By aurora linnea
My body, my choice. Our rallying cry, chanted in unison, rising hot and acid stinging up from our bellies through our throats to the tips of our tongues, sped past the screaming point by the sick shock of emergency. In June the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, and with that, the patriarchal regime made official once again its authority over female bodies as state property. We have lost one of the few legal protections from male domination that this land of the free ever afforded its female citizens. Since 1993, when a man fucked her over, a woman in the United States at least had the option to abort the fruit of his seed. She was not – not officially, not by law – forced to bear his child as an anchor sinking her bound to the man or the male-ruled state. (Unofficial enforcement remained in full effect, of course, emotional manipulation being a primary method.) With the dam of Roe v. Wade burst and a cascade of abortion bans coursing state to state, millions of women and girls now have one less escape route. Since we never had many, it is a staggering loss. And so the words resurge, taught to us as incantation against tyranny: my body, my choice.
We mean it as mutiny and it was powerful once, to be sure, innovative in its insistence that a woman’s body is her own therefore she decides what to do with it. If a woman wants to terminate her pregnancy, she should do so, whether men like it or not. Her body, her choice. If she wants to bear the child then she should bear it, whether men like it or not; she should not be sterilized or coerced into abortion because she is black or indigenous, poor, disabled or otherwise “undesirable.” Her body, her choice. A woman’s self-government as the mistress of her own body is the fundamental premise of and precondition for reproductive freedom.
But, like everything women have ever said, our words have been turned against us. “My body, my choice” was conceived as an assertion of female defiance and noncompliance. Men have long made their assessment of the best uses for female bodies abundantly, appallingly clear. Andrea Dworkin put it plainly: “the value of a female life is determined by its reproductive value.” It is patriarchal popular knowledge that women were put on this earth to bring forth men’s children and to rear them, that’s what women do, that’s what women are for. Maternity is the function of the female body and the defining purpose of female existence. Everything in a woman not attuned to her god- or nature-given role is negated, and the woman who does not reproduce is a worthless aberration. By declaring “my body, my choice,” women were rejecting men’s purposes for their female bodies in favor of their own female personhood. In the years between the winning of Roe v. Wade and last month’s loss of it, however, a reversal was performed. Today, the mantra can be invoked to do precisely the opposite of what it was meant to do. Now a woman’s right to let men use her body must be affirmed—her body, her choice! Submitting our bodies to men’s purposes, whatever they may be, is as essential an expression of reproductive freedom as refusing submission. Both choices being equally valid, it is also as deserving of defense.
It will astonish none of you that this catch-all interpretation of female bodily autonomy is the one patriarchal society endorses, enforces, and enlists women in upholding, with the result that “my body, my choice” has morphed into a terrifically multipurpose maxim. Demanding abortion access? My body, my choice. Legitimizing the commodification of women as wombs in reproductive prostitution, otherwise known as surrogacy? My body, my choice. To achieve full sovereignty a woman must be free to choose to place her body at men’s service, to serve the female function to which men have reduced her kind since the dawn of patriarchal civilization. To pay her way or prove her womanly value she must be free to hawk herself as a rent-a-uterus for the incubation of manmade on-demand heirs. Her body, her choice.
A woman has her reasons, she makes her choices. In Ukraine, where the surrogacy industry has come under some scrutiny of late due to war-wrought disturbances exposing the dismal realities of business-as-usual, many women choose to lease out their female flesh as the growth medium for paying customers’ commissioned offspring. Ukraine is the poorest European country. Like many nations impoverished by long histories of colonization and conflict, Ukraine’s economy leans on the commodification of women’s bodies. Both the repro-tech trade – which deals in women’s eggs and uteruses – and the sex industry are booming. With pauperized females galore and laws favorable to those on the market for made-to-order infants, Ukraine has carved a niche for itself as an international surrogacy destination. And although prostitution is illegal in Ukraine, the country has nevertheless been termed a “sex tourism mecca” and is also a major exporter of women, stocking the brothels of Germany and other European countries where state-sanctioned sexual exploitation thrives. The United Nations estimates that over 86,000 Ukrainian women were employed “in a variety of sex work environments” in 2018. It is likely that the actual number was higher then and has risen since and will continue to rise as a consequence of the current war.
