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Gestational surrogacy: nature and culture in kinship.
by Hal B. Levine Anthropological writing about the new reproductive technologies has focused on how they undermine presumed links between nature and culture in kinship. Surrogate motherhood in particular is said to show that "natural facts" serve as symbolic resources to facilitate choice, a key value of Western culture. This work has generated important insights into contemporary discourse about the social and cultural implications of reproductive technology. However, treating nature as a cultural domain exacerbates the tendency to divorce kinship from biology. An analysis of the stated motives of women who become gestational surrogates is presented here to support an argument that a focus on emotion, and its manipulation, can help anthropologists to better integrate human nature and culture in the study of kinship. (Surrogacy, kinship, nature, culture) Peletz (1995) dates the end of "essentialist thinking" in the study of kinship to Needham's (1971) Rethinking Kinship and Marriage. That volume effectively decentered the field well before postmodernism, that indefatigable enemy of essence, reared its head in anthropology. The old view, held since Morgan, that kinship is something specific built from a combination of discrete elements (terminologies and rules of descent, marriage, and residence) gave way to an emphasis on context, where kinship is seen to be embedded in specific constellations of gender, power, difference, contradiction, paradox, and ambivalence. Contemporary analyses of gay families and surrogate motherhood in Western culture bring these points home, as they demonstrate how destabilized the building blocks of kinship in our own societies have become. Peletz (1995:366) approves dismantling the "building blocks" approach and kinship's anticipation of the postmodern critique, but criticizes an associated development, that anthropology has "turned its back" on biology. He sees this as especially unfortunate because new developments in reproductive technology make "'nature' and biology more relevant to our analytic thinking about kinship than they have been since Morgan." Surrogate motherhood provides particularly good opportunities for a reappraisal of the relationships between the "natural" and sociocultural aspects of reproduction and kinship. The opportunity to revisit some unresolved issues arises because the split between gestational and genetic motherhood has opened a range of new reproductive options. Conception and pregnancy can be separated and turned into commercial transactions and professionally managed procedures. A woman can give birth to her own grandchild, for example, by carrying a pregnancy from her daughter's egg. Embryos can be frozen and a child brought into the world long after its genetic parents are dead. The existence of such choices makes once apparently secure connections between biology, folk biology, conception ideology, and kinship categories less stable than they were. Does culture bend to accommodate these changes or, to paraphrase Ragone (1996:363), is surrogacy placed inside tradition? Overall, the anthropological literature about the new reproductive technologies takes a strongly culturalist view, one that illustrates Peletz's (1995) point about the antipathy toward biological models in recent kinship literature. Ragone (1998:2) links biological explanations with determinism, androcentrism, and ethnocentrism as factors behind the tunnel vision of previous anthropological accounts of reproduction. Ragone (1998:120) notes, "Reproduction is concerned with topics no less central than world view, cosmology and culture ... definitions of personhood; and the production of knowledge." Quoting Schneider, whose critique of the idea that kinship is anchored in procreation was as influential in undermining the building-blocks approach as Needham's, Ragone (1998:124) says, "It has become increasingly clear that 'biological' elements have primarily symbolic significance ... [whose] meaning is not biology at all." Newer work, stimulated by Strathern's (1992a, 1992b) treatment of kinship as something that connects nature and culture, continues to elaborate these themes. Franklin and McKinnon (2001:16, 20) note that Strathern's view of kinship as "the site for producing what will count as the difference between nature and culture" challenges "the distinction between biological and social facts." Thompson (2001:197) very clearly and concisely summarizes the issues raised by this position. It has become commonplace to talk of the implosion or collapse of nature and culture: to claim that all concepts of nature, including scientific ones, are always already shaped, marked, and interpenetrated with the imprimatur of culture and ... that all concepts of culture invoke legitimising natural grounds for their systems of classification. Critics of these postmodern sensibilities rightly distrust the looseness or voluntarism that this seems to imply. Having said this, Thompson (2001:198) then emphasizes that her work at infertility clinics shows that when it comes to ordering the chaos that assisted reproduction brings to kinship categories, actors compose narratives that interweave the constraints of both nature and culture. But this focus on nature as an ingredient of narrative discourse is precisely what constitutes its culturalization. Social and biological facts are conflated, rather