Dare la vita – Michela Murgia
Michela Murgia, Dare la vita, Rizzoli 2024
In her posthumous book, Michela Murgia deals with the issue of gestational surrogacy without simplifications and without hypocrisy, but also without absolute certainties, with the willingness to project herself into the future, beyond her own life, in an attempt to overcome both the rift that has been created between feminists (for or against) and the paralysis which law has reached in many European countries and the world (where gestational surrogacy has always been either not allowed or totally prohibited).
Both reading Michela Murgia’s latest book, Dare la vita (Rizzoli 2024), and listening to Antonia and Franziska’s testimony collected by Lunàdigas (Why can’t my sister bear my child?) were two experiences that filled me with an enchanted astonishment.
I prefer to declare it immediately: I am not interested in any of the reasons why our Parliament, in the summer of 2023, declared surrogate gestation a ‘universal crime‘, that is punishable even if committed abroad (gestation by others was already banned by Law No 40/2004). The reasons of the right party are not mine, so I am not explaining or discussing them. My perspective, on the other hand, is that of those who have no faith in the regulation of the reproductive industry, based on an undeniable axiom: the non-marketability of bodies and the living human being.
In the current neo-liberal system (which on everything – environment, war and peace… – tightens increasingly its grip instead of loosening it) it is impossible, in my opinion, to practice surrogacy gestation without exploitation. Before all the ethical, feminist, legal, philosophical issues related to surrogacy, if I only think about the national healthcare service, which is falling apart, and about our politicians who have increasingly dismantled the right to health in order to weave clientelist entanglements with private health entrepreneurs, I cannot think of happiness, emancipation and freedom for women and their children as a goal to reach, but I only see an endless prairie without rules, that of profit. And raise your hand if some of you, at least once, while treating a disease, even a trivial one, have not had the sensation of being plucked alive, with tortuous twists and turns of medical-pharmacological solutions and practices only aimed at draining our economic resources a little at a time.
Yet, reading Michela Murgia’s Dare la vita and listening to Lunàdigas’ testimonies, I feel like I have taken a step forward.
Let’s go step by step and try to summarise it. Some stories, that enhance the emancipating power of new biotechnologies and the female altruism of women who offer their uterus in surrogate gestation, hide a non-negligible fact: if those who donate their uterus are women in poverty and fragility conditions (mostly from India, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Georgia), who risk their health and lives in exchange for not an outstanding price, we should not be talking about donation, but about sacrifice and exploitation.
Indian surrogacy clinics, for example, are based on the model of animal farms: rows of beds, with little space for each woman, who eats, sleeps, lives on the bed, isolated from the family, video-monitored, subjected to hormone injections (with even serious counterproductive effects, in the short and long term), surgeries, multiple embryo implantations, meant to be selectively aborted in the second trimester according to sex and tests for genetic diseases (urgently needed ethical questions raised by these eugenic and transhumanist drifts). Of all which the ‘gestational carriers’ are little aware because they are uneducated or illiterate (they often do not even receive a copy of the contract).
There are no records of what happens to pregnant women (if they are ill, if they die…) nor is there any record of whose child they are carrying. This violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which guarantees the right to know one’s origins and prohibits the sale of children (Art. 2 and 35). For all these reasons, the International Feminist Convention for the Abolition of Surrogate Gestation compares this practice to slavery, which, according to Article I of the United Nations Convention on Slavery (26 September 1926), is “the status or condition of a person over whom are practiced, in part or in full, the powers linked to the right of ownership”; and in Italy, the collective If Not Now When – Libere in 2015 launched an appeal to the European institutions in order to declare surrogate gestation illegal.
Many reports, edited by university professors, researchers and activists, offer discouraging data; those that I have read are collected in an essay with an explicit placement, but which tackles the issue from an international perspective and with an interdisciplinary slant: For the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood, edited by Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram, translated by Miguel Martinez, Ortica editrice 2022. Even Ilaria Maria Dondi’s book (Libere di scegliere se e come avere figli, Einaudi 2024, pp. 50-58; already reviewed by Lunadigas.com) illustrates how the profits of the reproductive market are expanding and how they are meant to increase.
From surrogate pregnancies women get 1-1.5% of the amount paid by willing would-be parents; almost the entire amount therefore represents a hyper-profit for the clinic. These clinics obviously have an interest in relocating in order to use cheap labour: pregnant women are brown women instead of white women, but with oocytes acquired from a white-skinned woman, which in this bio-market, where everything is for sale, are worth more than those of black or brown women. A bio-colonialism that responds to a racialised demand.
