A useful lens through which to explore the affective labour involved in pregnancy can be found in surrogacy – the process whereby a person gestates and gives birth to a baby for another person or couple, the surrogate may be genetically related to the foetus, although today it is more likely that the genetic material comes from the ‘intended parents.’ While laws and legislation enabling or banning surrogacy in different jurisdictions is constantly changing, usually it takes place via clinics within a global fertility industry driven by financial incentives.29 Surrogacy, along with egg donation, is rarely considered a form of labour in the bioeconomy, even within Marxist analyses.30 As Melinda Cooper and Catharine Waldby write, while egg and sperm vendors and gestational surrogates provide the living tissues and in vivo labour that sustains the post-industrial biomedical economy, the productive labour of the experimenting scientists is recognised as the point at which surplus value is created.31 Instead, surrogacy, even when it is financially compensated, is frequently considered through altruistic or donor framings in order to ‘protect’ surrogates from exploitation, which ironically Cooper and Waldby argue ‘leads to atavistic forms of labour contract and desultory forms of compensation’ (8). This framing of surrogacy as a ‘labour of love’ rather than work done for financial incentive is key for its market success, enabling clinics to keep wages low while easing the minds of intended parents – aligning surrogacy, as Heather Jacobson argues, with nonmarket notions of feminine caregiving and sacrifice.32

In Jacobson’s work on gestational surrogacy in California in the United States, where for the most part surrogacy is organised through contractual arrangements, she finds ‘emotional labour’ a crucial part of the job. Using Hochschild’s framing, Jacobson argues that in addition to physical and administrative labour, surrogate labour also involves ‘emotional labour’, wherein surrogates ‘often work hard to cultivate relationships with their IPs [intended parents], which involves managing their own emotions. They must also manage relationships between their family members and those of their IPs’ (64–65). While many of the surrogates who Jacobson interviews do not view their surrogate pregnancies as work, nearly all of them comment on the emotional strain in language that frequently equates it to a job: ‘I mean this is very emotionally taxing, physically and mentally’ (66). Another surrogate describes ‘trust’ as a key affect involved in the surrogacy arrangement, trust which is ‘evidenced through respect and pleasant relations’ a key part of the market exchange (112). Zsuza Berend finds similar emotional work taking place in the United States in her analysis of www.surromomsonline.com, the largest surrogacy forum and support website. Here Berend finds surrogates sharing examples where their role involves nurturing not only the foetus but also future parents – with emphasis placed on creating the right bond with a “match” when finding intended parents, where ‘emotional compatibility’ is particularly prized.33

This affective labour is not always straightforward. While surrogates in Jacobson’s study were expected to demonstrate good feelings towards their foetus, at the same time they were keen to stress in interviews that they did not want to keep the babies they were gestating, indeed ‘part of their work as surrogates involves communicating this idea to their IPs and to others’ (97). Jacobson describes how surrogates worked hard to calm fears in IPs ‘by using specific language when talking about the pregnancy to others to signal their emotional distance from the babies’ (97). This does not necessarily mean a complete emotional cut-off, rather many surrogates ‘spoke of the love they have for their surro-babies as being similar to their love for their nieces or nephews, or for the children of their good friends’ (97–98). Here a delicate balancing act is performed, wanting to demonstrate care and empathy towards the ‘surro-babies’ they are gestating, without crossing a boundary. In other examples surrogates report disappointment at a lack of emotional connection with intended parents who ‘understood their relationship in more transitory, businesslike terms’ (108) – in these examples, Jacobson documents surrogates hiding feelings of sadness or disappointment. Part of the work of surrogacy then, involves the ‘suppression or reframing of feelings and emotion’ (112) – whether controlling the level of feeling directed at the foetus or the intended parents, affective labour becomes a key part of the job.

