PARIS, LONDON, PHOENIX: questioning surrogacy
Astrid Healy, one of the founders of the Phoenix Collective, relates Paris Hilton’s surrogacy to a broader phenomenon of commodification, arguing that feminists should critically engage with new reproductive practices, looking beyond liberal understandings of choice.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Paris Hilton is lying in a hospital bed with a full face of make-up, wearing a blue satin robe. She’s holding her newborn child, Phoenix. She takes a couple of selfies and daydreams about taking her baby boy to Taco Bell. The Instagram video is captioned : ‘My life is finally complete. My journey into motherhood is on the new season of #ParisInLove’. This journey had a somewhat unusual beginning though. Despite the hospital mise en scène, Hilton had never actually been pregnant.
Although this might seem like another instance of parents using their children for social media likes, in reality it goes much further than this. American celebrities are increasingly taking advantage of changing legal frameworks surrounding reproductive rights and technologies, in particular IVF and surrogacy, in order to buy their very own perfect family.
Kim Kardashian, Hilton’s close friend, has also used surrogates to bear her children. Both women share the same surrogacy doctor, and have helped each other on this peculiar ‘journey’ to motherhood. Just as Hilton possesses multiple expensive homes, owns fancy clothes and treats herself to numerous beauty treatments, she has purchased both her children. She hasn’t given birth to them, yet thanks to new tech, children London and Phoenix are genetically hers. These new additions to hers and husband Carter Reum’s family were made in private, as neither Paris’ mum nor sister were even aware of the ‘delivery’. Paris defends this secrecy, claiming to seek shelter from the public attention she’s received all her life : ‘I’ve never really had anything just be mine (...) I just really felt that I wanted to have this journey with us only.’
“In reality, Paris Hilton’s surrogacy is inscribed in a broader phenomenon of global capitalism’s increasing commodification of all forms of human activity.”
These words are symptomatic of the wider, underlying rise of individualism in American society. Indeed, claiming the journey to having this child as only hers dissimulates the reality of surrogacy. It ignores the participation of the surrogate and creates the impression that such experiences are entirely personal events. In reality, Paris Hilton’s surrogacy is inscribed in a broader phenomenon of global capitalism’s increasing commodification of all forms of human activity. More worryingly, it highlights the progressive erosion of the boundary between persons and things. Indeed, as individuality has become reified, we come to see ourselves as the sole free-thinking engineers of our life. We can design our life as we wish, on the whim of a purchase. Our entire lives become commodified, including the realm of personhood. Moreover, because late stage capitalism is supported by claims that consumption is empowering, and human-sourced goods and services can now be purchased, we are stuck with the illusory belief that practices which commodify humans are inherently good and even liberating. In some US states and perhaps soon Belgium, ‘the client is king’, even when the item purchased is a human itself. Feminism has in some ways acted as an enabler for this shift, particularly with the popularity of ‘choice feminism’ which frames the choices of individual women as inherently empowering.
More and more families are resorting to ‘family planning’ through the use of reproductive technologies. These include IVF and variants, but also surrogacy. In the United States, between 1999 and 2013, there were 30,927 surrogate pregnancies. This can be understood as a response to increasing infertility, but it is also a symptom of Western tendencies to seek control over anything deemed ‘uncontrollable’ - including reproduction. Thus, scientific governmentality over nature has been normalised, and any means for life ‘improvement’ are legitimised. But whose life conditions are we concerned about? Why have ethical concerns about such practices been ignored, even in left-wing ‘progressive’ circles ?
“as individuality has become reified, we come to see ourselves as the sole free-thinking engineers of our life. We can design our life as we wish, on the whim of a purchase.”
Reproductive technologies are celebrated as ‘progressive’ for their accommodation of people’s supposed ‘right to children’ rather than criticised for their lack of consideration of women’s rights (see UK organisations such as Surrogacy UK or Brilliant Beginnings). The left’s ethical compass has lost its focus. In a rush to celebrate acts of female autonomy, the ways in which economic circumstances condition the exercise of that autonomy has been ignored. Indeed, the autonomous acts of wealthy women can exploit the desperation of other women who are forced to offer their bodies for rent. This is particularly striking with regards to surrogacy. It is an extremely costly practice (ranging from $80,000 to $150,000 or more, in the US) that benefits the ultra-rich, such as the Kardashian or Hilton families, at the expense of women whose choice of entering this exchange is fuelled by financial necessity.
