Assisted Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

American society has typically associated motherhood with biology. Assisted reproductive technologies (ART's) challenge this view by fragmenting motherhood into the social, the genetic, and the gestational. To ascertain the extent to which such a challenge has actually succeeded in changing societal understandings of motherhood, this study explored court cases involving four types of ART's. The findings suggest that although these ART's have the potential to re-create societal conceptions of motherhood, such a change has yet to occur in toto. Rather, certain aspects of biological motherhood continue to be seen as more permanent than social motherhood.

Socially Disruptive Technologies and Moral Certainty

“…Ectogestative technology is likely to contribute to the already existing uncertainty about what the respective roles of mothers and fathers should be, how care tasks should be divided, and about what it means to be a good mother, father, or parent. While ongoing changes of our understanding of gender roles and the family are caused by a multiplicity of factors mutually enforcing each other -such as assisted reproductive technologies (Hammons 2008), changes in the labour market, social movements such as the LGBTQ-movement, social media, and so forth -a technology that enabled the development of a human being entirely outside of its mother's body would have unprecedented disruptive effects. Whereas to this point, the aforementioned changes happened rather slowly, with certain elements of, for instance, our image of motherhood turning out to be highly resilient (see Hammons 2008, 278), 13 ectogestative technology has the potential to fundamentally de-stabilise that image.…”

Whose Child is This? The Problem of Constructing and Deconstructing Kinship Bonds on the Donor Gamete Market

“…Казалось бы, родство без всяких сомнений можно определить через наличие у индивидов общего биогенетического вещества. Однако вспомогательные репродуктивные технологии изменяют такое представление людей о родстве (Carsten, 2004: 163), нарушают целостность репродуктивного процесса (рождение ребёнка возможно без полового акта) и расщепляют биологическое материнство на гестационное и генетическое (Hammons, 2008;. С одной стороны, работники репродуктивного бизнеса заинтересованы в передаче генетического материала от родителей к ребёнку, для чего они развивают методы лечения бесплодия без привлечения донорских гамет и создают криобанки, в которых мужчины и женщины имеют возможность сохранять собственный биогенетический материал.…”

Les juges français et la gestation pour autrui

“…En dépit de la pluralité des courants féministes, l'ensemble des féministes s'accordent pour dire que la grossesse choisie est une liberté individuelle, et même une « conquête » des femmes avec la légalisation de la contraception et la reconnaissance progressive d'un véritable droit à l'interruption volontaire de grossesse. Cependant, elles sont partagées sur la question de la GPA (Markens, 2007 ;Hammons, 2008). Les opposants à la GPA y voient un esclavage moderne 31 qui ne saurait être régulé (Frison-Roche, 2014).…”