Social Capital
Associated with social networks and family relationships, social capital for surrogates should be understood in both societal aspect (i.e., with intending parents) and private sector (i.e., within family) separately, and above all, in a self-reflexive manner. By nature, despite its rather obscure and “temporarily-existing” characteristics, the social ties established between surrogates and cross-border intending mothers before the new Bill launched are generally deemed to create positive social capital for surrogates. For example, when taking up surrogacy work, these young mothers are often taken good care of as these international intending parents tend to provide extra medical and both monetary and non-monetary support. Despite this, surrogates are told by the clinics to be grateful for having surrogacy as “God’s gift”, in which reduced their inborne resistance when facing injustices. The “gift-giving sisterhood” narrative has, being real or imagined, provided them with social bonding and a sense of belonging despite the class, race, and power difference (Pande, 2011).
However, judging from the opposite perspective, as surrogates are often the chosen and needy mothers to “fulfilling their familial duties”, rhetoric like “gift,” “mission” and “sisterhood” have strengthened the external reliance of surrogates on contractual relationship within which the idea of “reciprocity” is never equally executed. Under the North-South commercial surrogacy context, though this kind of give-and-take social tie is positively constructed, the imbalanced relationship makes the social bonding harder to maintain after the contract terminates.
On the other hand, under the impacts of traditional Indian values and geographies of class, social capital in family and local communities is accumulated negatively. The effort of these women as wage-earning individuals and sometimes even breadwinners of the family has not much been recognized socially but ironically downplayed because of socio-cultural factors, making their image of dutiful mothers reinforced unintendedly. More generally, neither the social capital accumulated from ties with intending parents could easily transform into economic or cultural capital, nor the social capital from family and community could complete vice versa, especially the latter has already negatively influenced the formation of social capital.