Heather Brunskell-Evans from FiLiA in conversation with Renate Klein.

Heather:  My name is Heather Brunskell-Evans. And today I'm interviewing Dr Renate Klein. So Renate is a biologist and a social scientist, and she's been a feminist activist since the early eighties around issues to do with women's health and reproduction.

 Renate, I'm delighted to interview you today. Firstly, because I know that you're coming to the FiLiA conference and you'll be on a panel about surrogacy, a human rights issue. And in relation to that, I started to read your work, which unfortunately, I hadn't come across before. This is remiss of me. So I have also read Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation, which I think is one of the major contributions that you've made to this debate. You can come back to me and say, you made many other contributions too.

 So what I wanted to start off with was something like this. I know in the UK, it would be very difficult to talk about surrogacy without putting it into the framework of: it's progressive. And it's to do with the human rights of people who are not in either conventional heterosexual relationships or for one reason or another can't have a baby of their own.

And so as a society, we're progressive because we're facilitating these people to have their own family. And I think that you are going to take a different position to that. So I wanted to know what your response would be to that, for example, the Kardashians, Elton John are famous figures, who are this sort of flagbearers for the kind of narrative that I've just talked about. 

Renate: Yeah. Well, that's exactly right. Heather, it's a pleasure to be talking to you. It's not just in the UK where that is being rammed down our throats. Oh, it's so positive. It's so progressive. And of course immediately it allows these poor gay men who otherwise can't have their own babies, you know, to have happy precious families.

And yes, there's Elton John and countless other, mostly American celebrities. So we get that too. And my argument is: Indeed. It is a human rights violation, but not of these, what I call baby buyers or in a nicer, frame or a nicer way to say way to say intended parents or commissioning parents. It is a human rights violation of the so-called surrogate, the birth mother, who is carrying this child for nine months, actually making this child out of her own bones and blood for nine months. It is a human rights violation of the so-called egg donor who can jeopardises her life, her health in the process of ‘donating’ these eggs. And then there's the child.

Nobody has asked this child if it wants to be a take away baby. Being taken away from the birth mother, mostly in a caesarean and given to this couple who it has absolutely no association with and what it knows, this baby, a boy or girl, it knows only the birth mother that it has been nine months in her womb developing.

It knows her smell. It knows her voice. It knows her movements and it misses her greatly. And this can be quite horrible for baby because he doesn't know anything about these new parents. 

So my attack on human rights violation is absolutely the opposite. And the so-called, progressive people who see the surrogacy as some wonderful liberatery new ways of making families, they should look into their mirror and should ask themselves, am I okay with founding a family on the potential harm and exploitation of two other women?

Plus, the question has the child asked for it?  

Heather: I'm really interested in what you've just said. What it was reminding me of is that in the 1990s there was a slur, which was used to academics. I was doing my PhD at that point, was to be biologically essentialist. So that stopped one from thinking about, almost prohibited one from thinking about firstly the bond the mother might have with the child. So the mother's body. If you're determined not to be a biological essentialist, you would say the mother's body is just a vessel. She's doing work like any other work. It happens to be with her body.

You seem to be suggesting that that separation from the body from the person is, apart from the unethical aspects to the woman's health, possible health problems, but also to some split that she has to do within herself in relation to bearing this child. And secondly, just to throw into this, the idea that a child can be brought up and not know it's biological mother.

That that in itself would be seen as sort of biologically essentialist I suppose, in that the argument would be well, if it's parented, if it's loved, what would be the problem with that? 

Renate: I'll try to answer the first one first about the biological essentialism.

You know, we hear that all the time. And my response to that is: all right, a pregnant woman and you watch what's happening to her body and you watch what she goes through, you watch if she gets gestational diabetes or hypertension or even just hiccups, you just watched that. And then you tell me if that is not a real woman who has very significant changes in her body during these nine months when she actually makes this baby.

 Now, is that biological essentialism? I think it's the reality. And I think since we have to endure all these waves of postmodernism that had already started in the 1980s, they have all been, especially those in academia and I was an Associate Professor of Women's Studies from 1991 until 2006, when I retired, we were all kind of told that postmodernism was the new way to talk and speak.

You couldn't mention things like women and sex and, and biology, but luckily, I've had the great advantage of actually teaching in a women's studies program together with my colleague, Robin Roland. And we were a radical feminist Women's Studies program. And I have also written a lot about postmodernism and how it really, really destroys the whole idea of what women can together as you know, social and biological beings, it's obviously both.

