Last night at the Human Rights Campaign dinner President Barack Obama delivered his first big speech on lgbt issues since becoming President.   There was much anticipation for the speech, as some in the gay community feel that the President has not moved fast enough on the issues affecting our community.

What is “an LGBT Issue”?

But what impressed me about the speech was not that he failed to set a date or timetable for the repeal of  “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” or that he offered no new legislative strategy to pass ENDA, but rather the “queer-ness” of his remarks.   After a pretty funny joke where he thanked HRC for inviting him to be the opening act for Lady Gaga, he acknoweldged that many in the audience held the view that “progress had not come fast enough” on lgbt issues.  He challenged the assembled homo audience to think expansively about what it means for something to be an “lgbt issue”:

I think it’s important to remember that there is not a single issue that my administration deals with on a daily basis that does not touch on the lives of the lgbt community.  We all have a stake in reviving this ecomony.  We all have a stake in putting people back to work.   We all have a stake in improving our schools and in acheiving quality, affordable healthcare.   We all have a stake in meeting the difficult challenges we face in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These and other remarks signaled the President’s strong anti-identitarian and non-institutional approach to civil rights, an approach not shared by the likes of HRC and many other lgbt rights groups.   Rejecting the notion that “our issues” are exhausted by those that have “our names” on them, such as “gay marriage,”  “gays in the military,” or a “gay-rights bill,” Obama suggested that the community take on a much more ambitious agenda.  Take the marriage equality campaign, for instance.  Many lgbt people seek the legal recognition of their relationships in order to gain their partner’s health benefits.  But there are many, many lesbian and gay people who can’t or won’t marry someone with good benefits, and a right to marry a same sex partner won’t help them.  Health care reform that secures a right to decent health care, regardless of one’s marital status or one’s ability to hook up with someone with good benefits, surely should be on “our agenda,” as Obama put it to us in his HRC speech.

In a sense the President was subtly acknowledging that there are large parts of the lgbt community that would never attend one of these dinners, and that don’t see HRC as “their” organization.  I’m going to guess that very few of the people attending the dinner – all of whom paid at least $250 to attend (and many paid much more) – had been laid off in the last six months and/or were among the upwards of 47 million Americans without health insurance.   Indeed, the President was one of the very few people of color in the room who wasn’t serving the food and clearing the tables.   If you check out HRC’s website, it’s health tab says nothing about the pending health care reform legislation in Congress or whether HRC has taken a position on the legislation.  It’s clearly not part of “their agenda.”

In his HRC speech, President Obama also challenged his audience to think expansively about what it means to be gay or lesbian:

For, while some may wish to define you solely for your sexual orientation or gender identity alone, you know and I know that none of us wants to be defined by just one part of what makes us whole.

This was perhaps the queerest moment of the speech.  Rather than invoking the now-common, creepily nationalistic moniker “gay-American” that Jim McGreevy tragically wrapped himself in when he came out in 2004, Obama’s speech urged his audience to focus more on interests than on identity.

Rather than reading Obama’s remarks as somehow falling short when it comes to ticking off the gay agenda, maybe we should listen more closely.  Could it be that his support of civil unions instead of marriage rights for same sex couples, and his prioritization of health care and jobs over the immediate repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” mark how he’s actually out in front of “us”?   More progressive than “we” are?

Take a moment and read Lisa Duggan’s piece in the Nation from last summer, What’s Right with Utah, in which she describes the successful and radically progressive political campaign going on in Salt Lake City undertaken by the lgbt community after they lost the chance to gain marriage rights when the state constitution was amended barring such unions.  They regrouped, found straight partners with whom to work in coalition, and have taken on much broader reforms than what they could have accomplished with “mere” marriage rights for lesbian and gay couples.  Brilliantly, they found local Mormons who opposed gay marriage, but who said they weren’t homophobic and took them at their word.  They found that of this group 62 percent supported employment nondiscrimination laws, 56 percent supported fair housing laws and 73 percent supported granting adult designees of state employees health insurance coverage. They also found that 56 percent backed legal protections like inheritance rights and job protection for LGBT people.  When they could no longer ask for marriage they found unlikely partners with whom they could ask for much more than what marriage would have provided.

