I approach the question of race, motherhood, and gestational surrogacy, by looking at courts\u27 opinions in the case of Johnson v. Calvert and the racialized institution of motherhood. In the next section, I discuss motherhood as a social institution. I contrast some of the radical feminist critiques of motherhood, which recognize motherhood as institutionalized and compulsory, with Black feminist criticism, which understands motherhood as a site of power for African-American women. In Section III, I discuss the current popular understanding of the cultural and legal dictates of institutionalized motherhood from a historical perspective, focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries\u27 cult of domesticity as a way of unde...