BioTexCom, a popular surrogacy clinic in Ukraine, “produces” an est. 60 infants per month.
A Ukrainian woman employed as a school teacher can expect to earn an annual salary equivalent to $4,500 USD. Selling sexual access to her body in a brothel, she might make slightly above $5,000 USD. For carrying a paid pregnancy to term, a Ukrainian woman hired out by a surrogacy agency can net as much as $18,000 USD, with the possibility of a bonus if she doubles her output by producing twins. A young Ukrainian woman told the New York Times that she planned to buy her family a house with her surrogacy wages, something she could never have hoped to afford in her previous occupation as a manicurist. She made her choice.
Women are also poor in India, which held bragging rights as the world’s premier destination for uterine real estate until a 2018 law banned commercial surrogacy, significantly cramping Western baby buyers’ style. Before the ban, a woman whose annual income (for a family of up ten people) had totaled $540 USD could anticipate a “life-changing” sum of $4,000–$8,000 USD per successful “surrogate” pregnancy. India emerged as the baby factory of the world because of the bargain basement prices on female bodies guaranteed by women’s extreme poverty. A pittance for the middle-class North American or European seeking to outsource spawn production was a massive windfall for an Indian woman—enough to fund a new business venture, restore a home demolished by natural disaster, pay off an alcoholic husband’s debts, or send her children to school. Women made their choices. (Or, not infrequently, men made women’s choices for them: women interviewed about their motivations for becoming surrogates often reported pressure from their husbands to enter the industry.)
In the United States, so-called “military wives” make up a large segment of the female population choosing employment in commercial surrogacy. By U.S. standards, these women too are poor; they are typically less educated, have children of their own at a younger age, and – because of the nature of their husbands’ careers – move around too much to hold down other jobs. Surrogacy brokers specifically target these women when placing want ads for “opportunities” in paid pregnancy. Where commercial surrogacy is illegal but women are permitted to undertake this sacred mission supremely suited to their sex out of the tenderness of their unfathomable feminine hearts, altruistic surrogacy entices women with the promise of love, proof of virtue, and all those other warm fuzzy intangible rewards that Virgin-Mary-style self-sacrifice brings.
Female and destitute, female and economically disenfranchised, female and with children of her own to keep housed and fed, female and wanting to be good, female and socialized to exalt maternity as her consummation, female and her other option is men fucking her for money but she’s not “that kind of girl” so she’ll sell the less filthy parts of herself instead, female and pimped out by her husband, female and worth so close to nothing in male-supremacist society but desperate to survive, a woman makes her choices.
Surrogacy banks on women’s choicelessness to re-envision compulsory motherhood for the modern era, redistributing the timeless women’s work of reproduction in congruence with the currents of globalized capitalism. The poverty in which capitalist patriarchy holds women paralyzed supplies a self-selected breeder class of the world’s poorest women, who “earn [their] womanly keep in [their] womanly way” through strict compliance with the female sex role in exchange for basic subsistence. It is the monetization of sex-class subordination, with women receiving less than minimum wage to naturalize the patriarchal concept of what a female is and does and what she’s for. No pretense is made towards respecting the personhood of members of the new breeder class. Instead, they are downgraded to objects with functions, commodities – incubators, gestational carriers, receptacles, hatcheries, suitcases, Easy-Bake ovens – or even less than that, disdained as fleshy appendages inconveniently tacked on to “useful wombs.” Gena Corea, in her book The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technology from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (1985), cites a 1976 article from the Western Journal of Medicine referring to “the woman attached to the rented womb.”
The terms of an “incubator’s” employment dictate complete acquiescence to the will and whims of her employers along with a full-body devotion to the “quality” of her product. The medicalized patriarchal control over her body and life is all-consuming: she withstands the required tests, saturates her flesh with the required pharmaceuticals, eats what she is told to eat, lives where she is made to live; her contract stipulates if and when she can have sex and what kind of exercises are appropriate for her and if she can visit the dentist or travel out of state or dye her hair. At her employers’ request, she is enjoined to allow a doctor to destroy surplus or otherwise unwanted products of her labors by way of a procedure called “selective reduction”: the unfit fetus is killed inside her, eventually to be reabsorbed by her body. Her body absorbs it because the “good” she is hired to “produce” is in reality her own body remade into the nascent body of another, her own life rechanneled into the creation of a new life, her blood its blood, the sum of her physiology reconfigured to foster the flowering of this little being she creates cell by cell. Although men have shattered women into fragments, imagining us as usable parts and pieces, holes and hollows, the truth is that the uterus is inseparable from the woman; it cannot exist apart from her and so to “rent a uterus” is impossible—there is only renting a woman whole. Thus the breeding-class female gives her all, inevitably. Sometimes she gets sick – gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and anemia are regular complications of surrogate pregnancies – and sometimes she dies, however much men do beg to differ, the female body was not meant for this.
Celebrants of surrogacy would have us believe that women employed in the gestation sector have made a particularly modern choice of how to earn their livelihoods. It is superficially modern in its connection to “cutting edge” technologies, which lends the enterprise a clean chromium sheen, sleek and futuristic. On a more theoretical level, uterine employment is touted as modern for how it assigns a wage to a service that women have historically performed without pay. To the capitalist mind, this is patent evidence of progress. If what is paid for is valued and those who do valuable things are valued then the society that pays women to do something it once expected they would do for free has increased its valuation of women—and that’s progressive! The capitalist mind also conflates financial gain with freedom: the more money you have, the freer you will be, whatever it is you do to get that money. Whatever you do for money is work and as long as you’re paid fairly to do it, you’re not being exploited or degraded in the doing; just like magic, you are no longer enslaved, now you’re working—even if you are still doing the same exact thing you were once forced to do. It’s different now, because those who used to force you have deigned to pay you “what you’re worth.”
But what most makes surrogacy stand out as a model job for the modern woman is the “gestational worker’s” own commodification of her female body and its capacities. The modern woman recognizes her body’s value as an asset and like the cool-headed entrepreneur she is, she puts herself piece by piece up for sale on men’s marketplace, her bottom line the maximal extraction of profit from the materials she has at her disposal, i.e. her female flesh. The modern woman is not sentimentally attached to her body; worldly-wise she has outgrown any illusions of the sanctity of sex or reproduction or her own body or anybody else’s. No, the modern woman is sufficiently shrewd, street-smart and sophisticated to see the female body she commands for what it is: a hot commodity. A thing men want and will pay for. Her acute monetary instincts tell her she can benefit from men’s use of her body. Her body, her property, her choice.
Besides the increasingly elaborate technology involved, however, there is nothing modern about surrogacy, as practice or industry. Since the advent of patriarchal civilization, women’s survival has depended on submitting their bodies to men’s purposes. Women, the sentimental and the savvy alike, have given themselves up and sold themselves off to men in hopes of dodging death-by-destitution. And since the advent of patriarchal civilization, men have been reducing women to “mere vessels for the incubation of men’s sons” while fancying themselves the active force in generation, the true masters of reproduction. As Dr. Renate Klein writes in Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation (2017), the delusion at the heart of surrogacy is an ancient one: that it is really men who make babies. Corea supplies a concise historical review of this delusion in The Mother Machine. The Ancient Greeks made Athena spring fully grown from Zeus’s skull and Dionysus from his thigh; the dramatist Aeschylus (525-456 BC) had Apollo reassure men that, in human procreation, the female “is no parent, just a nurse…[t]he parent is the one who plants the seed, the father.” Aristotle (384-322 BC) espoused the theory that men were reproduction’s primary players on account of the life-giving, soul-infusing action of male sperm, while women merely supplied passive matter to the proceedings. The Indian Manusmriti (Laws of Manu), a canonical text of Hinduism penned between 200-300 BCE, concurs with Aristotle’s assessment of female passivity, proposing that men were created when the Sun God (actively) planted his seed in the Earth Mother’s (passive) soil. Likewise, the Christian god begat the first man from dirt, and then it was the first man who became the first mother-father, siring the first woman from his breast. To drive home the point, here’s a Japanese proverb: “A woman’s womb is a borrowed vessel to beget a child.” And also, finally, in a 17th c. treatise, the alchemist Michael Maier rhapsodized that Man would in due time consummate his overthrow of nature when, via technological genius, he achieved the “assumption of maternity” from the female and bore himself a baby.