This is the subtle premise of Obama’s speech last night:  think critically and progresively about what it means for something to be part of “the gay agenda.”   His remarks cautioned a kind of self-ghettoization that is always at risk when one’s politics are premised on and invested in a claim to identity that demands that political and legal victories be framed in terms of a ratification of that identity.  So too, there is a lesson in these remarks for the groups that speak on behalf of that identity, such as HRC.

The good news is that there are organizations that see the connection between, for instance, the health care public option and the interests of lgbt and queer people.  Queers for Economic Justice is perhaps the best but not the only example.  See their work on health care here.

In 1995 Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, Jane Balin, Ann Bartow & Deborah Lee Batchel published a study of the gender-based bias and stratification of the law school experience at Penn Law School.  Becoming Gentlemen: Women’s Experience at One Ivy League Law School, 143 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1 (1995).    I often mention this article in my teaching, urging students to reflect on the role of gender not only in the law but in their legal education.  When I referred this spring in my 1L class to the findings of Becoming Gentlemen, one of the students pushed back, saying that the insights of Guinier et al.’s work may no longer hold true, or at least doesn’t hold true at Columbia.  I asked her if she’d be willing to write something about why, and here it is – Katherine Franke

Unlike the accounts described in Becoming Gentlemen, my own experience as a woman in Law School has been positive, in the sense that I have never felt prejudice or experienced a barrier because of my gender. I have never been called a “lesbian” or “feminazi dyke” because I expressed my opinion in class. Nor  have I ever been berated by a professor. I have also never thought my chances for academic or workplace success were limited because of my gender (In fact, women at Columbia have earned some of the highest markers of academic excellence, such as Editor in Chief of the Law Review and finalists in the Stone Moot Court competition).

Gender is so far in the background, such a “non-issue,” that questions of gender are not really discussed or thought of amongst my peers. As one friend remarked, “When I discuss gender stereotypes, domestic violence, or rape, I feel like alot of people don’t get it and don’t really care to.” I am one of those people. Without the efforts of friends such as the one above, I would likely forget that my life could have a gendered dimension because it is not part of my daily experience.

While I had a hard time relating to the experiences of the surveyed women, what most confused me was the way minorities were simply “lumped in” with their respective gender and the nuances of their individual experiences were ignored. The piece initially left the impression that minority women were most readily singled out because of their gender. Meanwhile, it portrayed minority men as heavy participants in gender discrimination and equal beneficiaries of the “good old boy” network.

In my own experience, the opposite is true. There is far greater discrimination and informal barriers to success because of race than gender. For example, there are few (2, that I know of) Hispanic professors at Columbia and they do not teach 1Ls. There are no cases in Con Law which describe the significant contributions towards the development of Civil Rights law by Latinos. In Crim Law, Latino is the assumed race of drug dealers.

Latino 1Ls have informally agreed to support one another in the classroom. We have formed groups and blogs to educate ourselves about issues (such as Critical Race Theory, Immigration, famous Latino cases and important Latino legal organizations) which are mostly ignored by the curriculum and faculty. We acutely feel the pressure to “represent” our community in the classroom and (someday) in the courtroom. Most importantly, we all, male and female, have felt the need to come together as a support group in a (sometimes openly) hostile environment.

A close reading reveals, however, that minority men and women in the study expressed similar views and had similar experiences 20 years ago. In the footnotes, Black/Latino men and women both expressed similar desires to “help their community” and to “represent their people.”

There was not a single example given of a Latina or African-American woman who showed a strong identity with white women on the issue of gender in the school. Rather, their statements closely mirror those of the minority men. This correlation makes it difficult to say that the experience of law school was simply “gendered”. Rather, it appears that it was more of “white male” vs. everyone else.

What is disturbing to me, however, is that these problems of race were present 20 years ago and, unlike the issues facing white women, have not been sufficiently addressed. Surveys which exclusively focus on the “gendered” experience, at the expense of race, only add to this problem because they allow a false sense of “mission accomplished.” Under the rubric offered in Becoming Gentlemen, as long as white women’s experiences improve, then both minority men and women can be “left behind”; their needs and issues delegitmatized and unaddressed.

I understand that this may place a difficult standard on researchers who seek to focus only on one variable or who are most interested in the gendered experience. But the fact that things have changed so little for many minority students, including minority women, while they have changed so dramatically for white women is something that should not be accepted by researchers interested in gender. I hope these researches are aware of the way their observations on gender and race can influence policies and perceptions, and I challenge them to confront the nuances that race adds to the experience of gender.

