Surrogacy, Birth and the Nation: Neo-eugenics and birth of a nation?

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences</strong> CSSS Colloquium <strong>Prof. Amrita Pande</strong> (University of Cape Town) a paper on <strong>Surrogacy, Birth and the Nation: Neo-eugenics and birth of a nation?</strong> Date :<strong> April 28, 2016 (Thursday)</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Women of the South…. are increasingly reduced to numbers, targets, wombs, tubes and other reproductive parts by the population controllers" (Mies and Shiva, 1993:282-83) "(W)omen live at once under the scrutiny of the state and transnational forces of intervention and at a remove from the certainties of life captured in the term 'infrastructure' or the fantasy of 'health care'" (Pinto 2008:2) A detailed account of the social history of India is not plausible here. What is necessary, however, is a brief sketch of the, strangely contradictory, history of the landscape that forms the context for the rise and spread of surrogacy. How does a labor market based on pro-natal technologies fit in the context of an aggressively anti-natalist state? How do we analyze the sudden hyper-medicalization of child-birth for a group of women previously exposed to very low rates of medicalization?? Scholars, have previously analyzed, what they call, the "revised eugenics script" in the policies of the (international) population movement (Ramsden 2001, Hartmann 2006). On the one hand, negative eugenics, targeted mainly at minorities, continues with policies like voluntary or incentivized sterilizations. On the other hand, positive eugenics has appropriated the language of "individual choices" to strategically emphasize assisted fertility options for upper class, white couples (Stern 2005, Hartmann 2006). Unarguably, the history of reproductive politics in India is a story of the state's surveillance and regulation of women's (fertile) bodies. It is also a history of contradictions. When neo-liberalism becomes the buzzword, pro-natalist technologies entering an otherwise anti-natalist state leads to explicit instances of, what I have called, "neo-eugenics". In the colloquium I demonstrate how the reproductive politics of surrogates in everyday life is in conversation with this form of eugenics. The narratives of the surrogates reveal not just the ubiquity of state interventions in their reproductive lives but also its intimacy, its identity with or proximity to the everyday. In essence, on an everyday basis, as surrogates negotiate with the multiple levels of power – at the level of the family and clinic, their resistive strategies inadvertently speak to the global imperative of lowering the fertility of lower class women, especially women in the global south. The women who were never allowed to birth the nation, are now birthing to minimize waste and maximize choice. <strong>Bio:</strong> Amrita Pande, author of Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (2014: Columbia University Press) is in the Sociology department at University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research focuses on the intersection of globalization and reproductive labour. Her work on surrogacy has appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender and Society, Qualitative Sociology, Feminist Studies, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Anthropologica, PhiloSOPHIA, Reproductive BioMedicine and in numerous edited volumes. She has written for national newspapers across the world and has appeared in Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed on the BBC, Sarah Carey's Newstalk on Irish radio, DR2 Deadline (Danish National television) and Otherwise SAfM, South Africa. She is also an educator-performer touring the world with a multi-media theatre production, Made in India: Notes from a Baby Farm.