Achieving Parenthood in the US: Surrogacy, Biogenetic Connection and Reproductive Justice

The imagery of surrogate mothers is characterized using a language of extremes. A surrogate's pregnancy is portrayed either as the actions of an apathetic woman willing to commoditize her womb, or as the paradigm of altruism (Lewis, 2019). To better understand their perspectives, I conducted eighteen interviews with surrogates and intended parents across the United States. Using a grounded theory framework for data analysis, I found surrogates described their motivations as primarily altruistic and insist on principles like offering affordable prices to intended parents. They reported viewing surrogacy as an opportunity to provide individuals struggling with infertility or from marginalized backgrounds the possibility of biogenetic children. I also found that surrogates and intended parents discuss biogenetic relations as a tool. For surrogates, it is a leveraged to justify their decision to gestate and then return the baby to the intended parents. Intended parents, on the other hand, choose to rely on biogenetic relations to assert their maternity or paternity. Intended parents point to biogenetics to ascribe permanence to their connection with the child and analogize their surrogate to an "an oven," signifying their transient role. From interviews with gay identifying intended parents, I show that biogenetics is employed to assert the normalcy of gay men's families. This paper contributes to the literature about the impact of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) on our cultural, social, and legal conceptualizations of familial and kinship ties and addresses whether surrogacy is exploitative. Additionally using my data, I provide policy recommendations for regulations that could protect both surrogates and intended parents' interests. These prescriptions stem directly from the data collected during my interviews. An aim of this paper is adding to the growing body of qualitative research (Ashby, 2011) centering policy around the recommendations of those most likely to be impacted.