Neglected or Misunderstood Read online

  Firestone’s call was not only for the technological transformation of reproduction, but also for its social transfiguration. In her proposed society, individuals who wished to parent would be supported collectively, through the provision of the resources that both they and the child required. This is anathema to today’s neoliberal world, where the constant refrain is that only the irredeemably feckless have children for whose provision they may need to call on social support. Constantly subjected to the “parenthood-as-destiny” mantra, young people are simultaneously told that they must wait until they can afford children, even as employment and social security policies push this “when” endlessly back into a horizon that is never reached. Into this mix of anxiety and confusion come the private fertility clinics, promising the small minority of women who can afford it the prospect of solving this problem through an unreliable, invasive and potentially traumatic medical procedure. Since egg-freezing is, as journalist Viv Groskop has noted, essentially delayed IVF that may never be needed,81 its commercialization represents an extension and normalization of IVF as a procedure for all women, not only for those who are actually encountering difficulties with fertility. In so doing, it helps to create and promote a culture in which women, even in the earliest years of adulthood, are asked to relate to themselves as baby-incubators, to carry with them a heightened sense of the importance of biological motherhood and of their own dwindling capacity for it (thereby dovetailing with the US pre-pregnancy movement82). Far from freeing women from their biological designation as the reproducers of the species, this looks very much like a reinforcement of it.

  The fertility industry, through its control of IVF, already benefits from the hegemony of parenthood, and the valorization of genetic parenthood in particular; its “miracle baby” narrative works to obscure what is the reality for all too many of its customers: repeated miscarriage, spiraling debt, relationship breakdown and depressive illness. IVF clinics have been subjected to criticism for offering patients costly add-on treatments for which there is little or no evidence base.83 Given the clear potential for exploitation of often vulnerable, even desperate, people, critics have called for increasing regulation of an industry that is allegedly all too often happy to overcharge clients while providing them with inadequate information about treatments, their risks and likely outcomes.84

  But what if the problem is more fundamental still? What if it is not insufficient regulation, but the very fact that these reproductive technologies are controlled by corporate interests at all? Firestone called for intervention into biological reproduction in the interests of people themselves, not of profit creation. We need urgently to make the “utopian” move of thinking reproductive technologies outside of this framework, and in concert with an analysis of the social, cultural and economic forces that inhibit those who wish to have and to raise children from doing so. Until such time, the fertility industry has found in egg-freezing a highly lucrative new product.

  Surrogacy

  Commercial surrogacy hit the headlines in 2014 with the case of Baby Gammy. Born to Pattaramon Chanbua, a young Thai woman who had entered into a surrogacy agreement with an Australian couple, Gammy was left with his mother when the couple returned to Australia with his twin sister, Pipah. Chanbua alleges that his surrogate parents rejected Gammy when they discovered he had Down’s Syndrome and a heart condition, although the couple deny this, claiming that they had sincerely believed that the surrogate had chosen to keep the child. Despite the economic burden of an unsought-for child, who has needs that she is financially ill-equipped to meet, Chanbua has undertaken to raise Gammy as her own son; and following revelations that one of the Australian couple had been jailed previously for child sexual offenses, has campaigned for custody of his twin sister. This application was turned down by an Australian judge in 2016, who found that Pipah faced “only a very low risk of … being abused,” and ruled that the story of the couple’s abandonment of Gammy was “untrue.” The misunderstanding was not surprising, however, “when a woman’s body is rented for the benefit of others.”85

  Non-sexual surrogacy, of course, is made possible by the technological advances that Firestone had looked forward to in 1970. There are different forms, but it typically involves artificial insemination (in cases where the surrogate is also the genetic mother), or egg-harvesting (from the genetic mother or a donor), in vitro fertilization and implantation. Like conventional IVF and egg-freezing, it promises to liberate people from the constraints of biology. It is often a course taken by heterosexual couples for whom IVF and other procedures have failed, or where a woman has a medical condition that means that pregnancy cannot be safely undertaken. For gay men, a surrogate may be the only way of having a child genetically related to one of the partners. But like IVF and egg-freezing, surrogacy does not alleviate women of what is for Firestone the burden of physical reproduction. Rather, it transfers it. And in the case of commercial surrogacy, it generally transfers it to a woman who is economically disadvantaged, with all the risks to physical health that poverty entails.

  Commercial surrogacy requires economic inequality to be viable. And in most instances it requires the vast economic inequalities that are produced by globalized capitalism. Pattaramon Chanbua, for example, said of her decision to become a surrogate that the A$16,000 “that was offered was a lot for me. In my mind, with that money, one, we can educate my children; two, we can repay our debt.”86 In other countries of the non-Western world where commercial overseas surrogacy is legal, surrogacy may offer a solution (however transiently) to unemployment, destitution or hunger. Although the payment for surrogacy might equal several times the yearly wage that the surrogate could hope to earn, it is likely to be a fraction of the cost of surrogacy in one of the Western countries where it is legal.

