Taboo Trades

Exploitation Creep: Feminism, Sex, and Reproduction in International Law

• Season 5 • Episode 11

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Welcome to a very special bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast! Today I have a record number of guests – five in total—continuing a discussion that we began at Yale’s Newman Colloquium earlier this summer. We discuss exploitation and trafficking in international human rights law, especially in the context of reproductive and sexual labor. You’ll hear more about that colloquium and that conversation during the podcast. Each guest introduces themselves at the start of the podcast, but you can also read their full bios and a reading list in the show notes. 

Host: Kim Krawiec, Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Guests: 

Janie Chuang, Professor of Law, American University, Washington College of Law

Dina Francesca Haynes, Executive Director, Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights; Lecturer in Law (spring term), and Research Scholar in Law, Yale University

Joanne Meyerowitz, Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and Professor of American Studies, Yale University

Alice M. Miller, Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Law and Co-Director, Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale University

Mindy Jane Roseman, Director of International Law Programs and Director of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights, Yale University

Reading List:

Janie A. Chuang

  • "Preventing trafficking through new global governance over labor migration." Ga. St. UL Rev. 36 (2019): 1027.
  • “Exploitation Creep And The Unmaking Of Human Trafficking Law.” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 108, no. 4, 2014, pp. 609–49. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5305/amerjintelaw.108.4.0609 . Accessed 13 June 2025.

Dina Haynes

Kimberly D. Krawiec

Joanne Meyerowitz<

Mindy Roseman: The Newman Fund, which supported the colloquium,

is targeted towards scholarship on international comparative law.

And when I reached out to Ali and Dina about the topic,

we were very alive to the increasing conservative, if not authoritarian, nature of the international space and the use of terms such as exploitation and protection to motivate a revision in thinking around human rights,

particularly as relates to gender, sexuality and reproduction.

Kim Krawiec: Hey. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Traits Podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell, but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravik.

Welcome to a very special bonus episode of the Taboo Traits Podcast.

Today I have a record number of guests, five in total.

Continuing a discussion that we began at Yale's Newman Colloquium earlier this summer.

We discuss exploitation and trafficking in international law,

especially in the context of reproductive and sexual labor.

You'll hear more about that colloquium and that conversation during the podcast.

Each guest introduces themselves at the start of the podcast,

but you can also read their full bios and a reading list in the show notes.

Okay, well this is definitely a first for the podcast. Not one, not two, not three, but five guests, which is definitely a record.

Before today, the most I had ever had was two people, if there were was a co authored paper or something. So this is very exciting.

Why don't we start by having each of you just introduce yourselves to the listeners. Janie, why don't we start with you?

Janie Chuang: Hi everyone. So I'm Janie Chuang. I teach at American University, Washington College of Law. I have been working on trafficking issues.

Dina Haynes: For.

Janie Chuang: Almost 25 years. Over 25 years?

Kim Krawiec: No, you're not that old, Janie. It can't be.

Janie Chuang: I was involved in the drafting of the UN Trafficking protocol and have been amazed by how this field has morphed over the decades.

I teach courses relating to trafficking and my focus in the trafficking world has been on non sexual labor trafficking.

Kim Krawiec: Joanne?

Joanne Meyerowitz: Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm Joanne Meyerowitz and I'm a professor of history and American Studies at Yale University and I work on recent U.S. history and recent international history with a focus on gender and sexuality.

And most recently I've been working been looking at the history of some radical feminists who've worked with the anti conservative, anti gender movement.

Kim Krawiec: Allie.

Ali Miller: Hi. I'm also very glad to be here and with this set of people.

I teach between the public health school and the law school at Yale and the Women Gender and Sexuality Studies Council and co direct a global health justice partnership between law and public health.

I also have a long history. I was one of the international human rights law advisors to the Global Alliance against trafficking women in 1994 when they formed up in Chiang Mai,

Thailand,

and have, like many of us, been interested in the ways that it has. What we tried to do has served many purposes other than our original goals.

Kim Krawiec: Allie, I'm not sure you said your full name right.

Ali Miller: I'm Ali Miller and I teach at the law school and the Public Health school here at Yale.

Dina Haynes: Hi, I'm Dena Haynes. I'm very pleased to be here. I am the executive director of the Shell center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School.

Mindy Roseman: I'm Mindy Jane Roseman. I direct international law programs and the Gruber Program for Global justice and Women's Rights at Yale Law.

I am a lawyer and a historian and I've been working on developing the international human rights framework around practices related to gestational surrogacy as part of family formation.

Kim Krawiec: So the reason that we are all here with such a record breaking number and in terms of how interesting they all are guests today is because we all recently met up with the group at Yale Law School for the Newman Colloquium.

And I'm going to let today's guest talk a little bit more about that. But just in brief,

the goal was to discuss the evolving role of exploitation and of trafficking as well in international law and policy. I put exploitation and scare quotes up here. Listeners can't see it, but we're going to talk a little bit about sort of the use of that term, exploitation for various purposes,

particularly its deployment around sex work and reproductive labor, such as surrogacy. And we all wanted to explore how the concept of exploitation is doing a lot of work, both legally and politically, sometimes in contexts where exploitation, as a lot of us would think of that term, is not clear or is contested.

And in fact, as we're going to talk more about during this show, the word exploitation sits at the heart of a lot of contemporary legal debates, both domestically and internationally, but it often remains ill defined or just sort of not defined at all.

Dina, Mindy and Ali were the organizers of that colloquium. I'm going to turn it first over to Mindy so she can start us off. And Mindy, if you could just talk a little bit about what caused you to think that this particular discussion was needed right now.

