Womb to let
A fetus farm for super-rich Americans has Handmaid’s Tale overtones.
The Farm is a cautionary tale by firsttime author Joanne Ramos about what happens when humans are regarded as things. It starts in New York’s immigrant Filipino community: we meet twentysomething Jane and her cousin Ate, a tough 70-year-old working hard to send money back home to support her disabled adult son. Ate and her fellow boarding-house residents do mainly domestic work. The baby nursing, child-minding, cooking and cleaning that the super-wealthy of New York outsource so they can continue to earn vast sums, exercise, eat superfoods and make documentaries about the hard-working Filipino community. Often without visas, the Filipinos have no job security and no workers’ rights.
When Jane, with her tiny baby, separates from her feckless American husband, she seeks Ate’s help. Ate knows of a lucrative opportunity – becoming a womb-for-rent at Golden Oaks, a luxury “fertility retreat” run by Chinese-American Mae Yu.
Young women known as “Hosts” are paid to stay while the embryos of rich clients are implanted in their healthy wombs and develop to term. The faceless clients are paying to have the embryos treated like royalty so they’ll be born with an edge. This means the Hosts must act optimally at all times. They are strictly monitored via a wristband: every movement, every morsel, every conversation.
“They’re obsessed with everything related to their babies,” bolshie Lisa advises a wide-eyed Jane. “It’s the new narcissism. That’s the Farm’s gig: feeding it; fanning it.”
Lisa is one of two “premium” (that is, Caucasian) Hosts whom Jane befriends. She and Reagan have their own troubled backstories. Eventually, all three try to escape Golden Oaks and the control and surveillance the place puts them under. Their efforts drive the story along and make for a satisfyingly nail-biting narrative.
Comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale are inevitable, but in contrast to Margaret Attwood’s classic, it’s not a repressive patriarchy that is to blame for the commodification of women’s bodies. Here, the culprits are rampant capitalism and consumerism. Taken to their logical conclusion, Ramos argues, they create a world where “everything sacred [is] outsourced, packaged, sold to the highest bidder”.
Ramos’ writing is serviceable rather than elegant, but the story is thoroughly engaging. It’s truly speculative fiction; the world it portrays feels not that far away.
THE FARM, by Joanne Ramos (Bloomsbury, $33)