Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Politics of Reproduction Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism Edited by ModhuMita Roy and MaRy thoMpson THE POLITICS OF REPRODUCTION FORMATIONS: ADOPTION, KINSHIP, AND CULTURE Emily Hipchen and John McLeod, Series Editors The Politics of Reproduction Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism Edited by Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2019 by Th e Ohio State University. Th is edition licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at catalog.loc.gov. Cover design by Nathan Putens Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Th e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. We dedicate this volume to the memory of our fathers, Richard E. Thompson Jr. (1924–2011) and Birendra Narayan Roy (1926–2011), and to our mothers, Barbara J. Thompson and Pranati Roy, with love and thanks. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION MODHUMITA ROY AND MARY THOMPSON 1 CHAPTER 1 Precarity and Disaster in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones: A Reproductive Justice Reading MARY THOMPSON 25 CHAPTER 2 Privileging God the Father: The Neoliberal Theology of the Evangelical Orphan Care Movement VALERIE A. STEIN 42 CHAPTER 3 White Futures: Reproduction and Labor in Neoliberal Times HEATHER MOONEY 61 CHAPTER 4 One Woman’s Choice Is Another Woman’s Disobedience: Seguro Popular and Threats to Midwifery in Mexico ROSALYNN VEGA 82 CHAPTER 5 The Work/Life Equation: Notes toward De-Privatizing the Maternal ZARENA ASLAMI 101 viii • CONTENTS CHAPTER 6 The Angel in the McMansion: Female Citizenship and Fetal Personhood in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Juno DIANA YORK BLAINE 119 CHAPTER 7 “Masters of Their Own Destiny”: Women’s Rights and Forced Sterilizations in Peru JULIETA CHAPARRO-BUITRAGO 138 CHAPTER 8 It’s All Biopolitics: A Feminist Response to the Disability Rights Critique of Prenatal Testing KAREN WEINGARTEN 155 CHAPTER 9 Commodification Anxiety and the Making of American Families in a State-Contracted Adoption and Foster Care Program MELISSA HARDESTY 172 CHAPTER 10 “It’s Your Choice, But . .”: Paradoxes of Neoliberal Reproduction for Indigenous Women in Oaxaca, Mexico REBECCA HOWES-MISCHEL 189 CHAPTER 11 The Globalization of Assisted Reproduction: Vulnerability and Regulation RACHEL ANNE FENTON 206 CHAPTER 12 Dangerous Desires and Abjected Lives: Baby-Hunger, Coerced Surrogacy, and Family-Making in Michael Robotham’s The Night Ferry MODHUMITA ROY 225 List of Contributors 241 Index 245 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WE ARE indebted to many whose support and encouragement have made this volume possible. We want to express our deep gratitude, even if we are unable to name them all here. At Ohio State University Press, our editor, Kristen Elias Rowley, has pro- vided guidance, support, and advice throughout the process. The book would not have been possible without her enthusiasm and encouragement from the start. We thank her for her help in seeing this project through to completion. Sincere thanks to Tara Cyphers for her keen eye and sound advice in the final stages of the book’s preparation. We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers, who understood the political and intellectual stakes of the volume, for their generous and perspicacious feedback, which pushed us to answer our questions and to galvanize the volume’s focus. Our collaboration would not have been possible without the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI), and that orga- nization’s founder and force of nature, Andrea O’Reilly. We are grateful for her capacious understanding of “mothers, mothering, and motherhood” that includes all facets of reproduction. We wish to acknowledge the generous support of our departments and deans’ offices at James Madison University and Tufts University. We thank JMU College of Arts and Letters Faculty Mini-Grants and Faculty Research ix x • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Awards Committee Grants-in-Aid, Tufts University, for providing funding for manuscript preparation. We are indebted to the contributors to this volume for their hard work and commitment to reproductive politics. Special thanks to Kate Walters for allowing us to use her evocative painting for the cover, and to Matthew White for his meticulous work on indexing the volume. Modhumita would like to thank her “middle-aged brigade,” Pilar Bartley, Goizane Suengas, and Heiddis Valdimarsdottir, for always being there. A very warm thank you to her sister, Anindita Raj Bakshi, who broke the rules first and showed the way. Thanks also to comrade and mentor Malini Bhattacharya for her encouragement, and to Paromita Chakravarti for her irreverent wit and sustaining friendship. And, of course, the late, great Jasodhara Bagchi, fiery feminist and friend, whose work continues to inspire. A grateful thank you to Abha Sur for filling her with delicious meals and provocative ideas. Modhumita also wants to thank friends and colleagues at