A Q&A with My Body, Their Baby author Grace Y. Kao
Originally Published on the Stanford University Press Blog.
What made you want to write this book?
I didn’t go into carrying and delivering a baby for my friends thinking that I’d ever turn my story into a book! Basically when folks around me would find out I was expecting a child for someone else, they’d gently pepper with me questions like “What does your husband think about this?” or “Aren’t you scared you’ll grow attached to the baby and not want to give it up?” I’d address their concerns, we’d sometimes launch into an extended conversation about childbearing, infertility or related topics, and then several of my interlocutors who were also academics would often ask if I’d consider publishing or speaking publicly about what I had just shared.
I eventually came to realize something my colleagues had grasped before I had—that the world of former surrogates who are also trained ethicists has got to be very small. Through my hyper-visibility as an “advanced maternal age” pregnant woman and my openness about the baby not being mine, I saw firsthand how folks around me had so many questions and misconceptions about the practice. It thus became important to me to research them, investigate whether popular fears about surrogacy were well-founded, and then do what I could to set the record straight.
Given that you draw from your personal experience as a surrogate mother, what were the challenges of relating that perspective?
I wrestled with two primary things. The story of how and why I became a surrogate was inextricably tied to my friends’ struggle to have their first child. So my first challenge was to work out how I could truthfully convey my surro-mom experiences—both the joys and the difficult parts—without sharing some details that my friends didn’t want to appear in print. I ended up self-censoring in early drafts, deleting some material in the penultimate draft at their request, and explaining in the intro the difference between speaking about vs. speaking for them.
The second challenge was more meta—how to oscillate between writing about my feelings and experiences in a manner appropriate for memoir-style reflections and also offering judgments about the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in a style consistent with good academic writing. As readers of My, Body, Their Baby » will see, I decided not only to open each chapter with a personal anecdote connected to the themes to be explored in the pages to follow, but also sometimes marble in my experiences elsewhere in ways that hopefully elucidate a point or provide a fuller picture of what surrogacy is like from someone who has gone through it firsthand.
The book explicitly addresses a progressive Christian and feminist angle, how did this inform your approach? Were these stances inherently in harmony with one another or was there ever internal tension you needed to unknot?
Thinkers who self-identify as both feminist and Christian have been producing scholarship for decades about how they fuse them together. They, like me, find large areas of convergence between those two sets of commitments, are not afraid to critique certain Christian norms, theologies, institutions, or practices from the standpoint of their feminism (or feminist Christianity), and also make interventions into or part company from the mainstream feminist movement when their Christian (or feminist Christian) values lead them in a different direction.
The focus I place on experience in my book is a connecting point between Christian ethics and feminist methodology. Experience is one of the four traditional sources of moral wisdom in Christian ethics (along with Scripture, tradition, and reason or secular sources of inquiry); it has also been valorized among feminists for a number of reasons, including the historical neglect powerbrokers have paid to women’s experiences. I draw upon the philosophical concept of “transformative experiences” to ground one of the seven ethical principles I defend in my framework for surrogacy, “trust women,” and explain why both feminists and progressive Christians should get behind its non-paternalistic intentions.
In the book, I also draw upon the “reproductive justice” (RJ) framework first developed by twelve pioneering Black women activists in 1994. Its insistence to look beyond individual reproductive choices to the social contexts in which they occur and centering of the lives of women of color jives well with the approach long taken by Christian social ethicists to attend to structural issues when assessing social problems and to especially care for the interests and wellbeing of the “least of these.”
What I have found interesting is that neither the (secular) mainstream feminist movement, RJ scholars and activists, nor those who identify as feminist or progressive Christians have reached a consensus on surrogacy. And yet, there are branches of feminism, for instance, “radical feminists” whose condemnation of one woman being commissioned to bear a child for another and of the use of reproductive technologies more generally mirror the Catholic Church’s and leading evangelical Christians’ objections to these same practices, even though they are grounded differently. When the National Catholic Register pushes out a headline entitled “Unlikely Ally: Feminist Gloria Steinem Joins Fight Against Surrogacy,” we should all wonder how and why this feminist icon and the Catholic Church and other “conservative” Christians have found common cause on a topic that has captured the public imaginary. What I do in the book is make the case why I as a feminist and progressive Christian are urging us to think differently.
What was the writing process like?
Before mapping out this book, I had delivered and published a paper advancing the good of “altruistic” gestational surrogacies from a feminist Christian perspective. I knew for the book that I wanted to develop the framework I originally sketched there, spend more time engaging feminist and Christian concerns about this way of bringing children into the world, and also cover other types of surrogacy. I sought advice from some colleagues and some editors at Stanford University Press to figure out how best to include and arrange all of those parts.
I wrote this book, as most academics must, whenever I could create space to research and write in between teaching, other professional obligations, and my regular care duties at home. Both the Covid-19 pandemic and some major institutional changes at my school took a toll on my productivity. But, as the writing process took longer than I had projected it would, the current events unfolding around like the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also had a major impact on surrogacy practices and markets in various locales. I was able to fold that material into the book in ways I couldn’t have foreseen doing so during the book proposal stage and I believe the book is even stronger for it.
What would you like people to take away from this book?
I want people to walk away having learned two things. First, we actually have four decades and counting of empirical and ethnographic studies conducted in various contexts on surrogates, the persons who commission them, and the children they collaboratively bring to life. I mostly draw upon research from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, India, Thailand, and Israel while occasionally referencing other surrogacy customs and practices elsewhere in the book. Now there are some notable differences in outcomes depending on the particularities of the arrangements (e.g., how the surrogate-IP pairings came to be, whether the arrangement was transnational, whether the IPs are gay or straight) and these differences should not be glossed over. But what the research across these decades and contexts has consistently shown is that many popular myths about surrogacy (e.g., that surrogates will be emotionally distressed at the end because they will have bonded with the baby in the process,) are not well-substantiated by evidence. I want people to read my book and see for themselves that this unconventional way of expanding families does carry risks—and I am not shy about naming what they are—but they are not typically like fictionalized Hollywood stories or the occasional real-life disasters one reads about in the news (e.g., the “baby M” saga of the mid-1980s).
Second, I want readers to come away knowing that there are progressive Christian views on sex, reproduction, and the family. Even if they are ultimately unpersuaded about my progressive Christian argument and framework for surrogacy as a way of expanding families, at the very least I want them to know about the mainline Protestant and progressive Christian commitments on which they are built.
What’s next?
My next book will take me in a different direction. I’ve been under contract to write Introduction to Asian American Christian Ethics with another press for some time. My co-edited anthology, Asian American Christian Ethics (2015) was the first major publication in the eponymous subfield of study some of my colleagues and I inaugurated. The subfield has since grown and I’ve been meaning to provide a one-volume primer that incorporates new scholarship, new perspectives, and some of my own work on an Asian American theology of reparations that builds upon philosophical and feminist theological discussions on intergenerational apologies, justice, and moral repair; the emerging human rights framework for reparations; and assorted voices from Asian America.
Start reading My Body, Their Baby »
Grace Y. Kao is Professor of Ethics, the inaugural Sano Chair in Pacific and Asian American Theology, and a founding co-director of the Center for Sexuality, Gender, and Religion at Claremont School of Theology. She is the author or co-editor of three other books. See drgracekao.com to learn more about her and her work.