Blogging for choice : The business of outsourcing choice

Today is January 22nd, 2008 and women across the United States will observe it as the 35 anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Many of them will even be blogging about how the right to choose is so important to them. Others will spend the day condemning it.

Which just brings me to the topic of birthing.

It seems like there is a baby boom in Hollywood. Everybody and their mother is pregnant. There is so much baby booming that it led Ricki Lake to make a documentary about the whole thing.

In The Business of Being Born, Lake goes on to document the way women in the United States go about birthing babies and reveal it for what it is, a business. As an advocate for midwifery and non-invasive birthing, Lake hopes "this film educates people and empowers them to really know their choices in childbirth."

One choice she didn't cover was the choice of the outsourced birth.

The Times of India published a few days ago an article titled, "Surrogate moms in hot demand". It talks about how expats and foreign born Indians are flooding the Punjabi region looking for a womb to rent.

The booming business is being called "surrogacy tourism".

In an AP article on the same subject, they break down the numbers of this new wombing economy :

- $10 - 20,000 for a surrogate in India is a bargain compared to up to $250,000 of in-vitro fertilization or up to $80,000 for a surrogate in the United States.

- 9 months of pregnancy for a surrogate can be equal to 15 years of earn income.

Judith Warner over at The New York Times has even more disturbing numbers : outsourced birthing and surrogacy tourism are estimated to be a $445-million-a-year business in India.

The ethical and moral repercussions of this baby booming choice are vast and overwhelming :

But our rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty, half a world away. Then, selling one’s body for money is not degrading but empowering. And the transaction is not outsourcing of the basest nature – not modern-day wet-nursing taken to the nth degree – but a good deal for everyone concerned. “There’s nothing wrong in this,” Priyanka Sharma, another surrogate, concluded the Marketplace segment. “We give them a baby and they give us much-needed money. It’s good for them and for us.”

I think it is incredibly important on a day like to day to ponder what this "perverse" empowerment means. In a day like today, in which so many feminists are celebrating the law that allows them in the United States to exercise their reproductive rights, how do we celebrate the choice to rent a womb?

Can a woman choose if she has no future, no resources, no way out?

Can a woman choose if all she is good for is birthing somebody else's baby?

Is that choice?

Even if it that womb of hers will get her 15 years of wages?

Discuss.

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