Mindy Roseman: Thanks so much. That's a great question. The Newman Fund, which supported the colloquium,

is targeted towards scholarship on international comparative law.

And when I reached out to Ali and Dina about the topic we were very alive to the increasing conservative, if not authoritarian, nature of the international space and the use of terms such as exploitation and protection to motivate a revision in thinking around human rights,

particularly as relates to gender, sexuality and reproduction.

You may or may not know,

but recently the European Union had amended its 2011 directive on preventing and Combating Trafficking in Human Beings to include new language called Exploitation of Surrogacy.

And while the EU Human Trafficking Directive was generally understood to target trafficking in sex and other labor sectors,

the use of surrogacy was new and the language of exploitation also a new engagement with surrogacy to expand now the remit of trafficking to include reproduction.

So what prompted the colloquium was the prospect of the continued deployment of the term exploitation to promulgate regressive human rights norms around sex, gender and reproduction, whether at the UN through its treaty bodies, or in regional human rights systems,

especially in light of the fact that exploitation is not well defined under international law.

Kim Krawiec: Thank you for that, Janie. I wanted to turn to you next because you are the one, as I understand it, who came up with this term exploitation creep or trafficking. Trafficking creep in your 2014 article.

I am linking to that in the show notes. I will also link to any of the other work that we discuss here today, as well as to the EU Directive that Mindy just mentioned.

So if listeners want to learn more about any of these topics or about any of the guests we have today and their work, you can just look to that. But Janie, can you talk a little bit more about that article and this notion of exploitation creep or trafficking creep which I actually blogged about for you guys that might not know.

I've already blogged about Janie since we got back from the colloquium.

Janie Chuang: Oh, thanks so much.

Yeah, so I wrote this article in 2014.

At the time I was really troubled by how the US Government had been really making a concerted effort to rebrand trafficking as modern slavery and then treating all forced labor as trafficking,

which in my view was a really troubling conflation of legal concepts, at least under international law.

What's ironic about it is it was actually a really well intentioned move on the part of the Obama administration's State Department at the time. There was a sense that there was this almost exclusive focus on sex trafficking and neglect a non sexual labor trafficking.

So if we just rebrand trafficking as modern slavery and we invoke imagery of chattel slavery, that'll provoke outrage.

We can draw attention to non Sexual forms of forced labor and labor trafficking.

And so it was an effort to pivot right towards non sexual labor trafficking, but through a conflation of concepts. So there are two conflations. One was the conflation of trafficking with slavery, and then the second was to conflate forced labor with trafficking.

And so prior to this move, there had always been kind of, I think from the time of the protocol drafting, the sense that trafficking was distinct in that there were three parts to it.

Right. There was an act element of recruitment or movement or sale of a person using some form of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of putting them into exploitation.

Right. So three elements.

And we'd always sort of assumed that if you had the exploitation element, you met the means element already, the force, fraud or coercion. Because the type of exploitation we were thinking about would inherently involve some form of force, fraud or coercion.

So really the trafficking operationally definition came down to the sort of act element and the exploitation element.

And what the State Department did was to say, oh, well,

we'll take this element of this part of the act element of harboring and read it really expansively. So you'd no longer need movement or any sort of recruitment process.

Right. Somebody could be born into a situation of trafficking. So what this meant was traditionally the ILO and the State Department or the Labor Department department had kind of jurisdiction over forced labor and that would include intergenerational bonded labor where people are born into the situation, they're not recruited or moved into it.

But really this was kind of a bureaucratic turf war between state and labor. And state wanted to sort of take over the entire portfolio and subsume all forced labor under trafficking.

And so, you know, what that means is that if you essentially get rid of the distinctive act element, you're left with exploitation. Right. So the three part definition of trafficking reduces to the purpose of exploitation.

And as has been mentioned, exploitation is not defined under international law. It very much counts, depends on the eye of the beholder.

And so it created so many opportunities for mischief in terms of what we're going to call exploitation.

And so now we have a situation where,

you know, you call it exploitation and it's trafficking, and if it's trafficking, it's modern slavery.

And so you can use that rhetoric, that stream of creeping from that thing we call exploitation to modern slavery to make it all the more condemnable. Right.

And so that's what I was worried about was just this week to use these terms that actually do have legal definitions and Conflate them in a way that I don't think is, at the end of the day,

very useful for the people we're purporting to try to protect.

Kim Krawiec: Great, thank you for that.

So, Joanne, I'm gonna turn to you now and let you give us sort of your historian's perspective, all of this. Can you talk to us? So I know that you have also written and researched on these shifting uses of the framing of exploitation, especially around feminist advocacy.

How has that. What can you tell us about the evolution of that term and its uses then over the decades within that space?

Joanne Meyerowitz: Thanks for that question.

So I've been doing research on a group of feminists who call themselves radical feminists, or abolitionist feminists, or gender critical feminists. And their opponents have other names for them. TERFs, governance feminists, carceral feminists.

And these feminists are ones who have collaborated repeatedly with the conservative anti gender movement.

And we can trace their history back to the late 1970s and early 1980s,

when US feminists were fighting with each other over issues of sexuality, the so called sex wars.

And to give you a very simplified account of these sex wars, on one side there were feminists who emphasized women's right to sexual expression, to sexual pleasure and bodily autonomy.

And then the other side there were these radical feminists, the ones who called themselves radical feminists, who emphasized the dangers of sexuality and especially sexual violence at the hands of men.

