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The human body is horrible. The human body is wonderful. The engine. The guts. The architecture. The biological and philosophical implications of having a body is wildly opaque to me. Which is unfortunate, considering greater knowledge would help me navigate a country hostile to female-presenting bodies. For the sake of transparency, I am a cisgender woman. Obviously, the spiritual and physical connections to one’s own body become even more significant in one’s private life and in cultural spaces as a transgender or nonbinary person.
Consider the body’s labor. Not only the exercises it must do to survive, the life-or-death involuntary behaviors (walking, sitting, shitting, eating), but the labor. Monetization of the body’s possibilities in order to simply pay the bills on time. Or even to thrive, to have more than enough to satisfy needs and desires. Call it by its name: capitalism. Wrists and fingers twisting little screws and pin-thin parts into larger parts on an assembly line. For ten hours a day. Five days a week. For over thirty years. The exhaustive labor of hands. The labor of legs crouching to lift fifty pound boxes of commercial goods to stack in Amazon warehouses. Delivery persons. Uber drivers. Slaughterhouse butchers. Nurses. Think street prostitution. The sexual labor of the vagina, the mouth. Providing a service. OnlyFans. The labor of the body on display, modifying, “beautifying” the body for digital, visual consumption. Despite the rise in “knowledge work,” the work of programmers, academics, lawyers, etc., for the majority of Americans, our bodies are our main tool in order to make money.
If our bodies break down, betray us, then our paychecks are threatened. Disability has impoverished large swaths of the population.
Put the body to work. To good use. There is the labor of childbirth. Motherhood and childbirth are two separate phenomena in my mind. Motherhood is something I think about daily because I have a living mother after all, and my mother wants me to get married and have children. Preferably before she is “too old” to play with her grandkids. Traditional aspirations for a female life. No one can say that their mothers have not envisioned this future for their daughters and made it known their disappointment when that dream is threatened by contemporary feminism. My mother has told me that her children are her story, her poetry. Her experience of motherhood has been at times exhausting and tough, but she has also made motherhood a beautiful art.
My boyfriend and I are not financially stable enough to raise a child from infancy to adulthood without that child experiencing the threat of poverty. I have debt. Lots of student loan debt. Medical debt. I also have desires that have in the past created a lack in my adulthood. I am selfish. Do I even know if my boyfriend is cut out for fatherhood? Am I ready to kill in order to save my baby’s life? What sacrifices must I make?
Motherhood is labor. Beyond the philosophical questions of what makes procreation valuable to a burning, drowning planet, or what is a mother anyway, in the abstract. Dressing. Feeding. Cleaning. Protecting. Bending. Lifting. Squatting. Playing. Crying. Working.
Motherhood is also spiritual. I can’t explain it. I’m not a mother. Never have been. But I’ve witnessed mothers with children. The body and spirit are in concert with one another, both are fulfilling objectives of love, care, and providence in service to a child. You either have this spirit of motherhood in you, or you do not. Or socioeconomic circumstances, mental illness, trauma have robbed you of this spirit.
Now divide the twin conditions of motherhood and childbirth. They can exist independent of one another. Childbirth. It can be cold. Soulless? Possibly mindless? It’s a process, a bloody procedure in order to forcefully extract a squirming human creature from the uterus. Once you have survived the process of childbirth, motherhood is optional. If you’re a moral person, and you intend to raise that child, then motherhood is absolutely not optional. The second labor begins. You are now raising a child, and you must raise that child well, with all your power to avoid adversity. Or there is the threat of state intervention in the form of child protective services, or you traumatize your kid.
But consider commercial surrogacy.1 The monetization and renting of your sexual organs. Carrying a fetus for willing and paying individuals and couples who have not been “ordained” to give birth for whatever reasons. Be it medical conditions or biological sex. Here the landscape of the divisive debates on surrogacy unfurl before us. The soulfulness of motherhood, of parent-child genetic and spiritual connection are in question. The financial and bodily autonomy of women capable of bearing children is also a battlefield.
From the rat-infested corner of Twitter that the right wing in American politics inhabits, a slew of vitriolic criticism targeted conservative YouTube personality, Dave Rubin, following the announcement that he and his husband were expecting their first child via surrogacy. There of course is sickening homophobia, which Rubin, a piece of shit himself, has to endure from his own fanbase. But set that aside for the sake of my investigations here. Boiling over in the Twitter thread were hundreds upon hundreds of tweets claiming the very nature of surrogacy to be “barbaric,” “an affront to nature and God,” “inhumane.” The majority of this venom was coming from Catholics and evangelicals.
