The global reproductive health market: U.S. media framings and public discourses about transnational surrogacy

Abstract

During the first decade of the 21st century a new “dramatic story” about the growing global surrogacy industry brought renewed attention to surrogacy as a social problem and a health policy issue. This paper asks: What cultural assumptions about gender, family and the global reproductive health market are revealed in current U.S. media coverage of and public discourses about surrogacy? From a qualitative analysis of prominent news accounts of surrogacy that were published in 2008, New York Times articles and blogs published on the topic between 2006 and 2010, and over 1000 online reader comments to these articles, I identify key frames used to discursively construct and debate the international surrogacy market. This study reveals the distinct contrast between the occasions when reproductive labor is rhetorically distanced from commodification processes and when it is linked to those processes. The findings contribute to intersectional analyses of assisted reproductive practices and women’s health/bodies/gametes. In particular, this study’s analysis of recent media framings of and public discourses about surrogacy across the globe serves as another illustration that national/classed/racialized bodies continue to be reproductively stratified via differently gendered discourses about women, motherhood and family.

Introduction

In the 1980s, the U.S. public and the world-at-large were introduced to a new reproductive health practice – surrogacy – via a deluge of media coverage of the Baby M custody case. The novelty of the issue produced unparalleled attention to the topic during this custody trial. Since then there’s been a waxing and waning of news coverage over the years, with no one news outlet ever spending too much time on the issue, nor any one specific storyline receiving the widespread coverage that the Baby M case did (see Markens, 2007). Meanwhile, the use of surrogate mothers in the U.S. has seemingly become “normalized” in the mass media as witnessed by news reports of celebrities, from Ricky Martin to Sarah Jessica Parker, hiring surrogates to have children, as well as the visibility of entertainment storylines about surrogacy from the hit television sitcom Friends in the late 1990s to the mainstream Hollywood feature film Baby Mama in 2008.

However, in the beginning of the 21st century a new “dramatic story” about surrogacy emerged that brought renewed attention to the topic as a social problem and a public/health policy issue. Between 2006 and 2010 reports of a growing global surrogacy industry in India appeared in most mainstream U.S. media outlets from the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post to MSNBC, CBS News, CNN, ABC News, and The Oprah Winfrey show (CBSNews.com, 2007, Chu, 2006, CNN.com, 2008, Cohen, 2009, Dolnick, 2007, Gentleman, 2008, Goodman, 2008, Kohl, 2007, MSNBC.com, 2007, Mukhergee, 2007, The Oprah Winfrey Show, 2006, Ward, 2010). Concurrently, several mainstream media outlets published stories on surrogacy with a focus on U.S. military wives who were surrogates (e.g., Hennessy-Fiske, 2009, James, 2008, Nosheen and Schellmann, 2010, Rodrigues and Meyersohn, 2010). Thus, as the first decade of the 21st century came to a close, the topic of surrogate motherhood seemed once again prevalent in the American press. For instance, one Wall Street Journal online columnist wrote: “The last time surrogate motherhood made these kinds of headlines was during the famous ‘Baby M’ case of the late 1980s” (Miller, 2008), while a Hartford Courant article focused on why “the practice of surrogacy has emerged again as a media preoccupation” (Klimkiewicz, 2008). Given this ostensibly renewed media fascination with surrogacy, and in particular the new storylines about the Indian surrogacy industry as well as surrogates who are military wives, this paper asks: What cultural assumptions about gender, family and the global reproductive health market are revealed in current U.S. media coverage of and public discourses about surrogacy?

Why focus on the media in order to understand contemporary manifestations and understandings of surrogacy arrangements? As an extensive body of research has shown, the media is an important claims-maker to the extent that they choose what events to report, and the amount of coverage given to any specific issue (e.g., Gans, 1979, McCombs and Shaw, 1972, Tuchman, 1978). Research has also found that the lay public receives much of its information about health issues from the news (Brodie et al., 2003, Gollust and Lantz, 2009). This should be particularly so for surrogacy, a reproductive practice with which very few have direct experience. The public is thus only aware of the issue of surrogate parenting as a “social problem” because the media reports on it; at the same time, the public’s views of surrogacy are shaped by the “dramatic stories” and frames used to tell stories about it (Markens, 2007).

This study draws on constructivist approaches to social problems (Best, 1991, Hilgartner and Bosk, 1988, Spector and Kitsuse, 1977), and in particular framing analysis (e.g., Entman, 1993, Gamson, 1988, Gamson, 1992, Hilgartner and Bosk, 1988) in order to analyze the discursive contests over the meaning of the global surrogacy industry as “different ways of framing the situation may compete to be accepted as an authoritative version of reality” (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988, p. 58). Framing involves the rhetorical tools and definitional activities that tell a particular story about an issue by emphasizing certain aspects over others (Entman, 1993, Gamson, 1992). As Gamson (1988) writes: “The frame suggests what the issue is about. It answers the question, ‘what is the basic source of controversy or concern on this issue’?”(p. 165). A focus on the media frames used to tell stories about this relatively rare type of reproductive/medical tourism is therefore important in as much as it could influence public perceptions and political reactions, if any, to the global reproductive surrogacy industry. As Sarah Franklin (1993) writes, “dominant cultural representations…have become key sites of struggle over the meanings through which reproductive politics are defined” (p. 524). At the same time, an analysis of media frames also reveals what ideas resonate in the public sphere (Ferree, 2003), and thus provides a useful window to the larger cultural assumptions that shape debates about surrogacy.