Cutting out the surrogate: Caesarean sections in the Mexican surrogacy industry

Childbirth practices shed light on cultural values, ideologies of gender and motherhood, and social inequalities. Transnational, commercial surrogacy presents a useful lens through which to view the social dynamics that shape childbirth experiences. Surrogacy challenges dominant views on the naturalness and inevitability of maternal-fetal bonds because it involves the separation of gestation from motherhood. What ideologies inform childbirth practices in the consumer-driven context of surrogacy in which the woman giving birth is neither the consumer nor the “mother”? Based on multi-sited ethnographic research between 2014 and 2017 and in-depth interviews with 120 participants in the Mexican surrogacy industry, I argue that doctors draw on normative ideologies of kinship, gender, and maternal-child bonding to justify and normalize the use of Caesarean sections among surrogates. The ideology espoused by these doctors reinforces the notion that maternal-fetal bonding is natural and inevitable, constructs women as irrational and driven by hormones, and presumes that bonding between surrogate mothers and the children they gestate is detrimental to the surrogacy process. Furthermore, the proffered justifications for the Caesarean sections reproduces stereotypes about poor Mexican women as risky patients, contributes to the “disposability” of their labor, and reinforces a hierarchy in which the perceived interests of intended parents and children are elevated above those of surrogate mothers. This article contributes to social science studies of medicine by demonstrating how classist and racist stereotypes, and folk notions of kinship, gender, and maternal-child bonding are biologized in medical practice.