Bodies and Babies Commodified: A Review of "Breeders"
We can now add to the growing list of disquieting films about the global reproductive industry and its ramifications the documentary Breeders: A Subclass of Women?, produced by the Center for Bioethics and Culture.
Listen to the stories of the women in this documentary—Heather, Gail, Tanya, and Cindy, all white and American—and you will be struck at turns by their compassion, naïveté, and befuddled disempowerment. Heather, 20 years old with two children of her own under age 3, wants to help another family experience the same joy she has felt. Gail initially only wants to provide eggs for her brother and his same sex partner, but becomes convinced to serve as a surrogate. Tanya, who has found her previous pregnancies easy, intended to serve as a surrogate only for a gay couple, because she believed it would be easier to separate from the baby that way. Cindy proceeded under the assumption that she was going to bear babies with a friend of hers and help raise them, but not within the confines of a “normal” relationship.
Breeders serves as a necessary corrective to the rosy PR the surrogacy industry puts out. If you haven’t had occasion to land on surrogacy websites lately, suffice it to say that they frame the act of bearing children for other people for pay in entirely positive terms, deploying everything from sports analogies (become a part of “Team Baby”) to invocations of creating a “miracle.” Jennifer Lahl, founder of the socially conservative Center for Bioethics and Culture, which also produced Eggsploitation and Anonymous Father’s Day, about egg and sperm donation, and Matthew Eppinette, who with Lahl wrote, produced, and directed Breeders, provide a look at the realities behind the hype.
Spoiler alert: These are heartbreaking tales. Nothing turned out as planned. As Breeders unfolds, good turns to bad turns to worse.
The women in Breeders entered into surrogacy with various motives. Each, in telling her story, downplays the fiscal motive (although Lahl, who appears on screen, underscores the monetary driver, noting that many military wives and women from lower income brackets have been drafted into surrogacy). Each describes what happened as they encountered major physical and emotional problems with their pregnancies—we see and hear their distress—and as their relationship with the commissioning couples turned sour, yielding schisms and legal interventions. As Lahl remarks, “When money and contracts get involved in the creation of a child, what often happens when things go wrong is that the law has to step in.”
Breeders turns to O. Carter Snead, a law professor and the William P. and Hazel B. White Director of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame (and an outspoken opponent of abortion rights), for an overarching perspective on the legal issues involved in surrogacy. Snead notes that while surrogacy is not technically baby selling, the practice in many states circumvents the frameworks that have been put in place for adoption, which are meant to protect the best interests of children. “We don’t have a lot of good empirical evidence on the question of what are the harms, short-term and long-term, with respect to children or anyone who’s involved in this process,” he says. “And it seems to me if you’re confronted with the possibility of real, serious harms, the prudent thing to do for the legislature would be to try to pause for a moment, impose a moratorium, and conduct very serious and searching inquiry into what the harms are.”
Lahl and Eppinette explore the potential emotional harms to children born via surrogacy arrangements by interviewing psychotherapist Nancy Verrier, author of Primal Wound (1993). Verrier argues that pre- and perinatal bonding between mother and infant is disrupted by surrogacy. As a result, such children may be left questioning their identity within the family or suffering other long-term psychological impacts.
Breeders has a bias: The filmmakers chose only to include narratives of women whose experiences had been so negative in sum as to leave viewers shaken by a sense of sorrow and injustice. Even those entirely opposed to surrogacy must grant that not all such arrangements go so badly awry. The film does include segments with Darren Spedale, founder of Family by Design, which works in the “modern family space” and helps people form “parenting partnerships,” and with Joe Taravella, a clinical psychologist, both of whom talk about the benefits that surrogacy brings to couples straight and gay, and to single parents, and emphasize that it suits the modern redefinition of parenting. Says Taravella, “A family is love. And long gone are the days when we have a mom and a dad and two children.” Collin Smikle and Marlane Angle, the medical and IVF lab directors of Laurel Fertility Care in San Francisco also tell us how stressful building families outside normal channels is, and Angle admonishes us that it’s not anyone’s place to stand in judgment.
But the overwhelming message is that surrogacy poses grave social risks.
Lahl and others in her organization oppose abortion, though they keep that issue out of their films about assisted reproduction. And Lahl has worked with prochoice advocates who are also deeply disturbed by aspects of the fertility industry, including commercial surrogacy. In Breeders, Kathleen Sloan and MonaLisa Wallace, both on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW), emphasize that it is part of the ongoing trend whereby reproductive medicine commodifies women’s bodies. Sloan sees the fertility industry as having “huge profit generating capacity and [a] need for constant inputs, be that women providing their eggs or providing their bodies.” Wallace sees the surrogacy business as attempting to hide the fact that they treat women as mere means to an end: “Calling a mother a gestational carrier is a euphemistic way of dehumanizing her and taking away the relationship [with the child] by removing the word ‘mother.’” What results are “industrial human farms.”
In a film full of haunting moments, perhaps the most jarring comes when we hear from Jessica, who at age 26 found her birth mother. She says, “As much as I do believe that surrogacy can come from a compassionate place, as a product of surrogacy, it’s hard not to be aware that there is a price tag. There is an awareness that in essence you were bought by the family you grew up with. You are a product at the end of the day.”
Gina Maranto is Director of Ecosystem Science and Policy and coordinator of the Environmental Science and Policy program at the University of Miami's Leonard and Jayne Abess Center. She is the author of Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996).
Previously on Biopolitical Times: