Revisiting surrogacy in India: domino effects of the ban

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I use a multi-scalar approach to understand the full repercussions of a national ban on the transnational practice of surrogacy in India. I use my ethnographic findings to analyse the effects of the ban on the local and the national. At the level of the local I revisit a surrogacy clinic and hostel in India, after a decade of my first ethnographic research, to argue that despite the legal upheavals, not much had changed for the gestational mothers themselves. The rigid discipline structure and the ambiguities around contract, payment, and post-natal care remain intact. There is, however, a noticeable dissipation in the gestational mothers’ demands for change in part due to a management’s strategy of manufacturing consent and loyalty. At the national level as India moves from specializing in babies ‘Made in India’ to ‘Make in India’, its role in the reproductive assembly line is transformed, with repercussions for gestational mothers. In the concluding remarks, I propose an alternative to the current debates by offering surrogacy as a praxis for opening up discussions about feminisms and transnational feminisms.