Reassembling Motherhood

Procreation and Care in a Globalized World

Yasmine Ergas, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, Yasmine Ergas, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231538077
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The word "mother" traditionally meant a woman who bears and nurtures a child. In recent decades, changes in social norms and public policy as well as advances in reproductive technologies and the development of markets for procreation and care have radically expanded definitions of motherhood. But while maternity has become a matter of choice for more women, the freedom to make reproductive decisions is unevenly distributed. Restrictive policies, socioeconomic disadvantages, cultural mores, and discrimination force some women into motherhood and prevent others from caring for their children.

Reassembling Motherhood brings together contributors from across the disciplines to consider the transformation of motherhood as both an identity and a role. It examines how the processes of bearing and rearing a child are being restructured as reproductive labor and care work change around the globe. The authors examine issues such as artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, fetal ultrasounds, adoption, nonparental care, and the legal status of kinship, showing how complex chains of procreation and childcare have simultaneously generated greater liberty and new forms of constraint. Emphasizing the tension between the liberalization of procreation and care on the one hand, and the limits to their democratization due to race, class, and global inequality on the other, the book highlights debates that have emerged as these multifaceted changes have led to both the fragmentation and reassembling of motherhood.

1

CERTAIN MOTHERS, UNCERTAIN FATHERS

Placing Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Historical Perspective

NARA MILANICH

In their foundational volume on the global politics of reproduction, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (1995) asked, “What’s new about the new reproductive technologies?” In the succeeding two decades, the burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarship on assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) seems to have answered: just about everything. A recurring but generally unexamined refrain is that the advent of assisted reproduction heralded a discrete rupture in patterns of human reproduction and in the social meanings, relationships, and identities attached to it. In vitro fertilization, surrogacy, artificial insemination, and other practices “challenge our most established ideas about motherhood, paternity, biological inheritance, the integrity of the family, and the ‘naturalness’ of birth itself” (Shore et al. 1992, 295), producing a “transformation of the boundaries of family” (Satz 2007, 523). Such changes are said to be destabilizing, to have “shaken the unshakable” (Stumpf 1986, 187), and to have unsettled roles and identities once assumed to be transparent, self-evident, and stable. New technologies are thus “deconstructive in introducing ambiguity and uncertainty into kin relationships, including the fundamental categories of motherhood and fatherhood” (de Parseval and Collard 2007, cited in Inhorn and Birenbaum-Carmeli 2008, 182). One gleans from the literature the sense of a fixed and unambiguous “before” and a brave, new “after,” with ARTs as the critical watershed between them.

On one level, this narrative makes sense. The technoscientific novelty of ARTs as well as the creative social and legal adaptations and reformulations they have engendered seem indisputable. But what if, rather than framing their emergence as rupture, we considered ARTs as part of a longer-running and dynamic process in which law, science, technology, culture, religion, the state, and social practice have shaped and reshaped constructions of kinship and identity, maternity and paternity? For, as the ART literature itself shows so well, these are all malleable social categories, subject to profound reinterpretation and resignification within changing political and technological contexts. What if, then, we view ARTs as not the first, but merely the latest, reformulation of categories and identities that derive from and shape reproduction?

This chapter attempts to do that, exploring enduring tensions and synergies among social, legal, and scientific constructions of parentage. Such a historical exercise helps to place contemporary debates about who counts as a father or mother in a broader perspective, showing that ambiguity and contestation long predate the emergence of these new technologies. More specifically, even as one signal contribution of the scholarship on ARTs is to question facile assumptions about the social and the biological, the narrative of rupture tends to reify unwittingly not only the past as a foil to the present but also the binaries of certainty/uncertainty and ambiguity/unambiguity that signify a reproductive “before” and “after.” Invoked to make a point about the unprecedented novelty and disruptive potential of ARTs, notions of ambiguity/certainty themselves go unrecognized as social and legal constructs.

Invocations of past and present, certainty and uncertainty are common not only in the ART literature but also in assessments of another domain of technoscientific practice said to have revolutionized reproductive roles and identities: DNA paternity testing. But biological paternity has historically been constructed, in binary opposition to maternity, as intrinsically uncertain. Thus, if ARTs have rendered maternity ambiguous, genetic parentage testing has done precisely the opposite: made knowable that which had previously seemed inscrutable. As one scientist on the cusp of the DNA revolution declared, “Motherhood has always been a biologic certainty; now fatherhood will be as well” (Shaw 1983, 2537). And as with ARTs, this development tends to be framed in historical terms, in order to highlight its unprecedented novelty. “As society enters a new millennium, the age-old problem of determining paternity is finally being eradicated” is a typical refrain (Shapiro, Reifler, and Psome 1992, 2).