And that second group of feminists was unequivocally opposed to ***********, sex work, surrogacy, and trans rights.

And for almost half a century now, since the 1980s, they've been joining conservatives at national and international levels to make ***********, sex work, surrogacy, and trans inclusion illegal, all in the name of protecting women.

And you can find these radical feminists, and they are by no means a majority among feminists in the feminist movement, but you can find them occasionally using the word exploitation from at least the 1980s on.

But back then they were, it seems much more likely to emphasize violence, to use the word violence than the word exploitation.

So early on, they claimed that all *********** and all sex work, for example, were violence against women,

and claiming that surrogacy was a violation of women's bodies, and claiming that trans women were predatory,

potentially violent,

invasive men.

But more recently, in the past couple decades, they've been shifting away from this language of violence and more into this language of exploitation and using that vague term, exploitation, where you don't actually have to show that there was actual violence to make the case to make their case.

So if a woman voluntarily agrees to participate in an erotic film or voluntarily engages in sex work,

they don't have to say there was actually violence involved or coercion or fraud involved in this in order to say it's wrong. They can just claim she was exploited. That vague term exploitation, and that's an easier argument to make.

So the word exploitation has been helpful.

Kim Krawiec: Thank you so much. A recurring thought,

I think, through a lot of the comments that we just had, conflation of various terms that might have distinct meanings, as well as the use of terms that don't actually have a very well defined meaning, at least within the law.

And sometimes the intentions for which they are invoked are well intended. Janie mentioned that the, you know, it was well intended in the beginning,

and then sometimes, as we're gonna talk about, it's may not be so well intended. And even when it's well intended, that doesn't mean that we might be happy with the results,

the consequences that come from that, whether intended or unintended.

So let's dig in then a little bit more to this concept of the opportunistic use of exploitation,

the weaponization of that term around exploitation and trafficking narratives.

Dina, I'm gonna turn it over to you now. I know that you have a forthcoming book on regressive governance and that you also wrote, I think it was back in 2019,

on this weaponization of the human trafficking narrative as a means to consolidate power in regressive leaders.

And so can you maybe draw this connection between regressive governance and the trafficking narrative? And that wouldn't, I think, be obvious to listeners upon first hearing about the two concepts?

Dina Haynes: Yeah, I'd be delighted to, I think, want to first say that I think about exploitation maybe a little bit differently than some of the other people on this panel. And it's because although I'm an academic, I'm also a practicing lawyer.

And I think about it exclusively, even in my writing, through the lens of representing immigrant clients.

I am not a terf, I am not a radical feminist,

and I just published a piece today talking about how many people have been driven out of this work because of the interfighting and those sorts of accusations and discussions. So I just want to make clear that one of the reasons I think about exploitation differently is simply because Congress in the US created these routes,

very limited routes for immigrants to access benefits, often immigration related, that they are seeking. Right. So my, my lawyering is very much through trying to redress the stripping of agency that immigrant clients have already felt by helping them gain access to some of the limited benefits that are available to them,

which always,

because Congress has required it,

require some explanation of the exploitation that they have suffered.

Kim Krawiec: That's kind of interesting, Dina, just to back up that one mechanism for returning agency to your clients is to highlight the ways in which agency has been denied to them through the exploitation lens.

Dina Haynes: Yeah, I mean, I call myself a client centered human rights advocate and I wrote an article with that title way back in 2012 or something like that because people validly were concerned about lawyers working within a system that strips them of their agency.

And I agree with that.

So I wanted to make sure to center my work in what the client wants. Right.

That's what a lawyer's job is, to help the person that they're assisting understand the law and then make choices themselves to achieve what they're trying to achieve. So all of that is just to give a backdrop for me maybe thinking about this a little bit differently.

And I think it's important to say that because one of the things that the government is doing as they try to weaponize all of this is accusing lawyers and people like me of harming and harboring and trafficking our own clients.

So I want to just put out there that,

that while we have all of these conversations, I think it is important to not feed into the narrative that is being used and weaponized by these same regressive leaders that in accessing laws that have been created by Congress that still exist, for the time being at least,

lawyers are somehow,

as Jeff Sessions said, dirty,

or as Stephen Miller regularly says, unethical.

Because of course I don't believe that that's true. I believe that I'm assisting people with their,

with their rights as they are currently written.

On the,

on the weaponization issue,

I have written about how what I call regressive leaders in the United States, but elsewhere as well, I mean, Orban and others,

leaders in Greece and Italy are, are guilty of the same thing. Which is again weaponizing the human trafficking narrative to attack advocates and people who are migrating by framing migrants as traffickers or the aggressors and citizens as the victims.

Not always, but quite often that's the binary that regressive leaders are using. And of course it's because it feeds into their fostering.

What they're trying to do is foster and exploit rising anti immigrant sentiment to justify building literal and legal walls.

So Trump famously, in his first time in office,

regularly talked about traffickers bringing people across the borders to rape and pillage.

You know, our women so it's a very nativist narrative as well.

I would just say as well that from my view, capitalism is the problem, not exploitation or exploitation creep.

It's if we had good laws that allowed us to limit exploitation of people, of workers,

then we wouldn't need to worry about human trafficking being used to exploit. But I very much appreciate Janie's comment that this is why there was this battle in part between Department of Labor and Department of State, because there are these two sort of competing frameworks for thinking about trafficking.

And at the international level, all of this is under the international criminal law. Right. So we have some sort of competing,

larger legal narratives here as well.

Kim Krawiec: Thank you.

So with that, I want to turn to Allie.