Oh, so it doesn't really phase me to have these accusations. And I just said, look at the reality of a pregnant woman, then tell me that this is only a text and this is only 25,000 subjectivities, right. Because that's not my reality. And that those, they believe there is something as cold reality in something called truth.

So, you know, that's that argument. Now, the other argument that you mentioned that the child may never know his or her birth mother and may still have a very happy life. I mean, that is absolutely true. And I would argue that it's very true that, as long as the child has love and support and caring, it can have a very good childhood and adolescence.

However, in surrogacy, that's very different. In surrogacy it's not that you have this orphaned child, and let's assume it is a properly orphaned child somewhere that needs your care and love. In surrogacy you actually produce a baby with making an embryo that you then transfer into the womb of another woman who you either pay or say, she does it for love, if it's a family member and you do that specifically to nine months later, when this baby's taken out, mostly with a caesarean, to then take it away.

 So it's not that there's this child that really needs a home. If you actually deliberately set out to make a child to take it away. Now that is called trafficking in children, or it can be called the sale of children if money changes hands. Money changes hands, even in so-called altruistic surrogacy. 

So that is a very, very different situation from caring for children who wouldn't have nobody else. And also if I may add to this also, I think the discussion has got so one-sided because since the advent of technology, which is called gestational surrogacy in, an embryo is made from sperm and an egg, and that can be, if it's a heterosexual couple, the egg of the female partner or in a gay couple, there always has to be an egg donor. And so then this embryo that's made of the sperm and the egg is then put into this third woman, the so-called surrogate. And ever since that technology has become possible in the late eighties, what IVF doctors are saying, oh, this baby has nothing to do with you, to the birth mother or the surrogate mother, has nothing to do with you because it is not your child, because it doesn't have your genes. And unfortunately, some so-called surrogate mothers, and I think it's a really bad term because she's not a substitute, she is the birth mother, but some of these women who carry these babies have totally taken on this language. They have dissociated themselves from their reality and have really as Aikman says, you know, have developed a split self. 

And so there's a real example of the real woman who acted as a surrogate in Australia said, well, it is not my child, it was just a passenger on my bus. Now, I think it's really sad if women compare their bodies and lives really, to a bus and then to say, oh, no, the growing child is just a passenger on my bus.

 But that is the indoctrination that the pro surrogacy groups, and let's not forget, it is a multi-billion global industry. The IVF clinics, you know, greatly profit and there are more and more, more because they're not doing all that also they need more clients and that's exactly what they say. It's got nothing to do with the birth mother You can take that child away, nothing to do with her. She's not suffering and it's her choice. She has agreed. And first of all, I really have big problems with that. It's just work like any other.

Heather: You know, when I was reading your book, I was reminded so much of the arguments pro surrogacy are so similar to the ‘pro sex work’ argument that they seem so interconnected. So the language changes then, so you use sex work instead of prostitution, people become clients and everybody apparently is happy because it's to do with choice. And so it's very similar political dynamic that's going on here. Do you think so yourself? 

Renate: Absolutely. And I mean, I do call surrogacy reproductive prostitution, and I'm not the one who said  that actually, Andrea Dworkin already said that. Gena Corea who wrote a fabulous book in 1985 called The Mother Machine. She called surrogacy reproductive prostitution.

We all said that. Absolutely parallel to all these discussions we have to have about sex industry, which is empowering for a woman or, you know, as others have said, and we at Spinifex Press have published a lot of books critical of the sex work ideology.

Prostitution is violence against women. And in the same way, surrogacy is violence against women. The people who profit are, as we know, in prostitution, the pimps and all the whole industry around it. And in surrogacy, it is the IVF clinics. It's the lawyers, it's the brokers, it's the egg clinics.

It's the whole industry that wants to make money out of the bodies of these two women. And all this and always saying, oh, there's some poor infertile couple heterosexual or socially in fertile, like in gay men, they're needed, They’re wanted. And these women can give it. And what's bad about this. It's exactly the same.

Heather: When I talked about this with people, often people will bring up, an example of a gay couple who are their friends, and they can't then imagine that those two people are abusers. In the sense that this argument that you're making, to some people, might suggest that what you're saying is that the people who do it are wilfully harming others for their own ends.

I wonder how you would respond to that? 

