Abby Rabinowitz: Surrogate storytelling
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2014
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Journalist Abby Rabinowitz embarks on a journey through India's burgeoning surrogacy industry in search of a missing baby. Abby Rabinowitz teaches writing at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in nonfiction writing. Her work has appeared in the journal Science, the New York Times, and Nautilus. Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU a scientist? |
| 0:06.0 | I felt it. |
| 0:07.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:13.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | Hey, everyone. Hi everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider, where we bring you true stories of how science has affected people's lives. |
| 0:31.2 | This week's story is from Abby Rabinowitz as part of Human Enhancement, a collaboration with the New York Hall of Science to produce stories related to the Human Plus exhibit on how technology is changing who we are. |
| 0:42.4 | The story was recorded in April 2014 at Ibeam in New York City. |
| 0:53.6 | Two years ago, I went on a quest to find a white baby who was rumored to be lost in Mumbai. |
| 1:01.2 | I'd heard this rumor from a filmmaker in Brooklyn, who like me was researching surrogate motherhood in India. |
| 1:08.3 | And now, according to the story, there was an HIV positive surrogate who |
| 1:12.6 | is commanded by her doctor to have a late-term abortion. But the baby was born alive, or so |
| 1:19.6 | the story went. And the foreign couple who'd hired this woman to bear their child would never know |
| 1:26.2 | that the baby existed. Was the story true? |
| 1:30.1 | I decided that I would find out. Now at this point, I'd been researching surrogate motherhood in |
| 1:36.2 | India for three years. I'd come across the story first as a graduate student, and then I went to Mumbai |
| 1:42.7 | where I spent nine months interviewing surrogate mothers and egg donors. |
| 1:47.0 | And these women are part of what is essentially a new form of medical tourism, |
| 1:52.0 | where clients come from countries where surrogacy is illegal or expensive |
| 1:58.0 | to hire local women in India to bear their children at bargain rates. |
... |
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