“You Yourself Don’t Know How to Feel about It”: Frames, Plots and Scenarios of Surrogate Mothers’ Autobiographical Narratives

Abstract

The article is based on material from eight interviews with surrogate mothers (12 children born within the surrogacy programme), received by the authors of the article in 2023. The outline structure of the interviews includes the family history of the informants, their current marital status, motivation for participation in the surrogacy programme and assessment of the experience gained. An analysis of the interviews helps to define the places where frames shift, as well as the active rôle of the informants in framing their own life situation. The article aims to describe the main repertoire of autobiographical stories that encompass personal experience of surrogate motherhood, and to identify the most sensitive topics and the narrative means that surrogate mothers use to reduce their vulnerability. These include communication with the “close” and “distant” circles of people who are aware of woman’s participation in the surrogate motherhood programme; specifying a child’s status and the surrogate mother’s place in the child’s birth; perception of the biological parents and the type of communication with them. The study of this sphere of social interactions helps to develop a language for discussing various methods of reproductive technologies that is beneficial for the programme participants. In conversation with an interviewer women demonstrate good self-control and a skilful distribution of limited resources and control over their own emotional sphere; they emphasise the businesslike nature of their relations with the biological parents. The article discusses those cases when the behavioural strategies and narrative modes of surrogate mothers are determined by their negative social expectations of themselves or their children. The article pays special attention to the way participants in fast-developing medical practices adapt to the intolerant environment and change it gradually. In general, the surrogate motherhood case, despite its ethical vulnerability, is an opportunity to achieve a new level of “autobiographical competence”, which is an exceptional experience that makes such women unique.