Indentured clinical labor? An indigenist standpoint view of 'forced surrogacy' and reproductive governance in India.

This article centers on 'forced surrogacy,' an underexplored collateral of the erstwhile transnational surrogacy industry in India, to critically analyze recent policy developments around surrogacy regulation in India. Building upon Dalit feminist perspectives, in this article, I argue that 'forced surrogacy' is an indentured form of clinical labor performed through the bodies of subaltern women inhabiting the margins of the Indian polity. Analyzing recent media discourses on 'forced surrogacy' in conjunction with reproductive legislations formulated between 2005 and 2021, I demonstrate how an indigenous standpoint perspective usefully complicates theorizing about clinical labor highlighting a continuum between caste-based indentured labor and contemporary clinical labor in India. The analysis investigates the necropolitical dimensions of India's recent policy directive to ban 'commercial' surrogacy while condoning 'altruistic' surrogacy. Such a criminalization absolves the State of accountability for circumstances that enable 'forced surrogacy' outside the limits of both the traditional family and the 'free' market. The article concludes with a discussion on how indentured clinical labor reveals the limits of existing normative frameworks that overlook structural realities in governing clinical market regimes, and how these limits in turn become the basis for the extraction of unfree clinical labor from subaltern bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]