ABOUT THIS BOOK

During the last two decades, a new form of trade in commercial surrogacy grew across Asia. Starting in India, a “disruptive” model of surrogacy offered mass availability, rapid accessibility, and created new demands for surrogacy services from people who could not afford or access surrogacy elsewhere.

In International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia, Andrea Whittaker traces the development of this industry and its movement across Southeast Asia following a sequence of governmental bans in India, Nepal, Thailand, and Cambodia. Through a case study of the industry in Thailand, the book offers a nuanced and sympathetic examination of the industry from the perspectives of the people involved in it: surrogates, intended parents, and facilitators. The industry offers intended parents the opportunity to form much desired families, but also creates vulnerabilities for all people involved. These vulnerabilities became evident in cases of trafficking, exploitation, and criminality that emerged in southeast Asia, leading to greater scrutiny on the industry as a whole. Yet the trade continues in new flexible hybrid forms, involving the circulation of reproductive gametes, embryos, surrogates, and ova donors across international borders to circumvent regulations. The book demonstrates the need for new forms of regulation to protect those involved in international surrogacy arrangements.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Andrea Whittaker is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and convener of anthropology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of several books, including Thai In Vitro: Culture, Gender, and Assistant Reproductive Technologies in Thailand.

REVIEWS

“An original, comprehensive, and eye-opening account of the unprecedented growth of commercial surrogacy in Southeast Asia. By focusing on the industry’s multiple stakeholders—particularly Thai surrogates who have gestated babies for Australian intended parents—Whittaker writes with ethnographic sensitivity and compassion, while at the same time critiquing the “disruptive industry” within which surrogacy takes place. A must-read for those interested in globalization, biotechnology, and reproductive justice.”

— Marcia Inhorn, author of Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai

"Andrea Whittaker, one of the leading anthropologists working on reproduction has produced an important and timely book. We are presently at a moment when cross-border reproduction is at once, a lucrative industry, a facilitator of people's reproductive hopes and dreams and a site of intense scrutiny and regulation. It is this potent mixture that Whittaker analyses and describes so deftly, taking us through crises in South East Asian reproduction, that despite their particularity, span a globe of experience and connection. This assemblage of facilitators, intended parents, surrogates and the law form a powerful account of the centrality and importance of detailed ethnographic work to the future regulation of cross-border reproduction. Carefully woven and engrossing!"

— Michal Nahman, author of Extractions: An Ethnography of Reproductive Tourism

"Andrea Whittaker, one of the leading anthropologists working on reproduction has produced an important and timely book. We are presently at a moment when cross-border reproduction is at once, a lucrative industry, a facilitator of people's reproductive hopes and dreams and a site of intense scrutiny and regulation. It is this potent mixture that Whittaker analyses and describes so deftly, taking us through crises in South East Asian reproduction, that despite their particularity, span a globe of experience and connection. This assemblage of facilitators, intended parents, surrogates and the law form a powerful account of the centrality and importance of detailed ethnographic work to the future regulation of cross-border reproduction. Carefully woven and engrossing!"

— Michal Nahman, author of Extractions: An Ethnography of Reproductive Tourism

“An original, comprehensive, and eye-opening account of the unprecedented growth of commercial surrogacy in Southeast Asia. By focusing on the industry’s multiple stakeholders—particularly Thai surrogates who have gestated babies for Australian intended parents—Whittaker writes with ethnographic sensitivity and compassion, while at the same time critiquing the “disruptive industry” within which surrogacy takes place. A must-read for those interested in globalization, biotechnology, and reproductive justice.”

— Marcia Inhorn, author of Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Notes on Language and Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Growth of Disruptive Commercial Surrogacy in Asia
Chapter 2. Merit and Money: The Moral Economy of Surrogacy
Chapter 3. The Best of Intentions
Chapter 4. Facilitation
Chapter 5. Digital Umbilical Cords
Chapter 6. Rotten Trade
Chapter 7. Baby Gammy
Chapter 8. New Destinations, New Markets
Conclusions: The Future of International Surrogacy
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Glossary
References
Index