Laxman Utekar’s film ‘Mimi’ fails to fully depict the realities of commercial surrogacy in India

Pooja Singh

Laxman Utekar’s 2021 film Mimi was released on Netflix during a period where commercial surrogacy had already become a contentious issue of interest in India, both among the lawmakers as well as the general public. 

The film follows Mimi, a small town Indian girl who decides to become a commercial surrogate for an American couple for 2 million rupees to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. Things come to head when the American couple decides to leave a pregnant Mimi after learning that the surrogate child will be born with Down Syndrome. The movie showcases Mimi’s struggles to raise a child as a single mother in light of this development.  

Mimi is not the first mainstream Bollywood movie to address the issue of infertility, pregnancy or childbirth as movies like Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001) and Vicky Donor (2012) have earlier broached these issues in their own ways. However, it is the first movie that explicitly deals with the issue of commercial surrogacy by putting the surrogate mother at the center of the plot. 

Commercial surrogacy refers to a practice in which a couple who cannot have biological children of their own due to medical or other reasons contractually hire another woman to have their baby in lieu of a set payable amount. 

The hired surrogate only offers them gestational services, meaning she carries their baby in her womb, but does not offer her eggs for the baby. In case of heterosexual couples, the zygote is formed through the fusion of the egg and the sperm of the biological parents who are paying for this service. In case of queer couples, however, these arrangements may differ.

It is part of a new trend where previously unmarketable biological practices are slowly becoming commercialised, owing to scientific advancement and the spread of neoliberalism - a political- economic project that aims to expand the ambit of market to include all aspects of human life. 

After the 1990s, India started massively opening up its economy and markets for foreign trade and investment.  In an attempt to restructure its economy according to the principles of capitalist free market, it has gradually emerged as a big marketplace for commercial surrogacy. 

In a transnational context, commercial surrogacy, has primarily been a racialised practice. Foreign couples, predominantly White, are constantly searching for certain “non-white bodies” they can contractually make use of to obtain babies for prices far lower than those acceptable within their own countries.

Foreign as well as affluent Indian couples have used this service to combat biological childlessness. Women primarily belonging to economically disadvantaged backgrounds offer their services as commercial surrogates, despite the social stigma attached - in hope of achieving economic benefits.

In comparison to other types of care or affective work, commercial surrogacy tends to evoke extreme sentiments of moral judgment among general public as well as lawmakers and activists as it involves the sale of reproductive labour – a kind of labour which has historically been considered special and hence expected to remain outside the market. Moreover, women are often judged for having children out of wedlock.

For long, it has been argued that the sale of their reproductive labor by commercial surrogates is a practice akin to sex work where the worker, who happen to majorly women, sell their bodies to make a living. 

This parallel is teased in Mimi as well. The movie opens with a rather ambiguous scene where a middle-aged Indian man is repeatedly reassuring a foreign person that he now has access to the girls they asked for. This ambiguity sets a jarring tone where the viewer does not know whether these girls are going to be sold or trafficked for prostitution. This apprehension does not come true but it works to remind us that sex work and commercial surrogacy are often thought of in similar ways.

This is one of the many ideas that have repeatedly been used to ask for a total ban on commercial surrogacy within India. This arguments functions on the assumption that both sex work and commercial surrogacy are forms of labor that are intrinsically exploitative against the engaged workers and they must be abolished in totality. 

Such arguments are premised on the belief that it is the sell-ability of sex and reproduction that is the primary problem, not the exploitative conditions in which women are pushed to consider these professions. This line of thinking refuses to reckon with instances, rare as they may be, where these professions might be chosen consensually. In addition, it is more focused on the individual engaging in these jobs as opposed to the exploitative network that pushes people to take them on in the first place.

The Indian Supreme Court and the Indian parliament have listened to such allegations regarding the exploitative nature of commercial surrogacy and have regularly passed numerous bills since 2018 to ban commercial surrogacy within the country. As per the latest regulation, all forms of commercial surrogacy, whether sought by Indian or foreign couples, have been banned within the country. 

Indian couples are allowed to take recourse to altruistic surrogacy only under a limited set of circumstances. Indian queer couples cannot avail this service under any condition.

However, rather than helping the women being exploited, these regulations will most likely push the booming surrogacy market into informal fringes, which will only increase the risks involved.

This view stands opposed to the liberal feminist argument which states that so long as women engage in these professions consensually, they cannot be categorised as inherently exploitative. 

