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.