Transnationalising Reproduction

Third Party Conception in a Globalised World

Roisin Ryan Flood, Jenny Gunnarsson Payne, Roisin Ryan Flood, Jenny Gunnarsson Payne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317555742
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Third party conception is a growing phenomenon and provokes a burgeoning range of ethical, legal and social questions. What are the rights of donors, recipients and donor conceived children? How are these reproductive technologies regulated? How is kinship understood within these new family forms?

Written by specialists from three different continents, Transnationalising Reproduction examines a broad range of issues concerning kinship and identity, citizenship and regulation, and global markets of reproductive labour; including gamete donation and gestational surrogacy. Indeed, this book seeks to highlight how reproductive technologies not only makes possible new forms of kinship and family formations, but also how these give rise to new, ethical, political and legal dilemmas about parenthood as well as new modes of discrimination and a re-distribution of medical risks. It also thoroughly investigates the ways in which a commodification of reproductive tissue and labour affects the practices, representations and gendered self-understandings of gamete donors, fertility patients and intended parents in different parts of the world.

With a broad geographical scope, Transnationalising Reproduction offers new empirical and theoretical perspectives on third-party conception and demonstrates the need for more transnational approaches to third-party reproduction. This volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Gender Studies, Health Care Sciences, Reproductive Technology and Medical Sociology.

Part I

Kinship and identity

1 Grammars of kinship

Biological motherhood and assisted reproduction in the age of epigenetics¹

Jenny Gunnarsson Payne

The world’s first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby was born in 1978. By June 2012, over 5 million children had been born with the help of IVF. Newspapers all around the world commented on this as “the amazing story of IVF” (e.g., Brian 2013) and as a “medical success story” (Elvidge 2013), often referring to these children as “miracle babies” (see also ESHRE 2012). Although the sheer numbers of IVF children and new families that have been produced as a result of assisted reproductive technologies are indeed impressive, an even more significant consequence is that these technologies have transformed some previously indisputable facts concerning biological kinship and motherhood.

As feminist scholars such as Marilyn Strathern, Helena Ragoné, and others have argued, IVF constitutes the third in a series of shifts in a separation of conception, reproduction, and parenthood. Following medical advances such as hormonal contraceptives and assisted reproduction (e.g., artificial insemination), IVF was the final component in ultimately realizing what is now commonly referred to as the fragmentation of motherhood (see, e.g., Ragoné 1998: 119)². In other words, today it is possible, for the first time in human history, to distinguish not only between social and biological motherhood but also between various modalities of biological motherhood, such as genetic motherhood, gestational motherhood, and even, some might argue, mitochondrial motherhood.³

This means that an age-old principle that has traditionally underpinned European kinship, namely, the Roman legal principle mater semper certa est (the mother is always certain), is becoming increasingly contested, especially in the parts of the world where assisted reproduction is commonly used (see Melhuus 2012: 72). As a result, it is no longer self-evident that the birth mother should be defined as a child’s biological mother; in fact, it is no longer obvious what biological motherhood really is. For instance, in cases of so-called third-party reproduction (i.e., reproduction involving a third reproductive party such as a donor of gametes or a gestational surrogate), biological motherhood is sometimes determined with reference to nutrition via the blood or ideas of shared bloodstreams, sometimes with reference to the inheritance of DNA, and yet at other times with reference to epigenetic influences taking place within the womb.

To deepen our understanding about the role that biology plays in kinning processes – that is, the process through which kinship is established by connecting one (in this case, human) being to another – in the context of third-party reproduction, this chapter proposes a theoretical framework of kinship grammars. Building on previous insights within the field of new kinship studies and taking theoretical inspiration from the field of political discourse theory, it seeks to discuss how the kinship grammars of blood, genetics, and epigenetics offer different “rules” for determining the changing meaning of biological motherhood. In this framework, “rule following” should be understood not as a straightforward procedure but as one that always necessarily entails an element of subversion of the very rule it seeks to apply. This chapter constitutes one of several case studies of the kinship grammar of epigenetics in the context of assisted reproduction, all of which seek to investigate and theorize the significance of epigenetics for kinship in the context of assisted reproduction (see Dahl & Gunnarsson Payne 2015; Gunnarsson Payne 2015). I have selected the empirical data in accordance with what Adele Clarke has called “theoretical sampling,” meaning that it has been purposefully selected to shed light on and theorize this particular theoretical first problem (see Clarke 2005: 84). To this end, I introduce the notion of kinship grammars as a framework for understanding the role of biology in establishing kinship connections. I will argue that the notion of kinship grammars helps us to better understand how biological motherhood in the context of assisted reproduction is defined flexibly, depending on whether a grammar of blood, a grammar of genetics, or a grammar of epigenetics is applied in a given context (e.g., egg donation, surrogacy). Second, I turn my attention to a specific legal dispute concerning maternity in a surrogacy arrangement, namely, the High Court case M.R & Anor v An tArd Chláraitheoir and Others.⁴ I thereby seek to demonstrate not only how these three grammars coexist and are negotiated in a particular empirical example but also that the grammar of epigenetics may be an emerging way of understanding biology in relation to kinship, particularly in third-party reproduction. Third, I conclude this chapter by discussing the potential consequences that the emergence of a grammar of epigenetics might have for our understanding of biological kinship in third-party reproduction and beyond.

