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The American Journal of Bioethics Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uajb20
The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy: Or Why Are We Quibbling Over This? Barbara Katz Rothman
a
a
City University of New York Published online: 25 Apr 2014.
Click for updates To cite this article: Barbara Katz Rothman (2014) The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy: Or Why Are We Quibbling Over This?, The American Journal of Bioethics, 14:5, 36-37, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2014.894820 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2014.894820
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
The American Journal of Bioethics
woman engages in surrogacy for financial gain or for a humanistic goal of helping a fellow human being, a suitable and heuristic framework must be established to protect all parties involved without extinguishing the cooperation of the surrogate and the hopes and dreams of the expectant couple.
Loike, J., and R. L. Fischbach. 2013. New Ethical Horizons in Gestational Surrogacy, J IVF Reprod Med Genet 1: 109. doi:10.4172/jfiv.1000109 Klonisch, T., and R. Drouin. 2009. Fetal-maternal exchange of multipotent stem/progenitor cells: microchimerism in diagnosis and disease. Trends in Molecular Medicine 15: 510–518.
REFERENCES Isoda, T., A. M. Ford, D. Tomizawa, et al. 2009. Immunologically silent cancer clone transmission from mother to offspring. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106: 17882–17885.
Downloaded by [University of South Dakota] at 17:04 09 April 2015
Lillycrop, K. A., and G. C. Burdge. 2012. Epigenetic mechanisms linking early nutrition to long term health. Best Pract Res Clin Endocrinol Metab., 26(5):667–76.
Williams, Z., D. Zepf, J. Longtine, et al. 2009. Foreign fetal cells persist in the maternal circulation. Fertil Steril 91: 2593–2595.
Kirby, J. 2014. Transnational gestational surrogacy: Does it have to be exploitative? American Journal of Bioethics 14(5): 24–32.
van Dijk, M., and C. Oudejans. 2013. (Epi)genetics of pregnancyassociated diseases. Front Genet. 2013 Sep 10;4:180. eCollection 2013.
Lepez, T., M. Vandewoestyne, and D. Deforce. 2012. Fetal microchimeric cells in blood and thyroid glands of women with an autoimmune thyroid disease. Chimerism 3: 21–23.
Ye, Y., B. van Zyl, H. Varsani, et al. 2012. Maternal microchimerism in muscle biopsies from children with juvenile dermatomyositis. Rheumatology (Oxford) 51: 987–991.
The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy: Or Why Are We Quibbling Over This? Barbara Katz Rothman, City University of New York It probably is possible to envision circumstances in which wealthy people using surrogacy services from poor countries would not be “exploitative,” especially if we narrow our definition enough, as this author has. I could do the same if I took the question of wealthy people buying babies or buying organs from poor countries. I tend to think that this journal would not have accepted the first for publication but would entertain the second. Baby selling crosses a line. That said, I would like to explore briefly what makes surrogacy understood as more like buying an organ and less like buying a baby, when the object of transfer is so clearly a baby. The answer lies in the historical legacy of patriarchy, which values “seed” (now understood as egg as well as sperm) over relationships, including all other aspects of the maternal relationship, as the meaningful essence of the human. We can claim a baby is not being sold, because we think the baby existed at the moment of zygotic zero, when the nucleus of the first cell was formed. Ownership resides with those who produced (or indeed in these days simply purchased) the genetic material. The baby is the product of their union. The woman in whom that embryo is implanted is reduced to mere space, a body part. Failing to see and
to respect human relationships is inherently wrong and destructive of humanity. Pregnancy exists as an intimate physical, psychological, and social relationship. A bond has been formed. Mothers feel their babies’ movements, but the relationship is yet more intimate: Blood is mingled, the fluids of life are mixed. Fetal cells are in maternal circulation; maternal muscle and blood hold and nurture the forthcoming child. Women’s wombs don’t walk around separate from the woman. To be pregnant is a whole-body experience, as intimate a connection as one human being can have with another. Like prostitution, it is an intimate physical relationship, but unlike the brief contact of a sexual encounter, this goes on for months and months. And the relationship is not with the paying customer, but with the created baby. At birth, babies recognize their mother’s voices, respond to words and sounds that they became familiar with during pregnancy. In pregnancy, babies are living in the rhythms of the mother’s day—newborns, for example, tend to wake up at what was the pregnant women’s busiest times of the day. This is not a “surrogate” relationship, but an actual lived one. The idea of surrogacy draws deeply on a traditional patriarchal understanding of familial relationships. Societies
Address correspondence to Barbara Katz Rothman, Sociology, CUNY Graduate School, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10036, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
36 ajob
May, Volume 14, Number 5, 2014
Downloaded by [University of South Dakota] at 17:04 09 April 2015
Transnational Gestational Surrogacy
