These ties cross boundaries based on class, caste and religion and sometimes even race and nation. Despite these global structural inequalities, or perhaps because of it, surrogates’ creatively construct kinship ties with the baby and the intended mother. At another level, as they align their own reproduction through decisions about fertility, sterilization and abortion, in order to (re)produce children of higher classes and privileged nations, they ultimately conform to this global neo-eugenic imperative of reducing the fertility of lower class women in the global south. At one level, the womb-mothers (surrogates) subvert these hegemonic discourses by taking control over their bodies and using their fertile bodies “productively”. This national agenda resonates with a broader global population control program that frames the high fertility rates of countries in the global south as a “global danger” that needs to be controlled at whatever cost. To understand the booming market of surrogacy in India we have to situate it within its rather contradictory reproductive history – the post colonial state agenda of aggressive antinatalism at home coupled with the neo-liberal imperative of unrestrained fertility tourism. In this paper I analyze a fundamental paradox of commercial surrogacy – wherein a market that literally produces humans and human relationships is critically dependent on the maintenance of a global racial reproductive hierarchy that privileges certain relationships while completing denying others.

Pande ultimately advocates for a better understanding of this complex labor market, envisioning an international model of fair-trade surrogacy founded on openness and transparency in all business, medical, and emotional exchanges.

Yet her work also showcases the strategies surrogates deploy to retain control over their bodies and reproductive futures. From recruitment to training to delivery, Pande’s research focuses on the intersection of production and reproduction and its reflection of India’s larger labor regime. In the first detailed ethnography of India’s surrogacy industry, Amrita Pande visits clinics, lives in surrogacy hostels and speaks with surrogates, their families, clients, doctors, brokers, and hostel matrons to capture the full mechanics of the business and the experiences of the laborers within it.

Clients from all over the world hire Indian women to bear their children for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere with little to no government oversight or regulation.

Amrita pande surrogacy