Speaking of Solidarity: Transnational Gestational Surrogacy and the Rhetorics of Reproductive (In)Justice

We were able to come together, she and I, and give each other a life that neither of us could achieve on our own.

Jennifer, US American intended mother¹

Who would choose to do this? I have had a lifetime’s worth of injections pumped into me … This is not work, this is majboori [a compulsion]. … It’s just something we have to do to survive.

Salma, Indian surrogate mother²

Women around the world are helping other women. I just think that’s beautiful. I think that’s a beautiful thing.

Oprah Winfrey³

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the possibilities of feminist solidarity and reproductive justice in the midst of shifting technological terrains ask of us a bit more critical discernment, imagination, and will. Enabled by innovations in assisted reproduction and on the rise within and across borders, transnational gestational surrogacy resides at the nexus of complex and pressing feminist concerns regarding technology, globalization, flows of capital and labor, reproductive “choice,” and justice. Scholars and activists alike have rigorously engaged questions concerning surrogacy from a variety of critical perspectives, debating women’s agency within broader systems of power and attending to the structural conditions that shape globalized commercial markets in bodies, babies, and reproductive labor.⁴ Building on scholarship that interrogates contemporary commercial surrogacy from reproductive justice perspectives, this project traces rhetorical practices within popular US discourses that obscure reproductive injustice and constrain possibilities for feminist solidarity across borders of race, class, and nation.

More specifically, analyzing a range of popular texts as artifacts, I argue that transnational gestational surrogacy is rhetorically constructed in the United States as a form of “global sisterhood” and situated squarely within dominant logics of choice and altruism. The rhetoric of “global sisterhood” highlights the intended mother’s struggle with infertility at length; characterizes US surrogate mothers as selfless and patriotic; and sensationalizes the conditions of surrogacy in India, positioning it as a solution to, rather than a symptom of, profound social and economic injustice under systems of global capital.⁵ While choice and altruism do little to engage, let alone challenge, the conditions under which commercial surrogacy contracts are made possible, a focus on reproductive justice renders social and economic injustices visible and thus vulnerable to intervention. In lieu of reducing reproductive rights to privacy or simply an absence of government intrusion, reproductive justice

recognize[s] that the control, regulation, and stigmatization of female fertility, bodies, and sexuality are connected to the regulation of communities that are themselves based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality. … [It] emphasizes the relationship of reproductive rights to human rights and economic justice.⁶

Rooted in the lived experiences and organizing strategies of women of the global South and women of color of the global North, reproductive justice simultaneously accounts for “the ways individual women negotiate the risks, barriers, and opportunities associated with surrogacy work,” while offering “a theory, strategy and practice for organizing against … multiple, interlocking reproductive violences.”⁷ In short, it offers a vital framework for assessing what choice and altruism ignore—the structural conditions and constraints of commercial reproduction across borders.⁸

This larger project of reproductive justice hinges on a capacity to disrupt communicative practices that both authorize and mask various inequities under global capital. Rhetorical criticism is particularly well suited for this task, insofar as it illuminates public communicative acts as world making and offers critical models for “understanding, evaluating, and intervening in a broad range of human activities.”⁹ The rhetorical dimensions of transnational gestational surrogacy, however, have received less scholarly attention than its legal, ethical, structural, or ethnographic counterparts. In the self-monikered—and frighteningly apropos—“Wild West” of assisted reproduction, scientific innovation is often credited with producing profound social and cultural change, such as the proliferation of individual “choices” or the productive troubling of traditional notions of kin. This is undeniably part of the story. But rhetoric matters to such transformations, and deeply so.¹⁰ As innovation disrupts normative or familiar ways of being in the world, rhetorical acts, and broader [End...