than united, in this body of literature. The entry of Robin Fox (1993, 1997) into the literature on surrogacy seemed to provide an opening for the kind of debate about biology and kinship in the new reproductive technologies that Peletz (1995) envisioned. Fox, who has long championed a biosocial view of kinship (e.g., Fox 1967), devoted a chapter of his Reproduction and Succession (Fox 1993) to the famous case of Baby M., in which the surrogate refused to turn over the child she carried to the commissioning couple. They sued to enforce the contract. Fox filed an amicus curae brief with the court in the state of New Jersey. He argued that to uphold such an agreement would be unnatural, and that proceedings of this kind constituted part of a historical pattern of attack by states on kinship itself. His main point was that it is wrong to expect surrogate mothers to honor contracts to hand over children, because pregnant mammals bond to their fetuses well before parturition. Even in gestational surrogacy, where the surrogate uses someone else's eggs, this bonding ensures that such contracts will not sit comfortably on the bedrock of biological facts on which such cultural constructs are based. In a review of Fox's (1993) book, Strathern (1994) stressed that the new reproductive technologies are part of modernity's impulse to control the body and extend choice. Where Fox sees the latest round of a long attack by contract on status, Strathern sees the implications of new technologies working their way through society and culture. "What is new about these technologies are the enablements they afford. ... For each innovation simply seems to bring with it enhanced potential, extending previous procedures for which the old social categories are stretched or broadened" (Strathern 1994:265). To Fox there is a causal arrow from biology to culture, at least in the sense that human nature sets limits on what can work. Strathern does not deny that kinship universally entails reproductive arrangements. What interests her, however, is how English ideas about reproduction contain a folk theory about the relationship between nature and culture. Contemporary debates about surrogacy confirm points made previously in her Lewis Henry Morgan lectures (Strathern 1992b). Kinship itself is a domain of ideas about procreation, links across generations, marriage, etc., that simultaneously reproduces concepts of relatedness and autonomy. Arguments about surrogate motherhood, in the courts and legislative chambers, make appeals to status and contract. Rather than one subduing the other, there are more of both. Strathern treats nature as a folk category in English kinship and demonstrates its articulation with central cultural themes of modernity. Nature in this sense is clearly not the biology that Fox talks about. This essay argues that although cultural analyses, such as Strathern's, make penetrating points about Western kinship, we need a paradigm that reaches beyond culture to understand gestational surrogacy. It is necessary to look past pregnancy and childbirth into what motivates women to carry children for strangers in the first place. An analysis of surrogates' conversations, with me and each other, via an email discussion group, about their motivations and the dramatis personae of surrogate motherhood, shows that emotion and its manipulation is a vital ingredient of gestational surrogacy. GESTATIONAL SURROGACY AND PROXIMATE MECHANISMS OF REPRODUCTION Gestational surrogates are made pregnant by the implantation of embryos formed by the in-vitro fertilization of gametes from donated eggs and sperm. The pregnant woman therefore shares no genes with the fetus. Fox (1993:122-23) notes that some of his colleagues pointed out to him that bonding with a fetus that has none of her genes is clearly detrimental to the surrogate's own reproductive fitness. The argument about the importance of the bond between mother and fetus in surrogacy contradicts the basic tenet of sociobiology that organisms strive to increase reproductive fitness by placing their own genes into the next generation. Fox (1993:122-23) replied that this problem with his position is illusory. Humans do not consciously set out to maximize their reproductive success. "We seek certain proximate goals, which if achieved, will have the effect of optimising our reproductive fitness.... As far as human behaviour is concerned, it is these proximate mechanisms that matter. It is only of concern to long-term evolution what the genetic consequences of them are." In-utero bonding is a mechanism that will clearly optimize fitness in most cases since, in a natural pregnancy, the fetus carries the genes of the woman who gestates it. This is certainly a crucial point. Indeed, the distinction between proximate and genetic mechanisms goes a long way toward correcting the naive reductionism of "Wilson's ladder" explanations (Kitcher 1985:17). This style of sociobiological argument, identified by Kitcher with the subject's most well-known advocate, E. O. Wilson, proceeds from the observation that a particular behavior maximizes fitness to the circular conclusion that the behavior is ipso facto genetic, and therefore fixed. Social anthropologists, finding their concerns with society and culture completely bypassed, may be excused if they respond to this brand of social biology with hostility or indifference. Since proximate mechanisms are goals that can derive from a multitude of sources (social, cultural, and psychological as well as biological), a focus on them appears to encourage a view of society and culture in interaction with individual motives and biology. However, Fox casts nature only as a force that works against gestational surrogacy. He leaves us with a very flat view of how proximate mechanisms work in this case. A more rounded picture can emerge if we consider how the motivations of surrogate mothers articulate with the social and cultural contexts of the new reproductive technology. In a recent monograph, Reddy (2001) presents a framework for linking emotional expression and culture. The relevance of his work to this discussion lies in the close association between emotions and the goals and intentions that constitute proximate mechanisms. Reviewing the large corpus of work on emotion in anthropology and psychology, Reddy (2001:47) critiques the prevailing anthropological view of the cultural construction of emotions. "The greater power we suppose culture or discourse to have over emotions the more we are likely to disregard individual desire and choice as epiphenomenal." If we add social structure to Reddy's statement, this disregard has been apparent in the kinship literature for a long time. The paradigm shift from evolutionary concerns to functionalism was largely stimulated by Radcliffe-Brown's critique of Junod's account of the Bathonga mother's brother-sister's son joking relationship. Radcliffe-Brown insisted that, rather than a relict of matriarchy, ego's joking with his mother's brother was a product of the extension of warm sentiments from the mother to her brother in patrilineal societies. The extension-of-sentiments hypothesis figured in some important debates; e.g., when Malinowski engaged Freud on the Oedipus complex, and Homans and Schneider recast Levi-Strauss's explanation of cross-cousin marriage, before being attacked by Needham. (1) Fox (1993; and, as he notes, Murdock before him) states that functionalist kinship theory was anchored in a kind of psychology. However, the expression of sentiment was determined by social structure. The current emphasis on choice, love, and intention in kinship (Peletz 1995:365) demonstrates how feelings and actions are shaped by the values of contemporary consumer culture. Substituting culture for social structure results in an explanation that closely parallels earlier functionalism. If anthropologists acknowledge that emotions are internal states that involve mechanisms of thought, attention, and activation, we can avoid the tendency to reduce their content and expression to social and cultural constructs. Reddy's (2001:323) insistence that "communities systematically seek to train emotions, to idealize some, to condemn others" leads to the view that emotions are linked and bundled with social structure and culture, things external to individuals. Reyna (2002:850) calls this social monism. It militates against not only cultural but psychological or biological reductionism as well. Communication about the intentions of surrogate mothers, as I emphasize below, provides a particularly interesting illustration of how the emotional factors and sociocultural components of surrogacy interrelate. The argument is that gestational surrogacy fractures a formerly more integrated complex of psychobiological dispositions and cultural representations of motherhood. Isolating parts of this complex and reassembling them with values and attitudes deriving from consumer culture, surrogacy stimulates peculiarly postmodernistic ideas and relationships. INTENTIONS AS INDICATORS OF PROXIMATE MECHANISMS Although he makes valuable points about the necessity of a biosocial perspective and proximate mechanisms, Fox's (1993) specific argument about the viability of surrogacy as an institution is incorrect. The case of Baby M. was interesting but atypical. To make such an issue of bonding was no doubt an effective tactic in the New Jersey courts to support a particular woman who did not want to hand over a baby. However, as a focus for wider analysis, bonding fails to meet Fox's own criterion of how a biological substrate to social practices should operate. Fox (1993:123) says that "[c]ultural constructs must be rooted in biological reality or they will surely collapse." If a woman's attachment to a fetus constituted such a fundamental biological reality, surrogate motherhood programs would be unsustainable. Ragone (1996:360, 363), who studied six surrogacy programs, notes that "Without exception, when surrogates are asked whether they think of the child as their own, they say they do not." Women who are concerned about a biological link to the baby choose gestational surrogacy despite the higher risk of medical complication involved in the process of transferring and implanting eggs. They typically hand the babies over without incident and it is clear, regardless of the physiological relationships, that bonding does not constitute an impediment to surrogate motherhood. Therefore, unless bonding itself is inconsequential, some of the mechanisms at work in surrogacy must counteract the surrogate's impulse to identify the child as her own. In order to understand this matter, we need to focus on circumstances before rather than after impregnation, particularly the motives that women say impel them to become surrogates. These motives are neglected by anthropologists who focus on the problems surrogacy poses for conceptualization of motherhood. In commercial surrogacy, the