8 Keeping it in the Family: Debating the Bio-Intimacy ... 191exchanges whether in the form of UT or surrogacy reconfigure ethical
values and demand new analytical frameworks.
Bio-intimacy: The Feminist Debate
We briefly situate our topic within the feminist debates on reproduc-
tive technologies and organ transplantation. Feminist scholars have
remained critical of the ways that human reproduction and organ trans-
plantation entangle with late-modern forms of capitalism (Almeling
2009 ; DasGupta and Dasgupta 2010 ; Scheper-Hughes 2011 ). Critical
of what becomes positioned as the market in reproduction and organs
(human eggs, sperm, wombs, kidneys, for example), these scholars
note how women’s bodies are fragmented and turned into sellable parts
(Dickenson 2009 ; Scheper-Hughes 2011 ). Meanwhile women’s repro-
ductive work is, by feminist scholars, recast as a form of regenerative
labour (Cooper and Waldby 2014 ) or redefined, in cases of transna-
tional commercial surrogacy, as a type of mother-work (Pande 2010 ).
The fact that women’s oocytes can enter the reproductive as well as stem
cell industry coupled with low or no compensation creates new trajecto-
ries for women’s reproductive material. In these accounts, women’s bod-
ies become stratified, making some bodies (frequently poorer women
and women living in the developing world) bioavailable to other bod-
ies (older, wealthier women living in the developed world). As noted by
Cohen ( 2004 ), bioavailable bodies are those based not only on (immu-
nological) similarity but also (class, gender, or political) marginality.
This argument is echoed by Scheper-Hughes ( 2011 ), in her study of
Brazilian kidney donors, which critically interrogates how organ traf-
ficking follows well-established routes of capital from the South to the
North and from the Third to the First World.
The gift/commodity framework is one of the most frequent dichoto-
mies used in bioethical discussions on organ and reproductive exchanges
(Fox and Swazey 1992 ). Dating back to the work of Titmuss ( 1970 ),
gifting is cast as morally superior to forms of market place exchange.
In this chapter, we argue that not only is the gift/commodity frame-
work inadequate in explaining uterine exchanges and surrogacy; it fails