Humanization Ends:
The New Reproductive Technologies
Toomas Gross
A hypothetical vision of the end of humanisation. The NRT will challenge the most basic assumptions we make about family, about father and mother, parenthood and kinship, and bring about the possibility that the basic network for our sense of belonging may not exist in a few decades.
Toomas Gross is a social anthropologist at Cambridge, England.
Introduction
I will now turn to what I regard as the end of humanisation from the point of view of family, kin relationships, and parenthood, as outlined in my previous presentation. James Fox (1974: 13) in his seminal Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective argued:
From psychological point of view the sureness about one’s ancestry offers security. We perhaps feel less contingent and our place in the scheme of things may seem less arbitrary, if we know that we are part of the chain stretching into the past. This knowledge rids us of anonymity: we are not dropped into the world without a history. To use the metaphor most often associated with the search for ancestry, we have roots. (James Fox, 1974: 13)
We see the importance of these roots, the necessity of continuity among generations, the necessity of kinship, of land, and ancestors especially here in Canada among Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. All this might come to an end; all this might die.
I think that the emergence of the New Reproductive Technologies has already considerably altered or, rather, considerably confused our understanding of who we are and what we are, and as it is a rapidly growing industry, the changes will probably be more profound and more universal in the future. It must be stressed, however, that although I am presenting the New Reproductive Technologies (NRT) here as a vehicle I believe might lead us towards the end of humanisation, this does not imply that I am necessarily against the NRT, or think that the influence of the NRT would, in the end, only be negative. My aim is simply to draw the attention to the fact, that the NRT can potentially change our understanding about what it means to be human. I emphasise its potential problems, but do not deny that the NRT can also have positive consequences in the lives of people, and therefore, for the whole society. The idea that the widespread use of the NRT, could lead to the end of family, marriage, parenthood, kinship, and, eventually, the end of humanity as we understand it now, is just a hypothesis. That of which we can be certain is that the NRT will definitely bring about changes to our established understandings of these phenomena.
Parenthood as a cultural construct
According to Euro-American notions of procreation, the foetus has been seen as the combined product of genetic contributions of both the genitor (biological father) and genetrix (biological mother). Anthropologists have shown, however, that notions of procreation are social constructs that vary in history and culture. Trobrianders in the South Pacific, for instance, believe that the genetrix has the essential role in forming the foetus while the role of the genitor is marginal; ancient Greeks saw the genetrix as a mere vehicle for the essence, which the foetus derived exclusively from the genitor (Stolcke 1986: 6-7). What is common to all is that the definitions of mother and father do not mirror each other–not even in the case of an Euro-American understanding. According to Strathern (1992: 127), this asymmetry can be traced back to the asymmetry between semen and uterus, but it also derives from the different conceptualization of womanhood and manhood–where women have been and continue to be defined largely in terms of their reproductive capacities (Shore 1992: 296), i.e. their physiology. 1 Ross (1990: 148) argues, the evidence for physiological paternity has always been weaker than for physiological maternity. That is, motherhood is considered to be more evident, as the mother is biologically more involved with the child; while fatherhood, according to Strathern (1992: 26), is presumed, socially constructed and acknowledged. Maternity, in other words, is a matter of fact, paternity is a matter of opinion. To see a mother is to recognize a natural connection, while a man is not presumed to be a father unless he has some connection with the mother (ibid.,149). This connection is marriage. Malinowski (1968: 165-166), referring to the ignorance of biological parenthood expressed by the Trobrianders, shows that the husband of the woman who gives birth becomes a father ex officio, but for the child of an unmarried woman there is no father. Father is thus defined socially, and in order that there may be fatherhood, there must be marriage. Father, according to Hiatt (1990: 111) is "a 'cultural construction' in an ontological sense."
The differential construction of parenthood has for long been an issue in kinship studies in anthropology. In 1974, Barnes published his influential article Genetrix : genitor :: nature : culture? which studies the relationship of nature, culture and parenthood, stressing the differential relationship of motherhood and fatherhood to nature and culture. For Barnes, motherhood is primarily a natural construction while fatherhood is a social one,
... motherhood is a necessary interpretation in moral terms of a natural relation, whereas the relation of genitor is an optional interpretation, in the idiom of nature, of an essentially moral relation. (Barnes 1974, 73).