  Fertility tourism represents the transformation of women and children into commodities on the free market. This is what was disclosed in particularly glaring fashion by what had apparently happened in the case of baby Gammy. Gammy’s prospective parents had, it seemed, returned goods they had purchased that they considered faulty. That human beings – Gammy himself, and the woman left to care for him – could be so instrumentalized, so reduced to objects in the designs of others – provoked reactions of horror around the world. But would not this reaction be appropriate even if it were to be proven that, as they assert, the Australian couple did not do this, did not leave Gammy because they did not want him, because he was disabled?

  That such surrogacy involves the commoditization of women is evident from their treatment at the hands of the surrogacy industry. As journalist Divya Gupta reports, for instance, the Akanksha clinic in Gujarat houses its surrogates in a house located close to the clinic: ‘The women enjoy the rest and care they may not have had during their own pregnancies,’ notes Gupta, ‘but are confined to the house for the whole pregnancy. Their families can visit on Sundays but the surrogates only leave the premises for medical checkups or if there is a family emergency.’87 In her own investigation of Indian surrogacy, journalist Julie Bindel describes how a clinic tells her it is better for the women’s mental health to remain in their own homes, but that they will move a surrogate into the clinic’s hostel if Bindel pays enough. She reports on how the women are told ‘what and when to eat and drink’; on the prevalence of women being coerced into surrogacy by abusive husbands and pimps; on how it is common practice to use two women as surrogates for one commissioning couple, and if both become pregnant, to give one of these women an abortion. She describes the system of ‘sex, race and class supremacy’ that the industry is built upon, which sees poorer women hired as surrogates, but younger, better educated women as egg donors: and where commissioning parents can choose surrogates from a catalogue, and select donors at £2500 to £3000 for a Caucasian, £1000 for an Indian. Though the clinics will not reveal how much a surrogate is paid, it is clearly but a fraction of what the clinic obtains through its use of her body.

  Such are the horrors of over
seas surrogacy that some claim this is an argument for commercial surrogacy’s legalization in the West, where, it is argued, the practice can be regulated and ethical standards maintained. Commercial surrogacy, as opposed to “altruistic” surrogacy, where the surrogate does not benefit financially, is illegal in much of Europe and in Australia (despite calls in 2014 for the ban to be lifted). Its legality varies across the US, with bans in the majority of states but with some exceptions, such as California, where contracts for gestational surrogacy (where the surrogate is not genetically related) are regularly enforced and where the intended parents are legally recognized, before birth, as the parents of the child. In the UK, while commercial surrogacy is formally banned, it is legal for a surrogate to receive “reasonable expenses,” which may include compensation for lost earnings. Proponents of legalizing surrogacy argue that surrogacy provides a vital service, and that while the women who become surrogates are usually not motivated primarily by money, but by the altruistic desire to make parenthood possible for childless people, surrogates should be able to receive financial compensation for sacrifices entailed.

  But can any form of commercial surrogacy exist without encouraging the commodification of women and children, no matter what the intentions of those involved? Firestone is particularly helpful here. We have seen in earlier chapters that key to her analysis is an argument against property in other people; against the idea, that is, of having rights of ownership over other persons. It is on this basis that she objects to marriage, which, she says, has its origins in male ownership of women, in the contracting of the sexual and domestic labor of women in exchange for their financial support. The Victorian marriage contract, she shows, was only apparently freely undertaken since Victorian women, lacking the means to provide for themselves, were without viable alternatives. In a situation of radical inequality, Firestone shows, such a contract is thus coerced, not voluntary. It is an argument that voids all liberal defenses of overseas commercial surrogacy as being legitimated through the woman’s choice. But even in the context of the wealthy countries of the West, there remain stark inequalities of resources and opportunities. Is it really possible to pay for rights of use of the interior spaces of a woman’s body without feeling that that body has somehow become yours to use? Even if some individuals can manage this, can the use of women’s bodies in this way be normalized, and legalized, without contributing to a moral climate in which women are more likely to be perceived in this way?88 Can there be a society in which it is accepted that privileged women pay for use of the bodies of less privileged ones, and in which this is justly called “reproductive freedom”?

  But Firestone also points to the potentially damaging consequences of commercial surrogacy for children. It is not only for the use of the woman’s body that money has exchanged hands, but also for the child itself. As we have seen, a large part of Firestone’s objection to the biological family and her desire to diffuse parenting through the structure of the household is her identification of the harmfulness of the idea of “my child”; the possessiveness by which some parents relate to the child as an adjunct of themselves, as something over which they have rights of ownership. For Firestone, this parental attitude is encouraged by the ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth, and this is part of her objection to biological reproduction: “‘To think of what I went through to have you!”’ (208). There is a real danger that surrogacy, while it eliminates the traditional biological connection of mother to child entailed by pregnancy, and in some cases even the genetic connection, might actually intensify the risk of such an attitude, since “what I went through to have you!” also includes a huge and potentially debilitating financial cost.

