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L’hôpital en Asie du Sud

 | 
Clémence Jullien
, 
Bertrand Lefebvre
, 
Fabien Provost

Espaces hospitaliers : vers la complémentarité des soins ? / Hospital Spaces: Towards the Complementarity of Cares?

Beyond Healthcare at Hospitals. Experiences of Women Acting as Surrogates in India

Au-delà des soins de santé dans les hôpitaux. Expériences de mères porteuses en Inde

Sneha Banerjee

Abstract

This article focuses on the phenomenon of commercial surrogacy and the experiences of receiving healthcare by women who act as surrogates in India. Commercial surrogacy thrived in India, primarily located in the private healthcare sector, until the government announced a ban on the practice in 2016. With a spotlight on what transpires in a hospital space, beyond just healthcare provisioning in the case of commercial surrogacy, this article highlights how women acting as surrogates have differential access to healthcare when compared to their previous pregnancies. Moreover, it also draws attention to how, with the availability of reproductive technologies, hospitals emerge as sites of networks through which many socio-economically marginalised women negotiate livelihoods.

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Excerpt

Until a decision by the Union Cabinet to ban commercial surrogacy was announced in 2016, the phenomenon flourished as part of a booming Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) industry in India. Availability of ARTs and surrogacy in India has thrived mostly in the private healthcare sector (Nadimpally, Marwah & Shenoi 2011). Commercial surrogacy brought about the otherwise unlikely interface of women from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds with many private hospitals and clinics for acting as surrogates, receiving standards of care that they otherwise have not in their own pregnancies, but now paid for by those who can afford to commission a surrogacy. Through a spotlight on commercial surrogacy and experiences of women acting as surrogates in India, this article focuses on firstly, differential treatments they receive and secondly, on hospitals as novel sites of negotiating livelihoods for them.

Commercial surrogacy acquired prominence globally as an instance of “reproduc...

Author

She is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi. She was previously at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zürich as a postdoc recipient of the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (2017-18). She has a PhD (2016) from the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the field of feminist theory and gender studies, broadly and reproductive technologies, commercial surrogacy and reproductive labour in particular.

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