Thus, in traditional kinship-studies fatherhood has been viewed as a social construct and considered to be more ambiguous than motherhood. Numerous studies of tribal societies have revealed a distinction between biological father (genitor) and social father (pater). Ghost marriage, as a form of levirate among the Nuer, described by Evans-Pritchard (1951), is one of the most striking examples. 2 In other cases, physical paternity might be denied totally, and the father's role would have been believed to be merely social while the procreative role was often assigned to a spirit or a supernatural power. Examples of the denial of biological fatherhood include: the Australian Aborigines, who believed that a spirit enters woman's womb causing her to conceive (Ashley-Montagu 1937, cf. Hiatt 1990: 114); the Trobriand Islanders, who believed that conception succeeds when a spirit-child animated by the ancestral spirit baloma enters woman's belly (Malinowski 1968); and the Tully River Blacks, who believed that a woman begets children because she has been sitting over the fire, roasting a particular species of black bream given to her by a prospective father, or dreams about a child being put inside her (Roth 1903: 22, cf. Spiro 1968: 242).
Many anthropologists, however, do not believe that the people in the above-mentioned cases were actually unaware of physical paternity. Hiatt (1990: 113) concludes that with regard to physical paternity, ethnographers fall roughly into two opposing camps. He distinguishes between the classical school, which maintains that pre-colonial peoples were ignorant of the male role in reproduction; and the modern school, which argues that they were aware of it but placed greater importance upon spiritual factors. The majority of anthropologists consider the latter to be the case. Leach (1966: 41), for instance, insists that the conception beliefs of the Aborigines and the Trobrianders can be compared with the Christian belief in Virgin Birth, and thus it would be naive to consider it a general belief in all contexts. He remarks ironically that "if we believe in the Virgin Birth, we are devout; if others do, they are idiots." Even Malinowski, who studied them, leaves the question whether the Trobrianders suffer from ignorantia paternitatis or not, unanswered. He (1968: 155) claims that although the Trobrianders seem to be unaware of the generative power of male discharge, they do acknowledge the necessity of mechanical opening of the vagina to enable conception. The explicit denial of physiological paternity might just be psychologically and sociologically functional. Hiatt (1990: 127), for example, suggests that the morale of caring, seafaring fathers in the Trobriands might be better served by a doctrine of non-sexual reproduction than by a determined pursuit of the truth. Spiro (1968: 257-258) proposes an alternative explanation, arguing that by not considering the Trobriand father a genitor, the child's hatred towards father is reduced. In Freudian terms, Spiro's explanation is a solution to the Oedipus complex.
The emergence of the New Reproductive Technologies (NRT)
As I have mentioned, in making the distinction between social and biological parenthood, anthropologists generally meant the distinguishing between pater and genitor in some "non-Western" societies. However, in recent decades crucial changes have and are occurring in the sphere of kinship and family in industrial societies. The most revolutionary changes, to my mind, are the split between social and biological parenthood, and the deconstruction of motherhood. The reason for these remarkable changes is the emergence of the so-called New Reproductive Technologies (NRT) which Stacey (1992: 10) calls "a scientific revolution in human reproduction." The New Reproductive Technologies include such biological manipulations as artificial insemination (AI) 3 and in vitro fertilisation (IVF), 4which are accomplished by means of amniocentesis, embryo transfer and freezing, ultrasonography, gamete intrafallopian transfer, laparoscopy etc. (McNeil 1990: 19). Other phenomena like surrogacy, 5 test-tube children, post-menstrual babies and virgin births are also made possible by these procedures. Indeed, in a nutshell, the most revolutionary innovation that the NRT bring about is the production of life outside the human body; what Stolcke (1986: 9) calls ectogenesis. Breaking procreation down into different sub-processes, taking them out of human body and making them subject of technological manipulation confuses the boundary between nature and culture, which earlier had been considered clear. Strathern (1992: 55) concludes that the natural world, including the facts of human biology, cannot be taken for granted anymore.
Although the New Reproductive Technologies cause change and bring confusion to what was earlier taken for granted, their development in the context of the Euro-American conceptualisation of infertility is understandable. According to Franklin (1990: 200), typical descriptions of infertility in Euro-American discourse associate it with "desperation," "anguish," and "suffering." Infertile couples are referred to as "victims of childlessness," "unwillingly childless," "sufferers from infertility," as juxtaposed to "happy couples who have won the battle" against infertility. Infertility in Euro-American societies is stigmatised, and infertile couples suffer from both psychological and social pressures, because infertility contradicts the ascribed conventional roles of adulthood by the society. The inability to produce a biologically related child is represented in terms of the sense of exclusion, a lack of self-esteem or a loss of identity. Infertile couples are also supposed to be suffering from natural pressures, since it is believed that human beings have an in-built drive to reproduce (ibid.: 205-207). The battle is to be won with the help of the NRT.
