198 C. Kroløkke and M.N. Petersen
sorrow to the mother to give away the child and simultaneously you risk
to ‘rob the child from the only mother, it knows’ (Martensen 2016 ).
Within this discourse the child should not be disentangled from its ges-
tational mother (a disentanglement that leads to the baby becoming ‘a
thing’). Instead, maternity is assembled as the unity of a reproductive
body, gestation, birth, and (social) motherhood.
Echoing the stance against surrogacy, a Marxist-feminist discourse
is present as well. Here altruistic (as well as commercial) surrogacy
involves the trading of intimate matter including women’s bodies,
reproductive functions, materials, and even children. Swedish femi-
nist organisations voice this discourse when they, in a joint letter with
28 prominent feminist politicians, academics, lawyers, and leaders of
NGOs, write:
Surrogacy is human trade. It is about ordering a child and hiring a wom-
an’s uterus. There is a commodity, the child; there is a supplier, the surro-
gate mother; and there is a buyer. The conclusion is that surrogacy is and
always will be trade of children and trade of women’s bodies. This is true
with both commercial as well as so called altruistic surrogacy. (Beausang
et al. 2014 )In this way not only monetary exchanges but also any form of third
person reproduction becomes an undesirable trading of women’s bod-
ies and children. In this bio-intimate economy, procreation is intimately
connected to the female body and her uterus is positioned in an already
scripted (and gendered) kinship-making structure involving gestation,
birth, and motherhood.
In favour of altruistic surrogacy, we find a pragmatic-ethical discourse
which, albeit critical towards surrogacy in general nevertheless, views
altruistic surrogacy as a means to combat transnational commercial sur-
rogacy and regulates the phenomenon as well as a discourse in which
surrogacy becomes an exercise in reproductive rights. Both ethical coun-
cils share the pragmatic-ethical discourse as exemplified in a comment
made by of the Danish members: ‘The starting point is that we do not
want to open up surrogacy. But in light of that, surrogacy has become
an industry in India, while it has been very restrictive in Denmark, then
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