primary reason for this lacuna is that it all seems so obvious: the women are paid for their services. The surrogates themselves, however, represent money as a necessary but insufficient condition of their choice. (2) Ragone (1994, 1996) says her informants had three motives. They wanted to help infertile couples, they wanted to earn money at home, and that they loved being pregnant. Her informants were so consistent about their motivations that it seemed to Ragone that they were reading from a study by Parker (1983), a psychiatrist who interviewed 125 applicants to a surrogacy program. Dismissing the supposition that surrogates were driven by financial interest, he found that wanting to help others, earning money at home, and enjoying pregnancy complemented one another. In an especially interesting passage, Parker (1983:118) notes that a subset of women (he makes no mention of how many) "wanted to be pregnant the rest of their lives ... (they) felt more content, complete, special ... and often felt an inner glow." This love of pregnancy, along with the desire to give the "gift" of a child to another couple, was often discussed on a Web site that promotes surrogacy and connects surrogate mothers with one another. The way that the women interweave talk of money, gift giving, and pregnancy in their postings to each other suggests that, contra Fox, surrogacy sits well with current biological and cultural realities. THE MOTIVATIONS OF GESTATIONAL SURROGATES The surrogacy Web site examined for this project provides advocacy and organizational services for people interested in surrogate motherhood. This site contains information about technical and legal issues and also provides a place where "intended parents" can contact potential surrogates. The two resources that proved useful for research were a bulletin board and a listserve that connects surrogate mothers with each other. The bulletin board facilitated contact with the woman who became my key informant. A newly pregnant gestational surrogate, K. was articulate, conscientious, and interested in the research. We corresponded regularly from the second trimester of her pregnancy until a year after she had given birth to twins. During four months of this period she arranged access to the listserve material for me. I downloaded all the correspondence between current and former surrogates on the list, and with the aid of qualitative-analysis software searched this very large body of text for themes suggested by both the literature and correspondence with K. Stimulated by Fox's work, I initially concentrated on the bonding process. In her first letter, K. specified that because she was a gestational surrogate she did not feel that she would be giving up a child, "since the baby is not mine." In fact, she said, "I was unwilling to be a 'full' or 'traditional' surrogate with a genetic link to the babies for the reasons you are curious about. I would have an extremely hard time giving up a child that I had a biological link with." (3) K. maintained that it was the egg donor who was having the hardest time emotionally adjusting to the situation. (4) As her due date approached, K., was most troubled by the growing divergence of interest that was occurring between herself and the intended mother. (5) She became increasingly uncomfortable carrying twins and found it difficult to attend to her own young family. She decided to be induced early. The intended mother became angry and accused her of selfishly endangering the health of the babies. The birth took place in strained circumstances, but K. remained philosophical. She felt powerfully attracted to the twins just after the birth, but did not allow herself to bond with them. It was particularly heartrending when K.'s toddler offered to buy one of the babies from the intended parents. I finally realized what being the "birth mother" of the twins meant to me. Even though I didn't have the whole physiological bonding with them, the REALIZATION that I would have felt like I WAS THE MOTHER was enough for me to accept my role as the birth mother as opposed to simply "the carrier." ... I simply felt [before] like the physical body enabling them to grow. A year later, K. wrote that in retrospect the entire surrogacy episode seemed like a bizarre interlude in her life but, "I don't wake up at night screaming that I gave away my babies." It is clear in K.'s account that the physiological attachments that occurred in utero between her and the fetuses did not correspond with, or lead to, psychological bonding. There was a potential for this just after the birth, but K. never felt the babies were hers since they belonged with the intended parents. She was, therefore, able to resist the impulse to mother the twins. With this informant's experience in mind, the database from the listserve was searched for comments about bonding, and the process of handing over the babies after the birth. When the surrogates on the listserve discussed these things among themselves, they emphasized the importance of creating conditions that would ensure a smooth transition. They wanted to achieve a sense of closure for themselves, their families, and the intended parents. The surrogates' own children needed to realize that the babies who were going to another family were not siblings and that they themselves could never be given away. The intended parents also required assurance that no claim would be made to the children. The surrogate mothers very rarely