The development of the NRT has raised governmental and parliamentary debates in many countries in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in Britain. One of the striking features of these debates has been that human embryonic and prenatal life has become a major concern (Gallagher 1987; Strathern 1992: 22). According to Franklin (1993: 126), these debates have created a division between familiar and unfamiliar kinship. The latter form of kinship having been created by concern for the non-relational embryo; that is, an embryo not directly related to one or either parent.
Numerous acts and reports have been published to cope with the new situation. In Britain, for example, the Warnock Report (see Warnock 1985) which appeared in July 1984, studied the social, ethical and legal implications, and potential developments, of assisted reproduction. The Human Fertilization and Embryology Act was introduced in 1989, and enacted in 1990 (Franklin 1993; Price 1993). And the Glover Report (see Glover 1989) to the European Commission appeared in 1989.
Despite its remarkable potential social consequences, the social sciences were paradoxically excluded from the study of the impact of the NRT (Stacey 1992: 14) in the 1980s. This in spite of the fact that, for example, classic elements of anthropological kinship studies (like beliefs about conception and personhood; prescriptions concerning marriage, inheritance and descent; the symbolic significance of the shared bodily substance; the social construction of natural facts, etc.) can still be recognised (Rivière 1985). The first half of the 1990s, however, has been marked by rapid proliferation of anthropological and sociological studies. Changes in the domain of kinship–particularly marriage, family and parenthood–are the issues to which anthropological study can make major contributions. Strathern (1993: 1) suggests that anthropology can contribute to the answers of two important questions: first, how the cultural domain of kinship may, or may not, work as a context for the way in which people think about the social implications of the NRT; and second, how the NRT draw peoples' attention to matters of kinship.
The impact of the NRT on kinship relations in general
The NRT have had a great influence on kinship relations, and this is precisely the area where anthropologists can contribute to the debate. According to Edwards (1993: 43), the topic of the NRT acts as an ethnographic window, through which kinship ideas and assumptions are discerned. The NRT not only challenge biological facts, but our understanding of these facts. Shore (1992: 295) insists that our most established ideas about motherhood, paternity, biological inheritance, the integrity of the family, and the "naturalness" of birth itself are under attack. The development of the NRT is emblematic of the contemporary world of changing values and attitudes, which is why Hirsch (1993: 68) views them as part of "modern condition."
According to Strathern (1993: 13) Euro-Americans see kinship as the context in which one talks about relationships based on biology. Parenthood includes both social and biological roles, or in other words, social recognition of parenthood has followed the biological fact. Social relations have been considered to grow out of the genetic ones, and blood ties have stood as a symbol of permanence in human relations (Stanworth 1987: 20-21). The doctrine of "one child, one genitor," according to Hiatt (1990: 110), has been part of the Western tradition since Aristotle. For Euro-Americans, the equation of pater with genitor, and mater with genetrix, has been at the heart of stable social order (Rivière 1985: 4). The main building-block of society has been the biologically and sexually integrated nuclear family, that, in modern Western societies, has denoted a unit consisting of a husband, a wife and their children (Elliot 1986: 4). This unit has widely been thought of as a group based on marriage, biological parenthood, the sharing of a common residence and being united by ties of affection, obligations of care and support, and a sense of a common identity. Snowden (1990: 71) adds that the family in Euro-American kinship has been understood as a unit comprising a number of individuals linked by a set of enduring relationships, the most important of which were those affected by the birth process. Glover (1989: 54) defines the traditional ideal of the family as a heterosexual couple embarking on a monogamous marriage for life.
The development of the NRT has challenged these models. Shore (1992: 299), commenting on the impact of artificial insemination, claims that a "third party" has been introduced into the marital relationship, which threatens the stability of the nuclear family. Parenthood cannot be understood as an exclusively biological concept anymore. The fact that the NRT enable procreation without sex is another source of danger to Euro-American models of the ideal family. Stanworth (1987: 23) concludes, that sex, marriage and parenthood cease to be an indissoluble triad, as parenthood becomes separated from the sexual act. The NRT have created an unfamiliar kinship to the embryo by creating new persons, new relations and new forms of relatedness. Abrahams (1990: 131) looks at the phenomenon of new relations from another perspective, claiming that, new relations can also be created through organ donation and transplant surgery. The creation of new relations leads to broader questions of the definition, termination and perpetuation of an individual's identity in general.
