In this paper, Siggie Vertommen and Camille Barbagallo grapple with the stubborn question of why women in capitalist societies are expected to perform the reproductive work of gestation and birthing either as unwaged mothers or as badly paid surrogates. Rather than tackling surrogacy in moralising terms of ‘altruistic’ gift-giving versus ‘greedy’ money-making, this paper, published in Review of International Political Economy as part of a special issue on Contemporary Feminist Political Economies of Work (edited by Alessandra Mezzadri, Sara Stevano and Susan Newman), proposes an integrative reproductive labour perspective that looks at the dialectics of waged and unwaged work involved in the process of (re)producing people.