Discounted Life

"India is the world's top provider of surrogacy services, with a multi-million-dollar surrogacy industry that continues to grow exponentially. Some scholars have praised transnational surrogacy for the possibilities it opens for infertile couples, while others have offered bioethical cautionary tales or lamented the exploitation of surrogate mothers - but very little is known about the relationship between surrogate mothers and intended parents outside the lens of the many agencies that control surrogacy in India. Drawing from rich interviews with surrogate mothers and egg donors in Bangalore, as well as straight and gay couples in the U.S. and Australia, Discounted Life focuses on the processes of social and market exchange in transnational surrogacy. Sharmila Rudrappa interrogates the creation and maintenance of reproductive labor markets, the function of agencies and surrogacy brokers, and how women become surrogate mothers. She argues that this reproductive industry is organized to control and disempower women workers and yet, by and large, the surrogate mothers in Bangalore paradoxically find the experience life-affirming. A detailed and moving study, Discounted Life delineates how local labor markets intertwine with global reproduction industries and the remarkable ways in which surrogate mothers negotiate tenuous positions of power for themselves in progressively untenable socioeconomic conditions"--Unedited summary from book cover.