  The objections to surrogacy offered here concern commercial surrogacy, not surrogacy arrangements where a friend or family member agrees to bear a child for someone close to them. Of course, these arrangements are not free of the possibility of going painfully, tragically, wrong. But they are not characterized from the outset by a financial transaction that I have argued commodifies both surrogate and child – whatever the intentions of those involved.

  Conclusion

  Firestone surely did not envisage that the reproductive technologies she championed in 1970 should have enabled phenomena such as a predatory fertility industry, commercial surrogacy and fertility tourism. Does this demonstrate a naivety on her part about the potential of those technologies to be misused? I think not, although she may have been over-optimistic about the prospects of their not being so misused. Firestone was always clear that such technologies could be used in oppressive ways. The value of her contribution is that she asks us to think about the conditions that would have to be met for them not to be deployed in ways that entrench exploitation, but that rather unleash their liberatory potential. These might include conditions in which such technologies are available through state-funded healthcare and not through private, profitmaking providers; or in which economic structures, employment practices and the social prohibitions against lone parenting do not oblige those who wish to start a family to delay.

  Of course, from Firestone’s perspective, there remains a problem to the extent that egg-freezing, IVF and surrogacy are all techniques designed to make traditional parenthood possible for those for whom it otherwise would not be. There is a danger that the normalization of such practices would reinforce the hegemony of parenthood and the stigmatization of those who remain childless; and also that it would entrench the idea that to be a parent requires a biological, genetic, relation to a child. This is why Firestone’s calls for cultural shifts in our understanding of “parenting” are so important. By this, I mean both her demand that parenting be displaced from its hegemonic position and be considered of equal value alongside other, non-reproductive, lifestyles; and her call for a radical rethinking of what parenting is and in what kind of unit it may occur. I have just used the term “lone parenting.” But why should it be considered that to parent outside of the structure of the couple is to parent alone? In reality, single parents often share the responsibility and the pleasures of caring for a child with others: both with other members of perhaps an extended family, and with friends who have no genetic relationship to the child. What would it be for these support structures to be recognized as “parenting”? To be given social acknowledgment as ways in which children are raised, and not to be seen as inferior to the nuclear family? Such structures could in fact be given more formal social recognition in order better to materially support them. Why could not parental leave be shared by a nominated person or persons other than a biological or adoptive parent, for example?

  Such a rethinking of the unit in which children are raised is what Firestone was trying to achieve with her proposal for ‘households.’ An extended conception of the reproductive unit could have as just one of its advantages the opening up of the ability to be involved in child-raising for adults who cannot, or do not wish to have biological children of their own. It is possible that under such conditions the very desire for one’s own, genetic, child, would be diminished; and with it, interest in those technologies that make biological offspring possible for those for whom otherwise it is not.

  10

  Pregnancy on Trial

  “The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment for the woman.”

  (Donald Trump)

  It must not be forgotten that by “reproductive technologies,” Firestone meant not only such things as artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and artificial wombs, but also abortion and contraception. She was by no stretch alone among second wave feminists in calling for the widespread availability of these as a condition of women’s emancipation: in fact, this was a call that was widely made by liberal, socialist and radical feminists. But in arguing so forcefully that involuntary reproduction lies at the heart of women’s oppression, she presents a particularly powerful account of how contraception and abortion are basic, necessary – though not sufficient – conditions of gender equality.

/>   In the US, this account is today needed now more than ever. The forces of moral conservatism are rallying for an assault on women’s reproductive rights. Trump has allied himself to these forces, promising to nominate pro-life judges to the Supreme Court and to sign into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would enforce a ban on abortion after 20 weeks. He has undertaken to defund Planned Parenthood, which offers sexual health advice to millions of American women. He has said that he will make into permanent law the Hyde Amendment, which is added as a rider to legislation to prohibit taxpayer money from funding abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or threat to the woman’s life. And he is committed to dismantling the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature healthcare plan, which among other things guarantees access to contraception. Pro-choice campaigners fear that Roe v. Wade could be overturned. The wake of Trump’s election victory saw women urging each other on social media to obtain long-term forms of contraception such as IUDs, for fear that access to birth control would soon be withdrawn. There is a real danger of a return to the forced pregnancies, forced births and involuntary parenthood that preceded second wave feminism.

  And yet, in fact, these things had never really gone away. Access to birth control and abortion in the US (and in other countries) has always been a mixed picture, with the existence of formal, legal rights masking the extent to which a woman’s ability to make use of such rights varies drastically with her material circumstances. Without federal provision of reproductive healthcare, in many states it is left to charitable organizations such as Planned Parenthood to provide advice and access to contraception and abortion services. But inevitably in these circumstances, many women without private healthcare are unable to access such services and are therefore denied the means to control their reproductive lives. The threatened assaults on women’s reproductive rights today would roll back reproductive freedoms that in fact had never been equally available.