that are matrilineal could make no sense of surrogacy: People are related when they can trace their way back to a common womb. In a patriarchal society, familial/kin relationships require a common seed. Seed was once understood to be entirely the product of men, and children simply implanted by men in the bodies of women. The homunculus, the little child curled up in the head of the sperm, seemed to be there for early scientists to see with their new microscopes. We have gone beyond that. And yet we return directly to it with the idea of surrogacy. We now acknowledge, recognize, and even celebrate the seeds of women. In our modern systems, we have extended the patriarchal privilege to women. Children are, we are told, half his and half hers, comprised equally of father’s and mother’s nuclear genetic contribution. If that is true, babies might as well grow in the backyard. Or in any convenient hired belly. Or outsourced to India. With this understanding of kin, of who is and who is not “really” related, wombs and pregnancies are meaningless. Yes, some women can apparently now become fathers: place their seed in a woman’s body and have a baby “delivered” to them. And they can do that in a loving relationship, as a lesbian couple might do, or as sisters, cousins, dear friends might if they share egg and pregnancy. Or they can do that as slave owners did when they implanted their seed into their property to increase their slave holdings. Or they can do that in this new, outsourced way, in which they do not own the woman’s body but rent it, with—as Marx pointed out is the problem with forgoing ownership—no ongoing relationship, no tie but money. And yes, in this brave new world, empowerment for women in poverty can mean selling these services, can mean prostitution, can mean selling organs. It truly can be better to do these things than not. As it could truly be better for a woman in Auschwitz to give sexual services to a guard in exchange for another bit of gruel. The problem lies not with the woman making the “choice,” but with the situation. We of the wealthy world profit from the exploitation of poor women, men, and children with almost every shirt we put on our backs, almost every bite of food we take. We exploit people in poverty and never have to think about it. And now we can profit in our motherhood—but unlike the shirt and the food, this time the product is going to grow up and demand an explanation. These are loved and wanted children. They will get a good explanation. The risks of surrogacy are less to them than they are to all women who would be mothers. Surro-
May, Volume 14, Number 5, 2014
gacy is so very dangerous to the motherhood and personhood of all women, not just the very few women who serve as surrogates. If any pregnant woman is not necessarily, inherently, legally, morally, and obviously the mother of the baby in her belly, then no woman can stand firm before law and the state in her motherhood. We can be but half-owners of the babies within. Not only in surrogacy, but in other arenas of our culture and our commerce (if indeed there is a difference), pregnancy is more and more reduced to housing, to a site. As a culture develops its technology, that technology then acts back to reinforce the culture. We conceptualized pregnancy as a condition of “carrying,” of “hosting,” of being inhabited by someone else’s child, traditionally understood as a man’s child in the body of the woman. And then we developed technologies that grew out of that idea—technologies that enabled us to see past the mother, to find the baby within, to wave at the little fetus, send its photos around on Facebook, track its growth, test its genes and development. And then, in turn, that technology acts back on us, reinforcing the idea that the mother is just a place, a location, a bit of awkward geography separating the baby from the rest of us. Once that feels so real to people, once that baby is named, its cute little clothes waiting on the dresser in the baby’s room where the pink or blue curtains are hung, it seems almost irrelevant just where that pregnant belly is. Is it in the big bedroom down the hall? Or in an anonymous belly in India? The baby is constructed independent of pregnancy, its medical records intact, its photos on the fridge and e-mailed to grandma. In the early days of commercial surrogacy, a broker explained to me that the woman was not selling a baby, she was simply returning the baby to the father. Babies, to him, preexisted in sperm. Without that patriarchal legacy, the sale of a baby by its birth mother, brokered by international businesses, would be understood as the trafficking of babies. And such it is. Surrogacy is inherently wrong and destructive of the humanity of those most intimately involved. It requires us to close our eyes to the relationship between the baby and the woman who bears the baby, asks us not to see the humanity of the woman herself, nor the social relationships in which she and that baby are both embedded and engaged. Surrogacy is the selling of a baby by its mother. Even if everybody enters into that activity with full information and total willingness to engage, bioethicists should not spend their time quibbling over the question of a narrow definition of exploitation.
ajob 37
The American Journal of Bioethics Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uajb20
The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy: Or Why Are We Quibbling Over This? Barbara Katz Rothman
a
a
City University of New York Published online: 25 Apr 2014.
