The global reproductive health market: U.S. media framings and public discourses about transnational surrogacy.
During the first decade of the 21st century a new "dramatic story" about the growing global surrogacy industry brought renewed attention to surrogacy as a social problem and a health policy issue. This paper asks: What cultural assumptions about gender, family and the global reproductive health market are revealed in current U.S. media coverage of and public discourses about surrogacy? From a qualitative analysis of prominent news accounts of surrogacy that were published in 2008, New York Times articles and blogs published on the topic between 2006 and 2010, and over 1000 online reader comments to these articles, I identify key frames used to discursively construct and debate the international surrogacy market. This study reveals the distinct contrast between the occasions when reproductive labor is rhetorically distanced from commodification processes and when it is linked to those processes. The findings contribute to intersectional analyses of assisted reproductive practices and women's health/bodies/gametes. In particular, this study's analysis of recent media framings of and public discourses about surrogacy across the globe serves as another illustration that national/classed/racialized bodies continue to be reproductively stratified via differently gendered discourses about women, motherhood and family.
Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, NY, USA. susan.markens@lehman.cuny.edu
Susan
S
Markens
D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism; D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D018156:Journalism, Medical; D008402:Mass Media; D011247:Pregnancy; D011639:Public Opinion; D036301:Qualitative Research; D043762:Reproductive Behavior; D013533:Gestational Carriers; D014481:United States