Myth of Male Motherhood, Ex. 1: Zeus bears Athena from his skull, as imagined by Rene Antoine-Housse (The Birth of Minerva, 17th c.).
Myth of Male Motherhood, Ex. 2: A pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior (1994).
Surrogacy is neither modern nor progressive. It is vintage male supremacist scheming, the latest phase in an age-old patriarchal plot. Man’s agenda is to commandeer complete control over women’s unique biological capacity to bring forth new life, thereby placing the reproductive process gripped ever more squarely in male hands, so that Man may extend his dominion over all creation. The goal is god-status, Man self-promoted to the role of sole creator of everything that is. (An impossible, doomed fantasy, yes, but one men appear dangerously committed to.)
Men have been making use of women as raw material for their mad science experiments in total conquest for enough centuries now that it feels quite natural, as a woman, to cede one’s body to male purposes, for love or for profit. We’ve known nothing else. Female bodies have been men’s property, public and private, sex objects and breeding apparatuses, bought and sold and bartered. We have learned our bodies’ use value and exchange value as commodities on the male market but we’ve had no occasion to learn them as invaluable, worth more to us than any price men could set on them. To value our bodies as our own does not occur to us. Selling access to our orifices occurs to us, selling eggs, contracting out our wombs to buy our way in Man’s world. The idea that a woman can profit off her body, as its proprietor, is seductive—it’s as near as we can imagine to claiming the rights to ourselves. And anyway what good are our bodies to us, otherwise? Because women are hated we experience our female bodies as a source of shame and terror and suffering; we come to fear the body as a liability, for we are wise to what men can do and will do to our flesh, all the ways our female bodies can be hurt and broken. We do not want these bodies, we long to be rid of them—and if we can cash in on their disposal, isn’t that a sweet deal?
How easy it is, what a comfort to choose to sign over our bodies, which have been nothing but trouble to us. Let men put them to good use, since we have no better uses for them. They were never really ours, after all.
To commodify her female body, to sell or surrender it—while these may be choices a woman makes, they cannot be considered free. She does not make these choices under conditions of freedom, and they do not produce freedom for her or any other woman. The choice of how to prostitute ourselves in accommodation to men’s objectification of our sex is a pathetic freedom and if we settle for it, we make ourselves complicit in the sex-class degradation of women, defined by function and consigned for use. Resistance is a worthier choice than submission but choosing it will require that we as women cultivate a new understanding of our bodies, not as assets, not as resources or property or commodities, but as ourselves. We do not own our bodies; we are our bodies. Male rule has bludgeoned women into a profound, traumatized alienation from our physical physiological biological selves and to heal the damage done is our most revolutionary assignment. Urgently, we are called to reintegration: the active transformation of bodily estrangement and fragmentation into embodied integrity and wholeness. It is only when a woman can understand with real conviction that she is her body, that her body’s sole purpose is to live her own singular specific life, to sense the world’s extravagant aliveness all around her and herself vibrantly alive within it, to move through that world directed by no authority but her own, as best serves her and the vital earth of which she is a part; only then will female freedom become possible. When she chooses her body. Her own life. When she chooses herself.
Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.