Juxtaposing DNA testing with ARTs highlights how notions of certainty and uncertainty help to define maternity and paternity and to define them in opposition to one another. Indeed, the relationship between these two roughly contemporaneous technoscientific developments has been expressed in precisely these terms, perhaps most provocatively by feminist scholar of science Charis Thompson (2005, 68), who has suggested, “The new reproductive technologies … made biological motherhood uncertain just as DNA testing was beginning to make the notoriously uncertain facts of paternity more certain.” In other words, notions of maternal certainty are constructed against complementary notions of paternal ambiguity, and the past is posed against the present, to argue that recent developments in reproductive and genetic science have in effect reversed the signs, rendering maternity ambiguous and paternity certain.

Notions of certainty/uncertainty have a remarkably long historical genealogy in the domain of what scholars have referred to as Euro-American kinship (Schneider 1984; Strathern 1992), and indeed in Western legal and social thought more generally.1 I begin with a brief historical appraisal of these ideas in law and culture and go on to survey various historical scenarios that demonstrate how social and legal ordering produces them. I then assess the impact, beginning in the early twentieth century, of new scientific technologies on notions of parentage, with a focus on early paternity testing. I argue that, even as they promised to reveal the incontrovertible truth of paternity, new technologies arguably rendered paternal identity more ambiguous than ever. If ARTs and DNA testing have unsettled older social and legal categories, as many scholars have noted, the categories they unsettled are themselves the product of earlier interactions between law, state policies, social practices, and scientific developments. Given its length, this essay can only sketch this evidence in the broadest of strokes; still, restoring some texture and specificity to history before ARTs, even anecdotally, allows us to address anew Rapp and Ginsburg’s query, “What is new about the new reproductive technologies?”

CERTAIN MOTHERS, UNCERTAIN FATHERS: A BRIEF HISTORY

The notion of biological maternity as certain and biological paternity as uncertain is a long-standing trope of Western law and culture. Roman law, for example, held “mater semper certa est” (the mother is always certain), because the fact of maternity could be clearly and unambiguously attributed at the moment of a child’s birth. Notions of maternal certainty were in turn constructed against complementary notions of paternity as ambiguous. “Pater semper incertus est,” held the accompanying Roman dictum: the father is intrinsically uncertain, because nature had drawn an “impenetrable veil” over the fact of paternity (Fuchs 2008, 52).2 But Roman law then went on to establish a qualifying principle: “pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant” (the father is he whom marriage indicates); that is, the husband of the mother is always, by law, the father of her children. If marriage renders paternity certain, the corollary, of course, is that the father necessarily remains uncertain in the case of unmarried mothers. That is, paternity is made “knowable” by marriage, even as it is effaced outside of it.

This cluster of legal principles concerning certain maternity, uncertain paternity, and the so-called presumption of marital legitimacy traverses a variety of legal traditions ancient and modern, religious and secular, Western and “non-Western.” Present in Catholic canon law and Jewish and Islamic legal traditions, they also are found in Anglo-American law and the civil law of continental Europe as well as in Latin American and some Middle Eastern legal systems. While undergoing evident modifications in emphasis and interpretation over time (some of which are outlined below), today these tenets continue to exercise considerable weight across diverse legal jurisdictions. As one author has suggested, marital legitimacy, and the accompanying principle of paternal uncertainty outside marriage, is “as close to a cultural universal in law as we get” (Stolzenberg 2007, 345).