Renate: Yes. That's a very good point. I mean, it's the same way that we would never say to a woman in prostitution who says I'm a proud sex worker and I love what I do. We will never say to her. Uh, no, no, you're awful. You're terrible. And we hate you. We would never say that. And you're a bad person.

Similarly, whether it's a heterosexual couple or a gay couple who want to undertake surrogacy. They did not have this idea. This idea was put into their heads by the industry. And also of course, by the media who loves to show surrogacy stories, you know, remember Elton John and his husband with their babies in their hands.

Being a gay couple, these days, means you have to get married because that's now de rigueur. You have to get married. And then it almost is becoming like, oh, well, you're married now, where’s the child. 

In some interesting way, because we're always saying if heterosexual women were put on so much pressure to become mothers, because, you know, if you’re not a mother, you’re not a proper woman, then there would not be as much IVF or as much surrogacy. 

Now it's becoming the same with gay men. Get married and then have that child and so you can sort of see, like in Australia, practically the whole industry that is supporting surrogacy, almost to a person, are gay men. They're really making this whole thing about -  oh, you can't say anything about it because otherwise you're homophobic.

I've been a lesbian for 40 plus years. I've been called homophobic twice starting since my book appeared in 2017 and I had to really look at them and say, excuse me, just watch it, what you're actually talking about. 

This has nothing to do with homophobia. I am not saying that some gay man could be very good parents as some heterosexual men are. That is not the point. The point is, as I said before, how can you justify to bring a child into your life for the making of which two women were harmed. 

So that is the point. It's not the point that these two men are bad men, it's that the whole industry and the whole way it's been presented to the world at large is that surrogacy is a good thing. It can bring happiness. And then anybody who's against it is either a bigot a homophobe or a conservative, a religious conservative. 

So then they say, oh, that is unholy alliances between the conservatives and some strange feminists. The feminists happened to be a radical feminist, mostly, because the liberal feminists may be a little bit critical of surrogacy and they don't want women harmed, but they think that regulation is the answer. 

And that is what we are, for instance, having the problem with in Australia. In Australia we're lucky we don't have commercial surrogacy, nowhere. And the pro surrogacy gay lobby is trying, trying, trying but I think even they know it's not going to happen. But we have altruistic surrogacy. And so we still have to talk about that, this is not in the interest of women and not in the interest of the baby. 

Heather: So again, as you're talking, I was actually thinking about the Nordic Model and comparison to other forms of regulation that prostitution.

So I think that what you're saying is that it doesn't matter how much we regulate surrogacy, if it is still tolerated at a society level, then exploitation will happen.

Renate: That's precisely what I'm saying. And in fact, I'm very happy as of next week, we will have a new organisation in Australia.

And then we'll talk about that at FiLiA as well. Then it's called ABSA Abolish Surrogacy and then in brackets Australia. And basically what we want to do is to use some of the similar arguments to the ones we’re using in the Nordic Model. And the main one is really that we have to reduce demand. We have to somehow get a dialogue going in the media and amongst politicians that you don't have to go and have surrogacy if you're a gay couple, or even if you're an infertile heterosexual, couple, you don't have to do that. There’s other ways of having children in your lives, if you so desperately want a child. It's not about that you know, it has to be your own genes. 

And so reducing the demand is really important. I believe there can be a world free of prostitution, and I believe there can be a world free of surrogacy.

And when people look at you and say, I don't think so, where do you live? Which planet do you live on?  I think about when slavery was there and how these brave people said, we cannot live with such an amoral system and all right, they're still, you know, countries and places where there is slavery in pockets, but at least we have a UN convention against slavery. Or take smoking. I mean, Australia is not totally free of smoking. But if somebody smokes people look at you and you are treated a bit like a pariah. 

I would really like to see the day when somebody says, oh, I'm having a child via surrogacy and people turn to them and say, really? You really feel that's okay? You really feel that's ethical? That, you know, because you want to have a child, you are risking to harm two women.

So I would like to see that day arrive and maybe I will. 

Heather: I feel that we've probably covered quite a lot in this discussion that we're having. Is there any other aspect of it that you would like to talk about that I haven't asked you?

Renate: Maybe just to add that also again, similar to prostitution, we are talking about a very big industry. You know, we are talking about an industry that wants new clients and wants to expand and wants to make money. And the problem is that India and Cambodia and Nepal and Thailand, they have all closed their borders to commercial surrogacy by foreigners. And so. What the surrogacy industry is now looking is to create new markets.