Retheorizing biological kinship: the “new” in new kinship studies

When the kinship identities and formations that have emerged in the wake of assisted reproduction are mentioned, this is often followed by a series of examples from a whole new kinship vocabulary: test-tube baby, IVF baby, donor, gestational surrogate, donor-conceived offspring, embryo adoption, donor siblings, and mitochondrial motherhood. The list can be made much longer. This emerging and changing vocabulary provides us with useful insights into both dominant and transforming meanings of kinship in the age of assisted reproductive technologies (see also Cahn 2013: 7), and it plays a crucial part in processes of social change, not least in terms of normalizing these new ways of becoming related (see Thompson 2005). Moreover, the use of assisted reproductive technologies reactivates questions concerning the very nature of kinship itself by posing questions pertaining to, in Janet Carsten’s words, “the extent to which kinship is part of the pre-given, natural order of things and the extent to which it is shaped by human engagement” (2004: 6). Kinship cannot be understood solely as a “realm of the ‘given’ as opposed to the ‘made’” but has to be investigated as “an area of life in which people invest their emotions, their creative energy, and their new imaginings” (9). Considering this, it may not be surprising that studies of kinship have such a long-standing history, particularly in the discipline of anthropology, where kinship has almost come to symbolize the discipline per se (Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 1).

Carsten divides the history of kinship studies into three phases: first, the anthropology of kinship in the mid-twentieth century; second, the culturalist critique of kinship; and third, more recent developments in the field, or what is generally referred to as new kinship studies (Carsten 2004: 10). The first phase, the anthropology of kinship in the mid-twentieth century, encompasses, first, British social anthropology, such as the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Edward Evans-Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes, who were generally preoccupied with the study of descent groups and understood kinship as central for “constituting the political structure and providing the basis for social continuity in stateless societies” (Carsten 2004: 10). Second, it encompasses French structuralist anthropology, which was heavily influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of human culture, in which the notion of kinship played a fundamental role (Lévi-Strauss 1969). For Lévi-Strauss and his followers, kinship systems were to be understood as entirely symbolic systems and, as such, without any direct reference to biology. To be precise, Lévi-Strauss argued that the existence of a kinship structure necessitates the existence of three types of family relations: “a relation of consanguinity, a relation of affinity, and a relation of descent – in other words, a relation between siblings, a relation between spouses, and a relation between parent and child” (1963: 46), all of which, as we can see in the new and emerging kinship vocabulary, are acquiring new meaning in the post-IVF world. Significantly, one of the most transformative contributions of Lévi-Strauss’s theory of kinship was its shifting focus, from descent to marriage and exchange (Carsten 2004: 14). Third, the first phase of kinship studies also includes North American studies of kinship terminologies and classificatory systems, as carried out for decades by scholars such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Alfred Kroeber as well as more contemporary researchers such as Harold W. Scheffler and F. G. Lounsbury, to mention but a few (Carsten 2004: 16).

The second phase of kinship studies is marked by the contributions of North American anthropologist David Schneider, whose publications include the oft-mentioned American Kinship (1968) and the subsequent A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984). Schneider’s work refocused the anthropological study of kinship from a more structuralist understanding of kinship to one that was more semiotic and hermeneutical, a development that situated the field alongside the works of scholars such as Clifford Geertz and that followed an overarching trend in the discipline. Not only was Schneider highly critical of the role that kinship studies occupied in anthropology, he also “framed his analysis of American Kinship around ‘the order of nature’ and ‘the order of law,’ or between substance and code” (Carsten 2004: 19) in a way that opened the question of nature versus culture up for further interrogation. Schneider also pointed out how anthropologists consistently applied “Euro-American folk assumptions about the primacy of kinship from sexual procreation” and argued that these were not necessarily universal or valid outside of the Western context within which they were formulated (Carsten 2004: 19; see also Schneider 1968: 1984). While, as Carsten and others have pointed out, Schneider opened the role of biology in kinship up for questioning, it was not he but feminist anthropologist Marilyn Strathern who was first to re-theorize kinship in a way that “resolved the contradiction” between nature and culture that Schneider had pointed out and inaugurated what can be referred to as the third phase of kinship studies (Carsten 2004: 22; see also Strathern 1992a, 1992b).

