The practice of surrogacy can be said to date back to the Bible; in Genesis 16, Abram is promised descendants by God, but his wife Sarah is unable to conceive. Sarah then instructs Abram to lay with her handmaid, who is then able to bear his child and fulfill God’s promise. This story begins at the issue of infertility. Yet the practice today has evolved to address a myriad of motivations: the pro-natalism push, the desire to preserve one’s body, gay couples endeavoring to start a family. The heightened demand for surrogates has fueled a robust industry, including reduced-cost options via agencies that have sourced surrogates specifically in “countries blighted by poverty”. One novel motivation for using a surrogate that has emerged is that of some form of careerism. Celebrities like Lucy Liu, who cited the pace of her career as her reason, have welcomed children via surrogates. Carrying and delivering your own children is beginning to join the ranks of services that can be outsourced to others out of sheer convenience.
Sarah Anderson’s shrewd, satirical debut novel Fallow follows a woman named Natalie who is employed at a workplace grievance call center. She comes across a mysteriously lucrative opportunity: a position with a tech company called “The Company” offering a “GENEROUS SALARY WITH BENEFITS,” the only apparent requirements being a “healthy lifestyle, birthing hips, and discretion.” After a few white lies regarding substance use in the job interview, Natalie receives an offer from The Company to participate in their Genesis program. The program was conceived by The Company to combat the decreased emotional investment and productivity associated with maternity leave, allowing for female executives to instead employ an in-house surrogate. Natalie’s contract renders her responsible for seven viable pregnancies over the course of 10 years, while not disclosing the nature of her vocation to any of her personal associates. At the end, she is entitled to up to $60,000 in desired “reconstructive” surgery. Natalie, dazzled by the salary and the idea of freedom from the tedium of conventional work, signs the contract.
Natalie’s existence goes on to consist of becoming an optimal body to carry the babies of various female executives. She spends her days walking “aimlessly” on her treadmill, getting driven to the doctor, chiropractor, and acupuncturist, watching foreign language films for the fetus to internalize. Her first pregnancy and delivery go smoothly, largely unconcerning up to her physical postpartum symptoms of hives and severe body odor, which abate after a few weeks until she feels like a “looser, wetter version of herself.” An employee thanks Natalie, bemoaning her first terrible first pregnancy and her “relief” towards Genesis as a program.
The physical burden and risks of carrying a child are well documented, from perpetually nontrivial mortality rates to both literary and scientific writing continually using a language of violence to describe the experience. For privileged socioeconomic classes, this issue of gestational labor and its pitfalls can be absorbed by institutionalized surrogacy, which is considered to have emerged around 2011. Infertility clinics have emerged around the world, allowing women to essentially rent out their wombs. The development of this biotechnology and its subsequent institutionalization is described by Sophie Lewis in her 2021 book Full Surrogacy Now as capitalism’s “[application] of the logic of outsourcing” the very real hardships that come with bearing a child. Genesis is a development of this logic, now found under the guise of an employee benefit at a bloated tech company, later revealed to be the beginning of a campaign to cut maternity leave in its entirety.
Natalie gets six months between each pregnancy, during which she does not receive as many services but also is monitored much less closely. She uses this time to gorge on the junk food she is forbidden to eat under surveillance when she is pregnant as well as copious amounts of drugs and alcohol (she gathers that it is not explicitly prohibited in her contract). She’s mostly content, bar a few moments of vertigo, such as when she sees an Instagram post of a mother’s perfect figure hoisting the newborn that had just been delivered by Natalie, causing her to gaze critically upon her own changing shape and weight. Over time, the hedonistic pleasures of her “fallow” periods lose their appeal, feeling more like an obligatory period of abandon following the regimented rules during her pregnancies. Her friend from the call center notes that she’s behaving “feral, but not in a fun way” one night when they are out clubbing together; there is a sense of prolonged discontentedness festering within Natalie.
The technology industry’s excesses have continually tended towards the outsourcing of labor, both within their organizations in luxurious benefits packages as well as the technology being produced itself; meals, objects, groceries, brought to one’s doorstep by a gig worker at a tap of the screen. The years that Natalie works for The Company, while mired in all the issues that attend liberal feminism, are also amongst the cushiest that one could experience. Natalie is not ultimately responsible for any childcare or work outside of her pregnancies, and had a small army of various specialists at her beck and call (at the beginning of her first fallow period, she is dismayed to find out that her meals will not be provided to her). Yet none of this brings Natalie the fulfillment she seeks.
When Natalie carries for The Company’s chief marketing officer, Jackie, whose employment with The Company is terminated nine weeks into the pregnancy, Natalie is instructed by The Company to undergo an abortion. Jackie goes to the press to expose The Company and doxxes Natalie in the process, causing a flurry of headlines: “Handmaid’s Tale at The Company.” “Company Champions Birth & Gender Equality.” “Company Keeping Birthing Slave.” “Inside the ‘Family Building Benefit’ Revolution: A Win for Organized Labor.” “I’m A Conservative Woman. What The Company is Doing Is the Pro-Natalist Revolution We’ve Been Waiting For.” “Workplace Surrogacy: A Solution for Declining Birth Rates?” Anderson here toys with the range of ideologies and motivations that the general public holds towards surrogacy, quasi-anticipating critiques of her own book. The unique tangle of political implications of surrogacy are rendered clear here; there are dog whistles for conservatism and even eugenicism, yet also the acknowledgement of gestational work as a real type of labor that needs to be accounted for. The subject creates strange bedfellows: “the teachers’ unions argued it was an important benefit and that they supported policies that expanded choices for women in the workplace. Big Tech immediately latched onto them, forming an uneasy alliance.”
