Abstract
Currently, the ART (assisted reproductive technology) industry is unregulated, helping to produce human beings that would not exist otherwise. This production takes place through societally funded medical procedures but without public discussion, ethical and environmental considerations. Since human beings are the biggest source of carbon emissions on the planet, it is imperative to impose regulations on the ART industry in order to reduce life-threatening carbon emissions for all. This chapter uses key aspects of liberal feminism and feminist phenomenology to advocate for the international regulation of transnational gestational surrogacy or commercial surrogacy, the most popular of all ARTs. I bring out the procedural, intercorporeal and technological dimensions of gestational subjectivity that together expose the hidden anthropogenic harm at work in the billion-dollar business of commercial surrogacy. Finally, I advocate for its international regulation on feminist and environmental grounds.
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Notes
- 1.
P. Gerber (2015) “A Human Rights Response to Commercial Surrogacy”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llVRHwZICr0
- 2.
See Donna Dickenson’s Property Rights in the Body: Feminist Perspectives, pp. 65–87. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- 3.
Also known as procedural feminists.
- 4.
See work by K. Vora, A. Pande, A. Bailey, S. Lewis and SAMA on actual and potential harms accrued to gestational surrogates. This work lies beyond the scope of my essay.
- 5.
See Al Jazeera’s Inside Story with Hazem Sika, August 25, 2016, “Why is India Banning Commercial Surrogacy?”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpuVaQ-r1SY
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Geerts, Robert-Jan (2018), “Climate Change and the Philosophy of Technology.” In Spaces for the Future: A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, eds. Joseph Pitt and Ashley Shew. Routledge Press, p. 295.
- 8.
This includes non-human others such as various forms of wildlife, frogs and fish, whose fertility gets disrupted by the dumping of IVF fertility drugs into rivers and lakes. See Legal (2015, p. 82).
- 9.
Cited in Portnoy’s Sustainability, 26.
- 10.
Alison Bailey’s groundbreaking 2011 article “Reconceiving Surrogacy: Toward a Reproductive Justice Account of Indian Surrogacy” brings out the potential moral absence in feminist ethnography and the colonialist imposition inherent in normative, western feminisms in commercial surrogacy. Also see J. Kirby’s “Transnational Gestational Surrogacy: Does it Have to be Exploitative?” The American Journal of Bioethics, 14(5): 24–32, 2014.
- 11.
Dolezal draws on Lymer’s (2011) feminist phenomenological ontology according to which “the maternal body schema forms the basis of and for the foetal body schema and subsequent foetal development. Together, the manner in which the maternal and foetal body schemas merge and then diverge will form a communication that is born through situated, gestational embodied negotiations. This relationship is affectively structured through the negotiated movements themselves. Thus, by the time of our birth we have already, within our habituated repertoires, a way of moving and interrelating that may well set the foundations for affective intersubjective relations post-partum.” Parrhesia, 142.
- 12.
According to Barbara Duden’s haptic phenomenology, the fetus as a being that exists separate from the mother is “an object of our time” unknown to previous historical epochs. According to these earlier historical accounts, the “fetus” was an aspect of the pregnant woman’s body. See “Disembodied Health” in Thinkery, 2000 and “The Fetus as an Object of our Time” in Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 25 (Spring, 1994), pp. 132–135. I am thankful to the blind reviewer who recommended Duden’s work.
- 13.
For a phenomenological investigation into the material voice and its difference from the expressive voice, see Linda Fisher’s “Feminist Phenomenological Voice” in Continental Review (2010) 43:83–95.
- 14.
- 15.
See my Heidegger, Reproductive Technology and the Motherless Age (Palgrave, 2017) pp. 24–51.
- 16.
Cited in Christine Legals’ An Ecofeminist Analysis of In Vitro Fertilization, p. 64. Master’s Thesis. University of St. Michael’s College, Canada, 2015.
- 17.
See Andrew Feenberg’s for his primary and secondary instrumentalization theory (1999, 2010). that concretizes the enframing. It avoids a poorly differentiated, reductive understanding of technology by foregrounding the connection between the three stages of secondary instrumentalization (or the social integration of new technologies) made up of: systematization, mediation and vocation, and the four stages of primary instrumentalization: decontextualization, reduction, autonomization and positioning (the function level.)
- 18.
See Kalindi Vora’s interpretation of commercial surrogacy as an extension of Western colonialism in South East Asia, and a perpetuation of colonialist attitudes, a racial imaginary, that sees open land as available for taking and by analogy, sees women’s wombs as potential property. “Medicine, Markets and the Pregnant Body: Indian Commercial Surrogacy and Reproductive Labor in a Transnational Frame” (p. 5).
- 19.
See Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological distinction between the lived body (Leib) and the physical or objective body (Körper). See Husserl’s Ideas II, especially pp. 150, 155, 159, 166.
- 20.
For a heterosomatics and a historico-phenomenological account of pregnancy as haptic, humoral and defined by a “quickening” unlike the visual and organ centric account of pregnancy defined by a “due date”, see the work of Barbara Duden. Duden argues that medical categories such as the fetus, life and the womb would be unintelligible to pre-twentieth-century birthing practices when a woman’s narrative was part of her pregnancy. “What each woman brought to her doctor was not a body to be inspected and palpated but a story that is enfleshed.” (Duden 1993, p. 135) Back then “before a child comes to light it is a nondum, a “not yet.” (Duden, 2000, p. 10) A being of hope.” It is not a fetus. By the late twentieth century, “the technician foists on the [pregnant] patient a configuration of parameters, an iatrogenic (medicine made) construct that the patient …ascribes to [herself.]” (Duden, 2000, p. 58)
- 21.
Such kin relations would have to consider the needs, desires and well-being of the children, the surrogates and be worked out in accordance with state and local laws.
- 22.
Date on the experiences of surrogate children is still rather scant but beginning to be available in recent years, notably from grown surrogate children growing up in Australia.
- 23.
Due to poor data tracking, an accurate account of multiples is not available. In some cases, when multiples are not desired, the doctors perform a “medical reduction” removing one or more of the embryos. Some parents, as in the case of baby Gammy, do not want a twin if this one has a genetic abnormality. Some commissioning parents simply abandon developmentally challenged newborns on the streets of India. (Saravanan 2018, p. 171).
- 24.
Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax. “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacy of Individuals.” Global Environmental Change 19 (2009):14. “Our basic premise is that a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him. For a descendant that is n generations removed from the focal individual, the weight is ð1=2Þn. So, for example, a mother and father are each responsible for one half of the emissions of their offspring, and 1/4 of the emissions of their grandchildren”.
- 25.
Seth Wynes and Kimberly A. Nicholas, “The climate mitigation gap,” Environmental Research Letters 12, No. 7 (2017): 2.
- 26.
Ibid. 18.
- 27.
For instance, the growing use of time lapse embryo imaging technology helps to pick out viable embryos to increase success rates of IVF and to reduce the birth of multiples. However, this popular technology is likely to increase transnational surrogacy and thus heightens the need for its regulation. For more on this reproductive technology, see Lucy van de Wiel’s “The Datafication of Reproduction: Time lapse embryo imaging and the Commercialization of IVF.”
- 28.
My thanks to Duncan Cordy for this critical comment at The Post Kantian Bioethics Conference, Purdue University, April 2021.
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Belu, D.S. (2022). Missed Opportunities: Feminist Grounds for Regulating Transnational Surrogacy, in the Anthropocene. In: Terrone, E., Tripodi, V. (eds) Being and Value in Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88793-3_6
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