The third phase of kinship studies, also known as new kinship studies, grew out of a reengagement with kinship within the fields of interdisciplinary feminist and gender studies, as well as the field of science and technology studies, for which interrogation into the relationship between nature and culture has held center stage. Influences from anthropological studies of gender and personhood that had flourished in the 1970s and 1980s were also crucial for the developments in this phase, not least because it had become “increasingly clear that gender and personhood could not be understood if they were divorced from the kinds of social institutions that anthropologists had previously bracketed under kinship – marriage, family structures, procreation beliefs, inheritance, and so on” (Carsten 2004: 20; see also Yanagisako & Collier 1987). Additionally, and of particular importance for this chapter, are the developments in the field of assisted reproduction, such as the increased visibility of so-called artificial donor insemination and IVF, which further spurred scholarly inquiry into mother- and fatherhood, as well as kinship relations between parents and children (Carsten 2004: 21). These issues have been investigated both theoretically and empirically by feminist anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern (1992a, 1992b) and Sarah Franklin (1997), both of whom have played a crucial part in re-theorizing the relationship between nature and culture in kinship. Carsten points out how this strand of kinship studies differs from traditional kinship studies, not least in its geographical focus. Whereas the latter has had a tendency to focus on non-Western and often rural societies, the former has often engaged with new forms of reproductive technologies, often (but not always) in the West (Carsten 2004: 22–23). With regard to surrogacy specifically, the contribution of questions raised by new kinship studies cannot be underestimated, theoretically or practically. How kinship bonds are defined legally will have major practical consequences for all reproductive parties involved in a surrogacy arrangement, as well as the children that are born as a result of one, and this question has significant bearing for the affective ties and kinship identities that are formed between the people involved in surrogacy. Significantly, a crucial contribution made by new kinship studies is to explore the multifarious and contextually constituted ways in which “biology” plays a role in formations of kinship.

Nature, culture, and the grammars of biological kinship

As Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon have argued, kinship has often been theoretically conceptualized in terms of classificatory systems, or grammars. A grammar, in this sense, can be understood as “generative of the kinds of material, relational, and cultural worlds that are possible, and for whom” (Franklin & McKinnon 2001: 15). Such kinship grammars are mobilized and rearticulated differently in different contexts to form and reform relatedness through processes of connection and disconnection, and processes of inclusion and exclusion, “as well as the boundary-crossing trickster movements that confound such classifications” (15).

To specify more precisely what I take the concept of kinship grammars to mean within the bounds of this text, I am inspired by political discourse theorist Aletta Norval’s Wittgensteinian notion of political grammars; grammars, in this sense, cannot be said to be “answerable to facts” – they tell us nothing about how things “really” are – but they do delimit “what may count as possible descriptions of how things are” (Norval 2007: 7). Following this, kinship grammars tell us what “counts” as kinship; they provide us with the rules for who counts as kin (Gunnarsson Payne 2015). But, importantly, following a Wittgensteinian notion of grammars, the argument that I put forward acknowledges that the application of a grammatical “rule” can never be seen as external to the rule itself; rather, as we will see, the application of a rule has a constitutive dimension (see Wittgenstein 2001).

As such, the concept of kinship grammars not only helps us to acknowledge the existence of local variations and changes over time; it also highlights how a change of kinship grammar (e.g., the transformation of an existing grammar, the emergence of a hybrid grammar, or the production of a new one) changes kinship itself. Kinship grammars are not “added on to” an underlying “really existing kinship” but are what makes some human connections (in the loosest possible sense) into kinship connections. In this regard, kinship grammars can be understood as kinship technologies, in Franklin’s extended sense of the term (Franklin & McKinnon 2001). Furthermore, it is through the production and reproduction of kinship grammars that kinship becomes a site for negotiation and contestation over where the very line of demarcation between nature and culture should be drawn (Franklin & McKinnon 2001, 16). And in these ongoing negotiations and contestations, the role of “biology” – both as a discipline and as the object of investigation of that discipline – cannot be underestimated. Furthermore, the question of which kinship grammars emerge I take to be negotiated, contested, and transformed in a constant interrelationship between biology – in the double sense of its meaning – and our cultural understandings of it. In relation to this, it has to be pointed out that changes in material conditions (such as new medicines and medical practices, as well as economic processes) and new scientific discoveries will, as we have seen in the case of epigenetics, necessarily be codeterminative in the constitution of new kinship grammars. For the kinship grammars that emerge in the wake of assisted reproduction, science will necessarily play a key part in their constitution. As Donna Haraway has argued, “No scientific account escapes being story-laden, but it is equally true that stories are not all equal here” (1990: 8). As such, kinship grammars in the context of assisted reproduction cannot be understood as separate from the materiality of the reproductive body or from the scientific developments of reproductive medicine: put differently, the kinship grammars of blood, genetics, and epigenetics cannot be seen as mere fictions but rather as both story laden and materially determined at the same time. As a result, their articulation and rearticulation will always necessarily take place at the interface of meaning and matter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Kinship and identity
• PART II: Reproducing markets
• PART III: Citizenship and regulation
• Index