The Outsourced Womb

December of 2008 marks seven years since my leap of faith into blogging with culturekitchen. Actually, not just blogging but mommyblogging. At the time I wasn't familiar with the term because I didn't really know many women who blogged about arts, politics, philosophy and motherhood. The only blogger I stumbled upon with a similar mix was Belle Warig of John and Belle Have A Blog who went on to Crooked Timber fame. Her J&B blog was an inspiration that eventually got my writing juices flowing.

Now it seems as if everybody and their mother has a blog.

Especially a mommy blog.

It makes me wonder if we are in the middle of a baby boom.

It seems like there is a baby boom in Hollywood. So much so that it led Ricki Lake to make a documentary about the whole thing. In The Business of Being Born, Lake goes on to document the way women in the United States go about birthing babies and to reveal it for what it is, a business. As an advocate for midwifery and non-invasive birthing, Lake hopes "this film educates people and empowers them to really know their choices in childbirth."

One choice she didn't cover was the choice of the outsourced birth.

The Times of India published an article titled, "Surrogate moms in hot demand". It talks about how expats and foreign born Indians are flooding the Punjabi region looking for a womb to rent. The booming business is being called "surrogacy tourism".

In an AP article on the same subject, they break down the numbers of this new wombing economy :

$10 - 20,000 for a surrogate in India is a bargain compared to up to $250,000 of in-vitro fertilization or up to $80,000 for a surrogate in the United States.

9 months of pregnancy for a surrogate can be equal to 15 years of earn income.

Judith Warner over at The New York Times has even more disturbing numbers : outsourced birthing and surrogacy tourism are estimated to be a $445-million-a-year business in India.

The ethical and moral repercussions of this baby booming choice are vast and overwhelming :

But our rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty, half a world away. Then, selling one's body for money is not degrading but empowering. And the transaction is not outsourcing of the basest nature - not modern-day wet-nursing taken to the nth degree - but a good deal for everyone concerned. "There's nothing wrong in this," Priyanka Sharma, another surrogate, concluded the Marketplace segment. "We give them a baby and they give us much-needed money. It's good for them and for us."

I think it is incredibly important to ponder what this "perverse" empowerment means. In an era when American feminists are fighting to keep the laws that protects their reproductive rights, how do we celebrate the choice to rent a womb?

Can a woman choose if she has no future, no resources, no way out?

Can a woman choose if all she is good for is birthing somebody else's baby?

Is that choice?

Even if it that womb of hers will get her 15 years of wages?

Discuss.

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