In-Utero Advantage Maximisation
Joanne Ramos, The Farm
Bloomsbury, 336pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781526605252
reviewed by Stephanie Sy-Quia
These truths we hold to be self-evident:
- Motherhood is work.
- Motherhood is unpaid work.
- Motherhood is unpaid work which comes at the expense of paid work.
- Motherhood is unpaid work which, because it comes at the expense of paid work, is often subcontracted to other women, who are paid. Often, in the words of Megan Stack, ‘They [are] poor women, brown women, migrant women.’ And, she writes, ‘They were important to me, primarily, because they made me free.’ Stack is writing in her motherhood memoir Women’s Work, which is a work of non-fiction. The book I have before me now, Joanne Ramos’s debut The Farm, is a novel, billed as a dystopian take on the same subject.
Dystopia’s whole shtick is that it hits close to the bone. This we know. But for most of its life, dystopia has yanked elements of the natural, the real, the realistic, out of joint, distorting one element of the picture and inviting one to see it afresh from a new angle. We think of trains curling towards the spiny skylines of futuristic cities where the poor toil in boiler rooms, à la Hunger Games or Metropolis. We think of Skynets and Big Brothers, which sometimes scarily prefigure widespread technology. But we do not expect dystopia to give us portraits of things which already exist.
In this regard, The Farm is much more akin to Black Mirror, whose proximity to the bone (and reality) was too much for this critic to bear. Bloomsbury has pitched the novel as its big beach read of the summer, heir to Margaret Atwood and bearing a back-cover commendation from Sophie Mackintosh. Comparisons between The Farm and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are obvious – this is a book about a luxury surrogacy facility. But those comparisons do not stand. Atwood’s dystopia is predicated on a sexually obese culture (‘a society dying . . . of too much choice,’ in Aunt Lydia’s inimitable utterance) that falls prey to religious fundamentalists’ credit-seizing coup. The Farm is about the super-rich who can’t or don’t want to gestate their own children. This exists, and we know about it.
Kim Kardashian West is only the most recent of some high-profile examples. In May of this year, she became mother to her fourth child, the second to be delivered via surrogate. The willing woman was found through an agency and paid $45,000 in ten $4,500 monthly instalments. She signed a contract stipulating she would follow all the standard advice given to pregnant women: no drinking, no drugs, no smoking. No sex for a few weeks on either side of sexual implantation. No hot tubs, saunas, cat litter, hair dye or raw fish. Caffeination was to take place only once a day. She received a personal nutritionist, chef and trainer. If she lost reproductive organs as a result, she was to receive $4,000.
The Kardashian West baby is not genetically related to the woman who carried him, and was born via surrogate because Kardashian West suffered from two life-threatening conditions in the process of giving birth to her second child. But when a surrogate is hired to carry a child not genetically related to her, and there is no medical reason to do so, this is known as social surrogacy. In the US, it’s on the rise, mainly with the justification that for the women who can afford it, hiring a surrogate means being able to continue working right up until delivery and not risking bedrest in the eventuality of difficulties. In other words, it’s a rather worrying solution to the perennial problem of motherhood causing loss of, or damage to, livelihood.
Surrogacy in the US is expensive, so of course there is a burgeoning market in India, where it’s cheaper (at least $60,000 in the States versus $30,000 in India, although admittedly this is excluding flights, hotel stays, and egg/sperm extraction/storage/transportation). The image is a sinister one: dormitories full of young brown women carrying white people’s babies for the promise of six years’ income in nine months. Or, in the words of an Independent article on the subject, parents telling their end-product that they are a ‘very special’ child, because they have ‘a special angel in India.’
In The Farm, this exact dynamic is relocated to the rolling hills of Connecticut. And it’s not that hard to believe. The gestational facility, known as Golden Oaks, was once a farm, tucked away in the Berkshires, within striking distance of small towns with grassroots cultural offerings and amateur theatre scenes. Just like the Hogwarts, Golden Oaks could well exist; it’s just that it flies ‘far beneath the radar for a number of reasons, fetal security not least.’ It recruits via scouts.
