Nobody's Child, Everybody's Children:

What Does Surrogacy for the Benefit of Heterosexual Couples Tell Us About Maternity, Paternity, and Kinship in Western Societies?

Surrogacy has been forbidden in France since 1994, which has led French couples to travel to the United States and Canada for procreative purposes. Through years of clinical discussions with French heterosexual parents who have used surrogates in North America, along with anthropological kinship studies and interviews with American and Canadian surrogate mothers, this paper examines what surrogacy (both full and gestational) reveals about and how it contributes, with varying success, to the reformulation of Euro-American notions of maternity, paternity, and kinship.