Surrogate gestation contracts, stipulated by unscrupulous lawyers, provide that it is the willing parents (and not the pregnant woman) who decide with special clauses the circumstances of the selection of the embryos to be implanted or of any miscarriages and the mode of the birth. Not to mention the cases in which the contract is terminated, or contracts are not fulfilled due to the intentional parents’ afterthought (often in the case of malformation of the unborn child or the newborn). In many cases, destitute women not only did not receive the money agreed for the service but found themselves with another mouth to feed in their already fragile and big families.
These contracts do not mention the clinic but have the appearance of direct agreements between the pregnant woman and the intended parents, who are exempt from any liability or compensation if any pregnancy complications, illness or death occur. An opaque market. Sometimes the boundary between exploitation of surrogacy and exploitation of prostitution is intangible and the routes are the same as those of sex trafficking, so that many trafficked women have suffered both abuses, moving from the market of “sex without children (prostitution)” to the market of “children without sex (surrogacy)”, as Laura Nuño Gómez describes them (p. 154). Prostitution and surrogacy are thus far from being forms of self-determination for destitute women, but “gendered economic survival strategies that require women to take unreasonable risks” (Melissa Farley, p. 162). To make immediate an understandable comparison, think of the difference between organ donation and illegal organ trafficking. Rita Banerji makes a similar comparison: ‘If it were a poor man selling his kidney to a rich man, no one would say “nice” if that donor had been made a prisoner, subjected to medical procedures of which he had no idea, forced to give up his rights, to agree not to hold the hospital or the buyer responsible if he were ill or died, and forced to agree to give up his money if the donated kidney was rejected when implanted in the buyer. That would be outrageous’.
Considering a child a bargaining chip violates Article I of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to which “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”. These rights are indivisible and inalienable: either of all or of none. So much so that even LGBTQ+ rights activists, such as Gary Powell, believe that surrogacy has nothing to do with such rights if it only guarantees the privilege of wealthy gay parents to buy children in the bio-marketplaces; looking at the specific reality of the UK, Gary Powell urges one to mistrust even altruistic surrogacy and, numbers in hand, he demonstrates how blurred the boundary is with commercial surrogacy (pp. 128-29).
Surrogate gestation not only opens unimaginable profit potential for reproductive capitalism but, according to feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero (Nonostante Platone, Castelvecchi 2023, already reviewed on Lunadigas. com), it reinforces the patriarchal view of women as reproductive machines and of the uterus as the ‘oven in which the child rises’, forgetting how pregnancy involves not just a piece of a woman’s body, but her entire body, her life, her psycho-physical wellbeing, far beyond the end of the pregnancy.
Among the possible outcomes of pregnancy is the possibility that the woman has become attached to the child she was carrying and does not want to give it up when she gives birth. As a consequence, pregnant women, and not the clinics that enlist them or the intended parents, should be guaranteed both the right to keep the child to themselves and the right to stop the pregnancy if they have any afterthought. “If others – the surrogacy profiteer, the sperm or egg donor – claim this right, then what prevents the state or the church from making the same claim?” (Phyllis Chesler, p. 115).
Other studies show that between the pregnant woman and the foetus, through the placenta and the umbilical cord, there are profound cellular exchanges destined to deeply affect the health of one and the other (this phenomenon is called microchimerism), even when the pregnant woman is not the genetic mother of the unborn child (Laura Isabel Gomez García, pp. 176-183); furthermore, the child, while in the uterus, recognises its mother’s voice and smells and, at birth, the interaction with the gestational mother has positive effects on its development: therefore, the pregnant woman is, to all intents and purposes, the biological and legal mother of the child, more than the woman to whom the implanted ovum belongs (so also Eva Maria Bachinger, p. 194 and Catherine Lynch, pp. 197-214).
“It is important to remember that for thousands of years women gave birth to children and were not considered to be genetically related to them. They were seen as “containers” carrying the man’s child. The female gamete – the egg cell – was only discovered in 1827 by the biologist Karl Ernst von Baer […] Would surrogacy be accepted if it did not resonate with a deeply ingrained idea of the pregnant woman as a passive incubator? […] Social and legislative developments in the second half of the 20th century led to an increasing autonomy of women in the public and private sphere, but also to the recognition of the unity of body and mind. It was more accepted that women and their bodies were not at the disposal of others, that pregnancy could not be reduced to gestation, that pregnant women were no longer to be regarded as nannies allowing others to become parents or the state to have new citizens. The authorisation of contraception, the legalisation of abortion and the criminalisation of rape, as well as the power of paternity reduced to parental authority, were all steps in this direction. Surrogacy represents a break with these positive developments and a step backwards’ (Alexandra Clément-Saby, pp. 76; 80; 88).
