Abstract
This chapter tells the story of the new reproductive technologies of the 1980s, which, for the first time in human history, allowed for extracorporeal fertilization—the implantation of fertilized ova into so-called gestational mothers—and significant advances in gamete cryopreservation. These new medical technologies were introduced alongside an “infertility scare,” which warned, falsely, that there was a widespread decrease in the male population’s sperm count and that single women faced increasingly dire prospects for romance. With pressure on women to be successful both in their careers and as nurturing mothers, the new reproductive technologies promised a way to save these women through surrogacy. Thus, the 1980s saw a revival of what was in fact a biblical-era technology: surrogate parenting. Margaret Atwood’s science fiction novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) is one work that made the connection between science and tradition clear; and while the supposedly new parental relationships were in truth nothing different from what had been imagined millennia ago, the science fiction trappings of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the legal issues raised in paternity cases were. Here, the strange figure of the “surrogate mother” was born and debated upon either as a progressive validation of a woman’s right over her body or as a disgusting example of contracted slavery.
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Notes
Dion Farquhar, “Reproductive Technologies Are Here to Stay,” Sojourner 20 (1995): 6.
Nancy J. Chodorow and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,” in Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 80.
Valerie Hartouni, Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 32.
Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3.
Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 83.
E. Ann Kaplan, “The Politics of Surrogacy Narratives: 1980s Paradigms and Their Legacies in the 1990s,” in Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, & Fictions of Assisted Reproduction, eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Susan Squier (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 117.
George J. Annas, “Death Without Dignity for Commercial Surrogacy: The Case of Baby M,” The Hastings Center Report 18 (1988): 1. In that case, “fooled by broker publicity … [Judge] Sorkow saw surrogacy as so modern and marvelous that it could not possibly be subsumed under any existing laws” (Annas, 1). The “modern and marvelous” remains a clever juxtaposition for historicizing science; as advanced as science may become, it always retains the power of miracle.
Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), Infertility: Medical and Social Choices (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), 12, 267.
Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York: Norton, 1989), 129.
Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, “The Gold Spinner,” in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, ed. Edna Henry Lee Turpin (New York: Maynard, Merrill, & Co., 1903), 92–98.
Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (London: The Women’s Press, 1985), 55.
Phyllis Chesler, Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M (New York: Vintage, 1988), 118. This was recently made clearer to me by a friend’s mother who, seeing a homeless woman on the subway, pitifully exclaimed to me, “how horrible; that’s someone’s mother.” I couldn’t bring myself to point out that that need not be true, that she should have said “how horrible; that’s someone’s daughter.”
Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 9.
Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 298.
Ibid.
Ibid., 299.
Sarah Franklin, “Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction,” in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 335.
There is a slightly earlier reference to breeding “babies in bottles” from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1928] (New York: Bantam Dell, 2007).
Robert G. Edwards and Steven A. Brody, Principles and Practices of Assisted Human Reproduction (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co., 1995), 2.
Michelle Stanworth, ed., Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood, and Medicine (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 1.
Bruce L. Wilder, “Assisted Reproduction Technology: Trends and Suggestions for the Developing Law,” Assisted Reproduction Technology 18 (2002): 178.
Quoted in Heidi Wendel, Review of Birth Power: The Case for Surrogacy by Carmel Shalev, Columbia Law Review 90, no. 4 (1990): 1179.
Lee Salk, quoted in Michelle Harrison, “Social Construction of Mary Beth Whitehead,” Gender and Society 1, no. 3 (1987): 301.
For gestational surrogate mothers labeling themselves “babysitters,” see Sharyn Roach Anleu, “Surrogacy: For Love but Not for Money?” Gender and Society 6, no. 1 (1992): 42.
Barbara Katz Rothman, “Comment on Harrison: The Commodification of Motherhood,” Gender and Society 1, no. 3 (1987): 312, 313.
Andrew Kimbrell, The Human Body Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Human Life (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1997).
Mary Lyndon Shanley, “‘Surrogate Mothering’ and Women’s Freedom: A Critique of Contracts for Human Reproduction,” Signs 18, no. 3 (1993): 629.
Mary Beth Whitehead with Loretta Schwartz-Nobel, A Mother’s Story: The Truth About the Baby M Case (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 21, 22, 30, 33, 35, 46, 92, 129.
Ibid., 91. This, tellingly, in a chapter called “My Marriage to Rick.” This feeling was shared by Mr. Stern; in a footnote, Chesler gives us testimony not reported in the media: During the course of the pregnancy, Mrs. Whitehead expressed a desire to deal only with Mrs. Stern, and then after the pregnancy she rarely spoke to [Mr.]. Stern even on the telephone. [Mr.] Stern said that he felt like an intruder, that Mrs. Whitehead was carrying his baby and he felt extremely awkward. (206)
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© 2016 Kevin L. Ferguson
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Ferguson, K.L. (2016). The Surrogate Mother: Sed mater certissima?. In: Eighties People. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137584342_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137584342_2
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