The Words to Say it With: BORN NOT MADE

I have been asked: what is at stake in so much discussion of the surrogacy of maternity or gestation, also called gestation for others and womb to rent? Many names and much debate for a subject that has, in effect, different facets, and which lends itself to inquiries both deep and wide. I suggest a practical and realistic way of approaching this mess. It consists of seeing gestation for others as the invention of a business, that is, of a legal way of making money, exploiting the technical possibilities offered by medically assisted procreation, extended and regulated by a pertinent business contract. It is a question of separating the gestation (or pregnancy) from the process of being a mother, to make, in exchange, of that the independent production of a new human baby endowed with genetic characteristics that allows for them (legally...) to be attributed to third-party progenitors. The absence of a theory of female freedom can be read in capital letters in the invention of gestation for others. Because this carries with it a servile usage of the female body, in each one of its phases. The contract signed by the woman, on the other hand, does not eliminate but rather limits itself to legalizing the co-natural violence of the fact of splitting the gestation from the whole process of procreating, with the loss of the title of mother and, finally, with the traumatic separation from the infant given birth to. Gestation for others is as “free” as a marriage was in the full patriarchal regime. There was consensus there too. Was there freedom there, for all that? Transferred to the question that interests us here, the question becomes as to what it is that, in our culture and civilization, has made possible and even acceptable an invention like gestation for others that, amongst other things, foresees the obligatory separation of the recently born infant from the maternal body. An anti-natural practice that wounds the maternal relationship and, therefore, wounds the whole of humanity because all of us, women and men, are born of woman.