I peer into the stalls, admiring each pair of broodmare and foal. I take note of their special bonds; some mothers shield their babies from my intrusive gaze and others step aside to display their foal, almost as if they are boasting with pride about a great accomplishment. The gift of life and its beauty permeates every facet of this scene, yet I cannot ignore the feeling that the broodmares appear to be out of place. Though well-groomed and ostensibly in good health, they do not resemble the flashy performance mares found at the training barn next door. The longer I look, the more I realize that they do not resemble the foal suckling on their nipple either. Despite their youth, the foals exhibit prestigious conformation lines and muscle patterns – features their mothers lack. It is almost as if these pairings are not biological...because they are not.
The sport horse industry utilizes biotechnological techniques such as fertility outsourcing, to protect the value of performance mares’ breeding status. Through methods such as artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and cryopreservation, performance mares with desirable pedigrees are able to maintain their competitive status and refine their show records while still producing multiple offspring per year. All of which would be impossible without surrogate mares.
I approach a groom working in one of the stalls to inquire about these surrogate mares: Where did they come from? How much did they cost? How valuable are they? He tells me some were donated, others are retired athletes, but many were purchased at stockyards on their way to slaughter. He explains that as long as they fit the criteria, the stockyard is a good place to find cheap surrogate mares that otherwise have no value.
These mares are victims of structural violence as their animal rights have been infringed upon. Equines have been deeply immersed in the cultural sociology of human sports, playing a key role in the success of equestrians’ athletic and competitive endeavors. Most notably, equestrian sports were the trailblazers of sports betting. However, these surrogate mares revert to mere biological beings, stripped of their status as cultural creatures due to their inability to perform in processes and structures of anthropocentric significance in the way that performance mares do. This value reduction places certain equines at greater risk for suffering, violence, illness, and death – a reality that has become invisible and normalized by the agriculture industry. As described by the groom, these mares’ value lies solely in their ability to reproduce – a perspective with dangerous implications for the female body as they exist as anonymous vessels for feminine capacities.
Surrogacy techniques were absorbed from the agriculture industry by professionals in both the healthcare and legal industries to address and resolve the constraints of human infertility. Originally, human surrogacy was advertised as an alternative to adoption for couples facing infertility issues. Presented in a wholesome manner, surrogacy agencies recruited women who “wished to help another couple have children” [2]. This process was designed to assist infertile couples in building a traditional nuclear family. However, in modern practices and via elective application, surrogacy has become exploitative and violates the childbearing body, reducing the female body to a commodity used to perpetuate sexist gender roles both in the home and the professional realm.
As the job market and professional opportunities continue to expand for women in Western societies, young women are experiencing more pressure to choose between motherhood and their career:
- If you choose to be a homemaker and stay-at-home mom, you are criticized for your “lack of ambition” in the workplace and are a disappointment to feminists of the past who fought for women’s rights.
- If you choose to live a more career-oriented life, you are criticized for being coldhearted and unwomanly in your disinterest in building a family.
- If you choose to be a “working mom” (note that no one ever refers to men as “working dads”), you will never be able to fully thrive in both roles as you must sacrifice the quality of one for the experience of the other.
In an interview, actress Jamie Chung expresses the fear she felt of losing traction as a rising Hollywood actress given the inevitable career setbacks a woman faces when starting a family. Chung explains, “I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. In my industry, it feels like you’re easily forgotten if you don’t work within the next month of your last job” [1]. Chung and her husband opted for the surrogacy route not because of issues in carrying a fetus to term, but so that Chung could maintain her professional image – a phenomenon rooted in the sport horse industry. As a professional actress, Chung cannot afford to take the time off work required to have and raise a child in the same way that performance mares can’t afford to miss two-plus years of competition. Surrogacy is no longer a solution for infertility, but a method to adhere to toxic cultural and workplace pressures placed on human and nonhuman beings with childbearing ability.
The market-based model of private surrogacy operations feeds not only on professional women but also on socioeconomically marginalized women searching for means of contributing to society. Our society turns to disadvantaged and marginalized women to compensate for the Western working woman, “women often support themselves and their children by recasting their feminine capacities for nurturance, maternity, and sexuality as negotiable assets, able to be traded for money in countries where they can find employment as maids and nannies, as cleaners and waitresses, and as sex workers of various kinds. In Sassen’s terms, they form the ‘lower circuits of globalization,’ shoring up knowledge-worker households with their high consumption patterns and need for household assistance and ‘wifely’ services no longer performed by educated, professional women” [2].
Like the surrogate mares, human surrogates and women capitalizing off their femininity are anonymous vessels for feminine capacities. Women who have fallen victim to structural violence for any number of reasons (systemic racism, financial insecurity, restricted access to education, etc.) are vulnerable to being reduced to basic biological beings, stripped of their status as cultural creatures because of their inability to contribute to society. Thus, surrogates are no longer autonomous individuals but rather become enslaved incubators for the rich.
Private surrogacy operations have lacked appropriate ethical governance and moral guidance from educated physicians since they first opened in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cooper and Waldby emphasize that “agencies were set up not by clinicians but by attorneys, often in firms already working in the area of family law” [2]. Because of its ties to the legal profession, the organization of these early surrogacy operations was largely bureaucratic. Morality is lost in the bureaucratic model of healthcare, as it focuses on legalistic and procedural uniformity rather than subjective treatment, irresponsibly ascribes autonomy to vulnerable parties in need of additional aid, threatens unjust treatment of vulnerable parties, empowers those who are well-educated in legalistic and contractual practices, ignores everchanging social dynamics, and lacks sufficient information to provide informed consent [4].
Most notably, surrogacy is a direct violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy. Surrogacy deals are made under a contract or a “legal instrument that binds the vendor’s reproductive biology to the commissioning couples’ intentions” [2]. German philosopher and ethicist Immanuel Kant would argue that there are limits to autonomy and that selling your liberty – whether temporarily or indefinitely – is an attack on a person’s autonomy because it “erases the possibility of all autonomous action” [5]. Under contract, commissioning couples have the right to make healthcare and lifestyle decisions on behalf of their surrogate. Not only has the surrogate lost her independence in the care of her body regarding medications and medical treatments, but her independent lifestyle is also compromised. Socially, she becomes enslaved to the commissioning couple, limited in her engagement in certain activities, stripped of her free will to consume certain foods and beverages, and confined geographically by travel restraints. Often, decision-making about pregnancy termination is left entirely up to the commissioning couple, sometimes threatening the health of the surrogate. We have a moral duty to treat humanity in such a way that does not instrumentalize others. In conclusion, the border between human and equine surrogacy is “good to think with” to better conceptualize systemic sexism, human and nonhuman rights, and the limits of autonomy [3].
1. Chung, Jamie. Interview. Conducted by Marianne Garvey. CNN Entertainment, 9 June 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/06/09/entertainment/jamie-chung-surrogate-twins/index.html.
2. Cooper, Melinda, and Catherine Waldby. Clinical Labor. Duke UP, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377009.
3. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham, Boston, Beacon Press, 1963.
4. Scherz, Paul. "Critics of Principlism." The University of Virginia, 6 Sept. 2023, Charlottesville. Lecture.
5. Scherz, Paul. "Limits to Autonomy." The University of Virginia, 23 Oct. 2023, Charlottesville. Lecture.