Abstract
After the release of new Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill in 2020, surrogate
mothers in India showed greater concerns over the rights to their
bodies. Despite receiving economic compensation from the intending
parents, surrogates have failed to convert their income into greater
well-beingness. In understanding what Sen (1999) claimed asCapability Poverty , the research investigated the concept through
a dynamic interaction analysis of Bourdieu (1984)’s Capitalformation throughout the contracted pregnancy, contributing to the
surrogacy literature a novel ground in depicting a more dynamic capital
formation. The inconvertibility of economic capital for social,
cultural, and emotional capital proved a continued suffering for
surrogates, including both physical exploitations due to oppressive
medical settings and psychological burdens from stigmatisation
(re)produced from the traditional values and geographies of class. In
debating over whether surrogates possess actual ability to exercise
their agency over structure, it is essential that this research reminds
once again their choices over work are not made in isolation from
socioeconomic and cultural factors.
Introduction
In the Global South, informal work is often unstable and precarious,
causing destabilization of the daily lives of workers (Allison, 2012),
sometimes even causing stigmatization within their own society (Millar,
2014). On the other hand, these works can also provide them with
financial support and social belonging, alongside time flexibility and
even future aspirations to their family members. Despite being risky and
dangerous, many people in middle-and-low-income countries still tilt
towards informal work, avoiding direct participation of the formal
economy. Thus, the precarity and exploitative labour conditions embedded
within post-war Fordism era have become part of the everyday-life
experience of the labouring poor (Millar, 2014), of which is also a
“class-of-the-making” that is difficult to escape (Standing, 2014:
974).
Built-off of a widely accepted argument that informal workers’ choices
over work are constrained by socioeconomic structure and cultural norms,
with little possibility to alter through agency, this research sets the
tone by recognising and probing into the importance and power of
Bourdieu’s Habitus (1986) over agency. For Bourdieu,Habitus is not only a “structuring” but a deeply buried
“structured” structure shaped by money (economic capital), the
cultivation of practices and knowledge (cultural capital), and
acquaintances and networks (social capital) (Ortner, 1998). In applyingHabitus to the escaping from precarity and poverty, this
overdetermining factor shapes these informal workers’ dispositions by
their conformity to the dominance of others, simultaneously limiting
their ability to exercise power and agency. The fact that every-day
poverty “organizes practices and the perception of practices”
(Bourdieu, 1984:170) for people working in the informal economy has
largely constrained the re-making of their class position, in turn
limiting the coins they possess and exchange in the “game of Roulette”
(Bourdieu, 1986: 241) – the capital in hand is limited.
Another important concept to clarify for this research is the type of
poverty identified through Sen’s Capability Approach :
“Capability Poverty” (Sen, 1999). As reducing income deprivation alone
is no longer sufficient for anti-poverty actions under the
multidimensional poverty analysis, targeting the difficulty in
converting income into “functionings” (1999: 88) has widened the
understanding of poverty in general, within which the concept of
‘capability poverty’ captures more necessities for a holistic
“well-beingness” for individuals. By shifting the primary focus away
from means to ends that people have reason and capacity to
pursue the substantive freedoms, the discussing of capability poverty
helps acknowledge the complex nature and causes of poverty, the
instrumental relation between income and capability, and particularly
the respective contingent consequences on different gender and social
roles, in this case, the surrogate mothers.
Surrogacy is a gender-specific form of industrial contract labour that
exists under a larger global medical tourism industry, and specifically
in India these jobs are often rigidified within racial and class
hierarchies (Twine, 2012). Despite having large amount of renumeration
(Pande 2010), the invasive medical procedure may bring forth physically
exploitative consequences for women, limiting their possibility to
escape from capability poverty. Even with some feminists supporting the
right and freedom to enter surrogacy contracts, the fact that women may
have to suffer from physical risks, pain, and even death attract other
rhetoric criticizing surrogacy as “industrialization of pregnancy” and
the “degradation” and “commodification” of women’s bodies and
reproductive labour (Twine, 2012: 16). However, regardless of a
pro-or-against perspective, when viewing surrogates’ ability to exercise
their agency through the lens of Bourdieu’s Habitus , their
decisions are not made in isolation from socioeconomic and cultural
factors, but influenced by the factors of race, class position, maternal
and marital status, and their gender role in family and society.
This research hopes to argue analytically that surrogates are
persistently trapped in Sen’s “capability poverty” due to the
inconvertibility of Bourdieu’s economic, cultural, and socialcapital . Leveraging a secondary analysis of the existing data
(qualitative interviews), this research provides a novel methodological
approach – a dynamic interaction analysis of Bourdieu’s capitalformations on surrogates’ contracted pregnancy – to better understand
the continued suffering for surrogates due to the inconvertibility of
economic capital for social, cultural, and emotional capital.