mentioned any personal attachment to the babies. When they said something about a personal tie, someone on the list reminded them of their role as a gestator. For example, in reply to one woman who asked, "Do you think it will sound crazy if I say I want to be able to keep the baby in my room for a little while after the parents have decided to leave the hospital and go home for the night?" a member of the list replied, "They are the parent's. I hate to sound like I'm minimizing our job, but we are just there to carry babies. When the baby has its first cry our job is over." Such comments (and, more tellingly, the rarity of cases like Baby M.) suggest that the social and cultural organization of surrogate motherhood is effective in overcoming in-utero bonding. The psychological screening, contracts, medical procedures, and interactions among surrogates, as well as interaction between the women and the intended parents, almost always produce the desired result. The process of "open coding" (an open-minded reading of the textual material that involves an inductive search for themes) produced many comments from the women on the list congratulating each other upon finding intended parents, achieving a pregnancy, or giving birth. Expressions of sympathy and commiseration appeared when there were problems at one of these steps or milestones and a failure of the surrogacy. The sincere desire of these women to go through with a process that is so complicated, exhausting, and dangerous, both physically and psychologically, was striking. Ragone (1994) emphasizes social and cultural factors in her explanation of what motivates women to become surrogates. The pregnancy allows the woman to work at home. She spends the cash on her husband and children to compensate them for the inconvenience to which her atypical pregnancy puts them. Although carrying a baby for someone else violates conventions about child bearing, surrogates represent their actions as culturally appropriate, falling within the traditional roles of the nurturing woman. The surrogate creates motherhood and fatherhood for the intended parents by giving them the gift of a child. These points are convincing, and there is ample evidence on the Web site that the people involved in surrogacy (husbands, program staff, intended parents, and the women themselves) strive to make it seem legitimate and appropriate. However, the decision to become pregnant in this way cannot be explained purely in terms of posthoc explanations and their attempted alignment with the cultural values surrounding the family and work. Indeed, no one disputes the fact that the entire industry that supports surrogacy is underwritten by the money paid by men to satisfy their desires to achieve paternity. Might some analogous factor that has biopsychological as well as cultural dimensions enter into the motivations of surrogate mothers? My correspondence with K. made it clear that her motives derived from a variety of personal issues. She mentioned that she felt very sad for her childless aunts as they struggled with infertility, and she regretted being unable to help them. Also, her pregnancy with her own child was not the rewarding experience she expected it to be, and she wanted to "do it over again," to have a better pregnancy, even though she did not want another child at that particular time in her life. Since K. mentioned that one of the reasons she did not want to expand her family was financial, I asked what part money played in her decision to become a gestational surrogate. She replied that the intended parents certainly spent a great deal on the surrogacy. The embryo transfers cost $25,000, there were legal fees, flights, hotels, meals, and entertainment to pay for. She was to receive $11,000, an amount that did help her to stay at home with her daughter, but this modest sum of money only facilitated an altruistic decision. She was giving the intended parents a gift and they insisted on compensating her for her trouble and expense. THE GIFT OF LIFE K. said that although the intended parents appreciated her altruistic motives (they had come across some frankly mercenary women), she felt that she was not "as giving" as many of the surrogates she got to know through the listserve. They would do anything to help others to have children. The messages on the list contained a great deal of evidence that corroborated this. Surrogate motherhood is represented continually as the altruistic act of "giving the gift of life." Since the seminal work of Mauss (1935), anthropologists have written about how the giving of gifts functions in small-scale societies to create ties of various sorts. Where there are no formal economic and governmental institutions, gift exchange is essential to social integration. Gift-giving is similar to marriage in this regard, as the birth of legitimate children creates enduring kinship links between individuals and groups. Levi-Strauss (1970) connects Mauss's work on the gift very closely with marriage and reproduction. He argues that by creating kinship bonds between groups, the gift of women in marriage (made necessary by the incest taboo) underlies the creation of society and culture. It is intriguing that modern surrogacy combines these elements, the gift and reproduction of children, while emphatically excluding the surrogate from kinship or marriage. The ties that are emphasized (those between the intended mother and the surrogate) typically lapse after the child