A Transnational Feminist View of Surrogacy Biomarkets in India

This book takes a reproductive justice approach to argue that surrogacy as practised in the contemporary neoliberal biomarkets crosses the humanitarian thresholds of feminism. Drawing on her ethnographic work with surrogate mothers, intended parents and medical practitioners in India, the author shows the dark connections between poverty, gender, human rights violations and indignity in the surrogacy market. In a developing country like India, bio-technologies therefore create reproductive objects of certain female bodies while promoting an image of reproductive liberation for others. India is a classic example for how far these biomarkets can exploit vulnerabilities for individual requirements in the garb of reproductive liberty. This critical book refers to a range of liberal, radical and postcolonial feminist frameworks on surrogacy, and questions the individual reproductive rights perspective as an approach to examine global surrogacy. It introduces ‘humanitarian feminism’ as an alternative concept to bridge feminist factions divided on contextual and ideological grounds. It hopes to build a global feminist solidarity drawing on a ‘reproductive justice’ approach by recognizing the histories of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age and immigration oppression in all communities. This work is of interest to researchers and students of medical sociology and anthropology, gender studies, bioethics, and development studies.

Sheela Saravanan, PhD, has two master's degrees from the Universities of Bombay and Pune in India in Geography and Development Planning. Her Ph.D. from Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia in Public Health was on the influence of biomedical frameworks of knowledge on local birthing practices in India. She has worked and published on the status of reproductive health in South Asia, violence against women and female infanticide in India earlier and now specializes in new and assisted reproductive technologies in the context of Asia and Europe. Since 2007 she has worked in the Universities of Heidelberg, Bonn and Goettingen in Germany. She has published on global injustice, exploitation and objectification in the process of commercial surrogacy in India. Since January 2016 she has been working at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg on a DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) funded project. The research aims to examine individual notions of ‘desired children’ (Wunschkinder/Vansh) shaped by social experiences in the German and Indian contexts that lead to selective abortions. She teaches Global Reproductive Technologies: Socio-Ethical and Legal Dimensions; Theories and Practice of Reproductive Technologies and Feminism and Public Health to bachelor’s and master’s students studying anthropology at the South Asia Institute, Department of Anthropology, University of Heidelberg, Germany.