Based on ethnographic fieldwork among women acting as commercial surrogates in Mumbai, India, this paper explores how the surrogates motivated and made meaningful their decision to enter surrogacy. I challenge at once the neoliberal image of commercial surrogacy as a “win-win” situation that portrays surrogacy as the pursuit of individual self-interest by autonomous actors and gives a simplistic notion of surrogates as hapless victims of global capitalist “exploitation”. I argue that the women engaged in active and conscious decision processes, negotiating and reconceptualising surrogate motherhood and motherhood in general with reference to key aspects of traditional gender relations and feminine morality, such as submissiveness, sexual virtue and self-sacrifice. As such, commercial surrogacy exemplifies how globalisation contributes to new understandings and conceptualisations of gender and family, yet still in close dialogue with local gendered power relations and ideology.