This is not the case for surrogacy across the market. In the Indian market, writing before the practice was banned to international clients, Kalindi Vora and Sharmila Rudrappa find both similar and different forms of affective labour at play in comparison to the US.34 In Rudrappa’s interviews with Indian surrogates, they also ‘described the emotional and intellectual labor they performed in their surrogacy contracts’, however this frequently meant ‘positioning the yet-to-come baby as an alien being to whom they had no emotional ties’ (117). And while Jacobson found the fostering of relationships between intended parents and surrogates an important part of many surrogacy arrangements in California, in India ‘much of the work of the clinic staff is invested in preventing the attachment of emotional meaning to relationships between surrogates and commissioning parents and between the surrogate and the fetus she carried.’35 Vora argues that gestational surrogacy is ‘an obvious illustration of how intimate expression, requiring the production of genuine feelings, can be completely alienated from the producer’ (41) – particularly as, at least in the Indian context, it is very unlikely that a surrogate will ever see the child they have gestated after they have given birth to them. For Vora, naming surrogacy ‘affective labour’ helpfully draws parallels between surrogacy and service work in general, but also to ‘feminist critiques of the failure of labor analysis to account for nonpublic and interior processes that contribute to capitalist accumulation’ (41).

Here, as Lewis argues, suppression of feeling is a key part of the job: ‘they are supposed to be unemotional, committed, pure techne, uncreative muscle’ (24). While the commissioning parents are positioned as the ‘intentional, authorial producers of a child’ and the doctors and technical team in clinics perform high valued work, the surrogate herself is positioned as ‘performing the passive, merely reproductive and nonauthorial work of gestation.’36 Here, the affective labour involved in pregnancy includes the suppression of feelings or emotions. In the Indian context the surrogate is positioned as a passive container, which assures intended parents ‘that their surrogate’s body will leave no trace upon its product their baby.’37 Vora argues that in the context of India in particular, with its colonial legacies, the womb is positioned as a hermetic space that prevents the transmission of race. This same argument in relation to race and reproductive progeny is made by Jaya Keaney in the context of queer Australian intended parents who make use of gamete donation and gestational surrogacy. Here Keaney finds a similar ‘prevailing genomic arithmetic’ wherein egg and sperm donors are selected based on their racial make-up – which in turn means that ‘gestation is subtracted from the realm of racialized kinship’, race, Keaney argues, functions as a system for ordering not only biological relations but also affective attachments.38 In these examples part of the work of surrogacy is suppressing these potential affective attachments.

In the above examples we see different forms of emotion and affect necessarily deployed or suppressed at different points within different contexts. In this way, arguably, surrogacy helpfully allows a reframing of pregnancy that is not so directly mediated by the market, as Alys Eve Weinbaum writes, ‘surrogacy as commodified labour power is the exceptional case that compels the redefinition of all forms of biological reproduction.’39 That a surrogate is expected to induce or suppress particular emotions depending upon the setting in which they are working helpfully demonstrates that pregnancy itself does not necessarily consist of particular innate feelings. As Vora writes, ‘the commodification of these affects also suggests how the subject of mothering work can be detached from the subject of sentimental maternity’ (136). In making visible the invisibilised affective labour involved in pregnancy, surrogacy leads us to question whether non-surrogate pregnancy might also be separable from particular gendered subjectivities, in the next part of the paper I turn to this idea in relation to new technologies that encourage particular forms of affective labour and maternal subjectivities.

Above, I wrote that the foetus does not explicitly confront the parent as one in need of emotional or affective care– the foetus does not cry, have a tantrum, need to be washed and soothed. Increasingly, however, the gestational parent is being called upon to attend to the foetus as a subject with affective states, and not only within surrogacy contracts. Arguably, and as has been well documented, this increased subjectification of the foetus can be traced back to the widespread introduction of foetal ultrasound into prenatal care. In 1987 Rosalind Petchesky argued that rapid advancements in ultrasound imaging transformed the cultural climate of reproductive politics, the foetus became a ‘public presence’, the body of the gestational parent simultaneously removed from the screen. Petchesky writes that ‘from their beginnings, such photographs have represented the foetus as primary and autonomous, the woman as absent or peripheral.’40 The uterus is positioned as a passive container and a space that needs to be overcome in order to see the baby, relying upon politically regressive conceptualisations of pregnancy to do so. For Lauren Berlant this sonographic representation generates ‘new forms of affectivity’ for mothers – new technology creates a shift in subjectivity and by extension affective labour, which in turn shapes new maternal and foetal subjects (a dialectic relation).41 The image of the screen replaces sensational knowledge, Berlant argues, with ‘the technical mastery of fetology’ (191) – a ‘fetology’ that sees the foetus materialised in a sonogram stuck to a fridge, given an ‘interim name’ or in today’s media landscape circulated online, the ultrasound image becomes ‘baby’s first picture’ – this affectivity contributes to the creation of subjectivity.42 Berlant sees this as a ‘nostalgic energy for a family that has never existed’ (191)– wherein the sonogram is part of an array of new media technologies that make visible new forms of family and foetal identity and citizenship.