Click for updates To cite this article: Barbara Katz Rothman (2014) The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy: Or Why Are We Quibbling Over This?, The American Journal of Bioethics, 14:5, 36-37, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2014.894820 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2014.894820
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
The American Journal of Bioethics
woman engages in surrogacy for financial gain or for a humanistic goal of helping a fellow human being, a suitable and heuristic framework must be established to protect all parties involved without extinguishing the cooperation of the surrogate and the hopes and dreams of the expectant couple.
Loike, J., and R. L. Fischbach. 2013. New Ethical Horizons in Gestational Surrogacy, J IVF Reprod Med Genet 1: 109. doi:10.4172/jfiv.1000109 Klonisch, T., and R. Drouin. 2009. Fetal-maternal exchange of multipotent stem/progenitor cells: microchimerism in diagnosis and disease. Trends in Molecular Medicine 15: 510–518.
REFERENCES Isoda, T., A. M. Ford, D. Tomizawa, et al. 2009. Immunologically silent cancer clone transmission from mother to offspring. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106: 17882–17885.
Downloaded by [University of South Dakota] at 17:04 09 April 2015
Lillycrop, K. A., and G. C. Burdge. 2012. Epigenetic mechanisms linking early nutrition to long term health. Best Pract Res Clin Endocrinol Metab., 26(5):667–76.
Williams, Z., D. Zepf, J. Longtine, et al. 2009. Foreign fetal cells persist in the maternal circulation. Fertil Steril 91: 2593–2595.
Kirby, J. 2014. Transnational gestational surrogacy: Does it have to be exploitative? American Journal of Bioethics 14(5): 24–32.
van Dijk, M., and C. Oudejans. 2013. (Epi)genetics of pregnancyassociated diseases. Front Genet. 2013 Sep 10;4:180. eCollection 2013.
Lepez, T., M. Vandewoestyne, and D. Deforce. 2012. Fetal microchimeric cells in blood and thyroid glands of women with an autoimmune thyroid disease. Chimerism 3: 21–23.
Ye, Y., B. van Zyl, H. Varsani, et al. 2012. Maternal microchimerism in muscle biopsies from children with juvenile dermatomyositis. Rheumatology (Oxford) 51: 987–991.
The Legacy of Patriarchy as Context for Surrogacy: Or Why Are We Quibbling Over This? Barbara Katz Rothman, City University of New York It probably is possible to envision circumstances in which wealthy people using surrogacy services from poor countries would not be “exploitative,” especially if we narrow our definition enough, as this author has. I could do the same if I took the question of wealthy people buying babies or buying organs from poor countries. I tend to think that this journal would not have accepted the first for publication but would entertain the second. Baby selling crosses a line. That said, I would like to explore briefly what makes surrogacy understood as more like buying an organ and less like buying a baby, when the object of transfer is so clearly a baby. The answer lies in the historical legacy of patriarchy, which values “seed” (now understood as egg as well as sperm) over relationships, including all other aspects of the maternal relationship, as the meaningful essence of the human. We can claim a baby is not being sold, because we think the baby existed at the moment of zygotic zero, when the nucleus of the first cell was formed. Ownership resides with those who produced (or indeed in these days simply purchased) the genetic material. The baby is the product of their union. The woman in whom that embryo is implanted is reduced to mere space, a body part. Failing to see and
to respect human relationships is inherently wrong and destructive of humanity. Pregnancy exists as an intimate physical, psychological, and social relationship. A bond has been formed. Mothers feel their babies’ movements, but the relationship is yet more intimate: Blood is mingled, the fluids of life are mixed. Fetal cells are in maternal circulation; maternal muscle and blood hold and nurture the forthcoming child. Women’s wombs don’t walk around separate from the woman. To be pregnant is a whole-body experience, as intimate a connection as one human being can have with another. Like prostitution, it is an intimate physical relationship, but unlike the brief contact of a sexual encounter, this goes on for months and months. And the relationship is not with the paying customer, but with the created baby. At birth, babies recognize their mother’s voices, respond to words and sounds that they became familiar with during pregnancy. In pregnancy, babies are living in the rhythms of the mother’s day—newborns, for example, tend to wake up at what was the pregnant women’s busiest times of the day. This is not a “surrogate” relationship, but an actual lived one. The idea of surrogacy draws deeply on a traditional patriarchal understanding of familial relationships. Societies
Address correspondence to Barbara Katz Rothman, Sociology, CUNY Graduate School, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10036, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
36 ajob
May, Volume 14, Number 5, 2014
Downloaded by [University of South Dakota] at 17:04 09 April 2015
Transnational Gestational Surrogacy
