Reproductive Tourism

I just finished teaching Mahasweta Devi's bleak short story "Breast Giver." It's about a poor Indian woman who becomes a professional mother: she gives birth to 20 children and is hired at the same time to breast feed about another 30 children of the extended family of her rich employer. She gets breast cancer and dies alone in a hospital, deserted by her husband, children, and employers.

The story is brutal in its exposition of the way the ideology of motherhood (constructed by religion, tradition, and nationalism) is manipulated to exploit the bodies of poor women.

So when I saw this story in The LA Times, I immediately thought of Devi's Jashoda. These poor Indian women are now renting their wombs for wealthy couples who want kids. The women are doing it for money, with the encouragement of the husbands; and for the American couples they go to India because it's "cheap."

Why don't rich people just chop up poor people and eat them. I heard it's good for the health.