Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India

Anthropologies of American Medicine: Culture, Power, and Practice Series

by Daisy Deomampo

Transnational Reproduction traces the relationships among Western aspiring parents, Indian surrogates, and egg donors from around the world. In the early 2010s India was one of the top providers of surrogacy services in the world. Drawing on interviews with commissioning parents, surrogates, and egg donors as well as doctors and family members, Daisy Deomampo argues that while the surrogacy industry in India offers a clear example of "stratified reproduction"--the ways in which political, economic, and social forces structure the conditions under which women carry out physical and social reproductive labor--it also complicates that concept as the various actors in this reproductive work struggle to understand their relationships to one another.



The book shows how these actors make sense of their connections, illuminating the ways in which kinship ties are challenged, transformed, or reinforced in the context of transnational gestational surrogacy. The volume revisits the concept of stratified reproduction in ways that offer a more robust and nuanced understanding of race and power as ideas about kinship intersect with structures of inequality. It demonstrates that while reproductive actors share a common quest for conception, they make sense of family in the context of globalized assisted reproductive technologies in very different ways. In doing so, Deomampo uncovers the specific racial reproductive imaginaries that underpin the unequal relations at the heart of transnational surrogacy.

Genres: Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

Published September 27, 2016

Reviews

[Shelby]

I had to read this for my intro to anthropology class, and since it's technically a textbook, I'm not going to write an entire review for it or give a star rating for it.