Romancing the Sperm

Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families

Diane Tober

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813590806
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Sociología

The 1990s marked a new era in family formation. Increased access to donor sperm enabled single women and lesbian couples to create their families on their own terms, outside the bounds of heterosexual married relationships. However, emerging "alternative" families were not without social and political controversy. Women who chose to have children without male partners faced many challenges in their quest to have children. Despite current wider social acceptance of single people and same sex couples becoming parents, many of these challenges continue.In Romancing the Sperm, Diane Tober explores the intersections between sperm donation and the broader social and political environment in which "modern families" are created and regulated. Through tangible and intimate stories, this book provides a captivating read for anyone interested in family and kinship, genetics and eugenics, and how ever-expanding assisted reproductive technologies continue to redefine what it means to be human.

1 • MURPHY BROWN AND THE LESBIAN BABY BOOM

Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong.… It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.… We cannot be embarrassed out of our belief that two parents married to each other are better, in most cases, for children than one.

—Vice President Dan Quayle¹

Societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family.

—Vice President Mike Pence²

Jackie was forty-one by the time she delivered her first child, a son, conceived via donor insemination through a Berkeley, California, sperm bank. I first met her in the fall of 1997, outside her craftsman-style duplex. She was walking up the pathway to her house, almost fifteen minutes late for our appointment, pushing a stroller. Fumbling through her diaper bag, she found her keys and opened the front door. She took her one-and-a-half-year-old out of the stroller and carried him into the house while I grabbed the stroller and parked it by the indoor stairs. She took off his tiny sweater and shoes when we got inside, and I maneuvered quickly to barely miss stepping on a rattle in the entryway. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I was at the park with my Single Mothers by Choice group, and Logan didn’t want to leave.”³ As a thirty-six-year-old single mother of two- and three-year-old sons myself at the time, in the middle of a divorce, I completely understood the challenges of leaving a park while children are playing.

Like many women her age who decide to have a child on their own, Jackie had spent years getting her education—she had a master’s degree in biology—and had built a career in the health care field. As a bisexual woman, when she was in her early to mid-thirties, she had thought about having a child first in her relationship with a man, and later in her relationship with a woman using a sperm donor, and then with another woman, but none of those relationships worked out. With her son now down for a nap, she told me how she started the process to conceive her son:

When I was about a few months away from turning forty, I was really extremely depressed. My relationship was having a really rough go of it because it was becoming clear she really didn’t want to be a parent—and that’s what I was basing our relationship on. Then when she and I broke up, an ex-boyfriend reappeared, and he and I tried to get pregnant for a while. But that wasn’t working either. I wasn’t getting pregnant, and he and I broke up.

Then I was forty-one and involved with a woman again and she wanted to co-parent, but she didn’t want to be pregnant. And even though we’d just met, we started looking into getting a sperm donor—an African American donor because she was African American. But she was a lot younger than me and her perception of time was different than mine, and she wanted to take more time with the process. I finally decided I was at a good point in my career, I couldn’t wait to have a child at the right time in a relationship, and if I was going to do it, it had to be now. So we started at the sperm bank and got pregnant after about five tries.

Then the day I went in for my eight-week sonogram there was suddenly no heart beat. She didn’t really know how to handle it, and she almost seemed relieved. So we broke up. And I kept trying on my own. I really, really didn’t want to be a single parent but I didn’t want to not have a child either—being a mother felt like a calling to me. And I had a good stable job with at least some maternity leave so I figured, logistically, I could do it. So after the miscarriage, the doctor put me on Perganol, a fertility drug, and after four or five more tries I got pregnant with Logan. And now I’m in the middle of trying again.

Jackie’s story reflects a range of themes to be addressed throughout this book. First, facing the reality of her increasing age and declining fertility, she was aware that she only had a limited number of years left in which she would be able to have a child. Second, although she would have preferred to have a child with a partner, in the absence of being able to find an appropriate partner as ready to pursue having a family as she was—regardless of whether the partner was female or male—she decided that she would rather have a child on her own than no child at all. Third, since she had a lucrative career, good health insurance, and a good education, she could afford to support a child on her own. Jackie’s story also presents a range of issues concerning how women attempt conception—whether with a male sexual partner, a known sperm donor, or an anonymous donor—and how they choose donors or the men with whom they want to have a child outside a traditional, married relationship. Jackie also, at one point, decided to use an African American donor in order to match her partner. Women have a range of reasons for why they choose the donors they choose, and these reasons may change according to whether one is conceiving on one’s own or within a relationship. And finally, Jackie also experienced the trauma of numerous failed attempts at conception and pregnancy loss, before she finally delivered a healthy baby boy. She was parenting on her own when we met, and in the process of trying for a second child.

