ABSTRACT
International fertility travel engages structural inequalities arising from histories of conquest, capture and colonialism, and is entwined with the landscape of mobility, migration and rights. To better understand these relationships and their effects on participants in transnational fertility markets, this chapter explores how transnational surrogacy arrangements in India raise new issues around the legal and social construction of citizenship as a technology of mobility and of marking rights-bearing subjects. Locating foreign-born offspring, who are born to Indian surrogates but have the citizenship of their parents, within the history of birth and citizenship in the USA, we raise the question of how histories of labor, mobility, and citizenship influence the market for surrogacy. By bringing recent research on surrogacy together with critical theoretical work on the construction of citizenship, we highlight the ways in which the practice of transnational commercial surrogacy both grows out of and reinforces structures of inequality produced and controlled through apparatuses of the state. We use theories of citizenship and the nation-state to analyze the practice of US commissioning parents who contract commercial surrogacy in India, focusing in particular on US citizenship and its racial underpinnings, and suggest lines of inquiry for the ongoing scholarly examination of transnational surrogacy. Using the concepts of differential and flexible citizenship, we think through the consequences of the relatively weak citizenship of low-earning subjects like those who become surrogates in India by relating this to scholarship on women of color who are mothers in the USA. We also compare the context of citizenship issues raised by Indian surrogacy to historical instances where infants have been regarded as property, aliens, or citizens in the USA and India. We focus specifically on how foreign-born offspring complicate the history of citizenship through jus sanguinis in the USA. Through these relational and comparative analyses, this chapter brings a new analytics to scholarship on the exposure to risk of actors in surrogacy arrangements in terms of long-term health and social consequences, precarity and potential rightlessness.
