The Case for Webnancies

I like a good documentary. And with the Documentary Film Festival now hitting Wellington, it was a chance to see less populist documentary fare – and considering there were only about 10 people in the Readings cinema to view Google Baby, it definitely lived up to being a niche market movie.

The crowd might not have been large, but the movie itself was fascinating – for me anyway. The documentary followed the stories of a doctor in India running a surrogacy clinic for people who cannot carry children themselves, and of an Israeli man, Donon, who, after successfully obtaining a surrogate baby through the USA, was looking to start a surrogacy business, using Indian surrogates to lower the cost of what is the most expensive part of the process.

It’s odd that a film that portrays something as win-win-win could still leave me with a sense of unease. The egg and sperm donors from the West were either involved or compensated for their time and effort (allowing one family to buy even more guns to give to their own children), the surrogates were similarly well compensated and cared for (earning money to buy their own homes and educate their own children), and the homes to which the children were going obviously wanted them (at a reasonable price).

But there were moments of insight that went unexplored in the film that were a bit… disturbing. The Indian doctor described the possible negative side effects (miscarriage, bleeding, and even death) for the surrogate, with no responsibility on the clinic or the people wanting the child (there was no information on how often these things actually occurred). A successful surrogate’s husband expressed his dreams of financing his son’s future on repeated successful surrogacies by his “unintelligent” wife. While the rules of the clinic make it clear that parents are to be there to receive the child once it is born, one couple decide they can’t make the birth date and ask the clinic to hold on the child for a week until they can get there. Dolon’s friends who wanted a “cheaper child” seemed disturbingly detached from the whole process, picking donors as if choosing paint, and making off-colour jokes that implied a lack of understanding of the seriousness and commitment of the task that they were about to undertake. Even Dolon himself, initially portrayed as a loving parent, is not shown spending any time with his child for the rest of the documentary, leaving her to the care of his parents (not even his partner) while he is off around the world trying to start up his internet business. Most of which are potential issues in any pregnancy, granted, but none of which not addressed in any way during the course of the film.

It’s not like there wasn’t the time. There is a lot of padding in there: the camera lingers over Indian children and invalids in the streets of Mumbai for… well, no real reason; we follow some of the chores of people connected to the clinic but not actually involved in the surrogacy; and we get to see an egg donor’s family playing with their aforementioned guns – which is quite amusing, but really not that relevant.

The documentary really just follows a process and the start of a business venture. For a film about surrogacy, it is surprisingly detached from any sense of a deeper humanity. The film does not portray the agonies and joys of the new parents; briefly flashes over the feelings of the surrogates and the decisions they have made to get to this point; and the fact the surrogates seem to be hidden from the rest of society begs the question of how the surrogacy programme is viewed in India and why.

In a way, it seemed less like an insightful documentary and more like an advertisement for two ways of surrogacy through India. And like in most infomercials, the total cost of the process and the amount the “arrangers” made as part of the deal was not really entered into.

Verdict: There are whole worlds out there with which I am unfamiliar, and, in a very superficial way, Google Baby takes me into one of them. Revealing if not always enlightening, the documentary’s attempt at impartiality leaves some questions asking, though in documentaries, the provocation of thought is sometimes the intent. 6 search criteria out of 10.