Published Online:June 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES060625
DOI:10.71329/IUPJES/2025.20.2.67-77
Author Name:Suganya C and Vijayakumar M**
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:67-77
The Surrogacy Regulation Act (SRA), 2021 marked a legislative shift by banning commercial surrogacy and allowing only altruistic surrogacy for Indian couples under specific conditions. Despite this reform, the underlying issues of exploitation, bodily autonomy, and class disparity persist. The relationship between affluent intended parents and economically marginalized surrogate mothers often reflects a deep-rooted imbalance of power. Using Marxist biopolitical ideology of estranged labor, which critiques the commodification of human bodies and the control of reproductive labor under capitalist systems, this paper examines how surrogacy transforms women’s wombs into sites of production. Amulya Malladi’s A House for Happy Mothers (2016) serves as a critical literary lens to explore these concerns. Malladi highlights the physical, emotional and psychological toll on Indian surrogate mothers, emphasizing their limited agency within a global reproductive economy. This study unveils the mechanisms of exploitation embedded in surrogacy practices and evaluates them through a Marxist estranged labor framework that exposes how capitalism governs and profits from biological and reproductive life.
Surrogacy is a medical arrangement wherein a woman agrees to carry and deliver a child for another individual or couple, with the intended parents assuming full parental rights upon birth (Saxena, 2012).