Review by Choice Review
Sociologist Pande (Univ. of Cape Town, South Africa) points out that many depictions of transnational surrogacy go to extremes. The (mostly foreign) couples seeking the service have been portrayed as exploiters of poor Indian women, and the couples sometimes style themselves as altruists bent on helping the surrogates and their families out of poverty. (Pande exclusively studies commercial gestational surrogacy, so the Indian women have no genetic tie to the offspring they are bearing.) Staff in the assisted reproduction clinics treat the surrogates as rented wombs in need of constant surveillance and medicalized interventions. The women are subjected to painful injections and surgical procedures to ready the womb and thin out multiple implanted embryos, and babies are almost always delivered by Caesarian section. Indian attitudes tend to class surrogacy with sex work, to the extent that many surrogates conceal their occupation from in-laws, neighbors, and biological children. The surrogates' motives include obedience to husbands or in-laws, family financial needs (especially dowries for daughters), or fictive kin relations with the parents, which they hope might lead to long-lasting emotional and (in some cases) financial ties. A theoretically sophisticated and nuanced ethnography of interest to scholars in South Asian studies, women's studies, reproductive health, and labor studies. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Ann Hibner Koblitz, Arizona State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
