The possibility of showing solidarity in surrogacy, given its different meanings and history

What is it about?

Surrogacy is where a pregnancy is organized so that the baby will belong to a family that doesn't include the person who was pregnant with that baby. A large and profitable industry has grown around this, especially since it became easy to use none of the surrogate's genetic information in the making of the fetus, because there is a demand for babies who have "your own" genes. Commercial "gestational surrogates" work in paid workplaces and have bosses: they are workers. There might not seem to be much about this situation that would suggest a positive transformation of the world. But there are histories relevant to contemporary surrogacy that are overlooked. In Italy, radical anti-capitalist feminists in the 1970s made an important intervention in Marxism by saying that "housework" is work. That included pregnancy: "every miscarriage is a workplace accident", they said in their famous pamphlet Wages for Housework. This approach is not usually applied to today's surrogacy. Instead, feminists (including Marxist ones) campaign for surrogacy to be banned. But solidarity could instead be shown between surrogates and "mothers" (people who do pregnancy for no pay). In fact, if we look to the history of the Reproductive Justice movement, we can see that the difference between "surrogates", mothers and "other mothers" does not have to be marked. The practice of consciously reproducing children collectively, seeing children as belonging to many mothers of many genders, is called "polymaternalism". In America especially, Black feminists like Angela Davis have pointed out that the system of slavery made Black slaves who had babies on American plantations "surrogates" for white families. So, using these histories to reframe today's "surrogacy technology", this article talks about pregnancy as a type of work (or labor) people do: "gestational labor". It also takes care not to presume that doing "gestational labor" makes you a woman. (That's what the word "gender-inclusive is in the title.) Drawing from Wages for Housework and Reproductive Justice both, it argues that gestational labor (paid AND unpaid) should be collectively redistributed so as to make it more bearable and less dangerous.

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Why is it important?

This article is important because the majority of activist approaches to surrogacy see it as very different from other kinds of work, and want to "abolish" it without abolishing the systems that make people have to work to survive in the first place. Surrogates themselves do not want surrogacy to be banned. There needs to be support for surrogates themselves struggling - as workers and collective political actors - against the injustices in their workplaces and in the world.

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