Thai Surrogate Mothers’ Experiences of Transnational Commercial Surrogacy : Navigating Local Morality and Global Markets

Sammanfattning: Transnational commercial surrogacy is an arrangement where a woman gestates and delivers a child for intended parents from another country in exchange for money. This thesis explores the experiences of women who have acted as surrogate mothers in Thailand. Based on in-depth interviews with twelve former surrogate mothers, the thesis analyses their accounts in relation to gendered, local, and global dimensions of transnational commercial surrogacy. More specifically, it investigates how surrogacy has affected the women materially, socially, and personally; how they understand and negotiate family, kinship, and relationships in connection with their surrogacy experiences; but also how the global surrogacy market and local context interact in shaping the conditions for surrogacy in Thailand. The thesis engages in dialogue with research on commercial surrogacy in other settings, and draws upon theoretical frameworks of gender, motherhood and kinship, local moral economies, and precarious intimate labour. The analysis explores, first, how the women’s decisions to undertake surrogacy, and, for some, further involvement in surrogacy are enabled through women’s social networks and family relationships. Second, it investigates how, through the framing of surrogacy as primarily an opportunity to earn money for their own family but also as an act of making merit, the women draw upon material and religious rationalities as well as gender ideals that allow them to live up to their obligations as mothers and daughters. Third, it explores how their trajectories are marked by im/mobility and flexibility, taking shape in relation to the global reproductive market as well as local and national conditions. Finally, it demonstrates how the women use strategies of de/kinning that both align with and resist the idea that the surrogate mother is not related to the child. The results highlight the precariousness of these women’s labour and how surrogacy stretches into their lives beyond the nine months of pregnancy. Results also focus the women’s own decision-making and negotiations within the context of constrained but real agency. This thesis contributes knowledge about the situation of surrogate mothers post-pregnancy, and also in a context where surrogacy is illegal. It also contributes to the research fields of transnational reproduction, gendered and global division of intimate labour and feminist discussions on motherhood.