is handed over. Although gestational surrogacy is socially constructed as a type of gift-giving, the prestation takes a peculiarly modernistic form. Godbout (1998:56) says that the modern gift "is voluntary, carries with it no obligation to reciprocate, and is made to a stranger." Organ donation provides Godbout's (1998:91) prototypical example of this kind of gift. "Nothing tangible is returned. But, however unilateral this may appear, testimony indicates that the return is enormous, even if what is returned is implicit in the act itself and is not embodied in any specific object or service. Organ donation shows that the gift is a moral act...." Carrier (1991, 1995) notes that enmeshed as we are in a world of commodities, consumers have little choice but to give mass-produced impersonal objects to one another. However, the gift is made "perfect" when the material object comes to symbolize a personal tie between the parties. The emphasis on free and unconstraining sentiment in gift-giving constitutes "a powerful ideology, one that is able to disembody objects, divest them of their material aspect and transmute them into pure, spontaneous expressions of being and love" (Carrier 1991:21-22). Ragone (1996:355-57) perceptively discusses how the emphasis on the gift of life allows surrogates to transcend the base notion that they are prostituting their maternity. Surrogacy programs emphasize that, payment notwithstanding, the women perform an altruistic act, one that creates not only a family but also a special tie between two women who were formerly strangers. It is thus not surprising, in view of their socialization, their life experiences, and their somewhat limited choices, that surrogates claim that it is their love of children, pregnancy, and family, and their desire to help others that motivate them to become surrogates. To do otherwise would be to acknowledge that there may be inconsistencies within, and areas of conflict between, their traditional female roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers and their newfound public personae as surrogate mothers (Ragone 1996:362). The anthropologist here asserts that a sociocultural perspective better accounts for the motives of her informants than their own statements. Explaining motives in terms of structures is a common anthropological strategy that often contributes substantially to the understandings of individual discourse and action. Ragone is convincing when she insists that there is more to these statements than meets the eye. However, her approach is like that of functional and structural writers commenting on sentiments or mental structures. They "implied strong psychological claims ... [but] never bothered to seek direct psychological evidence for the postulated mechanism" (Boyer 1999:225). This reluctance to step outside established anthropological frameworks when discussing motives reduces individual choice and desire in surrogacy to false consciousness, a mere epiphenomenon of society and culture. What surrogates say to each other on the listserve about becoming pregnant suggests that their motives are not rationalizations but proximate mechanisms of their actions. The women take strenuous steps to achieve pregnancy and express great joy when they do. They actively search for intended parents using the Web site and other contacts, and enthuse about their success upon finding them. When, after the hormonal preparation and implantation, pregnancy occurs, they are ecstatic. A typical message from a woman, notifying the list of her positive pregnancy test, stated, "I can't wait now to hear if all of you guys are pregnant too.... I think there are 2 or 3 just this week alone, waiting.... This is gonna be great.... We are on a winning streak." Highlighting the role of personal desires in surrogacy in no way diminishes the importance of social and cultural factors. Indeed, one of the basic issues, as Fox notes, is the extent to which any cultural practice reconciles potentially competing drives, interests, and values. The ideology of "the gift of life" seems part of an emotional regime articulated on the listserve that aligns emotion, personal choice, and cultural values for surrogate mothers. BEYOND DUALISM It is safe to say that, statements about the collapse of the distinction between nature and culture notwithstanding, the literature on surrogacy is characterized by underlying dualism. When Ragone and Strathern discuss motives, actions, and representations in purely cultural terms, they become what Reyna (2002) calls "fiber cultural analysts." (6) When Fox insists that the state cannot go on upholding contracts that challenge a woman's mammalian tendency to bond to a fetus, he sounds like an "uber biological anthropologist." Taken to their logical extremes, both approaches are counter-intuitive and contradictory. "[U]ber biological anthropologists view cultural anthropology as irrelevant to the study of culture and their fiber cultural counterparts view biology as irrelevant to the study of biological processes" (Reyna 2002:179). It is clear that the need for gestational surrogacy and other new reproductive technologies is a largely unintended byproduct of recent changes in marriage and the family. Since the 1960s, when effective methods of birth control became readily available, sex has become progressively detached from reproduction and marriage. Giddens (1999) sees this detachment and the accompanying disaggregation of links between men and