Priscilla Orta

From Columbia Law School Professor Patricia Williams, via The Nation

For some years now, the biotechnology of fertility enhancement has been exalted as God’s gift to the biblically barren. A relentless narrative of entitlement intertwined with prayerfulness has framed infertility as a tragedy, an oppression, an agony, a disease. Some have proclaimed a “right” to a “natural,” biologically related child, a child “like me.” Unusually large Middle American families–some with up to eighteen children–are offered movie deals and television programs.

Against the backdrop of a cold, impersonal and lonely world, these well-feathered and overly populated nests look villagey and warm. It’s an undeniably seductive vision, even if other options like adoption and fostering are almost never mentioned. Also less discussed are the side effects of this mad race for biological generation at all costs: the likelihood of multiple births, low birth weight and birth defects; the ethics of using poorer women as fetal hatcheries; the health risks to young women who have their “Ivy League” eggs extracted for handsome sums of cash.

There are loads of good reasons to think about regulating these medical procedures; we should have come up with something other than a “free market” for them years ago. But now, with the birth of Nadya Suleman’s octuplets in Bellflower, California, we are confronting a perfect storm of eugenic outcry. With a plunging economy, all the well-rehearsed elements of the “undeserving” welfare queen are lined up: Suleman is single, disabled, unemployed, on food stamps and has six other children under the age of 8, one of whom is reportedly autistic. She lives in a matchbox-size house with her resentful parents, who think she’s insane. Toss in that funny, foreign-sounding name–which turns out to be, gasp, Iraqi!–and the backlash is in full swing.

No doubt Suleman has emotional problems. But rather than caring about her mental health, much of the media are content to pillory her as a drain on the public dole–selfish, frivolous, calculating and cruel. No Brangelina-style accolades of “God Bless ‘Em” in People magazine. Just impassioned calls to cut off her remaining sources of income and to criminally prosecute the doctor who fertilized her. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even ran an op-ed calling for the government to appoint a legal advocate for every child born to an unmarried woman, since the “lack of a father’s guidance” must be “a major cause of [children's] suffering.” Furthermore, in the case of Suleman’s children, “the legal advocate would file suit against the fertility clinic or a physician who knowingly contributed to their abuse–life in a multiple-child household headed by a single woman.”

Nadya Suleman’s saga, in other words, has highlighted a deep cognitive dissonance about whether children are “assets” or eternal expenditure, divine joy or devilish curse in a time of dwindling planetary resources. When I first heard of Suleman, my immediate thought was of Andrea and Rusty Yates–married, fundamentalist Christian believers in that ubiquitous story line about going forth and multiplying no matter what. After caring for and home-schooling five very young children with no assistance but prayer, and with accumulating signs of postpartum psychosis, Andrea Yates woke up one morning and drowned all her children with quiet efficiency.

And so the specter of psychotic breakdown haunts me when I think of the Suleman abode: one autistic child, plus 2-year-old twins, plus four other kids ages 3 to 7, plus eight newborns ranging from one to three pounds, plus a grandfather who has gone back to Iraq to earn more money for the family, plus a grandmother furious at the medical professionals who “assisted” her daughter, plus a surreally chipper Nadya, who despite the miserable odds remains enrolled as a graduate student in, of all things, pediatric counseling. This situation is undeniably sheer madness, but the public discussion seems fixated on the question of whether she can “afford” so many kids, as though if she was rich, this would be sane.

This past fall The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Alex Kuczynski, fashion writer and self-confessed “cosmetic surgery addict.” Her wish to have a child was framed by fierce determinism, the “natural outgrowth” of marriage to her husband–without whom she “would skip the child.” Kuczynski is married to a man whose “sperm had a track record”–six other children by two prior wives. She, the third bride and twenty years her husband’s junior, described herself as engaged in nothing less than a “battle for my fertility”; having a biological child was “necessary,” a “mad desire,” a “compulsion” and “proof” of the marital bond, without which she faced “wrecked hopes” and an “abyss of grief.” Indeed, to die “without having created a life is to die two deaths: the death of yourself and the death of the immense opportunity that is a child.” When she thinks she’s pregnant, she feels a “shiver of victorious accomplishment…. my own fecundity triumphant.” When she tells people she’s not, she feels “barren, decrepit, desexualized,” “branded with a scarlet ‘I’ for ‘Infertile,’” “the dried-up crone with a uterus full of twigs.”

