In Utero Inc.

[marmar]

from Truthdig:




In Utero Inc.

Posted on Apr 9, 2008
By Ellen Goodman

BOSTON—By now we all have a story about a job outsourced beyond our reach in the global economy. My own favorite is about the California publisher who hired two reporters in India to cover the Pasadena city government. Really.

There are times as well when the offshoring of jobs takes on a quite literal meaning. When the labor we are talking about is, well, labor.

In the last few months we’ve had a full nursery of international stories about surrogate mothers. Hundreds of couples are crossing borders in search of lower-cost ways to fill the family business. In turn, there’s a new coterie of international workers who are gestating for a living.

Many of the stories about the globalization of baby production begin in India, where the government seems to regard this as, literally, a growth industry. In the little town of Anand, dubbed “The Cradle of the World,” 45 women were recently on the books of a local clinic. For the production and delivery of a child, they will earn $5,000 to $7,000, a decade’s worth of women’s wages in rural India.

But even in America, some women, including Army wives, are supplementing their income by contracting out their wombs. They have become surrogate mothers for wealthy couples from European countries that ban the practice.

This globalization of baby-making comes at the peculiar intersection of a high reproductive technology and a low-tech work force. The biotech business was created in the same petri dish as Baby Louise, the first IVF baby. But since then, we’ve seen conception outsourced to egg donors and sperm donors. We’ve had motherhood divided into its parts from genetic mother to gestational mother to birth mother and now contract mother. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080409_in_utero_inc/

[fasttense]

1. The ultimate in contracting out. n/t