Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India

by Sharmila Rudrappa

Winner, American Sociological Association Asia and Asian America Section Best Book on Asia/Transnational Asia

Finalist, 2015 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

India is the top provider of surrogacy services in the world, with a multi-million dollar surrogacy industry that continues to grow exponentially, as increasing numbers of couples from developed nations look for wombs in which to grow their babies. Some scholars have exulted transnational surrogacy for the possibilities it opens for infertile couples, while others have offered bioethical cautionary tales, rebuked exploitative intended parents, or lamented the exploitation of surrogate mothers—but very little is known about the experience of and transaction between surrogate mothers and intended parents outside the lens of the many agencies that control surrogacy in India. Drawing from rich interviews with surrogate mothers and egg donors in Bangalore, as well as twenty straight and gay couples in the U.S. and Australia, Discounted Life focuses on the processes of social and market exchange in transnational surrogacy.

Sharmila Rudrappa interrogates the creation and maintenance of reproductive labor markets, the function of agencies and surrogacy brokers, and how women become surrogate mothers. Is surrogacy solely a labor contract for which the surrogate mother receives wages, or do its meanings and import exceed the confines of the market? Rudrappa argues that this reproductive industry is organized to control and disempower women workers and yet her interviews reveal that, by and large, the surrogate mothers in Bangalore found the experience life affirming. Rudrappa explores this tension, and the lived realities of many surrogate mothers whose deepening bodily commodification is paradoxically experienced as a revitalizing life development.

A detailed and moving study, Discounted Life delineates how local labor markets intertwine with global reproduction industries, how Bangalore’s surrogate mothers make sense of their participation in reproductive assembly lines, and the remarkable ways in which they negotiate positions of power for themselves in progressively untenable socio-economic conditions.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, History

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2015

Reviews

[pritika]

thesis reading…

[Caroline Rose]

Very interesting book exploring the surrogacy market in India. Rudrappa first studied blogs by parents in the global North who utilized the surrogacy market. She then travelled to her childhood hometown of Bangalore, India where she was able, through the social network of her father who was a doctor, to connect with a surrogacy agency and then surrogacy mothers in the transnational surrogacy market. She spoke with parents who purchased surrogacy services from the US, UK, Australia, or from within India. She described the experiences of surrogacy workers within the social and economic context of international markets. The book was lite on the economic analysis and heavy on the more personal qualitative exploration of individual mothers/workers and parents/buyers. It was engaging enough that I read it in two days.

[Taylor]

Read this originally for a Gender Studies class and recently revisited. I actually got to speak to the author during that class and it was really interesting. This is an issue that I’d never considered or encountered before. The need to use women to bear children has far reaching effects across the globe and leads to exploitation of women in so many ways. The mere idea of surrogacy “brokers” is so disturbing. This book is well written and researched and incredibly informative.

[Alexandra Silverstein]

Sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa provides a complex exploration of the lives of women in India who work as gestational surrogates for foreign couples, including these surrogates’ experiences, motivations, and feelings about the work.

[Elicia]

read this for sociology of gender class and it was so so so eye opening!

[Yanna]

The legal history isn't expanded upon which left me confused, that was the only thing missing from this book. I just really wanted to know how contracts were formed, just a smidge

[Diana]

Excellent and accessible!