A new book by Clemence Due and myself – bringing together and building on our work over the past seven years on surrogacy – has just been released by Routledge, and is available now for purchase. Part of the Critical Approaches to Health series edited by Kerry Chamberlain and Antonia Lyons, the book offers a novel theoretical framework for thinking about reproductive desires and demands as they circulate within the context of compensated surrogacy arrangements.
This comprehensive text makes an important contribution to the study of surrogacy by developing a novel theoretical framework through which to understand the broader social contexts as well as individual decisions at play within surrogacy arrangements.
Drawing on empirical research conducted by the authors and supplemented by secondary analyses of media, legislative, and public accounts of surrogacy, this book engages with the key stakeholders involved in the practice of surrogacy. Specifically, the book canvases the standpoints of women who act as surrogates, intending parents who commission surrogacy arrangements, children born through surrogacy arrangements, clinics that facilitate surrogacy arrangements, and politicians and journalists who engage with the topic of surrogacy.
Through a focus on capitalism as a means of orientating ourselves to the topic of surrogacy, this book highlights the vulnerabilities that potentially arise in the context of surrogacy, as well as the claims to agency invoked by some parties in order to mitigate vulnerability. In so doing, this book demonstrates that the psychology of surrogacy must be broadly understood as an orientation to particular ways of thinking about children, reproduction, and economies of labor.