Deconstruction of parenthood
The biggest impact of the NRT on kin relations has been deconstruction of parenthood, both fatherhood and motherhood. The distinction between social and biological parenthood has become a part of everyday discourse. The defining of natural in parenthood has become increasingly ambiguous. Analyzing these issues, Strathern (1992: 19) claims:
Now biological parenthood does not replicate with exactness the old concept of natural kinship. It reproduces the idea. There is a new ambiguity about what should count as natural. The "natural" father was once the progenitor of a child born out of wedlock; the "natural" mother was once the progenitor of a child relinquished for adoption. Ideally, the social parent combined both biological and legal credentials, although it was not ordinarily necessary to mark the parent this way. ... assisted reproduction creates the biological parent as a separate category. By the same process, the social parent becomes marked as potentially deficient in biological credentials.
Because of the deconstruction of motherhood, as well as the similarity of the processes of technological manipulation with male and female genetic material (i.e. "egg donation" is imagined as analogous to "semen donation"), the NRT have had a somewhat balancing effect on the universally acknowledged asymmetry between motherhood and fatherhood. Snowden (1990: 71) shows that it is now possible for a child to be the subject of multiple parenting with two different men in the role of the father, and up to three different women in the role of the mother. The situation may now arise where one woman may be viewed as aunt and mother of the same child at the same time (Glover 1989: 53). The new roles created by the NRT are even more confused and ambiguous due to the fact that the definition of "father" and "mother" might depend on the particular method of the NRT used. For example, in everyday thinking, the man who provides the sperm in artificial insemination by donor is not usually considered to be the father, whereas in surrogacy he is. Similarly, carrying someone else's embryo makes one a mother in IVF, but not in surrogacy (Glover 1989: 56-57). Different biological criteria are chosen and utilized in different situations.
As stressed above, the understanding of motherhood, which earlier was considered "natural" and taken for granted, has undergone greater changes compared to that of fatherhood. The natural facts that define the mother have always seemed to be more comprehensive than those defining the father (Strathern 1992: 27). The mother both donated genetic material and gave birth. With the help of technological manipulation, however, the period of gestation has become culturally ambiguous, and the separation between the biological and social roles of motherhood has become a fact (ibid.). Zipper and Sevenhuijsen (1987: 129), studying the impact of surrogacy, admit that the unwritten rule "mater semper certa est" (motherhood is the only certainty) cannot be held for an eternal truth any longer. Stanworth (1987) insists that motherhood, as a unified biological process, has been deconstructed. In the place of one distinct mother, or what Haimes (1992: 120) calls the "complete mother," there will be ovarian mothers (or genetic mothers) who supply eggs, uterine mothers (or carrying mothers) who give birth to children, and social mothers who raise them. The distinction between the carrying mother and the genetic mother is radically new; it could not have arisen in nature, and is made possible by technologically assisted embryo transfer (Rivière 1985: 5). Stolcke (1986: 24) calls this phenomenon "the dissolution of the individual motherhood." Similarly, one can speak about the deconstruction, or dissolution, of reproduction and parenting. The reproductive process that earlier defined womanhood is now broken into a series of discontinuous steps, and parenting into differing degrees of nurture (Strathern 1992: 157).
It is understandable that the ambiguity and confusion that the deconstruction of parenthood creates can be harmful for the functioning of the society, since in many cases "mother" and "father" should still be legally defined (e.g. in the cases of ultimate responsibility for care, important decisions or inheritance). Defining motherhood by giving differential weight to different "materine contributions" has been one of the key issues of parliamentary debates (who is more the mother?). According to the British Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, the woman who is the carrier of the child is to be treated as the lawful mother, whether or not the child is genetically hers (Strathern 1992: 26). The Warnock Report (Warnock 1985: 44), commenting on donation, similarly recommends:
Where there has been a donation of egg or embryo to a carrying mother, we have recommended that a woman who gives birth should, for all purposes of law, regarded as the mother.
