Helena Ragone - Surrogate Motherhood: Conception In The Heart

George Marcus, Sharon Traweek, Richard Handler, and Vera Zolberg, Series Editors

Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart Helena Ragon

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Conception in the Heart

Helena Ragon

First published 1994 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
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Copyright 1994 by Helena Ragon

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ragon, Helena
Surrogate motherhood: conception in the heart / Helena Ragon.
p. cm. (Institutional structures of feeling)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8133-1978-1 ISBN 0-8133-1979-X (pbk.)
1. Surrogate motherhood. 2. Surrogate mothersAttitudes.
I. Title. II. Series.
HQ759.5.R34 1994
306.874'3dc20 93-44717
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-28924-9 (hbk)

xi

AS I COMPLETE THIS BOOK I realize how greatly indebted I am to many individuals for their contributions. I would like to thank the following people for their continuing support of my work on surrogate motherhood: Lina Fruzzetti for her encouragement, unwavering support, and belief in this project; Louise Lamphere for her incisive comments; Lucile Newman for her earnest commitment to this project and for keeping me in good cheer; and Bill Beeman for many insightful comments and continued support. Thanks are owed to all my anonymous reviewers. A special thanks to David Schneider for his encouragement and for reading and commenting on this book; like so many others, I am greatly indebted to him for his pioneering work on American kinship. I would like to thank Marilyn Strathern for her encouraging comments on this book and for her many thought-provoking analyses of reproductive technologies. Particular thanks to Sarah Franklin for her warm support and encouragement and to Jane Raese, my production editor, for her patience and conscientiousness. A sincere thanks to my editor, Gordon Lester-Massman, for his continuing encouragement.

For assistance with the early formulation of this project, I would like to extend my thanks to Dwight Heath, Marida Hollos, and Barbara Babcock. I would also like to thank those who supported me early in my studies and continue to provide support: Judith Wishnia, June Starr, Sally Sears, Alan Harwood, Jane Martin, Naomi Bishop, Lucille Kaplan, and Barbara Luedtke. A very special thanks to my friends Patricia and Alan Symonds, to my uncle, Ernest DeLuca, and to my brother, J. R Ragon, for their unwavering support. Thanks also to Bernard Bruce and Tom Franklin.

This book has been made possible first and foremost by the support of the directors, psychologists, assistants, and other staff members of the surrogate mother programs. My only regret is that I am unable to thank them by their proper names since pseudonyms have been used throughout the project. A very special thanks to the director of the Brookside program and to his wife, for their belief in this project and for their generosity and friendship. Thanks also to the entire staff of the Brookside; their cooperation in this project and continued support have greatly contributed to the making of this book. My thanks to the director of the Wick program and her family, for her generous support of this project. Special thanks are also due to the director of the Allen program, for her cooperation. I want also to thank the director of the Catlin program, the director of the Harper program, and the administrative assistant of the Drake program. Above all, I want to thank my life partner, Gail Hanlon, for her innumerable contributions. From the early days of formulating this project, her insightful comments on and editing of the manuscript have had a profound effect on the resulting book.

A simple thank-you cannot possibly convey my indebtedness to the surrogate mothers and commissioning couples who have participated in this study; without them this ethnography would have never been possible. It is my sincerest hope that I have been able to provide an illuminating account of their motivations, experiences, feelings, and understanding of surrogate motherhood in such a way as to reveal some of the nuances of the process.

Helena Ragon

IN THE WAKE OF the publicity created by the Baby M case, it seems unlikely that anyone in the United States remains unfamiliar with or has yet to form an opinion about surrogate motherhood. The Baby M case, and is a threat to the sanctity of motherhood to charges that it reduces or assigns women to a new breeder class, one structurally akin to prostitution (Dworkin 1978), or that it constitutes a form of commercial baby selling (Neuhaus 1988). Most of these theories were formed on the basis of few actual cases of surrogate motherhood, and it is the aim of this book to provide an ethnography in which the actual participants are heard and their experiences revealed.

My interests in gender, reproduction, and women's work first coalesced into a whole when I began to conduct research on surrogate motherhood. Although surrogate motherhood is but one of the currently available reproductive strategies for remedying childlessness, it holds a particular fascination for scholars and laypersons alike; this fascination seems to result from the fact that surrogate motherhood runs counter to, yet is in some ways consistent with, American cultural assumptions and ideologies about the importance of family, motherhood, fatherhood, and kinship. Whereas some theorists view assisted reproduction as representative of a profound departure from traditional reproduction, I have, over the course of my research, come to view the new reproductive technologies less as a departure from than as a reaffirmation of the importance of the family, parenthood, and biogenetic relatedness. Therefore, it seems to me that even though the means of achieving a family may have changed, the motivation or end result has not.