After highlighting, in a short summary, a framework that immediately seems very composite and problematic, because it invokes medical, legal and psychological issues, as well as questioning the most intimate moral, ethical and religious convictions, I will try to describe my experience of reading Michela Murgia’s Dare la vita. Murgia starts from a deconstruction of the concept of natural family, which is instead the patriarchal family, the minimum social cell of wider circuits of coercion and domination: the amoral familism told by sociologists Edward Banfield and Laura Fasano; the mafia culture denounced by Roberto Saviano; the “static state of the State”, as Michela calls it, indigestible to libertarian cultures… The author then goes on to describe other models of kinship and ‘relational happiness’, based not on blood ties, but on alternative affective and elective paradigms (children of the soul): within these relationships, Michela has learnt to distinguish between motherhood and pregnancy. This distinction, directly experienced in her queer family, led her to explore the topic of gestational surrogacy, without hiding the problematic issues I mentioned above, but with a very strong push forward, with a great will to project herself into the future, beyond her own life, in an attempt to overcome both the rift that has been created among feminists (for or against) and the paralysis that law has reached in many countries in Europe and around the world (where surrogacy has always been banned or totally prohibited).
The non-overlapping of maternity and pregnancy is already contemplated in Italian law,’ Murgia says, ‘and it guarantees a woman who becomes pregnant the right not to become a mother, that is, to have an abortion (law 194/1978) or to give birth anonymously, not assuming responsibility for her maternity (Presidential Decree 396/2000). Making maternity and pregnancy match therefore, in the debate on surrogacy, means threatening women’s freedom even with respect to these already guaranteed procedures.
Michela Murgia considers a law on gestation for others to be as urgent as one on abortion. Just as women not included into the legal and free service of voluntary termination of pregnancy are brought to have an illegal approach and will go searching for solutions that are dangerous for their health and their lives, in the same way, without proper regulation of this matter in national legislation, there will be those who will go searching for answers to their needs in India or in other countries that have opened their doors to this miserable reproductive tourism: “no one should be forced to give birth or have an abortion because they need the money, but until we are socially able to remove the economic obstacles that prevent women from choosing whether or not to become mothers according to their own desire alone, they must be able to do so within a framework of rules that protect them and protect those born from them. Asking for a law to be made to prevent surrogate gestation not only does not stop exploitation, but makes it limitless’ (Murgia, p. 72).
According to Michela Murgia, GPA contracts must contemplate high remuneration for the pregnant woman, correct medical courses, life insurance, support for the pregnant woman’s family, and guarantee her rights of self-determination until the birth of the child, including the choice to keep the child to herself, mainly because the child is not a product and above all because during the pregnancy not only the woman’s body is transformed, but also the will of a woman, who is not just a container, can change.
The problem that we must not hide is the poverty of women who offer themselves as pregnant women, just as it is for the care work that many women (caregivers) do abroad, with great emotional sacrifices, exclusively due to necessity. At the same time, Murgia is aware that less wealthy intentional parents, who do not have the economic possibility of bearing all the insurance and health expenses for the pregnant woman, will move to those countries where the legislation gives fewer guarantees. This consideration prevents her from having absolute certainty with respect to surrogacy.
Then there is the matter of the legitimacy/ illegitimacy of rejecting a child that does not conform to expectations, and therefore degraded to a product: Murgia endeavours to find a rational legal solution to this possibility as well. In these cases, the regulation of anonymous childbirth could apply, which makes it lawful not to assume parental authority over the child born: this right should be recognised both for the pregnant woman and the intended parents.
Does the newborn have the right to know how it was conceived? For Michela Murgia this is not an important issue. If the willing parents have implanted the gametes in the gestational carrier, they are to all intents and purposes its biological parents; if not, the rules laid down in the legislation on heterologous fertilisation apply, for countries where it is permitted; and then: over the centuries, how many have known the circumstances of their conception? Conjugal or casual love; relations with a lover without the spouse’s knowledge; prostitution… Has one ever felt the duty to explain such circumstances to one’s children?
