Gestational Surrogacy: Nature and Culture in Kinship

Abstract

Anthropological writing about the new reproductive technologies has focused on how they undermine presumed links between nature and culture in kinship. Surrogate motherhood in particular is said to show that "natural facts" serve as symbolic resources to facilitate choice, a key value of Western culture. This work has generated important insights into contemporary discourse about the social and cultural implications of reproductive technology. However, treating nature as a cultural domain exacerbates the tendency to divorce kinship from biology. An analysis of the stated motives of women who become gestational surrogates is presented here to support an argument that a focus on emotion, and its manipulation, can help anthropologists to better integrate human nature and culture in the study of kinship. (Surrogacy, kinship, nature, culture) ********** Peletz (1995) dates the end of "essentialist thinking" in the study of kinship to Needham's (1971) Rethinking Kinship and Marriage. That volume effectively decentered the field well before postmodernism, that indefatigable enemy of essence, reared its head in anthropology. The old view, held since Morgan, that kinship is something specific built from a combination of discrete elements (terminologies and rules of descent, marriage, and residence) gave way to an emphasis on context, where kinship is seen to be embedded in specific constellations of gender, power, difference, contradiction, paradox, and ambivalence. Contemporary analyses of gay families and surrogate motherhood in Western culture bring these points home, as they demonstrate how destabilized the building blocks of kinship in our own societies have become. Peletz (1995:366) approves dismantling the "building blocks" approach and kinship's anticipation of the postmodern critique, but criticizes an associated development, that anthropology has "turned its back" on biology. He sees this as especially unfortunate because new developments in reproductive technology make "'nature' and biology more relevant to our analytic thinking about kinship than they have been since Morgan." Surrogate motherhood provides particularly good opportunities for a reappraisal of the relationships between the "natural" and sociocultural aspects of reproduction and kinship. The opportunity to revisit some unresolved issues arises because the split between gestational and genetic motherhood has opened a range of new reproductive options. Conception and pregnancy can be separated and turned into commercial transactions and professionally managed procedures. A woman can give birth to her own grandchild, for example, by carrying a pregnancy from her daughter's egg. Embryos can be frozen and a child brought into the world long after its genetic parents are dead. The existence of such choices makes once apparently secure connections between biology, folk biology, conception ideology, and kinship categories less stable than they were. Does culture bend to accommodate these changes or, to paraphrase Ragone (1996:363), is surrogacy placed inside tradition? Overall, the anthropological literature about the new reproductive technologies takes a strongly culturalist view, one that illustrates Peletz's (1995) point about the antipathy toward biological models in recent kinship literature. Ragone (1998:2) links biological explanations with determinism, androcentrism, and ethnocentrism as factors behind the tunnel vision of previous anthropological accounts of reproduction. Ragone (1998:120) notes, "Reproduction is concerned with topics no less central than world view, cosmology and culture ... definitions of personhood; and the production of knowledge." Quoting Schneider, whose critique of the idea that kinship is anchored in procreation was as influential in undermining the building-blocks approach as Needham's, Ragone (1998:124) says, "It has become increasingly clear that 'biological' elements have primarily symbolic significance . …