Postgenomics and Biolegitimacy: Legitimation Work in Transnational Surrogacy

Self Cite

As genetic knowledge continues to strengthen notions of identity in Euro-American societies and beyond, epigenetic knowledge is intervening in these legitimation frameworks. I explore these interventions in the realm of assisted reproduction—including adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy. The right to identity is protected legally in many states and receives due attention in public and private international law. Originating from the context of adoption, donor-conceived and surrogacy-born persons have recently demanded the same protections and focused on the right to genetic knowledge. This article explores possible implications of epigenetic knowledge on identity. I start by articulating the deep influence of genetics on the notion of identity, and how this unfolds in legal contexts. Next, I examine how epigenetic findings that stress the importance of seeing biological life as situated and embedded in environments can challenge how adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy are experienced and understood. While I argue that epigenetic knowledge can reify identity with the same determinism underpinning genetics, it can also allow for more biosocial understandings of identity that consider history and experience as entangled with biology.

Section: The Emergence Of Epigenetic Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Emergence Of Epigenetic Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Emergence Of Epigenetic Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Identity in Postgenomic Times: Epigenetic Knowledge and the Pursuit of Biological Origins

Wichelen

2022

Self Cite

“…Gestational surrogacy markets flourish through a construction of the womb as a rentable space with an underdetermined relationship to motherhood, and little impact on a child’s physical and personality traits. These traits come, instead, from gametes, which are the primary basis for constructing relatedness in families created through assisted reproduction (van Wichelen 2016; Deomampo 2019). This formation exemplifies a broader cultural understanding of reproduction that privileges genetics over gestation, while locking the two in binary opposition.…”

Section: Surrogating Racementioning

confidence: 99%

The Racializing Womb: Surrogacy and Epigenetic Kinship

Keaney

2021

In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the womb is often figured as a holding environment that brings the child of commissioning parents to fruition but does not shape fetal identity. This article probes the racial imaginary of such a figuration—what I term the “nonracializing womb”—where gestation is seen as peripheral to racial transmission. Drawing on feminist science studies frameworks and data from interviews with parents who commissioned surrogates, this article traces the cultural politics of the nonracializing womb, positioning it as an index for broader understandings of race, reproductive labor, and kinship that hinge on nuclear and biogenetic forms. It then problematizes this figure of gestation by engaging emerging research on environmental epigenetics, which offers a lively model of pregnancy as shaping fetal biology, blurring the lines between surrogate and fetus. I argue that epigenetics offers a resource to reimagine gestation as a racializing process, by theorizing race not as solely genetic, but as relational, socio-environmental, and forged through distributed kinship lineages.

“…The problematic of disordered genetic links is at its most acute in the work of a small number of feminist scholars such as van Wichelen (2016) and Payne (2016) who have recognized that microchimerism sheds a very different light on the process of surrogacy. Although we might need to rethink the responsibility that exists between any pregnant woman or genetic parent and her child, the phenomenon throws up particular issues for a full gestational surrogate, who supposedly has no genetic links with the fetus she carries.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Maternal–Fetal Microchimerism and Genetic Origins: Some Socio-legal Implications

Shildrick

2022

What are the implications of microchimerism in sociocultural and ethico-legal contexts, particularly as they relate to the destabilization of genetic origins? Conventional biomedicine and related law have been reluctant to acknowledge microchimerism—the existence of unassimilated traces of genetic material that result in some cells in the body coding differently from the dominant DNA—despite it becoming increasingly evident that microchimerism is ubiquitous in the human population. One exception is maternal–fetal microchimerism which has long been recognized, albeit with little consideration of the nonmedical implications. Most immediate issues concern the ongoing biomedical debate around whether microchimerism is beneficial in terms of enhancing the body’s range of immunological responses, harmful in provoking autoimmune diseases, or simply neutral with respect to subsequent health. That controversy remains unresolved, but whichever way it develops, I want to extend consideration by insisting that changing biological concerns cannot be separated from sociocultural and ethico-legal effects. Once the diversity of DNA coding in a singular body has been established, relations of kinship, the identification of legal parenthood, and the operation of surrogacy laws are of direct interest. The overriding problematic asks whether our ethical and legal apparatus is able to address such newly emerging questions.