Just because Kuczynski is married and wealthy does not make her less obsessive or more profound than Suleman. Kuczynski sounds like a sad, silly child mooning over “fertile but fit” stars like Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek and “John Edwards’s sometime mistress,” who all had babies in their 40s. Likewise, Suleman takes heart looking at Angelina Jolie. Suleman and Kuczynski represent disturbing emotional extremes. But that should not excuse the rest of us from examining the oppressive competitive natality that seems to have gripped us–the fantasies of “baby bumps” and breeding, always breeding, yet more of “our kind.” Our culture’s antifeminist backlash and its unrealistic aspirations have bewitched Kuczynski and Suleman, these two young women who are so addled and so suggestible, so endowed and yet so impoverished. All these years after the age of “liberation,” perhaps it is time to revisit the myths we still concoct about childless women’s worth.

Columbia’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic recently filed a brief in the European Court of Human Rights involving the right of victims of sex trafficking to a remedy under various European and International Laws.  My recent article in the European Lawyer magazine, which takes a somewhat different view from Professor Franke’s post, elaborates the trafficking/slavery linkage.  Here’s an excerpt (you can link to the full article here ):

The UK officially abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade more than 250 years ago, but it turns out that the practice is far from dead.
A case recently filed in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), M. v the United Kingdom, shows just how vigorous and heinous the slave trade continues to be. But the trade’s character has changed, with £5 billion generated each year largely from traffickers’ control of women and children, making trafficking in persons the second largest criminal activity in the world.
With clearer attention to the facts and more developed identification systems, the international community has begun to see these women and children for what they are – victims of severe human rights abuses.  M v the United Kingdom thus offers an important opportunity, during a crucial moment, for the ECtHR to clarify the obligations of Council of Europe member states to trafficking victims. A ruling in M’s favour would reinforce that sex trafficking is a modern form of slavery and should be treated with as much seriousness as we treat the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the past. It would also clarify and underscore states’ responsibilities to victims in their territories who have suffered human rights abuses, including the duty not to act in ways that expose victims to further harm.

Khiara Bridges is the Center for Reproductive Rights/Columbia Law School fellow at Columbia Law School who has just completed her PhD in Columbia’s Anthropology Department studying the intersection of race, poverty, and gender through the experience of women in an obstetrics clinic in a New York City public hospital.  She blogged earlier on the racial implications of surrogacy and now offers the following reaction to a recent article in the New York Times on Dominican women’s “self-help” abortions:

For Privacy’s Sake: Taking Risks to End Pregnancy, an article that was published last weekend in the New York Times, reports on the use of misoprostol by Dominican women within New York City to self-induce abortions. Misoprostol is a prescription drug that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration to reduce gastric ulcers; however, the article reports that many Dominican women have purchased the drug, sans prescription, from local pharmacies and have used it to terminate unwanted pregnancies in their homes, without oversight from medical institutions and personnel. The article also reports on a study documenting Dominican women’s use of other “extra-medical” methods to abort pregnancies—such as “mixing malted beverages with aspirin, salt or nutmeg; throwing themselves down stairs or having people punch them in the stomach; and drinking teas of avocado leaf, pine wood, oak bark and mamon fruit peel. Interviews with several community leaders and individual women in Washington Heights echoed the findings, and revealed even more unconventional methods like ‘juice de jeans,’ a noxious brew made by boiling denim hems.”

Interestingly, the article argues that Dominican “culture” explains why many Dominican women do not look to medical institutions when seeking to terminate their pregnancies. The author argues that women from “fervently anti-abortion cultures” may use such methods to induce abortions “despite the widespread availability of safe, legal and inexpensive abortions in clinics and hospitals.”

In this way, the article exemplifies the dangers of “culture” as an explanatory concept. Although there are several other processes at work that do much to explain Dominican women’s off-label use of misoprostol to self-induce abortions, “culture” emerges for the author as that which explains the phenomenon most convincingly. The myriad of other, more compelling reasons as to why Dominican women avoid the medical establishment when terminating their pregnancies is discussed only after the author cites an obstetrician who offers that “‘[t]his is not just a culture of self-inducted abortion…. This is a culture of going to the pharmacy and getting the medicine you need.’” Coming second to “culture” is the fact that those residing in the country without documentation may distrust any institution, medical or otherwise, with the power to reveal their immigration status to officials. Less important than “culture” is the possibility that inducing one’s own abortion may allow women greater control over the meanings that they will attach to the event. Inferior to “culture” is the fact that for women who live in poverty and without access to health insurance, the “safe, legal” abortions that can be procured in clinics and hospitals are far from “inexpensive.” All of these explanations are derivative; “culture” is primary.

