Who’s Biting Who?: Headlines on white surrogate for Asian couple
Take a recent story from the UK Daily Mail on surrogacy with the headline: "I'm a white woman but I've become a surrogate mother for an Asian couple." The Brits surely have their fair share of sensationalist news coverage, but the only thing making this otherwise unremarkable story worthy of a 2,000 word expose is that the surrogate is White while the biological parents are Asian.
Cross-racial surrogacy is not uncommon; entire businesses are profiting handsomely by catering to Western (mainly white) couples outsourcing their pregnancies to India at a fraction of the cost. What's fascinating is that unlike the Daily Mail's account, the stories covering these transactions with Indian surrogates typically focus on economics: poor women making more money in one surrogacy than they would with years of manual labor while the biological parents catch a blue light special halfway across the world. But with the White woman in the Daily Mail story, financial compensation is only briefly discussed to dismiss it as a motivating factor, framing her as an altruist par excellence: "It was never about money. When [my doctor] told me surrogates receive around £10,000 in expenses I was surprised because, quite frankly, I would have done it for nothing."
Given that most surrogacies are between couples with means and cash strapped women, the Daily Mail ironically buries its man-bites-dog angle. It's not the difference between the parties - i.e. race - that makes this story unique, but rather what they have in common: class.