women as so complete that marriage and the family have now become "shell institutions" in the culture of globalization. They have kept their labels but their content has been completely transformed. The "pure relationship," centered on two people sharing emotional intimacy through disclosure of their innermost feelings, is replacing marriage throughout the world. Jamieson (1998) notes that plastic sexuality, more sexually transmitted diseases, and delayed conception (all consequences of what Giddens [1999] suggests we call "coupling" instead of marriage) "create infertility as a significant problem for career women." Echoing Strathern, Jamieson (1998:36) comments that the reproductive technologies that have arisen to repair fertility "render kinship more problematic as a way of thinking about, representing and constructing relationships between individuals and society, nature and culture." Strathern (1992a) also discusses the "fragmentation, decomposition and deconstruction of parenthood." The voluminous debate over the Warnock Report into reproductive technologies in Britain in the end resolves to define as a parent "the one who desires to be a parent." Now, Strathern (1992a:178) says, it is the yearning that seems natural. But the nature of the desire to be a parent is not changed by reproductive technology. What is new is that yearnings have become sufficient conditions of pregnancy and/or parenthood. The links emphasized by Giddens, Strathern, and Jamieson are simultaneously biological and psychological, as well as social and cultural. Disaggregation occurs at all these levels. The technology that makes gestational surrogacy possible detaches the drives, emotions, and desires of pregnancy from motherhood and marriage. This decontextualization is accompanied by a recontextualization. Reyna (2002) points to how this recontextualization may work when he asserts that external spaces (the social and cultural) get connected and internal spaces (biopsychological) do the connecting. The new autonomy of the contents of the internal spaces allows them to become proximate mechanisms of reproduction that attach to the kind of external spaces emphasized in the literature discussed above. Women who find pregnancy especially rewarding but do not want more children now can have an unrelated baby for strangers who desire to become parents. Their choices are validated by the ideology of giving the perfect gift, reinforced and kept on track by the emotional regime of surrogacy programs. CONCLUSIONS: TOWARD A MORE INCLUSIVE UNDERSTANDING Anthropologists did not abandon the building-blocks approach because they solved the problem of how kinship systems work. Rather, they lost faith in that enterprise. Now that our building blocks have been undermined by the new reproductive technologies, we are in a better position to appreciate that they are still there, part of the context of kinship anthropologists have become so enamored of exploring. This essay has suggested that biology, psychology, and culture come together in a particular way in gestational surrogacy: an institution that undermines our notions (as natives and as specialists) of what constitutes kinship. Biology and culture are not, contra Fox, somehow in opposition to one another, fighting a battle that started with the inception of the state. Neither are we simply drawn by market forces or cultural urges to extend choice and other ideologies into our reproduction. Although this much may be clear, it is important to stress that we hardly understand how the internal spaces of the brain and the mind articulate with and connect external spaces of society and culture. The value of focusing on surrogacy is that, like an atom smasher, its innovations show that kinship is composed of different kinds of elementary particles. If anthropologists develop a more unified approach to how these particles form and recombine, we could yet devise an appropriately scientific approach to the study of kinship. NOTES (1.) Fox (1993:53-58) provides a well-written precis of all this. (2.) Various state laws in the United States and the surrogacy agencies themselves intentionally keep the payments to surrogates low to avoid any hint of baby-selling and to keep anyone with mercenary interests at bay (Ragone 1994). (3.) K.'s statements on this matter seem typical. Ragone (1996:360) notes in her research, "Without exception, when surrogates are asked whether they think of the child as their own, they say they do not." Surrogates who cannot "dismiss their biological link to the child" opt for gestational surrogacy even though the risk of medical complication is greatly increased. (4.) K. said she felt both the intended mother and the egg donor were "the mother" of the babies. The egg donor was to be granted guardianship of the children in the event of the death of the intended parents. (5.) Ragone (1994) notes that the ideology of surrogacy emphasizes the relationship between the surrogate and the intended mother and downplays the relationship between the surrogate and the baby. K. certainly seemed to subscribe to this, but her experiences show that the divergent reproductive investments and interests of the women involved may undermine their friendship. (6.) Uber means "in the last instance." BIBLIOGRAPHY Boyer, P. 1999. Human Cognition and Cultural Evolution. Anthropological Theory Today, ed. H. L. Moore, pp. 206-33. Cambridge. Carrier, J. 1991. 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