Womb outsourcing... what's coming next?

(or The US: if there hadn't been them, we shouldn't have invented them anyway..)

A US company is settling a new lucrative business: outsourcing pregnancies from US and other perspective western countries to India. US hospital stays to give birth are so expensive that it seemed pretty much a good business opportunity to have ready-made children on the cheap side of the world, especially convenient for those that can't have children and are thinking of a surrogate mother: US mothers' surrogation expenses normally include not only hospital treatments, but also the mother's remuneration and are still not affordable for many mums-to-be.

In India, impoverished jobless women are getting the chance to earn good money and be respected by their families by renting their wombs to US and UK women that provide their own egg, their husbands' or donated sperms and get a ready-made Caucasian baby from them.

With all the respect for unfertile women and men who have been long wishing to have a baby, there is something sharply disturbing about this new surrogation.

Already multinationals didn't have any barriers (or had very few) to exploit the global leverage of underdeveloped countries to move there cost-effective factories, acquiring raw materials, setting monocultures, etc.; now, in the neoliberal phases 2, even normal individuals from our hemisphere enjoy the opportunity to earn something from this long-lasting unbalanced North-South relationship. Actually, it worked also before, when hour houses got full of Polish or Philippine nannies forced to migrate; but the birth outsourcing business sounds completely different stuff.

But why not, after all? Many Indian women are poor, culturally educated to give birth to the largest possible number of children, living in small villages with no job opportunity: by renting their wombs they manage to buy a house or send their children to school.

On the other side, many US women can't afford the price currently needed to cover the whole surrogate mother affair, which still is forbidden in most European countries, where the vitro fertilization practices are strictly regulated. Are economic considerations enough to allow the practice and to consider it as mutually beneficial?

Not in my opinion. Just imagine if the practice goes on: what would happen in a few years when western women busy with their careers and actually more and more stressed by their bosses not to benefit of maternity leaves (which in Italy is already a common thing whit temporary or atypical job contracts) will increasingly avail themselves of the practice? Doesn't sound like a barbarian form of exploitation getting poor women to give birth to our children cause we might not feel like, cause it might not be the right time, cause "I can't get a part-time right now"?

More, it sounds like the extreme turning point of the specialization trend that has been shaping our global society in the past 50 years. If any economic initiative must be cost-effective and take advantage of the local features where it could be best performed, why not doing the same with human beings'lives, that stay at the very core of the economy? In a 1984-like scenario, human beings' functions, even the basic animal ones, will be divided according to birthplace and social position: western offspring will study and access the higher intellectual and managerial positions, Asian human resources, well educated but cheap, will be used to produce high-tech, give birth to our children, take care of them and our houses; for African and middle-east low income people is not so odd to imagine a ghastly organ business future, with people literally selling parts of their bodies to western clients (something like that is already happening in Iran where the government promoted a liberal kidneys market and people are allowed to sell their kidneys to the best offerer).

International agreements are needed to regulate the matter and to reaffirm the untouchable dignity of human beings that, as Kant perfectly said more than 3 centuries ago, can never be means of other human beings' ends (nor can be used as "rented properties") but must be ends themselves.

CSR or revolution?

CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is the set of theories and practices increasingly produced in the last twenty years to enable companies to manage their role in the society. The public arena and the markets, nowadays networked in a whole tangled conversation, as the Cluetrain Manifesto warned us more than ten years ago (http://www.cluetrain.com/) are asking more to companies and what most of them have been answering is CSR policies.

These policies should allow the company to find its own decent place inside communities by running social and community programs, involving employees in voluntary activities, sponsoring educational initiatives, modifying their internal procedures and practices in compliance with legal or ethical requirements. Now, everybody understands the the true issue for companies is how to keep on attracting market shares that have become volatile, connected and much more aware of what is going on in the real world. Nothing is secret nowadays. A company bad performance or an unethical behavior is easily caught and brought up in the Internet public justice tribunal. None is anymore safe, at any level, even if managers are still earning fortunes.

Of course, the hope is that a crisis event would be strongly mitigated by an irony reputation, just the one that CSR is called to provide. Even if CSR is effectively working in providing pupils scholarships, minimizing environmental impact, sponsoring sport competitions and cultural events, the question is not if CSR can be trustworthy for consumers and citizens' wellbeing but, above all, if it is ethical or politically correct to accept money and services in exchange for the usual exploitation and disruption companies are bringing about, especially when they are more and more moving away from western countries to the south of the world.

Doesn't exist the risk that while we get the "social" smiling face of the company, someone else is actually getting its (our) wastes and the impoverishment of environment, health, ecetc.?

Moreover, in some evident cases CSR and charities are the means by which powerful organisations and their CEO clean up their bad conscience, so allowing themselves to keep on with their business (think about the well known Soros Foundation, or check out Mazzotta's documentary OIL http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfmfuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=50469345

The suggestion is that we should be not only mistrustful but openly hostile to whatever corporate means prevent us from clearly denouncing the ruin that the neoliberal economy and the big corporations are causing, no matter how friendly a new means as CSR is, and the concrete improvements it could actually provide or trigger within disadvantaged communities.

