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If you've read much science-fiction, you're probably familiar with the idea that, at some scary point in the future, the various aspects of mothering will be separated, enabling wealthy women to farm out the component tasks to less privileged women. The Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and reconstructions of biology and care (Routledge, 2010) makes it clear that that day has already come. With a focus on cross-border movement in the areas of domestic labor, adoption, and assisted reproduction, the book shows that the individual tasks that used to be bundled as motherhood have been dispersed to women scattered throughout the world and stratified by race and class. The dismantling of motherhood as we once knew it is no longer a paranoid futuristic fantasy, but rather a mostly dystopic reality.

The collection of academic essays edited by Wendy Chavkin and JaneMaree Maher, professors, respectively, of public health and women's studies, lays out a big, breathtaking picture that's most startling in its details. Take the Indian town of Anand, once famous for its dairy cooperative, which is now the "global surrogacy capital of India." Or simply consider that women across India now collectively earn more than $450 million per year as gestational surrogates. Then there's the fact that a Sri Lankan domestic worker considers the facility where she leaves her child while she cares for another family in Athens to be a "boarding school," while Western parents interested in adopting children from that institution understand it to be an "orphanage." And the complicated emotional reality of a young woman, born to Ethiopian parents and adopted by a Swedish couple, which reunites with her biological parents as an adult and decides that, "It doesn't matter that we have been away from them for more than 20 years, because they gave birth to us and we are there children." Or the Thai clinic's website, which offers visitors this greeting: "Welcome to IVF Thailand: Combining a great holiday with IVF!" The anecdotes beg repeating as windows onto this bizarre moment, when technologies are seeping into the globalized world in advance of much planning or regulation.

Some of the most memorable stories emerge in a chapter about couples who travel to and through Dubai as "reproductive tourists." In one example, a Syrian woman who had come from Lebanon for fertility treatment worries about having a Hindu, as opposed to a Muslim, doctor, even as she has a child in the care of a Filipina (non-Muslim) nanny. In another, a Sunni Muslim couple goes to Beirut (where there is a Shia majority) for egg donation, since that practice -- along with sperm donation, embryo donation and gestational surrogacy, has been banned by a fatwa in Sunni-dominated Muslim countries. The couple then seeks the eggs of a mid-Western, white American because, as the father-to-be explains it, "I want a white baby to look like me."

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