For example, in Ukraine, one of the poorest countries in Europe, around 2,000 surrogacies are organised every year, with the majority of babies being carried for foreign couples. These children are legally attached to the ‘intended’ parents rather than to the surrogate, and thus are easily shipped out of Ukraine. Following the start of the war in 2022, many Ukrainian surrogates were abandoned, while their surrogate children were taken away. Other women were trafficked into German brothels under pretences of safeguarding. In the US, surrogacy is also rooted in poverty, as argued by feminist activist Julie Bindel, following her interviews with surrogates in California : “Many of the women I met lived in trailer parks and were desperate to make money.” Even when surrogacy is ‘altruistic’, meaning that the surrogate bears no financial motive, the legitimation of this practice perpetuates the essentialisation of women as child-bearers first and people second.
Whilst researching this issue, I found dozens of articles explaining why Paris Hilton chose surrogacy twice, first for London, and now for Phoenix. Hilton presents her decision as rooted in 'medical trauma' experienced during her years at boarding school: ‘If I’m in a doctor’s office, I get a shot, anything, I will literally have a panic attack and I can’t breathe. I just knew that would not be healthy for me or the baby, growing inside of someone who has such high anxiety.’
Refusing to bear a child in order to protect your health is perfectly understandable. However, I’d argue that resorting to surrogacy instead of adoption means prioritising your desire to perpetuate your gene pool over all else. The choice of surrogacy legitimises the objectification of women’s wombs as spaces to rent and the marketisation of women’s reproductive labour. It is a capitalist practice that functions through the essentialization of women, preying on vulnerable women that are often poor and come from marginalised ethnic backgrounds.
“In a rush to celebrate acts of female autonomy, the ways in which economic circumstances condition the exercise of that autonomy has been ignored.”
Nothing can justify surrogacy. We must analyse this practice with a holistic approach to ethical considerations, rather than being satisfied with claims of supposedly ‘empowering choice’. People’s choice of surrogacy stems from the desire to have a child, their impossibility or choice not to bear the child themselves and a desire, more or less conscious, to bring into the world a new life to call theirs. This third factor of total ownership is, I’d argue, the most questionable.
Indeed, this desire sways the ‘intended parents’ toward the option of surrogacy instead of adoption, in a world in which thousands of abandoned children need parents. Surrogacy seeks to provide couple’s with total claims to their children, while the process of adoption is harder in that respect. The advantages of surrogacy for ‘Intended Parents’ can be illustrated in the famous example of 'Baby M'. In 1986, a woman agreed to be a traditional surrogate to a couple who couldn't conceive on their own. However, once the child was born, the surrogate decided she couldn’t give the child up, and went to court with the couple. The court eventually granted custody to the ‘Intended Father’, whose sperm had been used in the surrogacy. Later, Johnson v. Calvert established that gestational surrogacy (in which the surrogate shares no genetic ties to the child) is a legally binding agreement guaranteeing ‘Intended Parents’ parentage.
The choice of surrogacy over adoption participates in reinforcing three dangerous ideas about personhood, especially that of women and children. Firstly, it supports the idea that a parent’s real child must be biologically related to them. Secondly, it relies on the conceptualisation of a woman’s womb as a place to be rented and implanted with one’s own genetic material, to conveniently form a human life outside of one’s own body which can then be extracted when the time comes. In doing so, thirdly, it assumes a child is something that can be bought off a market when desired, arriving promptly, bearing no inconvenience for the buyer. Crucially, it seems that the rhetoric supporting surrogacy essentialises women in the same way that pro-lifers do: by favouring the possibility of a new life over the material reality of womanhood.
Paris Hilton claims having two surrogacies was ‘a difficult decision to make’. But who was it really difficult for? Her own sheltered and wealthy self, or the women whose bodies were used for the manufacture and delivery of two children? For the sake of women’s rights, surrogacy shouldn’t be an option at all. Instead, couples that cannot or will not bear their own children should make the ethical choice of adoption. Precarious women who would turn to surrogacy in order to make ends meet should be provided with financial aid, not short-term, objectifying liabilities disguised as solutions.
Feminism isn’t a label to be conveniently attached to make unethical practices seem politically correct. As feminists, we mustn't take liberal frameworks for granted. Agency is not solely an individual matter - and we must acknowledge how our own actions can rely on the denial of rights and agency to others. As second wave feminists argued, the personal is indeed political. What Paris Hilton does with her family isn’t only her business : it reveals a broader change in social understandings of personhood, which shape each and everyone of our future. Choices are political, and women’s choices are not all necessarily feminist.