Reproductive Labour, Commodification, and Gestational Surrogacy in Greece: A materialist feminist approach

Abstract

This paper examines surrogacy in Greece through a materialist and Marxist feminist framework grounded in Social Reproduction Theory, situating gestation within the political economy of reproductive labour under capitalism. While Greek law constructs surrogacy as an altruistic, non-commercial, and consensual act, such framing obscures the economic, affective, psychological and corporeal labour that gestation entails. Through an analysis of the Greek legislative context and an original reading of Greek surrogacy case law, the paper demonstrates how the legal framework operates as an ideological and repressive apparatus that depoliticises reproductive work and erases the surrogate’s labour, privileging the reproductive aspirations of intended parents. Situating surrogacy within a continuum of reproductive work, we highlight how alienation, understood in the Marxist sense of estrangement from one’s labour and its product, is produced materially and psychologically through moralised ideals of care, sacrifice, agency, and femininity. Making reproductive labour visible is the precondition for contesting its conditions of extraction, and a labour-centred reconceptualisation of surrogacy that repositions surrogates as reproductive workers opens space for collective contestation.