Michela Murgia makes no secret of the fact that the fertility market flourishes on the patriarchal assumption that one is not a woman if one is not a mother (and in fact for every ten couples who appeal to surrogate mothers, only three are homosexuals and the other seven are heterosexuals). The question every woman must ask herself is not ‘how much do I want a child’ but ‘how much am I willing to use the body of another to obtain one’. Michela Murgia asks: ‘is self-determination the thought that prevents me from fully perceiving myself as a woman if I do not also become a mother? I don’t know, because I have never felt this urge to reproduce myself biologically within me as to consider such a hypothesis. I do know, however, that when faced with the desire of a friend, of a beloved sister, what I have never asked of another for myself, I would freely do for her. And I would not want there to be a law telling me that I cannot do it‘ (Murgia, p. 96).
This last statement by Michela Murgia brings us back to the testimony of the German sisters Antonia and Franziska collected by Lunàdigas: Antonia cannot have children because of a cervical cancer that has compromised her uterus but not her ovaries, which can go back to producing eggs. She is young, she has fought against the disease for life and now, although medicine is ready and her sister Franziska is willing to be a surrogate mother, the law forbids her to give life, to look to the future. Antonia says: ‘My sister can give me blood. My sister can give me a kidney, if necessary, but she cannot give me a child. Well, that’s absurd’.
If the issue is female self-determination, are these women free to self-determine? I would say no.
All my doubts about gestational surrogacy remain, even after reading Michela Murgia and listening to Antonia and Franziska’s testimony. But nothing should stop us, in front of complicated issues, from continuing to search, from continuing to listen to those who know how to ask new questions, those who manage with their point of view to shed light on a hidden corner of a problem that is a polyhedron with a thousand facets, many of which are still in the shadow. For me, being lunàdigas means above all not judging, listening, not interrupting sisterhood, always questioning, not taking sides.
The story of Antonia and Franziska does not offer us a case of unscrupulous reproductive tourism, to the detriment of an oppressed woman for geopolitical, racial, class reasons. It is a story that still dwells on the threshold of close and established family ties, but at the same time amplifies and creatively reinvents them: mother, sister, son, niece. Franziska says: “I would be a surrogate mother for my sister, as I already have a child and I know how nice it is to have a child. When I imagine that one day I will give birth to a child for my sister, a child that will be my niece or nephew, it is so beautiful.”
I feel that this is the way: to experience new kinships; to enrich even blood ties through elective relationships. Standing on the threshold – at least this – rejecting an idea of family as a cradle or claustrophobic incubator. Beyond that threshold, somehow, sooner or later we will walk towards a more distant horizon.
Claudia Mazzilli
Notes:
Eva Maria Bachinger is a journalist and activist with the Austrian network Stoppt Leihmutterschaft (Stop Surrogacy).
Rita Banerji is a feminist activist born in India and raised in the U.S.; her writings on feminicide in India have been published worldwide.
Phyllis Chesler is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Women’s Studies, author of the best-selling Woman and Madness (1972), Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (2002; 2009) and studies on honour killing; she is a Senior Fellow of the Investigative Project on Terror and a contributor to the Middle East Forum and the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
Alexandra Clément-Saby is a pseudonym; she lives in France and teaches economic and social sciences; she studies forms of patriarchy and their origins.
Melissa Farley is a feminist psychologist and researcher; she has written books and articles on violence related to prostitution, pornography and surrogacy.
Laura Isabel Gomez García, a Spanish activist, studied Psychology and Feminist Theory and works on trafficking/prostitution and gender-based violence. She writes for NuevaRevolucion.es.
Laura Nuño Gómez is a tenured professor at the King Juan Carlos University of Madrid (URJC), where she has promoted courses in Gender Studies and initiated the Observatory on Gender Equality. She directs the High Performance Research Group on Gender and Feminism and the Teaching Innovation Group for the inclusion of the gender perspective in university studies at URJC. She is the author of Maternidades SA: The business of surrogate uterus (Catarata Books, Madrid, 2020).
Catherine Lynch, a lawyer, focuses on children’s rights, adoption systems and modern reproductive technologies and is a founding member of Abolish Surrogacy in Australia.
Gary Powell is a gay rights activist and European Special Advisor to the Center for Bioethics and Culture and Research Fellow for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity at the Bow Group in the UK.
The page numbers indicated next to the names of these authors refer to the Italian translation of their essays, collected in For the Abolition of Surrogacy (edited by Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram, translation by Miguel Martinez), Ortica editrice 2022.
For further reading:
Adriana Cavarero, Nonostante Platone, Castelvecchi 2023.
Adriana Cavarero, Donne che allattano cuccioli di lupo, Castelvecchi 2023.
https://www.lunadigas.com/archivio/maternita-surrogata-germania/
https://www.lunadigas.com/riflessioni/demetra-e-kore-nasciamo-figlie-prima-di-essere-madri/
link to Ilaria Dondi’s review