I wonder what are the moral complexities of bodily labor under capitalism, specifically the monetization of the body in service of childbirth. Does commercial surrogacy exist in a moral gray space, in which all of our answers are inadequate in solving what really is at stake for mothers, women, for childless couples, for children?
Countries have addressed the issue somewhat. In some U.S. states commercial surrogacy (“rent-a-womb”) is legal. Only three states have completely outlawed all forms of surrogacy: Louisiana, Nebraska, and Michigan. In some European nations (U.K., Ireland, Denmark) surrogacy is legal if the mother is not paid, or only paid for reasonable expenses, such as prenatal health care costs. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Bulgaria have outlawed all forms of surrogacy.
The religious arguments against commercial surrogacy are nothing new and wildly transparent. Anti-gay ideologies made policy in order to punish the LGBT community, locking them out of the legal experience of parenthood by limiting access to modern “family” creation. Here we see commercial surrogacy demonized as a tool of the “gay agenda,” a tool to spit in the face of God’s mandate that man and woman shall be the only genders in marital communion. In addition, the religious right cannot justify or support any labor or technology that allows for procreation without sexual intercourse with a man. Unironically, evangelicals center the participation and experience of men in their doctrine concerning childbirth. They will not allow you to abort the product of rape, but certainly your child born via in vitro fertilization is a “monster.”
The Roman Catholic Church’s response to biomedical ethics in the modern world comes in Donum Vitae, “Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation” first issued on February 22, 1987. Surrogacy has been defined as “an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood.” And in the Catholic Church’s doctrine, surrogacy creates “a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements” that create a family. Dignitas Personae in 2008 continues to address modern technology created to assist in human creation. The Church takes a critical stance against in vitro fertilization, selective reduction, prenatal diagnosis, cryopreservation, embryo donation, preimplantation. As well as the usual culprits of the Church’s sexual hangups: contraception, morning-after pills, abortion. Once again, despite biblical claims, religious doctrine is not concerned with just procreation (be fruitful, multiply) but is concerned with whether God or penises are centrally involved, the phallic-centered nuclear family must be preserved. Women’s bodies, so powerful and resilient and dangerous, must be tamed, limited.
Outside of religion, ethical bodily production under capitalism concerns secular anarchists and feminists driving anti-surrogacy policy in Europe (The U.S. has become one of many destinations for Europeans seeking children due to most European countries outlawing or limiting surrogacy). There is no ethical production or consumption under capitalism. Rightfully so, economic progressives, feminists, and myself understand that our physical, psychological, and existential well-being is at stake. Labor under capitalism is exploitative: wage theft, the lack of informed consent, the disregard for the physical and mental health of the body. Capitalism has not provided adequate medical and mental health care for millions of body laborers in this country. We do not control the means of production. We have no stake in the products themselves. And this becomes even more ominous and precarious for what we think of as female sexual labor—prostitution, pornography, childbirth, childrearing. Something as sacred as motherhood, parenthood, family is at the mercy of money.
“There is no ethical production or consumption under capitalism.”
I understand survival by any means necessary. I can empathize with the financial needs of women in abject poverty in India, their bodies used like farms, for carrying the fetuses of barren or childless individuals and partners, often citizens of the wealthiest nations. The underclass of women who might not experience the same levels of poverty, but still have debt, whose basic human rights are threatened, in countries like Thailand, Ukraine, are willing to divorce themselves from the traditional human dynamics of childbirth.
It is by design that some of the poorest countries globally would have a large class of women vulnerable to exploitation. Patriarchy and the lack of educational resources and access to so-called “knowledge work” for impoverished women leaves very few options for female labor outside of the theft or selling of their literal bodies, be it sex trafficking or commercial surrogacy.
Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now, contends that surrogacy arrangements will continue to be poisoned by capitalist corruption until the state can achieve a radical overhaul of the surrogacy industry, providing adequate protection for surrogates against wage theft, adequate health care, and stopping exploitation. But until then, the moral status of surrogacy remains in question.
In the abstract, what is there to say about arguments about human nature, the natural order of human procreation? I’m a millennial, an inheritor of previous generations’ social revolutions towards challenging the so-called natural order of things. I’ve come of age, like the rest of my generation, accepting of and comfortable with gay adoption, “test-tube babies,” the revolutions in science and medicine, cloning sheep, transgender men giving birth to their partner’s child. Thus, I wrestle with the perceived “sacredness” of the natural human experience. Science and technology are so profoundly intertwined in our physical lives, that to hear the Church or even secular feminists argue that surrogacy is “unnatural” and flies against the biological patterns of human nature, I pause and wonder what is “natural” anymore. And why does it even matter? We can genetically modify most everything, every species. We can make children when someone cannot biologically make their own. We have artificial uteruses now. Partners can now have the families they always wanted.
