There’s a certain kind of novel that’s not quite apocalyptic enough to be science fiction, but just far-fetched enough to be speculative. No one is from outer space; society has not yet been carved up into a hierarchy of groups with their own capitalized names. It is set in a recognizable present day—our already surreal moment of technology-driven surveillance capitalism. Its premise is plausible enough that reading it induces a specific kind of queasiness, along with an earnest prayer that Elon Musk hasn’t yet seen it and gotten any ideas.
This genre is fertile ground for feminist writers, perhaps because it doesn’t take much more than checking out the latest proposals coming out of, say, the Texas Statehouse, to send the imagination spiraling into worst-case scenarios. For women who have benefited most from centuries of progress—the college-educated women writing in rooms of their own—and feel viscerally how much they have to lose, the not-quite-sci-fi novel is a place to work out those fears.
In Sarah Anderson’s debut novel, Fallow, a young woman named Natalie finds herself, like so many other young women of her generation, underemployed and saddled with student loans. She works at a call center that handles whistleblower complaints on behalf of thousands of companies. One day, she comes across a flyer advertising a mysterious role that promises only a “GENEROUS SALARY WITH BENEFITS.” The last part is crucial. Natalie has tooth pain so severe she can barely sleep, and no dental insurance. After correctly answering a series of questions—Do you have any tattoos? Do you live with cats? Have you ever had an abortion?—she’s called in for a job interview that includes a vaginal ultrasound. She signs up to be a surrogate for a mysterious tech company (ominously referred to only as “The Company”).
In recent novels about surrogacy, the protagonists are often mothers whose only chance at providing a better life for their child is to rent out their womb. Natalie is neither a destitute Indian villager, like Asha, the surrogate in Amulya Malladi’s A House for Happy Mothers, living in a run-down surrogate hostel so she can pay her brilliant son’s school fees, nor a Filipina immigrant high school dropout single mother, like Jane in Joanne Ramos’s The Farm. Natalie, a college-educated American, theoretically has a certain degree of class mobility.
By doing away with some of the disparities that traditionally loom over both fictional and real-life surrogacy narratives, Anderson heads off common criticisms of surrogacy and the skewed power dynamics between gestational carriers and intended parents. Instead she focuses on surrogacy as just one type of job in America’s already exploitative labor market, and poses a stark question: If surrogacy exploits women, then who, exactly, is doing the exploiting?
Natalie is keenly aware of the capricious and crappy nature of work. In her job at the call center, she documents a variety of appalling incidents, from “every imaginable flavor of sexual harassment,” to accidents involving heavy machinery, to “people fired for being too sick from chemo to hand out seasonal cheese samples.” This panoramic survey of the labor market confirms for her “two important truths: that there is no such thing as a good job, and that I had no interest in working.”
Natalie’s toothache eventually drives her to the dentist, who quotes her between two and four thousand dollars for oral surgery. She considers starting an OnlyFans but realizes it would take too long and require too much effort to accumulate the money; she then begins selling her plasma, though she nets only $50 for a two-hour donation. The surrogacy role is significantly more lucrative.
Shane, the “beefy, red-faced man” who offers her the job, hands her a hefty contract that she is given half an hour to review. It proposes seven babies in 10 years; $92,000 for each of the first three successful births, plus a $10,000 bonus for unmedicated vaginal births; and a raise to $112,000 per birth for the next four. The seventh and final birth comes with a $700,000 completion bonus, plus $60,000 in “desired cosmetic and reconstructive surgery,” in other words, the “Mommy Makeover.” As a gestational carrier, she has no genetic connection to the embryos that will be implanted. She will be given 26 weeks off between births. And, she observes, “I didn’t even have to do the hardest part; I didn’t have to keep the babies.”
Natalie skates over the ethics of surrogacy as quickly as she skims the fine print of the contract. “I knew I should be thinking hard about this,” she muses. “But for me, the choice was clear.” It turns out that there’s not much to think about; it boils down to simple math: “One decade of my body to win back the rest of my life.” She could avoid working, she reasons, perhaps not forever, but “for a long, long time.”
Her job, instead, will help other women work longer and harder for The Company. She is the test case for Genesis, Shane’s brainchild, “a groundbreaking initiative designed to accelerate gender equity through gestational outsourcing.” Company research has found that female employees feel less connected to their work during maternity leave, and earn less money (although it’s not clear if Shane is referring to the widespread wage penalty women face after getting “mommy-tracked” into less senior roles, or if The Company simply pays women less when they’re on leave). If employees can use a surrogate instead of going through pregnancy themselves, they can forgo the physical demands of pregnancy and childbirth, enabling The Company to trim maternity leave down to a tiny sliver. Women can report back to their desks at least part-time just a week after welcoming their newborns.
The Company pitches this scheme as an act of feminist allyship—“an opportunity to support our female colleagues on their leadership journey in every possible way.” In fact, The Company’s plan is to “eliminate the issues caused by maternity leave” by, essentially, eliminating maternity leave.
Thus, Natalie whiles away her twenties gestating and delivering other people’s babies. The Company pays for her two-bedroom condo, and deposits nutritious meals, already cooked, into her fridge. Her only responsibilities are maintaining her weight, sleeping, exercising, taking supplements, meditating, and avoiding forbidden foods and chemicals. She passes seven years in this suspended state, filling her largely empty life with online shopping, reality TV, and social media scrolling. Her water and air are very, very purified. Serial birthing, by her own criteria, is actually a pretty sweet gig.
