Everyone wants women to have more babies, is technology the solution?

Many countries see fertility decline as a national and economic crisis (calling it a "baby crisis", "fertility crisis", or sometimes, a “population collapse"). The reasoning is that a shrinking labour force simply cannot continue to support an aging society. Industries and schools built for a younger or growing society will start to fail. 

Pronatalism is thus on the rise, pushing for restrictions, regulations, or welfare to promote a higher national birth rate. Countries after countries are messaging the need for more babies, swinging from the Danish government’s promise to solve the "involuntary childlessness" problem by covering fertility treatment under their public health system to Russia's omnipresent discourse of a "demographic crisis" and Putin’s current legal push to ban so-called "child-free propaganda". In the recent US elections, extreme pronatalist claims about population extinctions and race wars peppered the discourse over reproductive control. The previous scare of global overpopulation has somehow ceded into the background.

Navigating fertility markets requires constant ethical labour

Within the national reproductive complex, a whirlwind of routines, practices, and decisions govern the selective abortion, surrogate matches, or donations to a sperm bank. These structures, argues Wahlberg, shape the intimate experiences of individuals as they seek to navigate the process.

These processes are steeped in moral grey zones. Siegl examines the "intimate labour" Russian and Ukrainian surrogates sign up for when enter the commercial market, a practice deeply associated with moral taboos, illegitimacy, and secrecy. 

The highly commercial context provides a distant, "sanitised" trading experience. Siegl recalls an interview with a woman from Russia, who "was just happy that she would get paid and that the clinic took over all the communications. She didn’t have any contact with the parents and didn’t want to." This corresponds with the overall understanding of surrogacy as business relationship, which clearly sets Russia and Ukraine apart from countries such as the US, where altruism and love are common narratives around surrogacy. “While intimate and affective entanglements are deemed dangerous and unethical in the former, financial and economic aspects are considered tainting in the latter," says Siegl. 

Different socio-historical contexts impact the way we think about what’s right or wrong about surrogacy. As a result, birthing surrogates and the intended parents invest in what Siegl calls "ethical labour" as they grapple with and counter the moral critiques around them. Battling over the "true" meanings of surrogacy, which are often simplified and shifting, "helps surrogate participants navigate their roles in the reproductive market", explains Siegl, "while on a bigger scale, they ‘lubricate’ the market’s expansion". For instance, in Russia, framing surrogacy as paid work facilitates a neat exchange of money and baby that can then be casted and defended as saving the so-called "traditional family".