In the mid-1990s, when Jackie started her family, the sociopolitical environment surrounding what were called “alternative families” was not necessarily hospitable. While the San Francisco Bay Area has been known for its relative tolerance in terms of marital status, sexual orientation, and single parenting, stigma still existed. These prejudices emerged in terms of legal and medical policies and practices more so than in daily community life. Then-governor Pete Wilson proposed legislation to ban single men and women and same-sex couples from adopting children. His spokesperson, Sean Walsh, provided Wilson’s rationale: “The Governor believes the best interest for a child is to have a mother and father in the household” (New York Times, 1996). This move took place within a broader national climate in which both the Democratic and the Republican Parties boasted of their “family values” credentials and their support for the Defense of Marriage Act, which made a ban on gay marriage federal law.

The family symbolizes the ideal relationship between the human and the natural worlds (Schneider 1968). The notion that all children need two married parents—a mother and a father—is symbolically rooted in cultural notions of “natural” procreative sex. Mary Douglas (1968) has discussed the importance of taboos in preserving the boundaries of the moral and social order, and she has analyzed the cultural anxieties that arise when “natural” categories are defied (1966, 1970). By extension, when single women or same-sex couples create families, the traditional notion of family—and compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 1980)—is challenged at a fundamental level. Motherhood among women without male partners confronts many symbolic, cultural, and political anxieties.

THE BIOPOLITICS OF FAMILY

In The History of Sexuality, volume 1, Michel Foucault (1980) discusses the linked notions of biopower and biopolitics of the population. Biopower refers to the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations through numerous and diverse techniques of the state. He states that biopower is the set of “mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (2007, 1). Biopolitics, a concept closely linked to biopower, is the social and political power over life—the link between biology and politics. These concepts are relevant to this research, and to feminist inquiries into reproduction and access to assisted reproductive technologies more broadly, because they give us insight into the linkages between cultural norms and discourses, regulatory policies, the roles of institutions, and how they affect the intimate practices of daily life. As Elizabeth Krause and Silvia De Zordo note, “The disciplining measures and related surveillance of gendered and sexual bodies aim to get people to conform to norms related to contraception and reproduction across geopolitical contexts” (2015, 7). When we look at the broader sociopolitical context in which families are created, and how different family forms are condoned (or not) in medical, legal, and political practices, we get a clearer vision of how an expanded view of what constitutes family challenges the prevailing social milieu. Not only is the regulation of family political, but so too are the individual reproductive acts of rebellion against the norm.

In the mid-1980s, when the use of conceptive technologies was relatively new but gaining in popularity, many feminist writers objected to embryological and reproductive research and technological intervention in achieving pregnancy (see, e.g., Arditti, Klein, and Minden 1984; Corea and Klein 1985; Stanworth 1987). These arguments held that such research objectifies women, exploits their procreativity, destroys their physical integrity, and undermines their control over their own reproduction. These critiques also included analyses of how patriarchy, race, class, gender, and power influence the position of women as consumers and patients in a local and global reproductive market (Franklin 1995, 1997; Ragone 1994; Franklin and Ragone 1998; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Markens 2007).

In the broad scope of reproductive politics, and the struggles over contraception, abortion, adoption, and access to reproductive technologies, ethical quandaries abound (Solinger 2013). Feminist anthropologists have had a long-standing interest in the impact of reproductive technologies on women’s lives and how global inequalities are reflected in a stratified reproductive market. In Outsourcing the Womb, France Winddance Twine (2011) examines the dynamics of race and class in the global market for gestational surrogates. Similarly, Laura Harrison’s (2016) Brown Bodies, White Babies explores racial differences between commissioning infertile patients and gestational surrogates, as well as how reproductive technologies are used to serve the family-creation needs of the dominant, white, heterosexual middle class. These authors provide important critiques of the reproductive industry and the role of low-income women and women of color as providers of third-party reproductive services.

The arguments against the medical and scientific control over reproduction are not as clear as they seem, however. It is true that women experiencing difficulty conceiving do become exploited consumers of modern medicine (and often “alternative” medicine as well). However, these women are also longing for a child, and if they were told by a practitioner to stop trying, they would quickly reject that doctor and seek out another who would give them more hope. Many women want, and actively seek, whatever technological means are available to them to become pregnant (Sandelowski 1993; Sargent and Bascope 1996). In Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai, Marcia Inhorn (2015) examines the stories of infertile couples who travel far and wide to get access to fertility care. Fertility tourism, or “reprotravel,” creates complex, cross-border networks and assemblages with different destinations for different reproductive purposes, including access to third-party gamete donors and gestational surrogates.