Golden Oaks houses just over eighty surrogates or ‘Hosts’, carrying the embryos of their ‘Clients’ (or, as they’re known IRL, ‘commissioning parents’). They range from Chinese billionaires to Manhattanites who like to ‘“keep it real” by occasionally taking the subway and wearing ripped jeans.’ Some are too old to be pregnant themselves, some are too busy, and some have careers as models and can’t risk the stretch marks.
The majority of the Hosts are ‘native to Hispanic countries, various Caribbean islands, and the Philippines, although we do have a smattering from Eastern Europe and other parts of Southeast Asia. And of course, there are the Premium Hosts.’ Filipinas are popular with clients, ‘because their English is good and their personalities are mild and service-oriented.’ To be a Premium Host, you must be Caucasian (Irish-German is a ‘winsome mix’), pretty (‘but not – . . . this is critical – sexy’) and educated (‘smart but not too smart’ – magna cum laude from Duke University is the sweet spot). Families can choose the same surrogate more than once, or opt for a ‘Three-in-Three’ – three babies in three years.
The woman in charge is Chinese-American Mae, engaged and saving for ‘Phase 2’ of renovations to her apartment. Chapters alternate between her perspective and those of the other characters, which serves to aid understanding of everyone’s motives. (No one comes out well, but some are greater victims than others.) The tone of Mae’s desires, her great motivating factor, is that of a real estate listing or a business presentation: she will host a party in her ‘south-facing, natural-light flooded, six-hundred-square-foot living room’; she recently added ‘Enroll in Art Appreciation Class to her Long-Term, Non-Urgent-but-Important To-Do List. Now, though, she thinks she placed it too far down the list, sandwiched as it is between Organize B-School Golf Weekend and Digitize Tax Returns.’ She is a recognisable type: the cold-blooded corporate, super-proficient professional who reads about power poses in her alumni magazine and muses on mornings gone awry by thinking on the run not taken, the eggs (poached!) not eaten. She aspires, in short, to be like her clientele. The prose would sound bloodless if it weren’t so eerily true to life. Its aesthetic is corporate gloss, executed with deft realism. Mae’s character is well and truly superficial; she’s supposed to read like something copywritten.
The other characters include Jane, a Host and young Filipina in the States on an expired tourist visa who took the job to support her own infant daughter (who cannot visit for the duration of Jane’s gestation at Golden Oaks); Jane’s older cousin, Ate, who is supporting her three children back in Davao and hasn’t gone home in 20 years; and white, wealthy, art-dabbling Reagan, who wants to get out from under her father’s thumb and already donated her eggs (another fairly standard occurrence these days) while at college, musing ‘They grew inside only to be discarded each month, like toenail clippings or hair snippets on a salon floor’. Of all of them, it is the dynamic between Mae and Jane which is most compelling. Mae has ‘never had patience for identity politics, for playing up otherness – the word du jour – to get ahead,’ and has no interest in solidarity with ‘a motley crew of people who shared her eye shape.’ Where Jane seeks some sympathy from Mae, Mae rejects it with a shake of her blonde-highlighted head.
The environment Mae has created at the Farm reflects this. Hosts are cashmere-clad and examined in rooms with Calder mobiles hanging from the ceiling; copies of How To Spend It lie in the waiting rooms for Clients. Hosts have fitness tracker bracelets (‘WellBands’) and speakers (‘UteroSoundz’) uploaded with Churchill’s speeches, Shakespeare’s plays and ancient Chinese poetry so as to maximise ‘fetal potential.’ None of it sounds that far from the truth: it is a recognisable milieu of kale pesto, bitter green smoothies and bran muffins. Ramos has embellished, only a little, our wellness-crazed world, combining our fixation on the sanctitude of pregnancy with a life-hack approach to in-utero advantage maximisation.
Like any start-up these days, Mae’s ambition is cloaked in the faux-liberatory rhetoric of any tech mogul: ‘Why shouldn’t [The Farm] provide embryo storage so that women can pursue their dreams without worrying about their biological clocks? What about post-delivery services, like on-demand anti-biotic and allergen-free breast milk, or even, wet-nursing? Why leave baby-nursing to freelancers?’
This is classic techie solutionism. Is it really that ‘disruptive’ to make a work/gestational balance possible by subcontracting the gestational part, rather than rethinking the entire systems in which working people have children, in their entirety? I think not. But if we don’t come up with fresh ideas on that front quickly, the Farm will be here accepting commissions before we know it.