However, as radical and Marxist feminists have pointed out, such an argument employs an overly simplistic understanding of choice and consent within a binary framework of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. It fails to account for the ways in which socio-economic backgrounds and identities influence individual choice. This conundrum is reflected in the movie as well.

Mimi chooses to become a surrogate because of the money being offered to her, and not because she is particularly interested in commercial surrogacy as a profession. Still, her choice is, for the most part, a choice in the real sense of the term: she wants to earn quick money to become a Bollywood actress, not because she has no other alternative to ensure her survival.

This is hardly the case with most of the women who work as surrogates in India. These women primarily belong to the most economically disadvantaged class, and they choose this profession because they feel that this will offer them better economic opportunities as compared to the other jobs they can potentially pursue, such as daily wage construction work, domestic work, sanitation work, and sex work. 

Hence, commercial surrogacy is a choice for them only so much as it prevents them from being pushed into worse poverty and offers a better chance at survival. Given the widespread social stigma that is attached with commercial surrogacy, their choice still does not offer them an opportunity to pursue socially dignified occupation or let them become members of the formal economy.  

The plot twist in the movie shows us that even in cases where consent has enthusiastically been given, the process in itself may not necessarily favour the surrogate. The employing couple abandons a pregnant Mimi and her child after learning that the child will be born with Down Syndrome. Hence, Mimi helps us understand the naivety of seeing consent as a binary position divided between yes and no.

Apart from the commercialisation of intimate reproductive labour, commercial surrogacy has also complicated the relationship that poor women share with reproduction and childbirth. 

In India, poor women have often been forcibly sterilised or gently nudged towards ensuring better family planning by arguing that high fertility and birth rates within their families is one cause of their continued poverty. Now, these women are employing the same mechanisms to have a better chance at economic mobility.

Mimi’s hiring as a commercial surrogate also allows us to see another side of the commercial surrogate debate. Bhanu Pratap, the tour guide who convinces Mimi to become a surrogate, albeit for his own financial gain, tries to persuade her by pointing out the exceptional divinity and altruism inherent within the act of childbirth and mothering. 

According to research conducted by scholars engaged in this field, this is a pervasive attitude among women who choose to become commercial surrogates. They believe that they are doing a kind deed by helping a childless couple acquire a child of their own. 

The portrayal of the surrogacy period in Mimi is only partially reflective of the realities of commercial surrogacy in India. Where Mimi refuses to look too deeply into the nuances of the contract because she trusts her employers, a significant portion of Indian surrogates either simply do not possess the know-how or bargaining positions to closely examine the contracts they are signing.

Much like Mimi who lies to her family and goes to live with her friend in hiding due to her unmarried status and social taboos attached with premarital and extramarital pregnancies, most commercial surrogates also choose to go in hiding after being impregnated. They live in surrogate hostels attached to pregnancy clinics where their diet and physical activities are closely monitored and they receive a previously unexperienced level of medical attention – some necessary and some invasive. 

Surrogates have admitted that this artificial pregnancy is often extremely different from their own natural pregnancies where they did not have to live with such extreme restrictions.

The movie certainly does a good job of showing us some of the many malpractices that continue to haunt commercial surrogacy and dangers that commercial surrogates face within the country, but the film also has its own issues. 

The use of a potential disability plotline for shock value cannot be left unattended. The American couple only returns to take the child when they realise that he was born perfectly healthy. While there is no denying that such an instance may very well happen in reality, one certainly wonders what would have happened if this had not been the case. 

What measures would Mimi, her friends and family would have taken to ensure that the child has the best possible life in light of his disability? 

Mimi was certainly correct to argue that both disabled and able children have equal worth and dignity and the former must not be abandoned as undeserving of love, care and family as a result of their impairment. However, her response to the question of abortion lacks nuance.

When asked about whether she would like to abort the child in light of the abandonment she is facing, Mimi argues that if killing children outside the womb is wrong, the killing of the fetus outside is also always wrong. 

In India, abortion has anyways been a sensitive topic given the deplorable record of female feticide, but equating abortion with murder does not allow the viewer to give due consideration to those circumstances where childbirth is not feasible or desirable for reasons unrelated to bigotry, including the cases where the child-bearer is choosing to abort a fetus simply as an act of bodily autonomy.

Hence, Mimi is but one step, albeit a well-intentioned and mostly well-executed attempt, to talk about commercial surrogacy. It is a good example of how mainstream cinema can be a platform to talk about socially stigmatised issues. Regardless of its drawbacks, the movie deserves credit where it is due.