You have talked. I love both of these terms, by the way, and I'm going to, as I think I've told you, I'm going to start adopting them in my own conversations,

with credit, of course.

You've referred to trafficking as an accordion crime and also as a.

I hope I'm saying it right now, polimpsest.

So, first of all, can you explain what those two things mean and why trafficking in your mind sort of fits that definition?

Ali Miller: I will give it a try.

And in the. And the importance of thinking about,

thinking hard about the work that should be done to stop exploitation, to stop harm against workers is part of what I think underlies all of our conversations. And as Dina ended the fact that this word exploitation moves not from a kind of a labor context, not from comparative economic distributive justice context,

but into international criminal law is why I took on the piece of saying what's wrong with it in international criminal law, which is where I then use the terms accordion law and the palimpsest metaphor.

So I wanted to be clear that part of what motivates, I think all of us is attending to real harms. But noticing what happens when law gets negotiated in a field and with players and interests that have nothing to do with the people's interests most affected.

So that when the word exploitation that Janie was describing moves into international criminal law, it is precisely that it is in a criminal code.

And a criminal code is meant to be at minimum able to be read and predict what facts, what practices are forbidden.

And when you read the international criminal law on trafficking, which is in the UN Palermo Protocol, which has a long name,

you cannot tell what acts are forbidden. And I use the term accordion to capture the way that the ways in which nation states that ratify the Palermo Protocol can report on a wide range of practices illegal in their countries and call them elements of their commitment to end trafficking.

It expands and it contracts based on national law rather than having set an actual content against which nations would have to reform their law. There are some parts of the Palermo Protocol that have content.

Right.

The definition of Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol says that as exactly as Janie was earlier noting the three elements. It's a set of acts for the purpose of exploitation.

And then the text says exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation,

forced labor or services,

slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. So forced labor has meaning in international law. Servitude, they have meaning.

Exploitation of the prostitution of others has no clear definition.

So some countries claim to be fulfilling the international criminal law obligations of the Protocol through criminalizing buyers and sellers of sexual.

Some claim to be fulfilling it by criminalizing only the people that move people into the sex sector and any other labor sector with modes of coercion or force.

This is where the term palimpsest comes in.

How is it that the only content that is given to this vague concept of exploitation has sex in it?

A palimpsest in our history is when an original canvas is painted over,

but let's say the hand that was holding the apple then becomes the hand that's holding the baby. But you can still see the hand holding the apple in the painted over canvas.

In the Palermo Protocol, the fact that it was built on almost 100 years of what were called white slavery conventions, international covenants that only banned the movement of people,

mostly women,

sometimes women of full age and children,

across borders for the purposes of prostitution in the text, gratifying the passions of another.

So the palimpsest part is that even though the negotiators of the Palermo Protocol claim to be looking at a wide range of labor sectors and a wide range of abusive practices,

the only tilt they give this vague and undefined term of exploitation in the criminal code is a tilt that comes from history,

the legacy of laws against movement for the purposes of prostitution.

So it expands, it contracts. And that's why when Dina mentions it can be weaponized,

or when Janie talks about the way in which it becomes a turf war between different entities trying to increase their scope. It expands and contracts according to the interests of the people using it and almost never according to the needs of the people most affected.

Kim Krawiec: Thank you, Ali. That was really helpful.

Since we're on the topic of history, Joanne, I'm gonna just return to you.

You mentioned before,

I'm gonna use the phrase radical feminism,

although as you said, there are a lot of different terms that are used.

You mentioned how this, certain strands at least of radical feminism and collaboration with conservative actors helped institutionalize this sort of concept of exploitation, of trafficking,

originally by equating all sex work with violence.

Moving on and to sort of focusing more on exploitation, I'm going to shift us a little bit towards surrogacy.

Are we seeing a similar development there, a similar sort of movement at work?

Joanne Meyerowitz: So if it's okay with you, I'm going to give us a mini history lesson here.

Kim Krawiec: History lessons are always welcome.

Joanne Meyerowitz: So on the issue of sex work, there was one group that was particularly influential,

a radical feminist organization by the name of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, which is a group that still exists and was founded in 1988 by US anti *********** activists.

So these were radical feminists who had lost their battles over *********** in the U.S. they were trying to make it illegal in the U.S. they lost those battles and then they moved into the international arena opposing sex work.

Mindy Roseman: But.

Joanne Meyerowitz: And they soon won consultative status in the United Nations.

The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women claimed that all sex work was a form of violence and should be eliminated. And they fought with other feminists, especially socialist feminists,

and also fought with sex workers themselves who saw sex work as a kind of labor and called for the kind of labor standards that we find in other types of work.

This conflict came to a head at the end of the 1990s when the UN was hammering out its protocol on trafficking, that Palermo protocol that Ali was just talking about and that Janie was involved in.

So there were these protracted sessions in Vienna. There were 11 sessions over 1999 and 2000 where the feminists fought with each other.

And the Coalition in Trafficking Against Women and other radical feminists joined with religious conservatives in the attempt to include all voluntary migrations for sex work as trafficking,

thereby expanding that definition of trafficking beyond coercion and fraud and making the consent of the sex worker irrelevant.

And they had some success here in shaping the language of this protocol and using the term exploitation to sort of accordion that out. At the same time, there were some radical feminists, and I'm talking about some of the very same people here who were also opposing surrogacy.

And they saw that as violence, as a violation of women's bodies,

as a violation both by the doctors and by men who were hiring surrogates.

And in 1984, way back when, a group of them founded an international Group called finrage, which stands for Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering.

