Capitalism, law, and the labour of biological reproduction: a case study

Keywords: law; reproductive labour; capitalism; surrogacy
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 67

Abstract

On the grounds that any commercial trade in reproductive capabilities would result in the exploitation of marginalized surrogates by more privileged couples willing to pay for access to their wombs, Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act bans commercial surrogacy, allowing only for altruistic arrangements. This paper troubles altruism as a means of insulating surrogates from market-based exploitation. While acknowledging the serious concerns that dog commercial markets in reproductive biology, I argue that the AHRA recapitulates the long-standing devaluation of reproductive labour through a regime of what legal scholar Reva Siegel calls "judicially enforced altruism" (1994). By legally constituting “gestational work” (Lewis 2020) as a gift freely given, the AHRA facilitates the ongoing appropriation of reproductive labour by capitalism, which is assigned, once again, to the realm of non-value. A feminist political-economic critique of altruism, this paper does not argue for free-market commercialization. Rather, my aim is to upend the commercial/altruistic binary that has circumscribed so much of the thinking and legislating around biological labour in the bioeconomy. The reconstitution of gestation as work, while not an end in itself, may at present offer greater protection from market-based exploitation than does the ethical and moral insistence that the biological not be waged. And so too might it offer us a vantage from which to reconsider the relationship between law, capitalism, and the labour of reproduction in favour of more equitable futures.