Surrogacy at the Fertility Frontier

Abstract Surrogacy is a popular assisted reproductive practice in Israel, and it has been legal since 1996, albeit, until recently, only for married heterosexual couples. Same-sex couples who aspired to genetic parenthood were therefore “forced” to look for available surrogates abroad, in countries such as the United States, India, Nepal, Mexico, and Russia. This resulted in the emergence of a lucrative transnational surrogacy industry in Israel that relies on the reproductive labor power of racialized egg cell providers and surrogates in the global South, East, and North. While much of the existing research on surrogacy in Israel explains its ubiquity by centering cultural accounts of Jewishness, this article rethinks contemporary policies, practices, and markets of assisted reproduction from the vantage point of the “colonial episteme,” by unpacking the complex “intimacies” and reproductive afterlives of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in Israel/Palestine. The article argues that surrogacy operates both as a demographic frontier in the consolidation of a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine and as a commodity frontier for the accumulation of capital in a booming surrogacy industry. Surrogacy and other reproductive technologies also emerge as sites of reproductive resistance through practices of surrogacy strikes and sperm smuggling.