Overview

Surrogacy is heavily promoted by the stagnating IVF industry which seeks new markets for women over 40, and gay men who believe they have a ‘right’ to their own children and ‘family foundation’. Pro-surrogacy groups in rich countries such as Australia and Western Europe lobby for the shift to commercial surrogacy. Their capitalist neo-liberal argument is that a well-regulated fertility industry would avoid the exploitative practices of poor countries. Central to the project of transnational surrogacy is the ideology that legalised commercial surrogacy is a legitimate means to provide infertile couples and gay men with children who share all or part of their genes. Women, without whose bodies this project is not possible are reduced to incubators, to ovens, to suitcases. And the ‘product child’ is a tradable commodity who has never consented to being a ‘take away baby’: removed from their birth mother and given to strangers aka ‘intended parents’. Still, those in favour of this practice of reproductive slavery speak of ‘Fair Trade International Surrogacy’ and ‘responsible surrogacy’.

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9781922964366

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Dr Renate Klein holds an MSc from Zürich University, a BA (Honours) in Women’s Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in Sociology of Education from the University of London. She was a Research Associate in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Zürich. Klein was Associate Professor, Women’s Studies at Deakin University until retirement in 2006 and taught courses on International Feminism, Reproductive Medicine and Feminist Ethics. Since the early 1980s she has conducted critical feminist research on the new and old reproductive technologies including international population control, IVF (fertility drugs), hormonal and immunological contraceptives, RU 486 and Gardasil. With Dr Susan Hawthorne she co-founded the independent feminist publishing company Spinifex Press in Melbourne in 1991. She is the (co)author/(co)editor of 19 previous books including Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?; Infertility: Women’s Experiences with Reproductive Medicine; RU 486: Misconceptions, Myths and Morals; Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed; Cyberfeminism and Not Dead Yet. Dr Klein has authored 23 book chapters and 40 journal articles. Her latest article on international surrogacy was published in Arena (March 2025)

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