- Motherhood is work.
- Motherhood is unpaid work.
- Motherhood is unpaid work which comes at the expense of paid work.
- Motherhood is unpaid work which, because it comes at the expense of paid work, is often subcontracted to other women, who are paid. Often, in the words of Megan Stack, ‘They [are] poor women, brown women, migrant women.’ And, she writes, ‘They were important to me, primarily, because they made me free.’ Stack is writing in her motherhood memoir Women’s Work, which is a work of non-fiction. The book I have before me now, Joanne Ramos’s debut The Farm, is a novel, billed as a dystopian take on the same subject.
Dystopia’s whole shtick is that it hits close to the bone. This we know. But for most of its life, dystopia has yanked elements of the natural, the real, the realistic, out of joint, distorting one element of the picture and inviting one to see it afresh from a new angle. We think of trains curling towards the spiny skylines of futuristic cities where the poor toil in boiler rooms, à la Hunger Games or Metropolis. We think of Skynets and Big Brothers, which sometimes scarily prefigure widespread technology. But we do not expect dystopia to give us portraits of things which already exist.
In this regard, The Farm is much more akin to Black Mirror, whose proximity to the bone (and reality) was too much for this critic to bear. Bloomsbury has pitched the novel as its big beach read of the summer, heir to Margaret Atwood and bearing a back-cover commendation from Sophie Mackintosh. Comparisons between The Farm and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are obvious – this is a book about a luxury surrogacy facility. But those comparisons do not stand. Atwood’s dystopia is predicated on a sexually obese culture (‘a society dying . . . of too much choice,’ in Aunt Lydia’s inimitable utterance) that falls prey to religious fundamentalists’ credit-seizing coup. The Farm is about the super-rich who can’t or don’t want to gestate their own children. This exists, and we know about it.
Kim Kardashian West is only the most recent of some high-profile examples. In May of this year, she became mother to her fourth child, the second to be delivered via surrogate. The willing woman was found through an agency and paid $45,000 in ten $4,500 monthly instalments. She signed a contract stipulating she would follow all the standard advice given to pregnant women: no drinking, no drugs, no smoking. No sex for a few weeks on either side of sexual implantation. No hot tubs, saunas, cat litter, hair dye or raw fish. Caffeination was to take place only once a day. She received a personal nutritionist, chef and trainer. If she lost reproductive organs as a result, she was to receive $4,000.
The Kardashian West baby is not genetically related to the woman who carried him, and was born via surrogate because Kardashian West suffered from two life-threatening conditions in the process of giving birth to her second child. But when a surrogate is hired to carry a child not genetically related to her, and there is no medical reason to do so, this is known as social surrogacy. In the US, it’s on the rise, mainly with the justification that for the women who can afford it, hiring a surrogate means being able to continue working right up until delivery and not risking bedrest in the eventuality of difficulties. In other words, it’s a rather worrying solution to the perennial problem of motherhood causing loss of, or damage to, livelihood.
Surrogacy in the US is expensive, so of course there is a burgeoning market in India, where it’s cheaper (at least $60,000 in the States versus $30,000 in India, although admittedly this is excluding flights, hotel stays, and egg/sperm extraction/storage/transportation). The image is a sinister one: dormitories full of young brown women carrying white people’s babies for the promise of six years’ income in nine months. Or, in the words of an Independent article on the subject, parents telling their end-product that they are a ‘very special’ child, because they have ‘a special angel in India.’
In The Farm, this exact dynamic is relocated to the rolling hills of Connecticut. And it’s not that hard to believe. The gestational facility, known as Golden Oaks, was once a farm, tucked away in the Berkshires, within striking distance of small towns with grassroots cultural offerings and amateur theatre scenes. Just like the Hogwarts, Golden Oaks could well exist; it’s just that it flies ‘far beneath the radar for a number of reasons, fetal security not least.’ It recruits via scouts.
Golden Oaks houses just over eighty surrogates or ‘Hosts’, carrying the embryos of their ‘Clients’ (or, as they’re known IRL, ‘commissioning parents’). They range from Chinese billionaires to Manhattanites who like to ‘“keep it real” by occasionally taking the subway and wearing ripped jeans.’ Some are too old to be pregnant themselves, some are too busy, and some have careers as models and can’t risk the stretch marks.