Berlant is writing in 1994– fast forward to 2025 and new forms of sonographic imaging have emerged that intensify these new forms of affectivity. Here, rather than a passive container or one that is ‘absent or peripheral’ as in Petchesky and others’ analyses, the gestational parent is arguably positioned as an active consumer in their own pregnancy. While historically the image of the foetus as subject obscured the pregnant person, a shift in neoliberal subjectivity means that increasingly pregnant people are being called upon to intervene in their pregnancy and to demonstrate care, attention and nurture towards the unborn foetus, often through commodities and services that can be purchased on the market. In the last two decades we have witnessed an increasing number of 3D and 4D commercial ultrasound clinics opening across the UK, US, Europe and elsewhere globally.43 With names like ‘Window to the Womb’ and ‘Meet My Baby’, in the space of the commercial clinic, applications of the ultrasound technology are focused less on diagnostics and instead on forming relationships with the foetus before it is born.44 Barbara Katz Rothman writes that ‘displaying consumption of ultrasound technology’ contributes to the image of ‘consuming all available technologies during pregnancy [as] a sign of responsible mothering.’45 This sits within Hochschild’s argument that the market increasingly ‘reach[es] into the heart of our emotional lives, a realm previously more shielded from the market’ (11). Specifically, these commercial ultrasound clinics stress the ways in which the technology can facilitate ‘bonding’. While in the setting Petchesky describes in realm of diagnostic 2D ultrasounds the pregnant person is replaced by the foetus as subject, in these commercial clinics, ultrasound becomes another way in which the neoliberal parent materialises in the space of pregnancy– the pregnant person is positioned not as a patient but as a consumer, encouraged to purchase services that allow new forms of prenatal bonding, a form of affective labour facilitated by new scopic access to the womb.

These technologies fit with a broader trend that Elena Neiterman identifies, in which pregnant people are increasingly ‘expected to “do” pregnancy, actively performing socially established practices that signify the status of the body as pregnant’, which she describes as ‘pregnant work.’46 This can be read within broader analyses of neoliberalism and health, wherein individuals are expected to manage their health, and particularly their fertility.47 The affective labour that takes place in the spaces of 3D and 4D commercial clinics is not only about bonding with the foetus, but also constructing new families, wherein prospective parents do ‘display work’ in the space of these clinics in order to ‘do family.’48 This is emphasised by the effort often made in these ultrasound clinics to suggest ‘family resemblance’ between a parent or a sibling and the foetus– with sonographers drawing attention to specific features, such as the nose.49 This emphasis on family-making and bonding takes place not only in the private sphere but also in information provided by the NHS, who encourage bonding with ‘babies in the womb’.50 NHS Scotland go so far as to argue that establishing strong attachment and bonding is as important ‘before they’re born as when they arrive’.51 These practices fit within neoliberalism’s imperative not only for individual responsibility, but also, following Cooper for ‘family responsibility’. Cooper complicates the idea that neoliberalism necessarily privileges atomised individuals over family structures, rather she shows how neoliberalism depends as much on imperatives of family responsibility and investment in kinship obligations as it does on the responsibility of the individual.