Page (1990: 58) calls this the "Warnock rule" or "birth-mother rule" in opposition to the "genetic rule." Carrying a baby is considered to be a more powerful psychological fact, than the mere donation of genetic material. Fox (1993: 123) insists that mother-child bonding derives from having the child in the womb, and genetic relatedness should thus not take precedence over this bonding. Numerous cases of the reluctance of a surrogate mother to give up a baby to the commissioning mother after birth have often been reported (e.g. Edwards 1993: 48; Page 1990: 67), proving that motherhood is more than a genetic relationship. 6 For this reason many authors (e.g. Glover 1989: 77; Page 1990: 56) insist that in the case of surrogacy, the surrogate mother should legally have the right to keep the baby, and have her parental rights and duties restored.
Gamete donation as the creator of new relationships
Technological intervention disrupts existing relationships and creates novel, often antagonistic ones. The very basis of the creation of these new relations, however, is the act of gamete donation itself. Donation, similarly to gift exchange studied by anthropologists, establishes and maintains relations between people. This is the reason why some anthropologists (e.g. Strathern 1992) have seen analogy between the two. The difference in the different types of relations created by gamete donation, however, is that they are not always intentional, and moreover, they might be harmful for the society. For this reason, anonymity of donation has often been recommended. The Warnock Report (Warnock 1985: 15) poses:
We recommend that as a matter of good practice any third party donating gametes for infertility treatment should be unknown to the couple before, during and after the treatment, and equally the third party should not know the identity of the couple being helped.
Maintenance of anonymity in donation is, according to Strathern (1992: 128), facilitated by the fact that while donation links a person to a source of genetic endowment, it does not necessarily link a person to another person. Genetic substances, especially semen, are alienable from the body. A considerable challenge to anonymous donation, however, is the fear of incest (Moghissi 1989: 121). In the case of anonymity, there can be no control over possible incestual relationships; indeed, the probability of the meeting of siblings, according to Edwards (193: 47) is bigger than the statistical probability allows, because "like attracts like." Anonymity cannot be easily maintained for other reasons also. It has been reported that children often want to know their genetic parents (e.g. Price 1993: 37), for they suffer a sense of rootlessness. They want to know where they belong. And it seems that donors have difficulty retaining their indifference toward their genetic offspring–although Haimes (1990: 158) claims the contrary, arguing that even without risk of incurring responsibility, donors would not want to be identified. Anonymous donation surely causes enormous psychological pressure. Snowden (1990: 78) claims, that some men who donate semen in their youth have regrets later on in their life. Donation is an altruistic act, and a man who is motivated to act in a selfless way might be more than ordinarily susceptible to feeling disquieted about any offspring for whom he has relinquished all responsibility. Edwards (1993: 51) claims that most sperm donors would try to see the link with the child. The same often holds true in organ donation. Abrahams (1990: 132) refers to the cases where the donor wished to establish links with the recipient, in whom they saw themselves as, in some sense, living on.
Another challenge to anonymity is that people, more usually women, often prefer donations by their kin. 7 Steven (1987: 13, cf. Price 193: 35) refers to an interview with a woman who claimed to be secure in the knowledge that donated eggs come from "within the family." Sister's eggs continue the family's bloodline; their connection to recipient's parents and grandparents is the same. Sister egg-donation definitely has both biological (sisters have similar ova), and social (sisters are more willing to assist each other than unrelated women) advantages, but there are also hidden dangers in kin donation, highlighted by Edwards (1993: 54). It is likely that donating sisters would feel a greater attachment or claim to the child than is usual or appropriate for a mother's sister, and would interfere more in the child's upbringing. As Snowden (1990: 80) concludes, sister and brother gamete donation even further increases role confusion within family, as compared to anonymous donation. Not only do parents create children, but children also create parents, and thus the birth of a child has the potential for creating parents not only out of its parents, but out of the donating woman, and in the case of sister egg donation, her sister's husband (Edwards 1993: 55). Whiteford (1989: 155) also stresses that in case of gestational surrogacy, the relations between commissioning parents themselves might change and psychological problems result. The father in this case literally adopts his own child, and may feel greater responsibility for the child than the mother, due to his genetic relationship to it. The asymmetry of the roles of mother and father is thus turned upside down.
