangladesh loves Winston's a lot of the clients are coming from East Asia so I'm beginning to engage with East Asian clients for the first time and it's interesting that you bring that up because a lot of them are travelling precisely because of some reference so I don't know if at most any of you know that in India for instance some preference is so high that in now the state the government has passed a law which states that you cannot even go for an ultrasound to know the sex of the baby as soon as you know that it's a girl you might kill it you might get an abortion but in fact a very initial stage of you choose only the chromosomes that potentially the male embryos into either the intended mother's womb or so you not innocence you not viable you're not breaking any laws because you're making sure that you have done before even conception and my interest is masculinity so I did pay a lot of attention to what it does to their understanding of their role and because the in the city explain to you about what you did in where very often what I would do I would travel not very often but sometimes what I did was I traveled with the husband and child back to the village to see what was happening back home and the moment were in the hostel in many cases the husband had no idea what to do at home they had never taken care of household chores and they were suddenly pushed into it so the mother in-laws came in sometimes the clients paid some extra money for the husband to have a maid in the village because he just did not know what to do but in other cases and this is the wives you used to tell me very proudly that my husband now knows how to start the choo-choo lies the informal stove see now he now knows how to start a stove he now knows how to warm up milk for the child so there were certain things that they had they were there was only one instance where a marriage broke up post surrogacy because the husband just could not deal with the fact that the woman had turned back with savings in the bank become more than he had ever earned but in almost all the cases the women over compensated for the cost masculinity by giving almost and high money through the men rostered wife the hostel even there if the hostel you know if I was playing playing for you right now I would answer in character the doctor and she would say to you of course the hostel is not even a hostel it's a five-star hotel where every woman's fancy of the surrogates is being taken care of she wants an ice cream I'll get you an ice cream she'll get coconut water and it is true once all the surrogates did talk to me about the sheer boredom the shipment the energy the madness of staying within bars yet this is the first time I can really put up my future relax otherwise you're in my real pregnancies I was walking in the field I was doing all the household chores I was forced to have sex with my husband so many things so that there's no kind of one way of telling the story the doctor made sure that the women really were very well looked after in terms of diet and nutrition because she had to a lot of these women had previously been anemic were very underweight and she didn't want them to be good healthy carriers of the very precious white babies right so there was a lot of emphasis on nutrition there was a lot of emphasis on medicalization they got vitamins all kinds of injections everything possible because if if it was only about nutrition give her a package full of all the vitamins and let her go mate she's an adult she'll take care of the baby but it's about surveillance and hence even for the women who wanted to go home they were not allowed to in most cases the women did not want to go home because they could relax and they could be there for the money yeah so a lot of them actually so I'm thinking about the c-section as soon as you talk about technology I'm thinking about the c-section and even the c-section the women talk about and in not just in ways of it's being imposed on me because as soon as you talk about the c-section the women would say to you you know there are so many women in our village even if they are dying they cannot access a c-section and see I have a scar I got a c-section scar is being celebrated so in a lot of ways that it's a it's a very interesting twist that's tech new technologies this hyper medicalization it is not just about it being imposed because of the bare life in some sense it becomes their only way of accessing yes yes true because they are giving birth to a baby that's white and will go to a richer class or nation for sure but this is the first time they can even access get a taste of what it's like to be in the private sector to be in a hotel to interact with a white woman so many things they say at the end and the Sun is constantly reiterate that it's not bad they hope that this would open up become a passport when you would but even if it doesn't it opens up a tiny window through which we can see what the other world looks like [Applause]