Shifting surrogacies: Comparative ethnographies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gestational surrogacy is a reproductive arrangement where a woman gestates a child for others—the “intended parents”—in order to be handed over to them after birth. Since the turn of the millennium, demands for surrogacy have continuously increased due to social and demographic changes, rising rates of infertility, and the normalization of new, non-heteronormative, family forms. Many countries prohibit surrogacy, and others that previously permitted this reproductive arrangement closed down as a result of political decisions or surrogacy scandals. Moreover, surrogacy is offered at greatly varying costs, ranging from approximately US$50,000 in countries like the Republic of Georgia to US$200,000 in fertility clinics in California. Accordingly, many of these arrangements are transnational, with intended parents who cannot access surrogacy or afford surrogacy in their home country commissioning it in countries such as the United States, until recently Ukraine, and today increasingly in the Republic of Georgia. Existing research has focused on surrogacy from different angles, such as practices of kinning and de-kinning, inequality and stratification, the political economy of the fertility industry, and its gender dimensions. We engage in, but further these debates by drawing attention to settings, accounts, experiences, and new theoretical notions that diverge from “mainstream” presentations of surrogacy. Moreover, in this Special Issue, we experimented with writing joint papers with a deliberative aim to provide comparative analyses and emphasize the links between and diversity of different cases of surrogacy. Therefore, all papers have an explicit comparative character and are all based on empirical studies from more than one field site. They provide nuanced understandings of surrogacy arrangements, grounded in empirical data rather than ideological, political, or moral assessments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".