Breeders: A Subclass of Women? Directed by Jennifer Lahl and Matthew Eppinette (review)

When Louise Brown was born in 1978, the joyous occasion of her birth was met with more than a little handwringing and consternation about this new way of making babies. Some of the hyperventilating resulted from mere hyperbole: calling the little bundle of joy a “test tube baby” was both scientifically inaccurate and provocative, conjuring images of a dystopian future where babies would be grown in factories, manufactured to order. Millions of babies later, many of the initial fears about in vitro fertilization (IVF) proved more science fiction than science fact. The babies born through IVF are, for all intents and purposes, just like everyone else. Our speculations about what could go wrong and where the technology might lead were, as often is the case, limited by our anxieties, by fears of the unfamiliar, and by a lack of imagination. The unfamiliar soon became commonplace. It took little time for an enormous and lucrative industry to grow up around IVF, promising babies to the infertile, and potentially liberating women from the ticking clocks of their biology by offering a way to postpone childbearing. But the social changes wrought by IVF have in some ways been more insidious than those envisioned by early critics armed with their dog-eared copies of Brave New World. One of those scarcely imagined possibilities was gestational surrogacy, the employment of women who gestate and give birth to babies genetically unrelated to themselves, and who then deliver those children to others.

Breeders: A Subclass of Women?, a documentary film produced by the conservative Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, looks at gestational surrogacy from the largely neglected perspective of the women who become surrogates. It seeks to counteract the overwhelmingly positive image of surrogacy as promoted by the fertility industry—an image that emphasizes the family-building aspects of surrogacy. Agencies that recruit women as surrogates stress the positive and altruistic aspects of being a surrogate, seeking women, for example, who “enjoy being pregnant” and want “an opportunity to feel special,” who want to experience “the sheer joy of making a memorable difference in someone’slife,” and who have “empathy for childless couples” (Center for Surrogate Parenting 2014). Surrogacy is referred to as a “gift,” and even “the greatest gift humanly possible” (Circle Surrogacy 2014). There is a less rosy flip side, of course, in which the gestational surrogate (or “carrier” as she is sometimes called) is depicted in less than human terms as the “recipient” who “can be obtained from a surrogacy agency” (USC Fertility 2014).

While media stories about contested surrogacies often focus on the distraught, would-be parents of children delivered by surrogates, Breeders emphasizes the toll on women for whom carrying someone else’s child turns into a wrenching, heartbreaking experience of loss. It tells the stories of four women who became surrogates for different reasons. Heather, a young mother inspired by altruism and financial need, sees surrogacy as a way to help another family and to stay at home with her own children. Tanya, another young mother, found pregnancy easy, and thought serving as a surrogate for a gay couple would make separation from the child easier for herself. Gail was pressured by her brother and his same-sex partner to be both an egg donor and a surrogate. Cindy’s story is, in many ways, the strangest: she was duped by a friend who promised a kind of unconventional coparenting relationship when what he really wanted—and got—was a surrogate. Cindy is also visibly pregnant in the film, although the circumstances of that pregnancy are not explained. Is she, after all she went through before, a surrogate again?

These women all share in common a certain naïveté, an apparent tendency for wishful thinking that makes them poignantly vulnerable. They also have in common deep regrets about their experiences, about the pregnancies and babies lost, about their unanticipated sacrifices and unreciprocated altruism, and...