Brokers and Donors: Surrogacy Motherhood in Mexico

Abstract

One year after similar events in India and Thailand, a 2016 Mexican Senate regulatory prohibition brought eighteen years of open, commercial surrogacy to an end in Mexico. The new law marked a sea-change designed to get Mexico out of the commercial global surrogacy industry through penalties of up to seventeen years’ imprisonment for surrogacy-promotion and –intermediation activities. An ethnographic investigation in three Mexican cities realized among female and male reproductive-donation workers during the polemic’s high point (2015-17) allows us to meet the participants as well as learn how donation and intermediation functions among surrogates, egg-donors and brokers have been articulated in unprecedented ways. These new circumstances reveal discourses, practices and meanings that are both current and changing within the «choreographies» of assisted reproduction and family relationships in Mexico.

Keywords

• Donación reproductiva
• gestación subrogada
• reproducción asistida
• ovodonación
• México
• trabajo reproductivo
• intermediarios.