The article demonstrates the tendency, observed by progressive anthropologists and others, whereby racial and ethnic minorities, as well as others disempowered by reason of nation, class, religion, etc., are thought to have “culture.” Meanwhile, “culture” tends not to explain actions taken by those with power—i.e., “white males,” “the U.S.,” “the West”; indeed, such actors are thought to be free from “culture.” Last of the Old Guard: Abortion Providers Retire in the West, Leaving Their Posts Empty, published on July 30, 2008 in The Planet Jackson Online, helps to illustrate this tendency by offering an instructive counterpoint to For Privacy’s Sake. Last of the Old Guard tells the story of a woman living in South Dakota who resorted to inducing her own abortion because she could not afford to procure a “safe, legal and inexpensive abortion” in a clinic or hospital: “By her estimates, getting to Sioux Falls—some 300 miles away—for a ‘doctor abortion’ would have cost her $660, including $100 for gas, $60 for a hotel and $500 for the procedure itself. She would have needed a car, which she didn’t have, and two days off of work to wait out the state-mandated, 24-hour waiting period. Time and money were resources she simply had no access to.” As a result, she chose to “drink her pregnancy to death” by imbibing as much whiskey as she could on one snowy night. She reports, “‘I nearly drank me dead, too. I had to find that balance between it dying and me dying, you know?’” Nowhere in the article is “culture” offered to explain the dearth of abortion providers in the Midwest, this individual woman’s decision to self-induce an abortion, or medical students’ decisions to refuse to learn how to provide abortion services. Such phenomena— occurring within a wealthy, powerful nation to racially- and ethnically-nondescript “Americans”—are explained in terms of politics or individuals’ personally-held beliefs. The U.S. and the actors within are rendered free from “culture.” Yet, a young Dominican woman’s decision to “bring her period down” by taking several misoprostol pills is accounted for in terms of her “culture.”

For Privacy’s Sake reminds us that ostensibly neutral terms, like “culture,” may serve to marginalize the disempowered while naturalizing those who have historically occupied positions of power.

Nazneen Mehta is a second-year law student at Columbia Law School and is writing a Note on the international market in surrogacy services – particularly between relatively affluent “intended parents” in the US and poor female surrogates in India. Her Note will examine the ways in which this market might better be regulated by law in order to protect the rights and interests of the surrogates in India. Her research has taken her to Mumbai, India over the winter break to better understand the conditions under which the surrogates are working. What follows are her initial reflections on this research:

Alex Kuczynski’s story, “Her Body, My Baby,” about her experience bonding with the woman who became her son’s surrogate mother portends the rise of what Noa Ben-Asher on this blog suggested are “new and surprising extra-legal familial structures.”

But, maybe not. In a largely obscure industry that is becoming increasingly transnational, Kuczynski’s story could be the outlier.

Surrogacy has quietly spread beyond national borders, creating a multi-million dollar global industry that joins together women like Kuczynski with poor women in developing nations. But unlike Kuczynski and her surrogate, Cathy Hilling (with whom she was on a first-name basis), the surrogates in these developing nations will never share tuna sandwiches or host backyard barbeques with the “intended parents.”

In fact, very few surrogates in developing nations will meet the parents for whom they are carrying a child. As a doctor at an international surrogacy clinic in Mumbai, India, related to me, the clinic discourages intended parents from meeting the woman the center has chosen to be the surrogate. The doctor explained that the women come from the ranks of India’s poor, and if they “see foreigners,” the women may try to get more money or resources out of the intended parents. There is no “wink and nod” custom, and the reality of class division lie exposed between the intended parents and the surrogate.

The selection process further removes intended parents from knowing the individual women who become their surrogates. Kuczynski pored over the profiles of potential surrogates, reading each woman’s personal story and employment demands. International surrogacy agreements, however, are largely facilitated by surrogacy clinics operating in developing nations. The clinics recruit a pool of poor women to become surrogates and then assign the women to intended parents. There are no personal stories about the women’s lives or ambitions to distinguish one from another; women need only pass the clinics’ health and psychological screening to become a surrogate. (The selection process implicates the issues of race and class discussed by Khiara Bridges on this blog, and suggests that her analysis of Black women in the U.S. could extend to poor women of color in developing nations).