And even back then, in the 1980s, they were already drawing the analogy between surrogacy and sex work.

Some of them were calling sex work at that point reproductive trafficking. So the word trafficking is back in here.

Once again, these groups, this group opposed other feminists who wanted fair labor standards, who wanted regulation of surrogacy contracts, who wanted safety protections for reproductive labor, and so on.

And here, too, the radical feminists joined with religious conservatives in their attempt to make surrogacy illegal.

So for them, there was no such thing as ethical surrogacy.

So that movement, the radical feminist anti surrogacy movement, it faded a bit in the 1990s,

just as the anti sex work, anti trafficking movement was growing.

But it didn't disappear entirely,

and it's been revived. Finrage still exists, and it's been revived in the past 10 years.

So the analogy of surrogacy is akin to sex work, of surrogacy as a form of violence, of surrogacy as exploitation, of surrogacy as sexual trafficking.

It's been there all along,

but we're just hearing it again now, and we're hearing it more.

Kim Krawiec: So. Joanne, can I just follow up on that? What this. This is asking about very recent history rather than sort of the longer lens that I know you've used to look at this.

What is the current focus of a group like Fenrage, given.

Given the sort of liberalization that I think we've seen across most jurisdictions, at least in the United States, of access to reproductive technology?

What is there? Have they shifted the types of things that they're sort of doing battle against, or has it remained fairly constant?

Joanne Meyerowitz: You know, in terms of surrogacy? It's pretty much the same. Still opposed, still vehemently opposed.

Early on, they were also opposed to abortion pills and also opposed to ivf, which they saw as kinds of reproductive technologies, new reproductive technologies that were dangerous and violating women's bodies.

I've heard less, much less of that. The focus now is much more solely on something like surrogacy.

Kim Krawiec: Great, thank you.

Okay. So along these same lines, Mindy, I think I'm gonna turn to you, and then if Deena or Ali want to follow up, they can do that.

I want to turn us more to some of the contradictions that you have written about in how international institutions treat surrogacy and what's behind the emerging view that you kind of started us off with that surrogacy constitutes reproductive exploitation.

How does that map on to any other sort of broader movements or anxieties that you might see out there around gender, the family or other issues?

Mindy Roseman: Yeah, how much time do we have?

I think it's what we're experiencing right at the moment. And building on what Joanne had sketched out for us is the ascendancy of a certain kind of coalition of actors,

feminists, who really believe deeply that there's something sacred and different about the female body,

understood as somehow having definition and integrity in biology, like a foundation in biology and as defined against the male body.

And with that feminine comes a whole set of expectations about love and caring and sacrifice, you know, and then it gets mapped on to a political and social order which, you know,

marks the political and the market from the apolitical, the home. You know, it's almost a redeployment of haven in a heartless world of the 19th century. Separate sphere stuff, which we thought we overcame at least in the, you know,

with the various liberation movements in the 60s, 70s and so on.

We're seeing like, the retrenchment. The reaction to all of that right now is in the ascendancy.

I see surrogacy as this moral panic and inflection point about fears of global depopulation of the dominant group.

However, it's contextualized in many industrial countries.

I see it as somehow a very generative space for thinking,

for, like, just reinstantiating very traditional gender roles in this new technological space where information flows freely across borders, People can. Can get on a plane and go here to there very easily.

And we have,

through reproductive technology as a way to take the act of fertilization,

impregnation out of the body. The only thing right now that must be embodied is gestation.

There's just all of this, like,

maybe I'm being blathering on, but I just see there's a disassociation right now that is fertile grounds for moral panic. Like, nobody knows what's going to become of the body, what's the role of women and all of that.

So we have a return very much to. With those that oppose gestational surrogacy seeing somehow, you know, the act of conceiving, bearing, raising children should be somehow not subject to market forces.

Contract shouldn't be involved.

This is a labor of love.

And that gestational surrogacy sort of shows the contradictions, right when at the base of,

you know, maybe you're contracting to purchase gametes that are going to be frozen and sent across borders, and then you've contracted with another person who has a uterus to gestate that zygote and then the child who's born from that arrangement.

You know, also maybe they need to have some legal recognition that isn't quote unquote natural, but requires like a parental order.

And maybe that's transnational. And all of this is just great grounds for insecurity rather than understanding that the way that we make these dichotomies,

whether it's the natural and the social,

or the male and the female, or all of these,

the market, and what's the antithesis of the market, the home,

these are completely. These are dichotomies that are just rife with value.

They're rife with politics. They're not given right, they're socially constructed.

And right at this moment,

they're being redeployed. And as Ali and all of the other participants in this podcast have mentioned,

they're being,

we deployed not for the benefit of the people who are most affected,

but for some larger political project that doesn't necessarily take into account, say,

the actual risks that say, a gamete provider is faced with or that a surrogate, a gestational surrogate is, or intended parents. And just one last thing that I want to call attention to is the way in which the child is just invested with so much meaning so that the children born through surrogacy are somehow the product of exploitation and they themselves are being exploited in,

in the minds of those who are really in, in a tizzy about what they think is the practice of gestational surrogacy that somehow is going to supplant and,

you know,

erase the so called natural family.

And so that the site where child protection and concerns about child start getting vocalized, I mean, that's a site to really pay attention to.

Kim Krawiec: Thanks.

So, Dina or Allie, I just wanted to see if you guys wanted to add on to any of this. I mean, part of what I find so interesting about this tension that Mindy has been highlighting is because in some ways, I mean, as you say, it's all socially constructed.

