Patriarchy, male control of fertility, and surrogacy

The erasure of motherhood

Patriarchy originated as the violent installation of male control over female fertility. Surrogacy delivers a modern version of that control via a globalised capitalism which uses the language of human rights to expand its market, to guarantee paternity for male ‘intended parents’, and to erase the women who have to sell their eggs or rent out their wombs.

The Oresteia, a trilogy of tragedies written by Greek dramatist Aeschylus in the mid-5th century BCE, recall in myth a time when the patriarchal revolution took place. Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon, for having sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, to fight the Trojan War. Apollo (the god in charge of religious doctrine) commands Orestes, their son, to avenge the murder of his father by murdering his mother.  Defending Orestes at his trial,  Apollo overthrows the old doctrine of mother right, and argues that in this circumstance matricide was justified. He bases this on a claim that “The mother is not the true parent of the child which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth of young seed planted by the true parent, the male.” The jury is split, and Athene (the father-identified goddess supposedly born from Zeus’ head) gives her casting vote to acquit Orestes. ”No mother gave me birth”, she claims, so her loyalty is to “male supremacy in all things.”

One implication would have been clear to Athenian audiences - men would need to control women’s bodies in order to guarantee their paternity of the “young seed”, and they would need to deny the significance of the mother-child bond in order to assert their dominance.

Google Baby

I watched a documentary about surrogacy, Google Baby, on Channel 4 in 2011.  If Aeschylus’ drama was a disempowering in myth of women as givers of life, Google Baby showed the contemporary reality, in horrendous detail.  At the centre of Google Baby is an Israeli entrepreneur, Doron Mamet-Meged. He explains to two gay men how they can become parents. He shows how they can choose a woman in the USA whose eggs they can buy, on an online database of possible sellers complete with pictures and short biographies. The two men scroll through the website, and comment on the photos - “It looks like a dating site” - “Beautiful eyes” - “Nose problem, bad hair day” -  “Dimples, full lips” - “I don’t like her” - “I want more details about her”. Once they’ve chosen their ‘egg donor’, Doron explains that he will fly their sperm to the USA to fertilise her eggs, and that two frozen embryos will then be flown to India, to be defrosted and implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother. Within a year, the men can fly to India to collect ‘their’ baby.

I wanted to check if this was just exaggerated marketing hype. It wasn’t. The website of Doron’s company Tammuz (named after a male fertility god)  described the logistics of its ‘East-West plan’ in some detail. The online searchable database of Egg Donation Inc in the USA was exactly as shown in the documentary. Conditions for surrogate mothers at the clinic in India were skated over in the film, but have been described by surrogacy researcher Sheela Saravanan:

“They are overfed, restricted in movements, not allowed to go up and down the stairs….they are just supposed to lie around watching TV for those 10 months, and they are not allowed to meet their family or children. …It is poverty motivating them to do it, and it is inhuman”

(Sheela Saravanan, interviewed by Julie Bindel, Women in India suffer as they serve as surrogates,  truthdig.com, 3 Dec 2016).

I checked the Tammuz website again earlier this year. It oozes entitlement. Whether it’s same-sex couples, straight couples, single men, single women, or HIV+ individuals, it’s assumed that all (if they are wealthy enough) have the right to rent a woman’s womb in a low income country, with no concerns about the risks to her health or to her welfare. India, which has tightened its regulation of the surrogacy industry, no longer features - its place is now taken by Ukraine, Georgia, Colombia and Mexico, where regulation is more lax. Tammuz the fertility god has been rebranded as Tammuz Family, and become a multinational conglomerate, linking all the components in the fertility supply chain. It boasts that its business model, with its targeted focus on diverse market segments, its “one-stop-shop approach”, and its cost-cutting exploitation of an international division of labour, is uniquely competitive. And, of course, it claims to be advancing human rights:

“The company has spent countless hours trying to change public opinion about surrogacy. It has stood at the forefront of the legal battle to make surrogacy accessible for everyone without discrimination”.

