She also spoke to intended parents, doctors, nurses, surrogacy brokers, and hostel matrons, who run the housing where surrogates stay during their pregnancies. She visited surrogacy clinics and interviewed surrogates, their husbands, and their in-laws. Over a five-year period, Pande made three trips to India (in 2006, 2007, and 2011). Pande’s research depends heavily on the many interviews she conducted and on the data gathered on her trips to meet various stakeholders in this emerging market. She insists that we not bury this debate in terms of motherhood and reproduction, but instead consider the practice through the lens of work that crosses production and reproduction constructs.

She suggests that it is much more complex than a simple clash between the needs of women from two different classes: the affluent in India and abroad who buy, and the poor women in need of money who are forced to sell or rent their wombs.

Pande begins her book by challenging common perceptions and media distortions around the Indian surrogacy market. However, the author’s conclusion-that surrogacy should not be banned but merely regulated-leaves room for troubling human-rights abuses. This important book contributes greatly to a much-needed international conversation about surrogacy.

Her research culminated in Wombs in Labor. Her new awareness of a growing baby market-and her discovery that there has been little serious research on this industry-launched her into a five-year study on surrogacy in India. Pande describes herself as “haunted” by these “chilling visions.” She was deeply troubled by thoughts of her native India becoming filled with not only slum dogs and call centers, but exploitative baby farms as well. At that time, Pande was a recent immigrant studying in the United States. In her book, Pande recalls reading a 2006 newspaper article in The Guardian that covered “India’s new form of outsourcing.” The article described how couples from all over the world were coming to India to hire surrogates to bear their children-and paying a fraction of what it would have cost in their home countries. “Fair Trade Surrogacy.” That’s what sociologist Amrita Pande told me was needed when we spoke about her new book, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Surrogacy in India, recently released by Columbia University Press.Īfter reading her book, I interviewed Pande, now a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, via Skype and discussed her view of pregnancy as work in the growing billion-dollar-a-year industry of paid surrogacy in India.

Amrita pande surrogacy