Bad, Pathetic and Greedy Women: Expressions of Surrogate Motherhood Stigma in a Russian Online Forum
- PDF / 390,034 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 62 Downloads / 151 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Bad, Pathetic and Greedy Women: Expressions of Surrogate Motherhood Stigma in a Russian Online Forum Natalia Khvorostyanov 1 & Daphna Yeshua-Katz 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Gestational surrogacy, in which the surrogate mother is not biologically related to the child she is carrying, is the most common type of surrogacy today. Although technologically well-developed and legal in many countries, it is stigmatized socially because it provokes and even contradicts basic traditional concepts of family, motherhood, and gender roles. The present study examines the types and expressions of the surrogacy stigma in Russia, applying a dual-pathway stigma model to a qualitative content analysis of 15,602 posts on a Russian-language online forum for surrogate mothers. Our findings reveal that the women’s choice to become surrogate mothers initiated a social process in which these women experienced four types of stigma: Bad mothers, bad wives, pathetic losers, and greedy women. Surrogate mothers described the experience and internalization of stigma as threatening their social roles in the traditional family and financial realm alike. Our study places surrogacy stigma in the context of the post-Soviet financial and social climate as experienced and expressed by participants. Furthermore, understandings of the essence of perceived surrogacy stigma may help professionals develop a more nuanced and accurate approach for psychological and social care and may lead to increased accuracy in media, law, and political representation of members of this vulnerable group. Keywords Stigma . Surrogacy . Social support . Online self-help group . Gender . Online communities . Reproductive technologies . Post-soviet society
Commercial gestational surrogacy is a process in which the intended parents, who cannot have children naturally, pay a third party, the surrogate mother (SM), to carry their externally fertilized embryo. Although commercial gestational surrogacy is currently illegal in most parts of the world, it is legal in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, and in some states in the United States (Twine 2015). Despite the advanced and well-developed technology involved in the process, surrogacy is stigmatized socially because it provokes—and even contradicts—basic traditional concepts of family, motherhood, and gender roles (Abrams 2015). The conceptualization of surrogacy is shaped by social, cultural, and economic conditions in each country (Twine 2015).
* Daphna Yeshua-Katz [email protected]
1
A global discourse on the moral judgment of surrogacy ranges from perceiving SMs unfavorably as “bad mothers” who “sell their children” to “privileged women” to viewing them positively as women who help childless couples and deserve payment for their services (Arvidsson et al. 2017). To date, studies of surrogacy stigma have captured the experiences of SMs in Western countries (Abrams 2015; Poote and van den Akker 2009) and in India (Arvidsson et al. 2017; Bail
Data Loading...
