Motherhood, Double Consciousness, and Reproductive Neocolonialism: Creating a Transnational Surrogacy Fraud Novel

Reproduction is valued for its apparent authenticity. Birthing people are encouraged to eschew medical pain relief for self-hypnosis; caesarean sections are commiserated and vaginal births celebrated; formula milk is resorted to only if fenugreek, nipple shields, and lactation consultants have failed to extract the golden liquid from the breast. These aspects of pregnancy and motherhood are seen to exist outside capitalism, whose innovation 'was to separate the making of people from the making of profit, to assign the first job to women, and to subordinate it to the second' (Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, 2019).

By threatening to confound motherhood's earnestness with capitalism's ruthlessness, commercial gestational surrogacy arouses intense emotional, legislative, and carceral reactions. Surrogacy between citizens of former colonising and colonised states is even more divisive, locating in a single body conflicting ideas around empowerment and exploitation, workers' rights and bioethics.

The contemporary logistics of transnational surrogacy echo the century-old colonial policing of native bodies: surrogates in the Global South are given regular obstetric check-ups and housed on fertility farms to ensure the health of the foreign fetus, while previously women in colonies from Marrakech to Shanghai were subjected to mandatory pelvic exams and jail-like clinics to prevent the spread of venereal disease in the occupying military. 'How can we understand commercial surrogacy as part of a larger history of fertility regulation and the reproductive injustice embedded in colonial and post-colonial histories and hierarchies?' asks Twine (2017).

This is fertile ground for art. Theatre about transnational surrogacy 'can simultaneously address the personal and the global' (Feinberg and Maisel, 2014). Pande and Berg (2014) commissioned textile art by surrogate mothers to enrich a documentary play.

Apostolidou (2023) chose poetry and flash fiction to express 'surrogacy as paid work and as gift'. My novel expands the field by examining transnational surrogacy through the lens of the scam, illuminating themes of capitalism, authenticity, and double consciousness.