Most of the women in my study are based in the United States; however, one couple originally started their conception journey by having sperm shipped from the United States to Germany, where there were strict regulations against single women and lesbian couples having access to donor sperm. Women in my research are typically well informed about their options for treatment and recent advances in the field. They bring articles to their physicians’ attention and request certain drugs and procedures. In many cases, these women research their own symptoms and conditions, diagnose their own causes of infertility, and then demand they be treated accordingly. If a woman is dissatisfied with her physician, she typically shops around until she finds one she likes.

The fact that women consider parenting without a male partner to be a viable, even preferable, alternative indicates a major shift in the constitution of the family, despite conservative rhetoric and conventional “family values.” I focus specifically on single women and lesbian couples throughout this work because I am interested in how the use of technology does or does not correspond with prevailing social values and political rhetoric. The overarching questions I am asking are the following: What are the forces that influence access to reproductive technologies? How are social relations—for example, paternity, motherhood, families, and alternative kin networks—mediated through the use of technology? And how do perceptions of genetic inheritance influence donor choice? Although the users do, to a great degree, have the ability to “drive” the technology, how those technologies are used and who has access to them reflect varying philosophical and political principles. It is this manipulation of technology to achieve specific goals, according to personal and even national politics, in which I am most interested.

This ethnography takes place on three levels: (1) the daily operations of sperm banks and the business of selling sperm, (2) the individual lives of women attempting motherhood without male partners, and (3) the known and anonymous men who provide sperm to help other people have children. Looking at the junction at which these seemingly disparate entities meet provides a detailed ethnographic account of the complex interactions between technology, culture, sexuality, and lay interpretations of genetics, what I call folk genetics. Folk genetic beliefs influence how people select donors and lead to a type of “grassroots eugenics”—selecting for perceived desired traits, but in an individualized, idiosyncratic, innocuous way that is a pushback against traditional eugenics.

When I talk about “grassroots eugenics,” I want to be clear that I am not referring to eugenics in the usual sense. Traditional eugenics is rooted in a racist paradigm in which some people are considered less worthy to reproduce than others. Traditional eugenics has a malevolent past. Positive eugenics refers to the promotion of the higher reproduction of some people over others, including fertility incentives and pronatalist policies of the state intended to increase reproduction. Negative eugenics includes abuses such as forced sterilization of women from specific ethnic groups, Holocaust atrocities, and the removal of children from poor people and political dissidents in order for them to be raised by “suitable” families, among other things. Grassroots eugenics can be thought of as individual reproductive rebellion against racist, sexist, and classist patriarchal models, but with the ironic twist that those doing the selecting still consider some people to be more valuable than others. The beliefs that underlie donor selection reflect a modified genetic determinism in which in addition to phenotypic traits, an array of social traits—such as donor education, hobbies, or personal likes and dislikes—are prioritized. By exploring how people choose donors, this work uncovers the social meanings embedded in genetic material.

The manipulation of reproductive technologies is consistent with perceptions of genetic fitness. Screening practices within the reproductive industry typically enhance the reproduction of certain groups of people while attempting to limit the reproduction of others. For example, many sperm banks screen out donors who do not correspond to the repository’s notion of who is fit to be a genetic parent. Similar criteria can also be used to rule out potential recipients of sperm. Thus, the reproductive industry has the ability to influence what types of individuals can be reproduced and which kinds of families can be created.

The focal point of this book is how reproductive politics and notions of fitness (genetic and social) are played out through the bodies of individual women; how sperm banks act as liaisons between women and men who, otherwise, would not create a child together; and how these relationships are managed and controlled through sperm bank policies and regulations. The ways in which technologies can be manipulated to serve different interests is one point of connection between each of these areas. The uses of reproductive technologies can be simultaneously subversive and conforming, simultaneously challenging social norms on one level and reproducing them on another (Davis-Floyd and Dumit 1998, 7). Donor insemination, and reproductive technologies more broadly, facilitates alternative family arrangements within a broader sociopolitical context in which such families are regulated and stigmatized but those who have the resources to pay can find a way to get access regardless of their marital status or sexual orientation.

METHODOLOGY AND DATA

I conducted the initial phase of this research primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area over a seven-year period, between 1991 and 1998. This study includes qualitative, semistructured, open-ended interviews with women who conceived, or were attempting to conceive, with donor sperm; interviews with professionals working in the sperm-banking industry; and interviews with known and anonymous sperm bank donors. I recruited women from several sources: the larger infertility project for which I was a researcher at...