200 C. Kroløkke and M.N. Petersen
filled. This is cemented by the tendency to position commissioning
parents who engage in commercial surrogacy as selfish and monstrous,
as they in their desire for a child frequently cross not only bodily and
national but ethical borders.
Altruism mediates these monstrosities, however. As echoed by
the Swedish left party Vänsterpartiet, ‘It’s easy to take a stand against
the international surrogacy industry, where poor women, for exam-
ple in India, support themselves by carrying and giving birth to rich
Westerners. This is an industry Vänsterpartiet obviously should fight.
But it does not follow that surrogacy always is exploitative. The pre-
requisite for this is that it is based on altruism, not on economic
dependence or social pressure’ (Brunius et al. 2011 ). The right to self-
determination and autonomy is, as echoed by Vänsterpartiet, secured
through altruism. Thus, the promise of altruism works by unifying the
disturbances and fragmentations surrogacy creates. By placing altruistic
surrogacy in the family or with close friends, the nuclear family is re-
assembled and motherhood becomes once again related to heterosexual
kinship. Hegemonic scripts of womanhood structures how surrogacy
should be arranged and which actors it should involve. Having dis-
cussed key discourses in the Swedish and Danish debates on surrogacy,
we turn to the ways that UT is debated.
Debating UT: Recycling Reproductive Matter
and Restoring Reproductive Lives
At the age of 22, Anna was diagnosed with cancer and three years later
her uterus was, she recounts in her own story published at Sahlgrenska
Academy home to the UTx, ‘forcefully’ removed (Anna 2014 ). The
transplantation of her mother’s uterus grants Anna hope, that one day
she will be able to carry her own child to term, while importantly,
restoring her body into its previously normative state. ‘To me it is also
about replacing a bodily function that I have previously had and that
I need to become pregnant. The same technique that once took my
uterus, can now give me a uterus back’ (Anna 2014 ). In this section, we
http://www.ebook3000.com