It's not obvious to me that reproductive technologies would be something that upends traditional family values as opposed to supporting them. Because I can imagine in an environment that's sort of very focused on reproduction, right, a pronatalist society that really wants to further reproduction,

that this would be considered something that is consistent with traditional views of the family in many ways. And in some ways it's just a matter of sort of how it's culturally or socially coded.

And as Mindy has pointed out, often it is coded as this dichotomy between the home and commerce. But that doesn't strike me as being necessary and that we could code it a different way.

So, Dina or Ali, anything to add to any of that? And you don't have to follow up on my digression. You can go back to Mindy Wendy's original commentary if you want.

Dina Haynes: I would follow up on your digression just by saying that I would invite listeners who might be wondering why we're even talking about human trafficking and surrogacy together to really pay attention to that conflation because the drafters and the nation states that are dealing with the protocol are also thinking about surrogacy.

And so we want to attend to the ways in which that link might be used.

You mentioned pronatalism. Pay attention to pronatalist movements as they relate to regressive governments,

the trad wife movement, maybe to attacks on birthright citizenship,

to all of the commentary and the shooter manifestos on birth rates and how regressive leaders have really created vigilante movements around both limiting birth rates of the other and increasing birth rates of the quote unquote native.

And think about all of those things as they as as links, really disturbing links between these two issues that aren't otherwise obviously linked.

Kim Krawiec: What about you, Ali?

Ali Miller: Yeah, I'd like to think about with that conversation about links and the question of in some ways Joanne's history, which and my endless fascination with how the past erupts in unexpected ways on the canvas of the present.

Right. Which is the settings because we are in an era of global uncertainty. Right. So everything from the a number of people have spoken about this kind of fear of what what in reproductive health are called demographic winters.

Right. What is then coded as a fertility problem or a problem of reproduction of the right population that sits on top of both a faith in and the distrust of technology,

which sits on top of a global order which is utterly exploding. Which sits on top of. Right. So you have many.

There is no straight line. And so the question is who's going to produce a narrative that comforts people in the way that they need comfort because they aren't wrong. Things are screwed up.

There is anxiety production in the way that some forms of technologies do not think about the benefits to either the person giving birth or the person donating gametes and just make them technologically more efficient.

Right. Those questions are real. But how you resolve them. And this goes back to the weaponization language that Dina used and Janie's. You know, the histories of people struggling over things, how they will be resolved is not a straight line from anything.

Right. But rather how we see all those pieces getting pulled together by people with strong narratives. And I think what's interesting and what I want to add to the strong narratives, which I think, in a way, you know, Kim, you already began with, which is we are also in a place where,

as a set of response languages,

both the nation, the nature of the state, what is the state to support,

and the nature of human rights are also very much intentioned. Right. And in many of us who work in human rights are thinking about the way in which human rights is in a sort of phase of protecting against retrogression.

So that, for example, we have currently a un independent special mechanism of human rights, the special repertoire on violence against women.

Who has decided to return to sex based rights.

She has a new report on sex based violence, for example,

in order to return to what Mindy was describing as some narrative of the safety of and the presence of and attention to the female body,

which has a kind of. It's a reassurance, right. At the same time that people are unsure. It has its limitations, which all of us who've been feminists for the last 40 years have been struggling against the sex based truth of the body.

We don't deny biology, but we deny that biology leads to a truth of what your life should be.

And then I'm going to close with the absolute suturing together of the notion of biological truth and the role of the state.

We have one of President Trump's executive orders on January 20,

defending women from gender ideology,

extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.

What does the federal government have to do with biological truth?

Why are these narratives?

What makes this important for the Trump administration to pull together now? It is a form of comfort and a form of weaponization at the same time. And I think that's what we're all trying to both make sense of, while trying to work with and support the people who are making decisions about becoming gestational surrogates for reasons that need to be respected and their rights need to be respected in the process.

But how that happens in this era of multiple and conflicting kind of these kind of explosions is where we're struggling and why I think Mindy wanted to initiate the conversation in the first place.

Mindy Roseman: But if I could just jump in and answer your question, Kim, I mean, it is absolutely true that Reproductive technologies, including gestational surrogacy, could certainly be limited to the use of whatever,

say, the,

you know, the state would want.

So if it's to limit it to heteronormative.

The production of heteronormative families, it certainly could.

At this moment, you know, there is great diversity in how states approach the regulation of surrogacy,

and many people who are using it to form their families will forum, shop,

you know, travel out of their jurisdiction to one that is more permissive, which will allow them to form a family as they wish.

What the heart of the matter is, is really about control.

So how is the state controlling family formation?

And actually,

another of the reports that the special rapporteur on violence against women will be issuing soon is on surrogacy,

and it claims to be giving agency back to women.

But at the same time, this report is very likely to call for the prohibition and the abolition of the practice of gestational surrogacy and permitting it only in cases of what's called altruistic surrogacy, where the person gestating the future child will give it as a gift.

Right. The gift of life without any compensation for their reproductive labor.

Kim Krawiec: Okay, so I'm going to shift focus just a little bit here now and turn back to Janie. We've been talking a lot about the trafficking and exploitation concepts as applied to sexual and reproductive labor and all of the issues that that entails.

But, Janie, you kind of bring a comparative perspective to bear on this because you've written a lot about other forms of labor trafficking and labor migration.

And I wanted to just get you, if you could, to talk a little bit about any relevant similarities or differences you see in the approach to how we think about those issues across these various settings and whether that could similarly give us insight into some of these issues that we've been discussing today about framing and weaponization and discomfort and looking for comfort in the way in which we talk about or regulate these types of activities.

