Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)Making of Kin in India

Billed as an emerging transnational industry, the commercial surrogacy arrangement is more than mere commerce. It involves the birth of kin and relationships that include cross-cultural dialogues and conflicts between forms of reproduction and birthing. The process of making kin is fraught with different forms of negotiations regarding biology, nurture, pregnancy, and parenthood. This book engages with the idea of emerging forms of families and meanings of kinship in a transnational world through ethnographic research, kinship, gender studies, and science and technology studies. The ethnography draws from a context that is enmeshed in the local–global politics of reproduction, and the engaging and ongoing debate regarding ethics and morality in the sphere of reproductive rights. Drawing from conversations with foreign couples coming to India to hire Indian surrogates through Indian fertility clinics, lawmakers, and clinicians, this book looks at the politics of foreign gay couples seeking families through surrogacy in India, identity giving processes to the babies born to foreign couples, the clinicians understanding of kinship, the networks of commerce and agents, and the ways in which the surrogate and her husband positions itself within the arrangement. The mapping of transnational commercial surrogacy in its processual, dynamic representation—from the choice of the arrangement, to the pregnancy and finally to the birth of the child—is done in broad stages. This book aims to present an important ethnographic picture of a complicated, controversial practice such as commercial surrogacy by focusing on its relevance for kinship and our understanding of interpersonal relationships at large. Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)Making of Kin in India seeks to explore the multiple relationships that emerge, are constructed and rejected in the course of participating in a commercial surrogacy arrangement. Drawing from conversations with foreign couples coming to India to hire Indian surrogates through Indian fertility clinics, Indian surrogates, lawmakers, and clinicians, this book engages with multiple facets of the transnational commercial surrogacy process: the politics of foreign gay couples seeking families through surrogacy in India, identity giving processes to the babies born to foreign couples, the clinicians understanding of kinship, the networks of commerce and surrogacy agents, and the ways in which the surrogate and her husband position themselves within the arrangement. Some of the questions that the book is exploring are: What are the mechanisms by which kinship is understood and practiced in a comparative and cross-cultural milieu? How can anthropology develop a more nuanced notion of interpersonal relationships in a global, transnational setting? How does biology and the social come to be configured within kinship in transnational commercial surrogacy? In this book, transnational commercial surrogacy is seen as a fertile ground for the examination of cross-cultural engagements with kinship and technology. "This book maps the way in which in vitro fertilization (IVF) specialists, surrogacy agents, commissioning couples, surrogate mothers, and egg donors contribute to the understand of interpersonal in the process of commercial surrogacy." -- Book jacket Anindita Majumdar. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 200-225) And Index.