8 Keeping it in the Family: Debating the Bio-Intimacy ... 197living in difficult financial circumstances, will naturally be more likely to
become surrogate mothers than those with good economy. Some will also
feel compelled to commercial surrogacy and can be used as means for
infertile people’s purposes. But this applies to a variety of ethically uncon-
troversial transactions, such as those in the labour market, where many
are forced to take a stressful or soul-killing job - and where a wealthy
woman rarely sits at the counter at ICA [a Swedish supermarket]’.
Gestational motherhood and mothering are rarely seen as produc-
tive labour and when the liberal discourses in favour of commercial
surrogacy position the surrogate in the public sphere of the work mar-
ket, the surrogate’s gestational labour is removed from scripts of family
intimacy. Because (commercial) surrogacy challenges the public/private,
production/reproduction, family/market spheres, this set of discourses
frequently elevates the surrogate mother’s (intimate) motherhood in
relation to her ‘own’ children. Kroløkke and Madsen ( 2014 : 80) argue
that the surrogate mother’s motherhood is affectively framed in rela-
tion to her self-sacrifice to secure her ‘own’ children a better future. This
maternal framing is prevalent in the position in favour of commercial
surrogacy, as we see in the story of the parents through surrogacy Daniel
and Linda Jacobsen, where the couple explains that surrogate mothers
in India are paid in full and ‘many of the mothers use the money to buy
a house or pay for the children’s education’ (Sjödin 2011 ). In this spe-
cific bio-intimate economy, monetary exchange works doubly. It secures
the nuclear family’s intimacy and the demarcation between the sur-
rogate and family members, yet it simultaneously creates a stable sub-
ject position for the surrogate and positions her as a good woman and
mother to her ‘own’ children.
Within the position against all forms of surrogacy, we similarly
find two major discourses. One in which the biological bond is dis-
cursively constructed as a psychological one. If broken, it is seen to
severely damage both child and mother (that is the surrogate mother
as this discourse understands the surrogate as the mother). A member
of DER says: ‘During pregnancy a child is not the only thing created, a
mother is also created’, and he expresses concerns about ‘the attachment
between the surrogate mother and the child’ that can result in a big