01.03.2018 | Hauptbeiträge | Ausgabe 1/2018
Outsourcing labor
Surrogacy as body care work
- Zeitschrift:
- Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie > Ausgabe 1/2018
Abstract
Surrogacy has created new pathways to parenthood, but simultaneously opened up a heated debate among ethicists, lawmakers, and scholars in the social sciences and humanities. In a surrogacy arrangement, an individual or a couple hire a woman to gestate and birth a child for them. The most common way to do this is via gestational surrogacy, in which another woman’s egg is inseminated and then implanted into the surrogate’s uterus.
Theorizing surrogacy as a form of work is relatively new. What sorts of “work” do surrogate mothers perform? Is surrogacy only “work” when the surrogate is paid or is it also work if there is no financial compensation involved? This article suggests that surrogates perform body care work in both instances.