Of course, we need to recognize that the issue can't have the same weight for a young university researcher in Boston and for a workman's son in Ukraine, where getting a company support can really make the difference i the labor market (and actually it works a little bit everywhere).

What about CSR practitioners? Do they think they're helping the world get better or they look at CSR just as one of the awful boring office tasks they have to accomplish?

Personally, I like pretty practical approaches: can we keep on demonizing big companies while dreaming of a bloodless revolution or a natural catastrophe that should cleanse up our world from the misery of capitalism? If it was possible to get rid of all of them, could we get by without companies?

If a new social sensitivity and the Internet non hierarchical culture are finally penetrating the company world making it more human and democratic, this is an historical achievement that could raise up new unpredictable scenarios and even if companies' primary goal is still money, the good news is that it is no longer the only one. Acting the fiction becomes reality. Our global society can just be improved by a networked collective effort towards democratization and social justice at all levels, included corporate level: managers must be not only responsible in front of the public but reachable, as much as politicians should be. I personally don't dream of a society made just of public institutions or NGOs: the true goal is to open and democratize companies and CSR could just work as a trojan horse.

Le glorie di Roma...

Interessante parallelismo mi viene in mente pensando alle povere e ricorrenti sorti italiche. Sembra non sia passato molto tempo da quando la res publica romana e il suo modello politico dominavano la scena al di qua del mediterraneo.

Come allora l'assenza di un monarca e il senato non assicuravano l'egualitaria amministrazione della cosa pubblica né tanto meno la copartecipazione delle diverse classi alla gestione del potere, così oggi la politica italiana rende sempre più manifesta la sua natura di millenaria oligarchia, sotto le lise vesti democratiche, di corporativismo e clientelismo, di società complessivamente sottosviluppata (dal punto di vista culturale ed economico) ed apatica.

Anche oggi i nostri politici somigliano più a una fazione di grassi senatori che ad una moderna classe politica europea, capace di traghettare il paese verso la piena democratizzazione delle sue istituzioni e la gestione sostenibile del patrimonio pubblico. Clientelari e arrivisti, preoccupati unicamente del potere e delle ricchezze accumulate, stanno gettando da oltre vent'anni il nostro paese nella confusione, succhiando a più non posso le risorse disponibili, abbandonando la gente al fai da te nelle questioni sociali più urgenti, evitando accuratamente di risolvere anche solo uno dei nostri antichi problemi (burocrazia, mafie, disoccupazione, etc.).

Mi vien da dire che noi Italiani ce l'abbiamo nel sangue, echeggiando lo straordinario intervento di Monicelli a raiperunanotte: lui sosteneva giustamente che ci è sempre piaciuto essere governati, che è la cifra della nostra attitudine politica, avere qualcuno a cui affidare i nostri destini e che prenda le decisioni per noi, nel bene e nel male (almeno finché il male non diventa esasperatamente scandaloso e allora la sua rivelazione provoca una deflagrazione, come è accaduto con tangentopoli, che sembra nettare per un pò il nostro male morale, salvo poi riportarci puntualmente al punto di partenza).

E' chiaro che questo atteggiamento favorisce gli individui più intraprendenti e senza scrupoli, interessati alla sola acquisizione e protezione di un sempre maggior numero di privilegi, di cui altri ovviamente portano il fardello, proprio come accadeva nella Roma repubblicana: i senatori, una stretta oligarchia di origine prevalentemente nobiliare, difendevano strenuamente le loro libertas (privilegi, appunto) mischiando costantemente gli interessi di casata alle sorti dello stato, al più malcelando l'ostilità e il terrore della plebe con sparute concessioni istituzionali (i tribuni, magistrati, etc.).

Perché questo discorso, che a molti potrebbe sembrare ozioso? Perché sebbene nessuno si sognerebbe di riconoscere all'Italia la paternità delle istituzioni democratiche dell'occidente, né tantomeno il raggiungimento di standard soddisfacenti anche solo nell'attualità, è perlomeno da rimarcare che con l'istituto della res publica è nato proprio qui in Italia, configurandosi come una delle più potenti organizzazioni oligarchiche della storia, capace di conquistare e dominare territori vastissimi e di dare vita anche ad una notevole forma di civilizzazione, quella latina. L'assetto politico della Roma antica non era certo un uniquum ma non è assurdo immaginare che il suo lascito abbia segnato profondamente l'attitudine politica delle genti di questo paese, scavando un solco incolmabile tra le pratiche delle élites, belligeranti e ricchissime, e le masse schiacciate e inermi. Insomma, ce l'abbiamo nel sangue.

E si può lottare contro il proprio sangue?

Non ho mai valutato seriamente la questione dell'origine genetica delle cultura, o meglio in questo caso del comportamento civico: siamo abituati a pensare che tutto si possa risolvere nella valutazione di fattori sociali, economici, storici e politici. E invece un ruolo fondamentale nelle decisioni elettorali, nella cultura civica, etc., spetta a fattori del tutto personali, psicologici, oltreché totalmente irrazionali: più "information cascade" e meno discussione, insomma. Ma proprio in questo coacervo di personale e irrazionale chi può dire quanta parte abbia la genetica?