Surrogacy: Three Headlines

In this essay, I explore how hegemonic discourses legitimize and normalize surrogacy by looking at three magazine articles: from a celebrity magazine, a business magazine, and an academic/literary magazine. All three articles present surrogacy as normal, positive, and inevitable, while obscuring the power relations inherent in the practice.

Earlier this year, Hollywood Reporter carried the headline: “Khloe Kardashian is expecting her second baby with her ex-boyfriend Tristan Thompson via surrogate.” The little word “surrogate”—so inconspicuous—is added at the very end of the sentence, as if about to be pushed off a cliff without any damage to the main point of the headline: Woman expecting baby with man. Let us pause for a moment here, before the Hollywood Reporter does indeed push the word off the cliff, never to return to it, instead stating in the next sentence: “This will be the second child for Kardashian and Thompson, who plays for the NBA’s Chicago Bulls.”

MORE: https://www.illiberalism.org/surrogacy-three-headlines/