Drawing on ethnographic research in the United States and Israel, two countries that have long-term experience with surrogacy, we compare surrogates’ understanding of, approaches to, and expectations about regulation. Women who become surrogates in these two countries hold opposite views about regulation. US surrogates formulate their rejection of standardized regulation—including standardized screening and contracts—by emphasizing their own responsibility for the legal, relational, and medical aspects of surrogate pregnancy. They want more oversight of fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies but ultimately argue for individual accountability. Israeli surrogates, conversely, support centralized government regulation of the practice and even defend Israel’s centralized regulation of surrogacy; many advocate for the extension of the law and the state to assume more responsibility for these arrangements. We discuss these differing formations of legal consciousness in terms of Engel’s conceptualization of “individualism emphasizing personal responsibility” versus “rights-oriented individualism.”
AustinDMBrismanMB (2013) Essential elements of informed consent in egg donation and surrogacy. In: SauerM (ed.) Principles of Oocyte and Embryo Donation. London: Springer, pp. 335–337.
2.
BerendZ (2016) The Online World of Surrogacy. London: Berghahn Books.
3.
BerkHL (2020) Savvy surrogates and rock star parents: Compensation provisions, contracting practices, and the value of womb work. Law & Social Inquiry45(2): 398–431.
4.
Birenbaum-CarmeliD (2016) Thirty-five years of assisted reproductive technologies in Israel. Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online2: 16–23.
5.
BoholmÅ (2003) The cultural nature of risk: Can there be an anthropology of uncertainty?Ethnos68(2): 159–178.
6.
ChuaLJEngelDM (2019) Legal consciousness reconsidered. Annual Review of Law and Social Science15: 335–353.
7.
ComaroffJComaroffJL (2000) Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture12(2): 291–343.
8.
ConleyJMBarrW (1990) Rules Versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
9.
CoreaG (1985) The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs. New York: Harper & Row.
10.
CoverRM (1983) Foreword: Nomos and narrative. Harvard Law Review97: 4–68.
DeomampoD (2016) Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India. New York: NYU Press.
13.
DouglasM (2013) Risk and Blame. London: Routledge.
14.
EngelDM (1984) The oven bird’s song: Insiders, outsiders, and personal injuries in an American community. Law and Society Review: 551–582.
15.
EwickPSilbeySS (1991) Conformity, contestation, and resistance: An account of legal consciousness. New England Law Review26: 731–749.
16.
GiddensA (1999) Risk and responsibility. The Modern Law Review62: 1–10
17.
GooldinS (2013) Emotional rights,’ moral reasoning, and Jewish–Arab alliances in the regulation of in-vitro-fertilization in Israel: Theorizing the unexpected consequences of assisted reproductive technologies. Social Science & Medicine83: 90–98.
18.
GuerzoniCS (2020a) Gift narratives of US surrogates. Italian Sociological Review10(3).
19.
GuerzoniCS (2020b) Interconnected experiences, interconnected bodies the case of US surrogacy. In: GuerzoniCSMattalucciC (eds) Body Politics and Reproductive Governances: Ethnographies on Flesh,’ Technologies and Knowledge. West Yorkshire: Emerald Publishing. (in press).
20.
HovavA (2019) Producing moral palatability in the Mexican surrogacy market. Gender & Society33(2): 273–295.
21.
InhornMCBirenbaum-CarmeliDBirgerJ, et al. (2018) Elective egg freezing and its underlying socio-demography: A binational analysis with global implications. Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology161: 1–11.
22.
JacobsonH (2016) Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
23.
KahnSM (2000) Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
24.
LustenbergerS (2017) “We are citizens”—vulnerability and privilege in the experiences of Israeli gay men with surrogacy in India. Journal of Comparative Family Studies48(3): 393–403.
25.
MahmudZ (2021) Regulating gestation: Surrogacy across the Atlantic. In: Presented at the Ottawa-McGill Graduate Colloquium in Health Law, Policy and Ethics. May 21.
26.
MajumdarA (2017) Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)making of Kin in India. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.
27.
MarshallAMBarclayS (2003) In their own words: How ordinary people construct the legal world. Law & Soc. Inquiry28: 617–628.
28.
O’NeillO (2003) Some limits of informed consent. Journal of Medical Ethics29(1): 4–7.
29.
PandeA (2014) Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India. New York: Columbia University Press.
30.
Recommendation for practices utilizing gestational carriers: A committee opinion by the Practice Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2016.11.007
31.
RoseN (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
32.
RothmanBK (2000) Recreating Motherhood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
33.
RudrappaS (2015) Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India. New York: NYU Press.
34.
SaravananS (2018) A Transnational Feminist View of Surrogacy Biomarkets in India. Berlin: Springer.
35.
Scheper-HughesNLockMM (1987) The mindful body: A prolegomenon to future work in medical anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly1(1): 6–41.
36.
SchurrC (2018) The baby business booms: Economic geographies of assisted reproduction. Geography Compass12: e12395.
37.
SchurrCMilitzE (2018) The affective economy of transnational surrogacy. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space50(8): 1626–1645.
38.
SieglV (2018) Fragile truths. The ethical labour of doing transnational surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine, Doctoral thesis, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern.
39.
SilbeySS (2005) After legal consciousness. Annual Review of Law and Social Science1: 323–368.
40.
SongJ (2006) Family breakdown and invisible homeless women: Neoliberal governance during the Asian debt crisis in South Korea, 1997–2001. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique14(1): 37–65.
41.
TemanElly (2016) Surrogacy in Israel: State-controlled surrogacy as a mechanism of symbolic control. In SillsEric Scott (Ed.), Handbook of gestational surrogacy: International clinical practice & policy issues (Pp. 165–173). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
42.
TemanEBerendZ (2021) Surrogacy as a Family Project: How Surrogates Articulate Familial Identity and Belonging. Journal of Family Issues, 42(6): 1143–1165.
43.
TemanE (2010) Birthing a mother: The surrogate body and the pregnant self. Berkeley: University of California Press.
44.
TemanE (2019) The power of the single story in surrogacy. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies In Health & Illness, 38(3): 282–294.
45.
VoraK (2013) Potential, risk, and return in transnational Indian gestational surrogacy. Current Anthropology54(S7): S97–S106.
46.
WeisCC (2017) Reproductive Migrations: Surrogacy Workers and Stratified Reproduction in St Petersburg. De Monfort University.
47.
WhittakerA (2014) Merit and money: The situated ethics of transnational commercial surrogacy in Thailand. The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics7(2): 100–120.