Tufts University, especially Sonia Hofkosh and Elizabeth Ammons, for enriching her intellec- tual and personal life. Sincere thanks to Douglas Riggs, Jennifer LeBlanc, and Wendy Medeiros, in the English office, for their patience and help with tem- peramental computers and other sundry machines and for many everyday acts of support and kindness. Mary would like to thank her inspiring coworkers at The Center for Choice (1983–2013) for their fearless dedication to abortion access, boundless compassion, and bawdy/body humor. Gratitude is also due to Carol Yoder, her running partner, for her generous spirit, good humor, and for lending an ear— mile after mile. She also thanks her feministy colleagues and friends—Jessica Davidson, Dawn Goode, Kristin Wylie, Becca Howes-Mischel, Debali Mook- erjea-Leonard, and AJ Morey—for their sustaining conversations and support. Last but not least she thanks Olive the pit bull, and sweet, loyal Blondie, who ungrudgingly awaits—from her position directly behind the office chair—a promised walk. And, finally, we would like to express our love, gratitude, and thanks to our families, and especially, to our mothers, Barbara J. Thompson and Pranati Roy, to whom this volume is dedicated. INTRODUCTION MODHUMITA ROY AND MARY THOMPSON “WHAT SEPARATES and what connects the lives and stories of women imag- ined within the capacious borders of the global? . How are we simulta- neously intertwined with one another and made separate through relations of power, of position, of geography and history?” ask Cindi Katz and Nancy Miller in their “Editor’s Note” to a special double issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly (11). The Politics of Reproduction seeks to answer their questions by focusing on the entangled politics of abortion, adoption, and commercial surrogacy, as they play out in the “capacious borders of the global.” The essays in this collection are attentive particularly to the “diverse instantiations” (to borrow Wendy Brown’s phrase) of neoliberalism’s reshaping of economies and intimacies. Our aim here is to analyze and understand the dynamics of “simultaneously intertwined” reproductive politics as they unfold in specific instances of family creation, choice, and labor. Consider these three recent reports in the news that center on reproduction and reproductive choice: In October 2017, a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant from Central America, “Jane Doe,” having received a judicial bypass of the state paren- tal consent law in Texas, sought to have an abortion. Her action sparked a federal lawsuit, and a Court of Appeals’ three-judge panel (including then- member Brett M. Kavanaugh) initially blocked her request and compelled her to receive antiabortion counseling from a local crisis pregnancy clinic. 1 2 • INTRODUCTION Ultimately, the full Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit overturned the panel’s decision (6-to-3), and Jane Doe was able to terminate the pregnancy (Chappell). In November 2017, a gestational surrogate in California, Jessica Allen, gave birth to twins and handed them over to the commissioning couple, the Lius, who had travelled from China. In a rare phenomenon known as “superfeta- tion,” Allen had ovulated and become pregnant after being implanted with the Lius’ embryo, making one of the twins biologically unrelated to the Lius (Ridley). The Lius reportedly returned the non-biological child to the agency to adopt out. However, since Mrs. Liu’s name appeared on the birth certifi- cate, making her the legal mother of the twins, in order to gain custody of the child to whom they were biologically but not legally related, the Allens were initially asked to repay part of the surrogacy fee, in addition to incurred legal fees and the processing charge from the agency. In his January 2018 State of the Union address, President Trump introduced an adoptive couple, the Holets, as his special guests. Ryan Holet, a police offi- cer, had apprehended a pregnant woman injecting herself with heroin and, in that moment he claimed, “God spoke to him,” prompting him to persuade the woman to let his family adopt her baby. While the intended point of this anecdote was the altruism of the adoptive Christian couple, Trump’s account neglected to report what happened to the birthmother. These three alarming vignettes might appear, on one level, to reflect quite dif- ferent concerns: abortion, surrogacy, and adoption. But a closer look reveals some deeper connections, and it is these deeper, more insidious connections that this collection of essays explores: the asymmetrically distributed privilege and precarity within which reproductive choices are made, the confluence of different degrees and kinds of desperation that force particular decisions, and the biopolitics that regulate not just biological life but the very conditions of the regeneration of life. To unravel the “simultaneously intertwined” lives and concerns, we might begin by making deceptively simple observations about transnational move- ments of bodies and resources.