It starts with wanting children: Norwegian parents’ experiences with commercial surrogacy in the USA

This thesis explores Norwegian parents’ experiences with commercial surrogacy in the USA. Surrogacy is a controversial phenomenon, and illegal in Norway, yet relatively little research has been done on the population of Norwegians that travel abroad for such arrangements. This thesis centers their experiences, and asks: How do Norwegian parents describe and understand their own experiences with commercial surrogacy? In order to answer this question, three men and three women who had sought surrogacy arrangements in the USA were asked to participate in a two-part interview process guided by the principles of free association narrative interviewing (FANI). FANI assumes a psychosocial subject whose experiences and meaning-making processes are influenced both by societal discourses and their own personal biographies. I present my analysis in three parts: 1. The first analytical chapter deals with the way the parents of my study understand surrogacy to be the key part to a family creation process. It shows how they each experience the use of surrogacy as a norm violation, and showcases some examples of how such violations were dealt with emotionally and narratively. 2. The second analytical chapter concerns how the parents make use of different understandings of kinship to redraw boundaries between kin and non-kin. Parents creatively drew on established notions of kinship to prove their rightful and exclusive relatedness to the child. 3. The third and last analytical chapter concerns the threat of money, and how the parents negotiate the intimate and the commercial aspects of surrogacy. It shows that as a kinship project, the integrity of the activity was upheld by focusing on the intimate aspect of surrogacy, while the parents found different ways to accommodate the commercial aspect into this narrative. I conclude that the parents draw on a variety of narrative strategies that both reproduce and challenge normative ideals in creative ways. I suggest that their choices help shape global commerce in a way that increasingly works to accommodate intimate and deeply personal needs, and that despite reiterating certain notions of kinship, in the end, these new ways of making families must be seen together with the cultural movements to expand our notions of kinship and family altogether