Janie Chuang: Oh, okay.

So I guess I would say that more and more I've been trying to think about trafficking writ large in terms of the market. Now, Dina said, you know, the problem is populism,

and.

And I think that's a. That's a framing we should think more about.

I think this is,

you know, when we think about the sex trafficking, you know, the sex trafficking or sexual side of this issue,

you know, there's this move to try to tamp down on rights.

Right. And involve the role of the state in regulating and Restricting and preventing the creation or maintaining of markets, right. That we view as, or some policy makers might view as immoral or problematic.

And then on the non sexual side, it's all about creating and maintaining and bolstering markets, right? Markets that are built on the exploitation particularly of migrants,

labor.

And we see,

I just feel like in the trafficking space we see the solutions increasingly being market based, right? So I think on the sort of sex sector side, for instance, I point to Elena Shi's amazing book Manufacturing Freedom,

where she's a sociologist, she was looking at, she did these sort of ethnographic studies of NGOs that quote, unquote, rescue people from the sex sector and then put them to work making jewelry for survivor made jewelry markets in the wealthy destination countries, right?

So that people who care about trafficking or modern slavery, they can just buy this trinket and they are participating in the anti trafficking work or anti slavery. It's a moment of anti slavery activism.

And then these proceeds go back to funding these NGOs who are supposedly rescuing these women from the sex sector,

but putting them in dead end jobs that have no prospects of promotion, right? And where these women end up having to take on sex work on the side in order to be able to afford to live.

So it's, you know, but, but there's such a movement behind creating these survivor markets, right?

And then on the non sexual labor side,

you have,

you know, this sort of recognition that trafficking is a feature, it's not an anomaly of the global economy, right? We know that the global economy is built on the backs of severely exploited workers everywhere.

But rather than regulating the rights, right. And calling on the role of the state to bolster labor inspectorates and to call on states to pass legislation that affords rights, labor rights, workers rights,

we treat it as well, the market's going to solve a problem, right? Let's treat it as a management problem. Let's trust companies at the top of global supply chains to have these codes of conduct and that they'll abide by these codes of conduct and they will do better in terms of preventing forced labor and exploitation in their supply chain,

right? But not actually require them to actually afford these rights, much less implement them. And let's just rely on a growing market of private enforcement, right? So the audit industry, which is billions, like it said,

multibillion dollar industry now that certifies global supply chains as free of forced labor,

really problematic audits that are really biased and really don't actually mean anything at the end of the day because of the Conflicts of interest that are inherent to the audits.

And so it just strikes me as just when you think about these markets. And another solution, I would say, is,

you know, I think when I think about sort of demographic shifts right now, when we're thinking about migrant work, there's.

There are these development economists who are saying,

you know,

we should actually make a market out of migrant workers. We should, we should create a whole market of migrant workers,

not involve the state, that this can be just a private market.

And because we're dealing with the demographic inversion of the demographic pyramid, so we've got an aging population and not enough young people to support the aging population.

And so in order to deal with that, let's just import migrant workers.

And even though we recognize that there's anti immigrant sentiment like Dina was referring to,

the way to get around that anti immigrant xenophobic sentiment is to disaggregate the idea that migrants can belong to the host societies, host communities where they work by saying, look, they're only here temporarily.

And let's just. So let's disaggregate, you know,

the rights of belonging from the productive labor that they offer, right? So let's focus on what they can contribute to these communities, but also keep them temporary, not afford them rights,

so that nobody's threatened by their presence,

right? And we can create a whole market out of this. And so there's all this funding and talk now about creating migrant worker markets that are completely privatized and we keep the role of the state out of it because we don't want too many rights,

because too many rights will limit market access, right?

It'll affect,

it'll prevent people from being able to, or migrant workers from being able to access these foreign labor markets if we have too many rights assigned to their ability to move.

And so in any case,

I'm not sure that those are completely connected, but it just strikes me as,

in so many ways, a problem of markets. And whether or not you want to call something a market,

treat it as a market or not treat it as a market, or if you do treat it as a market,

what is the role of the state?

And at the end of the day,

where are all the workers in this picture, right? So little of this is constructed about around what workers need or want, or even creating a forum for them to voice what they want.

Kim Krawiec: So that's actually, that's a really nice way of summing it up, Janie, because as I heard your sort of comparison here,

the one thing that the two regimes, right,

trafficking and migration concerns as applied to sexual and reproductive labor versus other types of labor. The one thing they have in common that I think all of you have discussed is kind of a disregard for what it is that the participants in those markets might actually think they need to protect them,

either as consumers or as providers in that market. And then two very big differences. Right. Is that one, as I hear it, and of course, we've talked about that already throughout the podcast, is sort of tamping down.

Right. And controlling any negative effects of the market. Whereas when it comes to sort of non sexual and non reproductive labor, there's this tendency to say, hey, how can we help the market?

How can we make sure we don't restrict the market too much? Right.

And I sort of like that you've touched on both what sounds like a big dissimilarity, but also a commonality in the approach between the two different subject matters. I am going to just kick it to the entire panel for one last question.

So what do you want to leave listeners with? Right. Sort of the one lesson that we, they should take home from this discussion, whether it's a single concept, a legal reform, a scholarly intervention,

what do you think it's vital that listeners of today's podcast sort of take from our discussion today if they were to forget everything that we all talked about, as many of them no doubt will.

But remember one thing from each of you. And so I'm gonna change up the order a little bit just to give Janie a break, because she's just been talking. So, Mindy, I'm gonna turn to you to start us off on that conversation, if you don't mind.