Such ideas are not just the province of law. Disparate fields of knowledge have elaborated on the principles of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty and theorized about the significance of these seemingly natural facts to the origins of human societies, psychic development, cultural difference, and gender inequality. In the mid-nineteenth century, diverse strains of social theory attributed critical significance to the fact of paternal unknowability. Evolutionary accounts of the origins of human civilization from Friedrich Engels to Lewis Henry Morgan, for example, posited a primordial stage of familial promiscuity, uncertain paternal origins, and matrilineal descent. Johann Bachofen’s account of the defeat of “mother right”—the early stage of human society characterized by primitive matriarchy—hinged on the discovery that paternity could be made certain through monogamous marriage. Later, Sigmund Freud discussed the psychic impact of children’s dawning knowledge of human procreation and, in particular, their realization of their own indeterminate paternity, in “Family Romances” (1909). By the 1930s, anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski had embarked on a heated debate about whether contemporary “savages” understood the concept of physiological paternity (Allen 1999; Coward 1983; Delaney 1986). More recently, sociobiologists and primatologists have dwelled on how paternal indeterminacy shapes selection strategies among male and female primates. And even as they espouse a very different intellectual and political project, some strains of what has been labeled essentialist feminism have begun with a remarkably similar premise, arguing that the fact of uncertain paternity lies at the heart of patriarchy and its institutions (O’Brien 1981).

Such widely held and deeply rooted convictions about the “natural facts” of procreation form the backdrop for contemporary assessments of reproductive technologies. In a word, what is new about these new technologies is that they appear to have utterly revolutionized these facts. For the first time in human history, science has rendered maternity ambiguous, even as paternity has become certain and knowable. The naturalness of these facts constitutes the basic premise against which to assess the transformations wrought by reproductive technologies, from ARTs to paternity testing.

But are they, in fact, natural facts? I suggest that the principles of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty, enshrined in law and elaborated in social theory, sit uncomfortably with the historical record of cultural practice. The role of legal fictions—that is, presumptions created by law because it is socially and legally convenient to assume they are true—are a widely acknowledged dimension of the legal architecture of paternity, and I will return to this issue. First, however, I want to suggest, less conventionally, that there are equally powerful and enduring, but less recognized, legal fictions at work in this construction of maternity.

The dictum of certain maternity implies, first, a natural, physical, or biogenetic basis for maternal identity. Second, it implies that the fact of this natural relationship is unambiguous: over the course of a mother’s or child’s lifetime and beyond, the fleeting moment of birth imparts a clear and indelible link between a parturient and her progeny, despite eventual physical or social separation. A central pursuit of earlier generations of anthropological inquiry was the study of “non-Western” societies whose kinship systems or child-rearing practices operated according to a logic other than this physical or biogenetic one. But we need venture no further than Euro-American history to encounter a plethora of social scenarios in which this logic was normative rather than descriptive. In fact, the notion of maternal certainty fixed by and at birth seems utterly at odds with a wide array of child-rearing, familial, and labor practices in diverse Euro-American societies historically—societies, of course, governed by legal systems that nevertheless embraced the juridical logic of maternal certainty (and paternal uncertainty). These include the widespread practice of child abandonment, which dates from Roman history and stretches into the nineteenth century; the ubiquity of wet nursing and fosterage arrangements (Sussman 1982); and other cultural practices of child circulation, placement, fosterage, adoption, labor, and sale (Gager 1996; dos Guimarães Sá 1995).3 In different ways, all of these practices belied a fixed, stable, or singular maternal identity.

Significantly, these were not exceptional practices that existed on the margins of law or social custom. Rather, in particular times and places, they became widespread, ritualized, and institutionalized mechanisms for unmooring children from their natal identities and, when they survived, effecting their transfer to alternative kin and caretakers. Examples include oblatio, the donation of a child to a monastery, a prac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Negotiating “Mother” in the Twenty-First Century: Between Choice and Constraint
• 1. Certain Mothers, Uncertain Fathers: Placing Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Historical Perspective
• 2. Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Biological Bottom Line
• 3. Multiple “Mothers,” Many Requirements for Protection: Children’s Rights and the Status of Mothers in the Context of International Commercial Surrogacy
• 4. The Borders of Legal Motherhood: Rethinking Access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Europe
• 5. Pregnant Bodies and the Subjects of Rights: The Surrogacy–Abortion Nexus
• 6. The Motherless Fetus: Ultrasound Pictures and Their Magic Disappearing Trick
• 7. Contracting for Motherhood: Postadoption Visitation Agreements
• 8. Relinquishment and Adoption in Tamil Society: Mothers’ Experiences with De-Kinning
• 9. Marginalized Mothers and Intersecting Systems of Surveillance: Prisons and Foster Care
• 10. Care and Gender
• 11. The Double Lives of Transnational Mothers
• 12. Euro-Orphans and the Stigmatization of Migrant Motherhood
• 13. The New Maternalism: Children First; Women Second
• Afterword: Crossing into the Future
• Contributors
• Index