Made in India

mandy — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Directed by Vaishali Sinha, Rebecca Haimowitz

Made in India is a documentary about the growing trend of infertile American couples who outsource a surrogate pregnancy to a woman in India. The film follows one such couple, Lisa and Brian, from San Antonio, Texas, who have experienced seven years of infertility. They don’t have a lot of money (“by American standards, anyway,” they say) and are taking their last chance to start a family of their own on by using a “medical tourism” agency based in Los Angeles called Planet Hospital.

Made in India also follows Aasia, the woman chosen to become the surrogate for Lisa and Brian. She is married and already has three children. Her sister-in-law introduced her to the idea of surrogacy, and when asked about her choice, Aasia says (in Hindi), “A child without a man?! How can that be? There has to be some kind of a… ‘relationship,’ right?!” Nevertheless, she decides (against her husband’s wishes, no less) to become a surrogate in order to help provide for her children, especially her daughter.

The American couple visits India twice: once to have their egg and sperm extracted and deposited into Aasia (who they never meet during the trip), and a second time after their twin daughters are born. The babies are born more than a month earlier than anticipated in a hospital that doesn’t have a direct connection with the Planet Hospital agency. Lisa, Brian, and Aasia have to convince the hospital's administration that the babies belong to the American couple, not the Indian surrogate. It’s such a mess that even the American Embassy has to get involved.

I was surprised by how much this film made me care about the issues it brings up. I have never tried to have a child, and I hadn’t thought much about the lengths couples go to in order to start a family. Lisa and Brian made clear that, although they had thought about adopting, they decided against it until they had exhausted all the other biological options. Since having an Indian surrogate was an option they could afford, they went for it.

Made in India was well made, and thoroughly covered the couple’s journey from their commitment to Indian surrogacy until they got their daughters home. The film complicates the typical equation of becoming pregnant, giving birth, and what it means to be a mother. Even though she hadn’t carried them to term, the twins are Lisa's daughters, genetics and all.

Made in India gave me a lot to think about in the debate over who has a right to women’s bodies, surrogacy and adoption, and outsourcing employment to other countries from the United States. One may not fully agree with the decisions that are documented in this film, but it is thought-provoking nonetheless.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, October 6th 2010

Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Susan E. Klepp

University of North Carolina Press

Susan E. Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions tracks the changes in family size ideals and the associated changes in family planning and women’s roles in early America. It is unsurprising that Klepp’s work highlights the limitations to women’s agency in family planning. Revolutionary Conceptions makes clear that women played an increasing role in determining the number of children they would have, and how this was tied to a greater presence of women outside of the domestic sphere.

Klepp reproduces letters from women who talk about their desire to have fewer children, which are usually followed by a revelation that woman, ultimately, gave birth to (by modern, typical North American views, anyway) a large number of children. Female slaves, were, alternately, wanted for their reproductive capacity and then sold for having had “too many” children when large families were no longer en vogue. Klepp also highlights some areas in which women had (limited) control. Women were brought to court to testify as experts in cases such as rape and infanticide; however, it was men who made the ultimate decisions in these cases. Klepp notes, “[I]n the colonies, month-to-month fertility decisions were left to women.”

Throughout the text, the author notes the difficulties in acquiring information about her topic. Early censuses, for example, routinely under-counted infants, particularly girls, which makes Klepp’s task of tracking changes in birth rates difficult. Klepp’s task is even more challenging due to the paucity of birth records for slaves. Further, when Klepp examines family planning, she quotes from letters and other texts in which women talk about limiting the number of children they would have, but the methods these women used were not shared.

In one interesting section, Klepp discusses herbs and concoctions used as emmenagogues (used to induce menstruation), abortifacients, and contraceptives, but notes, “Women usually made only oblique references to their use of these medicines and practices.” Despite this, Klepp is able to produce a highly detailed study of the issue.

I appreciate the comprehensiveness of Klepp’s approach. Not only does she support her study with statistics (represented in text as well as several graphs and tables), but she also includes artwork. Her chapter examining images of women describes and provides examples of portraits of women and their children, as well as husbands, from 1682 to approximately 1830. Klepp traces changes in women’s poses and the symbolism of the accessories that accompany them.

The main flaw I found in this chapter was in the accompanying examples. It is a shame that not all images that Klepp discusses are included in the book, and the black and white reproduction of the images that do appear has obscured many of the significant details Klepp describes; however, these issues do not detract from Klepp’s analysis.

Despite the vagaries, lost information, and reticence to have recorded information in the first place, Klepp has produced a highly detailed, fact-based, and—perhaps most importantly—interesting study of the declining number of children that early colonial American women bore, and what this meant for their agency both within and outside of the household.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, February 27th 2010