She shows how an anti-natalist state like India, which has a controversial history of sterilizing lower-class women, has at the same time embraced medical tourism.
Pande begins her first chapter by giving a sketch of the rise of surrogacy in India. Spanning nine chapters, the book offers a deep understanding of the workings of the transnational labor market created by surrogacy linking the global south with the global north. Since the publication of the book, the current government of India passed the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Regulation) Bill, which bans commercial surrogacy completely and allows only altruistic surrogacy. In particular, the book illuminates in persuasive detail the specific relations that the women in India negotiate as surrogate mothers and workers in a fledging market “that is morally contentious and constructed as deviant and unnatural in mainstream Indian society” (5). Interviewing the range of actors, from the parents, the agents who oversee the transactions, the medical experts, and, finally, the women whose labor is extracted, Pande covers the dense world of transnational commercial surrogacy. The clinic specializes in surrogacy both for parents in the global north and India. This book is based on deep ethnographic work carried out over a period of six years at an Armaan maternity clinic in a place called Garv, in India. Amrita Pande’s Wombs in Labor is a very timely book contributing to the growing literature on commercial surrogacy, while intervening in debates about embodied labor, medical tourism, motherhood, and the ethics of assisted reproduction.
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