While the technological intervention into human procreation creates new types of relationships between people, it also undoes some previous ones. Children born by anonymous gamete donation or, as Edwards (1993: 57) says, from unattached gametes, could be regarded as born without a kinship context in the traditional sense. This does not, however, contradict much of the contemporary Euro-American understanding of personhood. Strathern (1992: 22) claims that Euro-Americans, contrary to people in many other cultures, can imagine a person without reference to other persons or a kinship network. Referring to parliamentary disputes, she (ibid.: 23) argues that the emergence of personhood is viewed as the outcome of biological development, not the participation in relationships with other persons. The simple transmission of unattached genetic substances themselves is thought to confer identity. Although Euro-American kinship enables one to acquire identity without reference to a wider kinship system, people consciously or unconsciously still try to place themselves within a kinship context. As Edwards (1993: 61) argues, using the words of one of her informants, "people want to know what box they slot into." For people, a kinship context is their unique nexus of relations, which differentiates them from others. As Glover (1989: 37) claims poetically, "a life where the biological parents are unknown is like a novel with the first chapter missing."
Fears associated with the development of the NRT
The new reproductive technologies not only change human relations but the whole understanding of life, and this can be a source of many fears. Steptoe and Edwards, who triggered off the whole revolution with the first successful in vitro fertilization, themselves admitted,
Now that we have demonstrated that human conception can occur outside the human body, many investigations can be done which were impossible before. These are challenges, which we should not fear, though we must be on our guard against abuses. (Steptoe and Edwards 1980: 215).
People's attitudes towards the NRT are mixed. Interviews by Edwards (1993: 43) in a small town in north-west England ("Alltown") revealed that, although people admitted that infertile couples should be helped, they considered interference in the natural processes of reproduction dangerous, and certain possibilities for assisting conception inappropriate. People associated technological intervention in reproduction with creating zombies, organised through different bodies and prearranged (ibid.: 60). Scientists were compared to God and Hitler (ibid.: 63). The conflict between the development of science, and psychological response to it, is also expressed by Leach, who began his famous Reith Lectures (published under a revealing title A Runaway World?) with the words,
Men have become like gods. Isn't it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid. (Leach 1969: 1).
Hirsch (1993: 68) refers to two other dark scenarios: commercialisation of the NRT that would lead to "baby shopping," and, having in mind Huxley's Brave New World, eugenic temptations to construct a "master race." This New World, according to Smart (1987: 117), would be peopled only by men and "mother-machines." Many other authors have also been concerned with commercialisation, especially of surrogacy (e.g. Zipper and Sevenhuijsen 1987; Garcia 1989b; Whiteford 1989).
The development of the NRT has also raised concerns about medical dominance over giving life. According to Shore (1992: 296), God, the church, women and the state have traditionally controlled reproduction and been responsible for the "gift" of life. With the development of the NRT, the medical profession should now be included in that list. Price (1993: 27) refers to many cases where doctors act as decision-makers about patient suitability (e.g. reluctance to help lesbian couples). Feminists see the NRT as an unmitigated attack on women, and in recent years this has been the main criticism of the NRT. Commenting on the NRT, Stolcke (1986: 6) insists, that although technocrats claim that the new technologies are value-free, they are in fact grafted onto the structure of society with very specific notions of paternity, maternity and the family, and they derive their meaning from the political and social context in which they emerge. The claim that they offer women escape from the "destiny" of their biology is not true, all they actually offer is male-biased manipulation. Rose (1987) studying IVF, claims, in her article with the symbolic title Victorian Values in the Test-tube, that nothing has really changed. Indeed, with the development of the NRT some consider the situation of women to have even worsened; women now serve as guinea-pigs for technological manipulation (Stolcke 1986: 20) and are merely turned into reproductive prostitutes–to use Stanworth's (1987: 16) expression. Corea and Klein (1985; cf. Shore 1992: 300) claim that surrogate mothers are more likely to become victims of patriarchy and commercialisation, because of their increased dependency on science and medical technology. Maria Mies' article Why do we need all this? (cf. Stolcke 1986: 12) sums up feminist critique,
Before an alternative use of technology is possible, alternative conditions would first have to be created. It is a historical fact that technological innovations within exploitative relationships of domination only lead to an intensification of the exploitation of the groups being oppressed. This applies in particular for the new reproductive technologies, the technology of the industrial production of human beings.
Conclusion
In his article Genetrix : Genitor :: Nature : Culture, Barnes (1974, 73), commenting on the relationships between nature and culture, said:
...there is a real world we call nature which exists independently of whatever social construction of reality we adopt. The relation between nature and culture is contingent; some aspects of nature impinge more obviously and insistently on the human imagination than others.
