Does it make sense for feminists to be singling out 'surrogacy' for condemnation?

What is it about?

This article is about the different kinds of feminism that are possible in relation to surrogacy. (Surrogacy is where a pregnancy is organized, legally and medically, so that the baby will belong to a family that doesn't include the person who was pregnant with that baby.) The main network of feminist anti-surrogacy activism until now was FINRRAGE: Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive And Genetic Engineering. To understand FINRRAGE, it helps to know that, by the mid-1980s, the revolutionary movement for women's liberation of the '60s and '70s had lost its strength across much of the English-speaking world. What was left, according to historian Alice Echols, was largely something called "cultural feminism", which called itself "radical feminism" despite being quite conservative. Although there are clearly lots of worrying things about the surrogacy industry as it exists today, the article argues that the cultural-feminist 'anti-surrogacy' position has a lot of problems. This matters because the tradition is still alive: it is currently represented by the campaign Stop Surrogacy Now, which argues for criminalizing surrogacy at an international level. It is not a position that people who are working as surrogates tend to take, and I argue that it is a bad one. In order to prove my case, I look back at the history of anti-surrogacy feminism and assess the arguments that were made, then and now, to single out surrogacy as "degrading to women". I contend that the arguments (which include heavy reference to "slavery", butchery, etcetera) are unconvincing because they don't explain why surrogacy in particular is the source of the harms to women and children they say they are worried about. The reason for this is that while they have a problem with 'commodification' (where something is turned into a tradeable object or service on the market) - at least, commodification that affects 'natural [cisgender] womanhood' and 'motherhood'! - they don't have a problem with capitalism (the underlying system that results in commodification). It is important to notice that this is actually a common problem in 'progressive' campaigning. These 'common-sense' antisurrogacy ideas overlap with technophobia (disgust towards technology), transphobia (disgust towards trans people, in particular transgender or transsexual women) and whorephobia (disgust towards sex-working people, in particular prostitutes who are women) - all of which are ideologies that have excluded racialized, trans, differently-abled and sex-working people people from feminist struggle instead of standing in solidarity with these crucial groups, as everybody should.

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Why is it important?

Anti-surrogacy feminism is back on the rise, and has the potential to do real damage to working-class women, in particular in the global south. It is important to combat these ideas - not with a wishy-washy argument that "anything goes", but on the contrary, with arguments that create solidarity between surrogacy workers and other workers.

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