Natalie is witheringly funny, but also superficial, incurious, and utterly devoid of maternal instincts, an antihero along the lines of the nameless protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, minus the drugs, and for many more years. OK, not quite minus the drugs. In what she calls her “fallow” periods, the six months off between births, Natalie goes on Rumspringas involving abundant cocaine and booze, revolting quantities of ultra-processed foods, and nightclubbing with Libby, her former colleague from the call center, who has become a flight attendant. Sustaining romantic relationships, or even close friendships, is tricky, since the terms of her employment contract forbid her from telling anyone about her job, preventing her from explaining why or how she has fallen pregnant.
To Natalie, the worst parts of the job are the ones that most resemble, well, a job. Shane informs her she must come into the office three days a week. Her dedicated obstetrician, Dr. X, surveils her minute by minute through an Oura-like ring, sending her passive-aggressive texts when one of her vital signs wavers. “BP looking a little high. [alarm emoji] Try meditation. Link in ur inbox.” His micromanagement underscores her function as merely an incubator, and yet she doesn’t really seem to mind. After her first, almost effortless natural birth, she wonders if she has finally discovered an innate talent: “Maybe this was something I was just good at.”
There’s some truth in The Company’s claim that Genesis helps female employees. One woman chooses to use a surrogate after having an extremely difficult first pregnancy, an experience she never wanted to repeat. Another woman “hated her husband and was clearly relieved not to have to naturally conceive.” A Black executive, cognizant of disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality among Black mothers, had been wary of childbirth.
The difference between Natalie’s job and more conventional employment is most obvious when a project she has been working on gets shut down, so to speak. In the first trimester of her pregnancy for Jackie, The Company’s chief marketing officer, Jackie is fired and loses her benefits, which leads Shane to direct Natalie to get an abortion. Natalie, given a packet of abortion pills, can’t bring herself to take them right away. Nearly a week goes by in which each morning she wakes up promising herself that this will be the day she finally does.
While Natalie wavers, Jackie goes to CNN with the story, resulting in a flurry of news coverage and protests outside The Company’s offices. Isolated in her apartment and under strict orders from Shane to not speak to anyone (“Remember your NDA”), she is overtaken by bitterness. “I was trapped here, knocked up and alone and villainized for a thing I hadn’t even done yet.” The media rehashes shallow and inadequate narratives about women, work, babies, and the relationships between them. In news commentary, Natalie is either “a brainwashed capitalist sex slave or a robot baby murderer whore or a kind-of-hot feminist icon.” None of these descriptions captures Natalie’s experience of being a surrogate, nor the stark power asymmetry between Jackie and The Company that briskly goes about destroying her best hope of having a child.
Jackie’s CNN appearance is not the last we hear from her, and it is ultimately her grace that brings about Natalie’s redemption. Fallow is a novel about surrogacy, but is also explicitly about work more broadly. Anderson nods throughout the book to the idea that embodied or emotional labor—OnlyFans, sugaring, plasma donation—can often feel like a woman’s best available options in an ever-worsening job market. One of Natalie’s clients leaves a $1,500 cash tip on her hospital nightstand, as if she were a high-end escort. When her sister Phoebe, unable to get a read on the sketchy details of Natalie’s job, asks if she’s doing sex work, she considers saying yes. “She wasn’t that far off, really,” Natalie thinks.
Natalie’s talent, as it were, for gestation, is not the norm. The closest she gets to the emotional highs and lows of pregnancy is crying during reality TV shows. She seems not to suffer physical discomfort or worse during pregnancy, as many women do. Being among the eldest of 11 sisters, she has been thoroughly desensitized to babies: One of the tests she passed with flying colors during The Company’s interview process required her to listen to the sound of an infant’s cries for 25 minutes, which she did without an emotional response. Other novelistic accounts of surrogacy describe the pain of separating from a baby one has been growing for nine months, and even Natalie admits that there’s something off about going home empty-handed after each birth. “It’s always a strange thing, leaving the hospital without a baby. It feels like I am recovering from a surgery, from the removal of something. A tumor, or my appendix.” There is a reason that forced gestation is a feature of many feminist dystopian novels; for many women, this job would be nothing less than a nightmare come true. But Natalie is the kind of exception that undoes attempts at making rules.
In a 2022 paper in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, four scholars argued for the plural term “surrogacies,” rather than surrogacy in the singular, to acknowledge the many versions of surrogacy and the wide variation in circumstances around each pregnancy and family. Fallow’s plot twists and turns, and the relationships and friendships Natalie eventually develops, demonstrate how the ethics of surrogacy are not reducible to any one of these narratives, but depend instead on the power relations that define each case. Natalie’s relationship to surrogacy itself evolves as the power dynamic evolves, from one of exploitation to one of respect and consent. Moreover, her entire approach to work shifts as her relationship to other people shifts: She learns to take pleasure in work when it becomes an act of interdependence rather than a mode of capitalist accumulation.
Feminists have long argued for wages for housework. They were asking for compensation for the unpaid work of social reproduction, or what one scholar calls “life-making”: birthing and raising and caring for generations new and old, cooking and cleaning and mending and all-around sustaining that has been, and overwhelmingly still is, done by women, ostensibly for love and not money. In its withering critique of work in all its more banal forms, Fallow suggests that unscrupulous bosses and our economy’s callous disregard for workers, not Natalie’s choice of labor, are the far more pressing problems.
