Outsourcing Pregnancy: Surrogacy as "Emotional Labor"

Writing in the current issue of The American Prospect, UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild recounts a round of interviews in India with commercial surrogates and surrogacy brokers. Her article, "Childbirth at the Global Crossroads," [subscription required] asks some big questions that reproductive rights advocates and others seldom consider: "What, if anything, is too sacred to sell?"

Her answers focus on the concept of "emotional labor," which she introduced in her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling.

Like nannies or nurses, surrogates perform "emotional labor" to suppress feelings that could interfere with doing their job….As science and global capitalism gallop forward, they kick up difficult questions about emotional attachment.

Dr. Patel….sees no problem with running the clinic like a business, seeking to increase inventory, safeguard quality, and improve efficiency. That means producing more babies, monitoring surrogates' diet and sexual contact, and assuring a smooth, emotion-free exchange of baby for money. (For every dollar that goes to the surrogates, observers estimate, three go to the clinic.)

In Akanksha's hostel, women sleep on cots, nine to a room, for nine months. Their young children sleep with them; older children do not stay in the hostel. The women exercise inside the hostel, rarely leaving it and then only with permission. Patel also advises surrogates to limit contact with clients. Staying detached from the genetic parents, she says, helps surrogate mothers give up their babies and get on with their lives - and maybe with the next surrogacy. This ideal of the de-personalized pregnancy is eerily reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, in which babies are emotionlessly mass-produced in the Central London Hatchery.

Patel's business may seem coldly efficient, but it also has a touch of Mother Teresa. Akanksha residents are offered daily English classes and weekly lessons in computer use. Patel arranges for film screenings and gives out school backpacks and pencil boxes to surrogates' children. She hopes to attract donations from grateful clients to help pay children's school fees as well. "For me this is a mission," Patel says.

In light of appalling government neglect of a population totally untouched by India's recent economic boom, this charity sounds wonderful. But is it wonderful enough to cancel out concerns about the factory?