The majority of the Hosts are ‘native to Hispanic countries, various Caribbean islands, and the Philippines, although we do have a smattering from Eastern Europe and other parts of Southeast Asia. And of course, there are the Premium Hosts.’ Filipinas are popular with clients, ‘because their English is good and their personalities are mild and service-oriented.’ To be a Premium Host, you must be Caucasian (Irish-German is a ‘winsome mix’), pretty (‘but not – . . . this is critical – sexy’) and educated (‘smart but not too smart’ – magna cum laude from Duke University is the sweet spot). Families can choose the same surrogate more than once, or opt for a ‘Three-in-Three’ – three babies in three years.
The woman in charge is Chinese-American Mae, engaged and saving for ‘Phase 2’ of renovations to her apartment. Chapters alternate between her perspective and those of the other characters, which serves to aid understanding of everyone’s motives. (No one comes out well, but some are greater victims than others.) The tone of Mae’s desires, her great motivating factor, is that of a real estate listing or a business presentation: she will host a party in her ‘south-facing, natural-light flooded, six-hundred-square-foot living room’; she recently added ‘Enroll in Art Appreciation Class to her Long-Term, Non-Urgent-but-Important To-Do List. Now, though, she thinks she placed it too far down the list, sandwiched as it is between Organize B-School Golf Weekend and Digitize Tax Returns.’ She is a recognisable type: the cold-blooded corporate, super-proficient professional who reads about power poses in her alumni magazine and muses on mornings gone awry by thinking on the run not taken, the eggs (poached!) not eaten. She aspires, in short, to be like her clientele. The prose would sound bloodless if it weren’t so eerily true to life. Its aesthetic is corporate gloss, executed with deft realism. Mae’s character is well and truly superficial; she’s supposed to read like something copywritten.
The other characters include Jane, a Host and young Filipina in the States on an expired tourist visa who took the job to support her own infant daughter (who cannot visit for the duration of Jane’s gestation at Golden Oaks); Jane’s older cousin, Ate, who is supporting her three children back in Davao and hasn’t gone home in 20 years; and white, wealthy, art-dabbling Reagan, who wants to get out from under her father’s thumb and already donated her eggs (another fairly standard occurrence these days) while at college, musing ‘They grew inside only to be discarded each month, like toenail clippings or hair snippets on a salon floor’. Of all of them, it is the dynamic between Mae and Jane which is most compelling. Mae has ‘never had patience for identity politics, for playing up otherness – the word du jour – to get ahead,’ and has no interest in solidarity with ‘a motley crew of people who shared her eye shape.’ Where Jane seeks some sympathy from Mae, Mae rejects it with a shake of her blonde-highlighted head.
The environment Mae has created at the Farm reflects this. Hosts are cashmere-clad and examined in rooms with Calder mobiles hanging from the ceiling; copies of How To Spend It lie in the waiting rooms for Clients. Hosts have fitness tracker bracelets (‘WellBands’) and speakers (‘UteroSoundz’) uploaded with Churchill’s speeches, Shakespeare’s plays and ancient Chinese poetry so as to maximise ‘fetal potential.’ None of it sounds that far from the truth: it is a recognisable milieu of kale pesto, bitter green smoothies and bran muffins. Ramos has embellished, only a little, our wellness-crazed world, combining our fixation on the sanctitude of pregnancy with a life-hack approach to in-utero advantage maximisation.
Like any start-up these days, Mae’s ambition is cloaked in the faux-liberatory rhetoric of any tech mogul: ‘Why shouldn’t [The Farm] provide embryo storage so that women can pursue their dreams without worrying about their biological clocks? What about post-delivery services, like on-demand anti-biotic and allergen-free breast milk, or even, wet-nursing? Why leave baby-nursing to freelancers?’
This is classic techie solutionism. Is it really that ‘disruptive’ to make a work/gestational balance possible by subcontracting the gestational part, rather than rethinking the entire systems in which working people have children, in their entirety? I think not. But if we don’t come up with fresh ideas on that front quickly, the Farm will be here accepting commissions before we know it.