Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India by Daisy Deomampo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India by Daisy Deomampo Kim Gutschow Daisy Deomampo, Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 288 pp. Transnational Reproduction provides an insightful account of how the surrogacy industry in India reinforces social hierarchies that minimize the power of surrogates despite the best intentions of those involved in the process. The book offers a compelling view of how surrogacy reifies a stratified reproduction that is produced by the practices that bind intended parents, doctors, surrogates, and surrogacy brokers to each other. Deomampo's analysis stands out for its frank assessment of how race and class structure and stratify the practices of surrogacy. Her text starkly delineates the processes of stratified reproduction that allow agents to assert their agendas, often at the expense of other actors. The introduction clearly states that object of analysis is not "Indian surrogacy," but rather an emergent social formation that takes into account the social imaginaries of global actors who are linked "at particular geographic, historical, and technological junctures" (8). This is an ambitious proposal and the book largely succeeds in its quest. Deomampo's introduction lays out the theoretical premise before describing her methods, her fieldwork sites, and informants, who are further summarized in the Appendix. The ethnography is based on fieldwork conducted at 4 different clinics in India between 2008–2010, with a few follow-up interviews in 2011 and 2014. Deomampo's informants included 21 clinic doctors, 45 Indian women who were surrogates and/or egg donors, and 49 intended parents--39 of whom were engaged in surrogacy and 10 in In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Half of the intended parents engaged in surrogacy Deomampo interviewed--19 out of 39 parents--were gay. This [End Page 829] is a greater percentage of gay informants than reported in other studies of surrogacy, and Deomampo briefly addresses how the preponderance of gay men in her sample may have influenced the orientalist and racist assumptions she describes in later chapters; yet she does not fully elaborate on how the demographics of her sample otherwise shaped her findings. Chapter 1 provides a brief history of public health in India and charts the relationship between population control programs and artificial reproductive technology. Deomampo neatly delineates the irony behind the Indian government's paradoxically opposed approaches to fertility—one seeking to limit fertility through aggressive family planning including widespread sterilization campaigns, and the other seeking to treat infertility by promoting ARTs (Assisted Reproductive Technologies) in India and marketing Indian surrogacy centers across to transnational audiences across the globe. This chapter briefly explores the stages of surrogacy regulation in India after 2000, but does not address the introduction of the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill of 2016, which was still being reviewed by the Indian Parliament in May of 2018. If this bill becomes law, commercial surrogacy will be banned and only altruistic surrogacy permitted for married, heterosexual Indian couples who have a history of infertility, with surrogates receiving medical reimbursement for their services. Deomampo does not describe the bill that effectively bans surrogacy for foreign nationals, NRIs (Non-Resident Indians), and PIOs (Persons of Indian Origin) and explicitly prevents single or LGBT parents from pursuing surrogacy. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explicitly chart the orientalist, racist, and nationalist imaginaries produced by intended parents seeking surrogates and egg donors in India. Deomampo does an excellent job of describing the innate othering processes of surrogacy that pitches the interests of intended parents and clinic doctors against surrogates, whose power and agency is most circumscribed. Deomampo carefully details the multiple ways her informants downplay as well as gesture towards the very commodification of pregnancy and wombs in which they are engaged. Each of the characters she describes—intended parents, clinic doctors, and surrogates—strives to help create a healthy baby while eliding the power inequities that bind them to one another. Deomampo is most successful when exposing how her informants can deny the very racism or exploitation they pursue. Yet one wishes she had analyzed her informants' statements on class or caste as closely as she pursues the concept of race. Early in Chapter 2, Deomampo summarizes...