Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy by Laura Harrison (review)

Does the race of the woman who gives birth to a non-genetically related child matter? It does in a society built on white privilege and underpinned by gender inequality. Gestational surrogacy involves a woman who bears a child for another individual or couple (intended parent[s]) using IVF, an assisted reproductive technology (ART) that creates an embryo through the fertilization of sperm and egg, acquired from donor(s) or the intended parent(s), that is then transferred into another woman's uterus. When gestational surrogacy is cross-racial, the gestational carrier is a different race than the intended parent(s), and usually a different socioeconomic class as well. Surrogacy is a multibillion-dollar global industry (Deonandan 2015) involving legal contracts for services, babies, adoption, people who want a child, surrogates who already have children of their own, and sometimes donor gametes. There is no comprehensive federal legislation to guide or structure the creation of embryos, the cost of surrogacy services, the transfer of the baby from surrogate to intended parents, and what constitutes "parent" status. Hence the focus of Laura Harrison's book Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics of Cross-Racial Surrogacy (2016) on gender, race, class, kinship, and power in a sociological examination of these issues.

Surrogacy is not cheap or common. Americans contract surrogates here and also around the world, most commonly in India. The overall cost for surrogacy using an agency can range in the United States from $98,000 to $140,000 (ConceiveAbilities 2016), while in India the costs decrease to about $40,000 (Deonandan 2016). These estimates include the approximately $20,000 paid to a US surrogate, compared with $6,000 for an average Indian surrogate (Deonandan 2015). The 481 babies born through surrogacy in 2006 (Gugcheva 2010) represented 0.001 percent of total births in the United States, compared to the 4,265,996 total births (Hamilton et al. 2006). While the incidence of cross-racial gestational surrogacy is not officially tracked, anthropological estimates suggest that 30 percent of gestational arrangements before 2000 could be categorized as such (p. 8).

Despite the infinitesimal impact of surrogacy on society, Harrison's book adeptly translates her findings into broader social and cultural implications. She argues that examining cross-racial gestational surrogacy is relevant to indicate trends in hegemonic ideologies of gender, class, race, kinship, and politics. She uses media content analysis, historical examination of race in relation to reproductive labor, analysis of court cases and existing legislation, and content analysis of websites where surrogacy and ARTs are facilitated. She delves into feminism, the social construction of surrogates as altruistic, naturalization of ARTs creating nuclear families, the tenuousness of kinship constructions within surrogacy, and the lack of ARTs regulation, critically framing them as discursive constructions of surrogacy used to shore up hegemonic ideologies about race, class, gender, kinship, and reproductive rights. Her timely book examines the current social issues of gay marriage, fetal personhood, globalization, legislative dearth in reproductive rights and ARTs, and gender, race, and class inequalities through the lens of surrogacy. This methodological interdisciplinarity lends itself well to the in-depth analysis Harrison employs of the ways the naturalization of beliefs surrounding race, class, and gender manifest in cross-racial surrogacy in the United States support white privilege and class dominance.

Racism and white privilege are prevalent in American society, so it should not be surprising that race is employed as a mechanism of inequality in surrogacy. Racism is about power, and whiteness has hegemonic power in ARTs and cross-racial surrogacy. Harrison's precise explanation of the geneticization of race by donor agencies and surrogacy agencies is one of the best I have read. It clearly lays out the ways phenotype and genotype are conflated through popular discourse applying to gametes, seamlessly facilitating an association between a white donor, an assumption of white genes in the gametes, and therefore white offspring. Harrison says that race...