So Ukraine has opened in a big way. Russia is beginning to open and for instance, Greece, although in Greece, they're only allowing altruistic surrogacy, but I also believe the review of surrogacy in the UK that is currently on the way. And that is not quite clear whether they will stick with altruistic surrogacy or if there is really a push towards commercial surrogacy.

I think that is all coming from the push from these IVF clinics. So it's an interesting question about gay couples, for instance, is it the gay couples who is pushing the IVF industry or is it the IVF industry that is pushing them? You know, it's a chicken and egg. It is probably a bit of both.

Part of me actually feels that maybe, maybe gay men have really become, sort of like, as I said before, they have to get married. Now they have to get the child. They are really becoming also, part of like, well, you have to do that in order to be seen as a proper with-it 21st century gay couple.

But on the other hand, this is also, especially gay couples, who say to the IVF industry, oh, you're discriminating against us. We need to change rules. So really, the push comes from both sides, but at the end of the day, the money is being made by the IVF industry and the lawyers and the brokers and all of them, not so much really the clients, which is also very similar to prostitution where that's the pimps who make the money with the brokers.

I think at the end of the day, surrogacy is a deeply patriarchal institution and basically who it profits most is men big. 

Just to give you one example. So let's say, you go to the US, to the States that allow commercial surrogacy, let's just say a heterosexual couple, and you'll have this child made by this woman and you pay her and then you want to take this child back to Australia or to the UK.

Now, in the case of Australia, all you need to do is to go to a consulate or an embassy, and the man has to do a DNA test. And if his genes are in the baby, he is then declared the father and the baby gets an Australian passport. The birth mother, the so-called surrogate mother doesn't have to be there nor does it matter if the female partner of this man, if it's her eggs that are in this baby, or if they used an egg donor, it's the erasure of women. It's the erasure of mothers at the same time. 

And really that's what it's about. It's basically men wanting their precious genes in their own babies. That’s what it comes down to. 

Heather: To conclude, what this has brought up for me in talking to you is the ways in which it has become quite impossible to talk about this, in the same way, it's quite impossible to talk about prostitution without culturally returning it to the individual and what I think you're wanting to do and what I like to do in my own research, is to look at the broader social issues. And to say that we can't make decisions on the basis of what an individual chooses or wants.

Because all of our choices or all of our laws have to be made on the basis of the greater good as it were. And it's very difficult for people to hear that. And to also to hear that there is a relationship between what we all do personally and larger social structures and capitalism. These kinds of discussions are shut down now, I think on the basis that as you said earlier about your phobic abuse, if you make any criticism at all of any individual person's choice.  

Renate: I'm nodding. Heather. I really agree with everything you say. And of course I didn't mention the word capitalism before, but that's what it is.

It's a growth industry in neoliberal, capitalism, and you're absolutely right. It is all about, sorry, who are you to tell me I can't have my child, my own child with my own genes? But look at what it does the collective women. Many people say, I don't care about that. I just want my child. And who are you to talk to me like this? 

And that's when then the word, the name calling comes in. You’re just the bigot you're just mean, or you don't have any empathy, which, as a matter of fact, we do have a lot of empathy, whether it's in prostitution or in surrogacy, we do. But so many people are such individualist, narcissists and couldn't care less.

And of course, what we haven't said is it's extremely expensive the whole process. And the surrogate mother only gets a pittance, even if it's paid surrogacy. Surrogacy can easily cost in the United States can easily cost around $150,000 - $200,000. So the people who can even envisage going down that road have to be rich and they're most always either white or they are members of the ruling class or the group who is in power. And that surrogate mothers are often of a different skin colour and certainly have a different economic and educational class as well. So that needs to be said as well. 

It's a grubby, grubby industry that is really only set out to make money under the guise saying, oh, but we helping so many desperate people.

What gets to me is: I had a conversation with a woman during a conference. And we talked all about the dangers, the health dangers to women, you know, the surrogate mother and the egg donor and she agreed with me. And then she said, yeah, I agree with you. But what about the poor gay man? How else can they have a baby? And what do you say to that? I mean, you lean back and you say, well, excuse me, since, when do men who have an X and the Y chromosome, have babies. But when you saw that, then you're again, either a biological essentialist or a moron or mean, or whatever.

Heather: Yes, I know. I think we should draw this to conclusion. Now. I want to say I'm really looking forward to meeting you at the FiLiA conference in October, and I'm going to be the chair on the panel.

Renate: Fantastic.