that are matrilineal could make no sense of surrogacy: People are related when they can trace their way back to a common womb. In a patriarchal society, familial/kin relationships require a common seed. Seed was once understood to be entirely the product of men, and children simply implanted by men in the bodies of women. The homunculus, the little child curled up in the head of the sperm, seemed to be there for early scientists to see with their new microscopes. We have gone beyond that. And yet we return directly to it with the idea of surrogacy. We now acknowledge, recognize, and even celebrate the seeds of women. In our modern systems, we have extended the patriarchal privilege to women. Children are, we are told, half his and half hers, comprised equally of father’s and mother’s nuclear genetic contribution. If that is true, babies might as well grow in the backyard. Or in any convenient hired belly. Or outsourced to India. With this understanding of kin, of who is and who is not “really” related, wombs and pregnancies are meaningless. Yes, some women can apparently now become fathers: place their seed in a woman’s body and have a baby “delivered” to them. And they can do that in a loving relationship, as a lesbian couple might do, or as sisters, cousins, dear friends might if they share egg and pregnancy. Or they can do that as slave owners did when they implanted their seed into their property to increase their slave holdings. Or they can do that in this new, outsourced way, in which they do not own the woman’s body but rent it, with—as Marx pointed out is the problem with forgoing ownership—no ongoing relationship, no tie but money. And yes, in this brave new world, empowerment for women in poverty can mean selling these services, can mean prostitution, can mean selling organs. It truly can be better to do these things than not. As it could truly be better for a woman in Auschwitz to give sexual services to a guard in exchange for another bit of gruel. The problem lies not with the woman making the “choice,” but with the situation. We of the wealthy world profit from the exploitation of poor women, men, and children with almost every shirt we put on our backs, almost every bite of food we take. We exploit people in poverty and never have to think about it. And now we can profit in our motherhood—but unlike the shirt and the food, this time the product is going to grow up and demand an explanation. These are loved and wanted children. They will get a good explanation. The risks of surrogacy are less to them than they are to all women who would be mothers. Surro-
May, Volume 14, Number 5, 2014
gacy is so very dangerous to the motherhood and personhood of all women, not just the very few women who serve as surrogates. If any pregnant woman is not necessarily, inherently, legally, morally, and obviously the mother of the baby in her belly, then no woman can stand firm before law and the state in her motherhood. We can be but half-owners of the babies within. Not only in surrogacy, but in other arenas of our culture and our commerce (if indeed there is a difference), pregnancy is more and more reduced to housing, to a site. As a culture develops its technology, that technology then acts back to reinforce the culture. We conceptualized pregnancy as a condition of “carrying,” of “hosting,” of being inhabited by someone else’s child, traditionally understood as a man’s child in the body of the woman. And then we developed technologies that grew out of that idea—technologies that enabled us to see past the mother, to find the baby within, to wave at the little fetus, send its photos around on Facebook, track its growth, test its genes and development. And then, in turn, that technology acts back on us, reinforcing the idea that the mother is just a place, a location, a bit of awkward geography separating the baby from the rest of us. Once that feels so real to people, once that baby is named, its cute little clothes waiting on the dresser in the baby’s room where the pink or blue curtains are hung, it seems almost irrelevant just where that pregnant belly is. Is it in the big bedroom down the hall? Or in an anonymous belly in India? The baby is constructed independent of pregnancy, its medical records intact, its photos on the fridge and e-mailed to grandma. In the early days of commercial surrogacy, a broker explained to me that the woman was not selling a baby, she was simply returning the baby to the father. Babies, to him, preexisted in sperm. Without that patriarchal legacy, the sale of a baby by its birth mother, brokered by international businesses, would be understood as the trafficking of babies. And such it is. Surrogacy is inherently wrong and destructive of the humanity of those most intimately involved. It requires us to close our eyes to the relationship between the baby and the woman who bears the baby, asks us not to see the humanity of the woman herself, nor the social relationships in which she and that baby are both embedded and engaged. Surrogacy is the selling of a baby by its mother. Even if everybody enters into that activity with full information and total willingness to engage, bioethicists should not spend their time quibbling over the question of a narrow definition of exploitation.
ajob 37