For Euro-Americans the domain of procreation was to be "real" and "natural," this was the domain where aspects of nature impinged obviously and insistently on the human imagination. As I have tried to show in this essay, this is no longer the case. The controversial structuralist distinctions between production and reproduction, as well as culture and nature, have been challenged by the development of new reproductive technologies. Technological intervention in human procreation has resulted in a culturisation of nature, technologies of production are supplemented with technologies of reproduction. Procreation can no more be associated with the natural and private sphere, as opposed to that of the cultural and public. As Franklin (1990: 201) puts it, "the NRT have removed procreation from the protected realm of private and the symbolic domain of the ‘natural,’ and relocated it within the scientist's laboratory." With technological intervention nature becomes a cultural construct.
It is this shift from a natural to a potentially purely cultural understanding of relatedness, which could spell the end of humanisation as we know it. What do I mean by the end of humanisation? I am not saying that it is the end of humanity, rather it is the end of how we have understood who and what we are thus far. It may bring along other forms of identity, but the family, motherhood, fatherhood, kinship, and marriage all have a new twist. We will have to see these things from a new perspective. Our most basic established understandings, our networks, our kinships might change.
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FOOTNOTES:
1. The "Virgin Birth debate" of the 1980s, however, has lead some feminist authors to criticize the whole understanding of maternity and turn everything on its head within the Christian context. Delaney (1986, 495) argues that in Christianity where the God is referred to as "Father-Creator," paternity has had begetting and creative role, while maternity has meant nurturing and bearing. This is made explicit in the Virgin Birth. The power to create and engender life is masculine, the Virgin, according to Delaney, is the vehicle through which the seminal Word became flesh. In another example, Ross (1990:148) describes pseudo-procreation myths in Old Norse mythology where natural female powers are ascribed to male creator deities.
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2. When a man dies among the Nuer, his younger brother is obliged to marry the widow and take care of his children. If other children are born from this relationship, they are considered to belong to the dead man and bear his name. return to text
3. The term "artificial insemination" is generally used to refer to the placing of semen inside a woman's vagina or uterus by means other than sexual intercourse. Artificial insemination by husband (AIH) and artificial insemination by donor (AID) can be distinguished (Warnock 1985: 17). Scottish physician John Hunter first used AI on humans at the end of the 18th century (Moghissi 1989: 117). The first recorded successful AID was carried out considerably later, in 1884 (Lasker and Borg 1989: 134). return to text
4. The first IVF baby in the world was born in the year 1978, when Edwards and Steptoe assisted Lesley Brown to give birth to Louise (see Edwards and Steptoe 1980). return to text
5. Surrogacy is defined as the practice whereby the surrogate or carrying mother carries a baby for the commissioning mother who takes over the child after birth (Rivière 1985: 4). Page (1990: 56) distinguishes between genetic surrogacy where the surrogate mother has her own genetic baby, usually fertilized with sperm from the commissioning father by artificial insemination, and gestatory surrogacy where surrogate mother gives birth to someone else's embryo by in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer. Singer and Wells (1984, cf. Garcia 1989b: 170) distinguish between partial surrogacy and full surrogacy respectively. Although surrogate motherhood is considered a modern phenomenon, it has existed in history in a range of forms for ages – e.g. the story of Sara and Hagar in the Bible (Zipper and Sevenhuijsen 1987: 119; Wolfram 1989: 188). return to text
6. Of many similar cases, the case of "Baby M" is the most famous (see Garcia 1989ª; Fox 1993). return to text
7. Edwards (1993: 56) proposes that men would prefer the sperm donated anonymously rather than by their brothers. This could be related to the underlying gender differences in the implications of sexual infidelity. Feminist authors (e.g. Lasker and Borg 1989: 141-142), however, claim that in a patriarchal society, demonstration of biological relationship to children is for men a means of maintaining dominance in the family and in society. Thus they often prefer not only anonymous donation, but the secrecy of the fact of donation itself. return to text
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THIS ARTICLE
Title: Humanization Ends : The New Reproductive Technologies
Author: Toomas Gross
Presented: Montreal, May 28, 1999 - May 30, 1999
Draft: 13/03/2000
Maximus' Slide-In Menu by Maximus at absolutegb.com/maximus
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