Law’s paradoxes: Governing surrogacy in India

Abstract

For feminists, law has long been a site of intense political, social and economic contestation. Surrogacy is no different. As India witnessed the fast-paced development of the transnational surrogacy sector in the past two decades, the Indian state adopted a range of policy positions toward commercial surrogacy ranging from a liberal, contract-based model in the late 1990s to a prohibitionist, carceral model in 2016. The chapter maps these legal and discursive shifts through a socio-legal understanding of several legislative proposals to reflect on the continued lack of settlement of legal norms in the surrogacy sector.