Lewis’s book contends with this precarious attitude towards institutionalized surrogacy and the long history of the “gestational fix,” which seeks to use technology to remediate that severe physical toll of gestation. Reproductive technology has made possible a 28 billion dollar industry of commercial gestational surrogates, with booming presences in the global South specifically. While the motivations of the wealthy for pursuing these alternative avenues of reproduction make many of us uneasy, they exist in response to an essential appetite to assuage the strain of child-bearing. Commercial surrogacy, for all its issues, is a true conceptualization of gestational work as compensated labor, achieving some backwards form of radicalism. To Lewis, this is the first step to recognizing gestational labor as work under capitalism, or “something to be struggled against in a utopian horizon free of work and free of value.” Lewis imagines a “gestational commune” that renders pregnancy and childcare collaborative and outside of the limits of the nuclear family, that democratizes reproductive technology by “seizing the means of reproduction.”
It is via this logic—nearly verbatim—that a member of Fallow’s feminist commune Wake-Robin Farm describes their motivations for kidnapping Natalie from The Company: “We took you from them. … You, the means of reproduction. Consider it a work stoppage of sorts. A strike.” While Natalie is held as a political prisoner so that Jackie, one of the farm’s founders, may negotiate the recompense and policy changes she desires from The Company, she is also roped into the “egalitarian” distribution of manual labor across all members of the farm (including hostages). Here, a significant tonal shift occurs; in the first two-thirds of the book seven years pass within pages, but the rest of the novel ambles by with a measured pace. The farm, formed in response to the “alienation of adult working life after late capitalism,” is structured so as to provide a sustainable and community-based alternative society for those who find the mainstream difficult to withstand. The labor system at Wake-Robin Farm requires five-and-a-half hours of work per day, which can be spent doing any of the farm’s income-generating activities like hammock-making, tofu-making, seed-selling, or any of the other domestic labor associated with generally being alive: doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, peeling garlic. Notably, pregnancy for members of Wake-Robin Farm is subject to an approval process; the community needs to agree to buy in to “share the burden of raising the child,” functionally a small realization of Lewis’s imagined gestational commune.
Natalie’s journey with The Company, however far-fetched it may first appear, is not very far removed from our current reality at all. Anderson’s prose is littered with hyper-contemporary cultural objects; Natalie's credit card is the Chase Sapphire Visa, The Company doles out Apple Airtags as “swag”, and Jackie smokes Virginia Slims. Genesis is suggested as a possibility in the alternative present, representative of an extreme collision of tech’s tendency towards outsourcing and the problem of gestational work. Fallow, to its credit, is not satisfied with a patriarchal critique of the contemporary and the framing of Natalie as a martyr for womankind in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale’s surrogacy plot. Despite their surface level parallels, Natalie retains full agency over her employment with The Company and her status as a highly paid surrogate. Gestational work as it exists today may be dystopian, but Anderson is interested in exploring other ways of organizing reproduction, both social and biological. The last act at Wake-Robin Farm makes an earnest effort to imagine how child-bearing and child rearing may function in an anti-capitalist society. That said, the novel rather notably does not contend with how much technological and gestational labor is ultimately outsourced to the global South in the contemporary, limiting the scope of its imagined liberation to a relatively deracialized global North. Natalie herself is a middle-class white woman—albeit downwardly mobile—and the subject of race and its intricate dynamics with respect to childbirth and surrogacy are mostly absent from the novel.
The act of giving birth itself is described as “going into labor”; the word reproduction is used for both the economy and the womb, and the novel’s title likens the fertility in the reproductive sense to the fertility of fallow fields. This existing overlap between language that describes that rote work of birthing another human being and the production of economic value implicates the two subjects as inextricably linked. Much equine-oriented language is used to describe Natalie when she works for The Company; the program coordinator sends her GIFs of a mare galloping, she’s referred to as a “winning horse” that The Company had bet on. At Wake-Robin Farm, the prose tends towards cow symbolism; Natalie feels the urge to “low,” she smells the sharp scent of their manure, and she explicitly states that she likes how “meditative” cows are. Anderson suggests that the farm is not concerned with horsepower but rather sowing fertile fields through measured pace and cyclical replenishment.
Natalie initially is allured by Genesis’s potential to provide her financial freedom and the ability to “avoid working”; the call center had taught her there was “no such thing as a good job.” At Wake-Robin Farm, she is surprised by her proclivity for both the income-generating and domestic labor that is assigned to her, even at times working an extra hour of her own volition. She amends her statement: “I never want to work a full-time job out there again.”