Other technologies that enable care or bonding to take place between parent, foetus and family are also available to buy on the pregnancy marketplace. For example, Marie Thompson looks to prenatal sound systems, intravaginal speakers which allow users to play music to their foetuses in vivo.52 With names like ‘Babypod’ and ‘Babyplus’, the makers of these technologies claim they are able to, ‘stimulate vocalisation in babies before birth, helping to develop their communication skills in the womb’ (74) and ‘enhance their current and future affective capacities’ (76). Thompson sees them as part of a sonic affect aimed at ‘shaping, transforming and enhancing the pre-born as future-child’. Here ‘good parenting’ can be enacted as early as 16 weeks – which Thompson argues amplifies neoliberal capitalism’s impulse towards personal, maternal and familial responsibility, and maternal-familial investment in the pre-born as child. Here, not only childhood but the space of pregnancy and the foetus has become a realm for ‘economic and psychic investment in the future’ – eroding a clear division between prenatal and postnatal development. Thompson reads this through Cindi Katz argument that under neoliberalism children have become an ‘accumulation strategy’, in which childhood becomes a spectacle and a space structured around preparing for a competitive future. Katz writes that ‘in the current period, children are both an economic and psychic investment in the future’ (9), with increased pressure for parents to curate a perfect childhood, moulding children into future workers via good education and extracurricular activities (11). This occurs in part due to anxieties around political, economic, geopolitical and environmental factors, wherein securing a ‘good’ future for children is becoming increasingly precarious. Prenatal sound systems and ultrasound bonding scans allow parents to begin investing in their child before birth – child as accumulation strategy becomes ‘foetus as accumulation strategy’ with an emphasis on parental-foetal mediation. Affective labour as comforting, nurturing, listening and caring can be enacted earlier and earlier via technologies. What’s more, if we return to Gotby’s notion that these forms of work create subjectivity, then we can see how early this formation of subjectivity, both of the foetus and the mother, starts to take place.

In part one of this paper, I looked to the work of Gotby to consider the argument that affective labour (or what Gotby refers to as ‘emotional reproduction’) as a component of gestational labour takes place in both the directly and indirectly market-mediated sphere and plays a central role in the construction of a gendered subjectivity. As I wrote above, viewed in this way it becomes increasingly difficult to locate a maternal subject who is not completely subsumed within their role in capitalism. In a paper in this journal from 2011, Sandford addresses this problematic, paying specific attention to a number of apparent contradictions in the concept of ‘maternal labour’, she asks, ‘how can the concept of the maternal circulate alongside the category of labour as anything other than an abjected, psychologistic and therefore idealistic theoretical deviance?’ (2). For Sandford the idea of ‘maternal labour’ ‘swallows’ experiences of the maternal, so that when attention is paid to the specifics of mothering, its potential character as labour is undone. While other forms of domestic labour – cooking, cleaning, running the household – can arguably be done by anybody, Sandford argues that the labour of maternity is ‘affective, invested, intersubjective’ (6) and relational. Focusing on its affective dimensions, the labour taking place is based on an interpersonal attachment that, she argues, cannot be theorised via labour frameworks alone.53 In calling maternal labour labour we lose what is specific about it, ‘which is precisely not a matter of indifference to the individual who labours’ (9). What is more, in the case of ‘gestational labour’, we potentially lose varied experiences of pregnancy so that differences, including miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion, are not given adequate space, and instead are congealed into the category of abstract labour.

I too am ultimately sceptical that we can derive all of the dimensions of human desire or experience from an analysis of the laws of capital– these aren’t questions that can be answered at a high level of abstraction alone.54 However, as I have sought to demonstrate in this paper through the examples of surrogacy, ultrasound ‘bonding’ scans and prenatal sound systems, while not fully subsumed, we can see how the market does play a significant role in creating new forms ‘affective, invested, intersubjective’ labours– shaping new foetal and maternal subjectivities at earlier and earlier moments in pregnancy, which has only increased since Berlant was writing in 1994. I could equally have dedicated a section of this paper to examples where embryos, facilitated by technological developments, are being positioned as proto-children, with new subjectivities and affective relations emerging in and outside of fertility clinics.55 What’s more, significantly, as I have argued throughout, it is in part because of this affective dimension of maternal labour as a ‘labour of love’, that it can be weaponised and devalued, naturalised and gendered, as Sandford herself notes when she writes that positioning maternal labour as labour allows us to usefully recognise it as ‘socially necessary labour delegated to women, rather than as a natural function of women (7).56 This points to a tension in a social reproduction or affective labour framing– between wanting to make visible the otherwise invisibilised reproductive labour involved in gestation and maternity, to degender and denaturalise these forms of work, while at the same time being careful to resist the ways in which neoliberalism has already transformed the womb into a space of production to be optimised.