Brown Bodies, White Babies

Book excerpt: Focuses on the practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, in which a woman--through in-vitro fertilization using the sperm and egg of intended parents or donors--carries a pregnancy for intended parents of a different race. Concentrating on the racial differences between parents and surrogates, Harrison is interested in how reproductive technologies intersect with race, particularly when brown bodies produce white babies. She provides an interdisciplinary analysis that includes legal cases of contested surrogacy, historical examples of surrogacy as a form of racialized reproductive labor, the role of genetics in the assisted reproduction industry, and the recent turn toward reproductive tourism. --From publisher description.