Mindy Roseman: Thanks. Gosh, only one,

I would think.

I mean, there's a kind of moral dumbfoundment or a kind of like, intuitive disgust people might have when thinking about how families are formed, if not in the natural way that they think families should be formed.

And that feeling and intuition is some site to be interrogated on the personal level and then expanding out, whether you're an academic or an advocate or a lawmaker, whether you're working domestically or internationally,

and to interrogate it and ask, like, like, what is the problem?

Who is defining the problem and who is there to help develop the solution to it, you know, and,

you know, I don't think of any of these issues, whether it's,

you know, I think of all of this as a reproductive justice issue of which labor is a component.

And that's all I have to say for my one thing.

Kim Krawiec: Okay, Allie, what is your one thing you want to leave listeners with?

Ali Miller: Oh, I famously never had one thing, but I think, well, I would say ditto to Mindy's think hard about and use a sort of Tolstoy. And part of what surrogacies does is it makes strange what we naturalize about reproduction and gestation.

Part of what Janie's conversation about care work is that it reminds us that workers do care work and our workers.

All of that is part of the same conversation. We need to make strange what we then want in order to decide what we want to embrace. So then echoing that, my one thing would be and be very careful when you use the criminal law to fix any part of that,

because that is one place where the weaponization and the harm and the ways in the unintended harms or sometimes intended harms are so much vaster than we initially can ever predict.

Kim Krawiec: Great. Joanne, what's your one thing you want to leave listeners with?

Joanne Meyerowitz: Oh boy.

Let me start by saying that we need to oppose coercion and fraud and real exploitation that is out there,

and we need to oppose violence against women, or violence against anyone for that matter. But we don't want to label everything that's potentially dangerous as trafficking or slavery or always inherently violent or coercive or exploitative.

And we don't want to tell women that they can't make their own decisions about what to do with their own bodies,

where we end up treating adult women as if they're the same way we often treat children as if they're unable to give consent.

And so I guess if there's one concept to keep in the foreground along with the others that Mindy and Allie have already raised, I would say bodily autonomy.

It's a concept that pushes us to think about why people get to make their own decisions about their own bodies,

and obviously at the same time knowing that no one's truly autonomous and that we all depend on each other.

But bodily autonomy also can maybe help us bring together a coalition of movements for reproductive rights and labor rights and gay rights and trans rights that are all importantly in ways in support of bodily autonomy.

Kim Krawiec: I just want to plug a prior episode of the podcast,

which is I realize that this is a group that may not think it has much in common with libertarians, but the episode with Ilya Soman, My Body, My Choice,

is actually calling for exactly that type of coalition. Right? And sort of Ilya's. I guess if I had to take one thing from his podcast, I think it would be that he would like for progressives and liberals to fully embrace the my body, My choice concept across more domains than they currently do and to be more consistent about it.

And I'm sure that this group would,

you know,

be comfortable with a higher level of regulation of many things than Ilya would, I'm sure,

but might agree with him that the my body, my choice narrative has been employed inconsistently, including by feminists across time and we would like to bring that to the forefront.

At least I would. I'm gonna co sign. I'm co signing everybody's concluding remarks, by the way, but I'm especially co signing Joanne's.

Mindy Roseman: Okay.

Dina Haynes: Dina,

on your point, Kimberly,

it's been a struggle and a blessing. Joy, I guess,

qualified Joy to work with Cato around migration issues,

which I never thought I would say or do.

Kim Krawiec: Oh, I didn't know you had been working with Cato around those issues.

Dina Haynes: Only in that I use their statistics because they have the best data on the fact that migrants are not making up the vast majority of criminals in communities and that things like our Social Security depend on sadly exploited migrant labor.

So there's that. But my one, my one point I would make, I guess, is to be discerning around issues of human trafficking. Maybe this is picking up on some things that Ali said.

Sort of like when you're voting and an amendment is written so that you think you're voting for the opposite of what you're actually voting for.

In human trafficking definitions and policies and especially groups that purport to do things like rescue people or protect people are often doing the opposite of what they say they're doing.

So yes, unintended consequences abound.

But well intentioned people who think they want to do something on human trafficking and to protect those who are exploited often end up giving their money and their time and their goodwill to really bad actors.

So be discerning and try to figure out where you're giving your money and attention to if you're interested in these issues.

Kim Krawiec: Great. And Janie, you get the last word on the one thing you want listeners to take from this.

Janie Chuang: Gosh, ditto all of the above.

I'm not sure what else to add. I guess I would say it doesn't need to be trafficking for us to have to care about it, right? When we're dealing with rights violations across the exploitation spectrum,

we know by now that we can't prosecute this problem away. So Allie,

point about criminal justice not being the solution, we know this from the global statistics in terms of,

you know, how many victims have been identified and how many prosecutions have been taken, much less convictions obtained. It's just not going to be solved by criminal justice approaches. And we know that just from the hard data couldn't be clearer.

But instead, we should think about, I guess, if the person is engaging in work.

Right. Whether it be care work, reproductive work,

other forms of work. Let's give them rights as workers,

recognize that they are workers who are entitled to rights,

including the right to organize and claim space, to be heard and to have their voices be the ones that are constructing the agendas and the ways forward.

Kim Krawiec: Great. Thanks to all of you for joining me. This was really a lot of fun and a nice extension of the conversation that we started up in New Haven,

and I hope we can continue it as we go forward.

Ali Miller: Thank you. And yes, thanks.

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