(About Us, tammuz.com)

Is surrogacy the new adoption?

Gestational surrogacy (where the surrogate mother is implanted with embryos produced by IVF) is still rare in the UK.  But it has become more fashionable than adoption, and is growing rapidly. It is easy to see why. Forced adoption still exists in the UK, but it is less common than it was, and fewer babies are available to be taken by adopters. And surrogacy is heavily promoted by both the fertility industry and the media. It is sold as a way of acquiring children who are genetically linked to you, without having to go through natural conception, pregnancy, and birth. Above all, it is presented as the ‘modern’ way to build a family, covering up the suffering of the women it exploits.

What is downplayed is that surrogacy is less strictly regulated than adoption, making it easier for ‘intended parents’ to avoid safeguarding checks, and that, unlike adoption, gestational surrogacy depends on the commodification of women’s body parts, and involves greater risks to women’s health.

Critics of surrogacy often query why ‘intended parents‘ need to go down the surrogacy route, and ask why don’t they adopt? Adoption, they imply, avoids the ethical objections to surrogacy, because it is caring for a child that already exists.  The myth that adoption provides homes for orphaned children lives on, particularly in the corrupt demand-driven market that is inter-country adoption.  Yet aid agencies and children’s rights groups estimate that 80-90% of children in orphanages worldwide have at least one living parent. What these children need is support for their families and communities that would enable them to thrive at home, not to be trafficked to adopters overseas.

Even Mirah Riben, an American critic of both forced adoption and reproductive technology, seemed, in an article exposing the exploitation that underlies the surrogacyindustry, to endorse the myth that adoption rescues orphans:

“There is nothing socially redeeming about surrogacy as there is with adoption, which purports to ‘rescue’ orphans. It is purely a self-serving act based on a desire to parent and feelings of entitlement to a child. In fact, those who choose surrogacy are choosing not to adopt.”

(Mirah Riben, Why is surrogacy illegal in most of the world?, Dissident Voice, 11 July 2020)

Entitlement and the erasure of mothers

Surrogacy and adoption both exploit women, both downplay the trauma for a child of being separated from his or her mother, and both are based on a claimed human right of every adult to have their own child. People claiming ‘procreative liberty’ as a human right dismiss the rights of the women who give life to the children.

Before adoption law in England and Wales was changed to allow adult adoptees to see their original birth certificate, adopters often pretended that ‘their’ children were not adopted, or that the first mother had died. Even now, they downplay the significance of the bond which links the first mother and her child, that adoption has severed.

The inhumanity of feeling entitled to take a child from its mother is illustrated particularly starkly by the worries of the surrogacy industry’s ‘intended parents’ at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (a centre of the global surrogacy business). These worries focussed on the fate of ‘their’ embryos, not on the women whose eggs had been harvested, or the women in whose wombs the embryos had been implanted.

“Many people are worried about the safety of their embryos if Kyiv gets bombed. Some spend a lot of money on donors over there, and want to make sure those embryos are safe.”

(Sam Everingham, Global Director of Growing Families, quoted in A Nightmare: parents fear for Australian surrogate babies in Ukraine, Sydney Morning Herald 23 Feb 2022).

The misunderstanding of human biology in the Orestes myth may have been rectified, but its denial of the significance of motherhood has remained. Adoption took this denial to a new stage by completely severing the mother-child bond after birth. The surrogacy industry takes denial even further. It rewrites the Orestes script by actually planting a “seed”  in the mother’s womb - a seed that has been created in a laboratory by the fertility industry, using as raw material eggs and sperm from different people in different parts of the globe. It’s not yet gestation in an artificial womb, but it’s as close to this as current technology and regulation allow. And it is, if we allow it, a step on a road that leads inexorably towards a transhumanist goal of erasing both motherhood and humans as a sexually reproducing species.

Coming next - the significance of that mother-child bond, and how it is fractured by both surrogacy and adoption.