Italian feminist writer Susanna Tamaro argues against surrogacy, viewing it as a devastating divorce between biological relationships. Parenthood, genealogy, are undermined in surrogacy. “Postmodernist thought believes that culture is more important than nature, but it’s an extremely weak concept,” Tamaro states to The Atlantic. The culture ascertains that humankind has dominion and power over the mechanisms of nature. Look at all we’ve done to progress in information and technology! But, what makes us human, not empty vessels or breeders or soulless robots, Tamaro argues, is genealogy. This genealogy is made of historical memory and epigenetic memory, and to produce a child “on demand,” (Tamaro’s words) is ruinous to our concept of what makes us human beings.
But since the beginnings of humanity, we can trace the trajectory of our advancement to predict that the disruption of nature was and is inevitable. We artificially inseminate our animals to produce our meat. We destroy rainforests in order to wipe our asses properly. But once human beings start changing ourselves, tooling with our own natural processes, our existential conception of self, of what is a human being, and what the definition of humanity must entail to separate us from other animals, that concept transforms. The family is no longer nuclear. Ma, Pa, Sally, Jimmy, and the dog. Children do not have to belong genetically to their parents—parenthood is for everyone, regardless of ability to reproduce children. I would argue that adoption is a more humanitarian effort than commercial surrogacy. But, there are even evangelicals questioning the “natural process” – the traditions of family creation. Grace Kao, who specializes in ethics and Asian American Christianity, insists that regardless of the methods, procreation is a mandate from God. And to end the needless suffering of parents who so desperately want to raise children means surrogacy is an ethical option, and can even be as humanitarian as fostering and adoptions. To be fair, Kao was a surrogate mother for a close friend, and did not carry the child for financial gain, nor did she need the money as an upper middle class academic in the U.S.
One day, I might wake up and want to be a mother, to desire motherhood. To want to participate fully in that beautiful art. And then I learn that I cannot bear my own children. What should I do?
I’m a feminist; this is true. And maybe I will wake up one day and want to be a mother but I do not want to experience childbirth. So I outsource this biological burden to another woman. Am I a good feminist?
“But once human beings start changing ourselves, tooling with our own natural processes, our existential conception of self, of what is a human being, and what the definition of humanity must entail to separate us from other animals, that concept transforms.”
The world is getting better in small ways that we take for granted. Progressive revolution has opened our culture to transformative visions of kinship. Whoever so desires to raise children can do so, and should not be locked out of that right to parenthood. But often our ideals as human beings produce profiteering, corruption, abuse of the underclass. Thus, our considerations of how and why and when we bring children into this world are not trivial. Bodily autonomy, ownership of one’s physical selfhood and spiritual dignity, the nature of control and possession when it is our bodies producing for another. These issues are important. There is a caste of women whose basic human rights are thwarted, or who are forfeiting control over their bodies, in order to satisfy the desires of an upperclass of women in the world. That should make any person concerned for the survival of the human race.
I think about motherhood a lot. Because I fret over how it could happen to me, the way some people are superstitious about standing under ladders or opening umbrellas inside. What is my body capable of without my conscious participation? What can my body produce? How should I treat my body? How can I use it? What privileges is my body afforded? Are there limits to my body? Physically? Spiritually?
The potential for my body to utterly upend my goddamn life is so high.
Sources:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2553&context=faculty_scholarship
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/nyregion/surrogate-pregnancy-law-ny.html
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1466&context=ilj
https://sarahjefford.com/feminism-and-surrogacy/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kelliauerbach/surrogacy-bodily-autonomy-feminists-embrace
https://www.versobooks.com/books/3756-full-surrogacy-now
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=christian+feminist+bioethics
https://sojo.net/articles/christians-considering-surrogacy-encounter-conflicting-views
https://www.focusonthefamily.com/family-qa/perspectives-on-surrogate-motherhood/
https://time.com/6096588/gabrielle-union-surrogacy/
https://www.bionews.org.uk/page_94694
https://www.cbc-network.org/breeders-press/
https://www.twincities.com/2014/03/31/sloan-lahl-inconvenient-truths-about-commercial-surrogacy/
https://www.stopsurrogacynow.com/films/
https://www.sensiblesurrogacy.com/surrogacy-in-the-united-states/
https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/how-surrogacy-harms-women-and-children
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/can-surrogacy-be-ethical/10098290
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-28679020
https://www.creativefamilyconnections.com/us-surrogacy-law-map/
Birth from the Underclass