I make these comparisons between international surrogacy and Kuczynski’s story not to push normative claims about either type of surrogacy agreement. Rather, I contrast the two models to bring international surrogacy into the discussion. And to suggest that in the battle between the legal frameworks mentioned by Ben-Asher—the surrogate as hired outsider vs. surrogate as extended family member—the former may be pulling ahead.

Khiara Bridges is the Center for Reproductive Rights/Columbia Law School fellow at Columbia Law School who has just completed her PhD in Columbia’s Anthropology Department studying the intersection of race, poverty, and gender through the experience of women in an obstetrics clinic in a New York City public hospital.  She offers the following further reflections on the New York Times Magazine’s cover story on surrogacy:

Her Body, My Baby, a story published in the New York Times Magazine on November 30, 2008 concerning the author’s experience with infertility and her decision to hire a gestational surrogate to give birth to her and her husband’s son, raises several fascinating issues. Noa Ben-Asher’s post on this blog tackles an important and exciting set of questions regarding the ability of gestational surrogacy to expand traditional notions of family. Here, I’d like to offer a couple of thoughts on the complicated race issues that gestational surrogacy produces.

Gestational surrogacy involves the implantation of an embryo—usually the result of the n vitro fertilization of the intended mother’s egg with her husband’s or male partner’s sperm—into the surrogate’s uterus. The surrogate—usually motivated by some mixture of altruism and financial need, and who is generously compensated by the intended parents for carrying the pregnancy to term—is genetically unrelated to the embryo and the child that is eventually born. Gestational surrogacy differs from traditional surrogacy arrangements, which involves the artificial insemination of the surrogate, who ultimately gives birth to a child that is genetically related to her.

As dramatized in Her Body, My Baby, infertile couples seeking surrogates tend to be wealthy—with the ability to pay for several rounds of expensive IVF treatments and to recompense the surrogate for her “services.” Indeed, the photo accompanying the story shows the author holding her son while the “baby nurse,” dressed in white uniform, stands stoically in the background. Moreover, because class and race closely follow one another in the U.S., these couples also tend to be White.

It would be incorrect to state that race is not implicated with traditional surrogacy, yet implicated with gestational surrogacy. However, race is implicated differently with these two surrogacy arrangements. Because the traditional surrogate is biologically-related to the child she carries, the infertile couple seeking a child that is “like” them in some respects will probably select a surrogate that shares their racial ascription. Accordingly, one would find White couples hiring White women to give birth to their children. However, because the gestational surrogate has no biological tie to the child she carries, the infertile couple need not seek a surrogate who is racially “like” them. One could envision a dystopian future in which financially-needy Black women, who disproportionately comprise the ranks of this country’s poor, are hired to give birth to the babies of rich White couples. Those of us interested in questions of social and racial justice might find such a future disturbing. It would reiterate the Black woman’s body as a laboring one (on multiple levels) while doing nothing to eradicate discourses in which the poor Black woman figures as an incompetent mother. That is, the Black woman would be empowered to produce children, yet remain disempowered to raise them.

Although the universe of gestational surrogates was open to the author of Her Body, My Baby, she nevertheless hired a woman who was “like” her—racially and socially. Indeed, what initially attracted the author to her surrogate’s application was that the latter had used a word processor to type thoughtful responses into the questionnaire. The author remarks that, although the woman was not as economically privileged as she, she excelled in other status-acquisitive areas: she played college tennis as well as the piano. She writes, “She played our Steinway while I got lunch. I stood outside the living room, holding a tray of tuna sandwiches and listening. I was numb. I can hardly play the piano. I never played on my college tennis team. Back in those days, I was smoking and dyeing my hair black.”

If the personal preferences of infertile couples help to determine the racial composition of those who will be hired as gestational surrogates, the dystopian future described above may never be realized. Although there may be a class of poor Black women willing to carry pregnancies for wealthy White couples, the latter may nevertheless choose to rely on those who are “like” them—socially, culturally, racially. However, the alternative cultural landscape produced may remain problematic, as it may be one in which poor Black women are not even empowered to be the birth “mothers.”