NEW REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

                                   New reproductive technologies and kinship

Reproductive Technologies are designed to intervene in the process of human reproduction. They fall into four groups:\
 a) The first and the most familiar group includes those concerned with fertility control: with preventing conception, frustrating implantation of an embryo or terminating pregnancy,, i.e. contraceptive technologies
b) The second group of RTs is concerned with the 'management of labour and childbirth'.
 c) The third group includes those concerned with improving the health and genetic characteristics of foetuses and of newborn babies.
 d) The fourth group includes conceptive technologies, directed to the promotion of pregnancy through techniques for overcoming or bypassing fertility (Stanworth: 1987:10-11 )

Various stances on the new reproductive technologies
 There are various positions that have been taken vis-a-vis NRTs. They are as follows:
a) NRTs are valuable and should be applied as extensively as possible.
b) It is not appropriate to interfere with the natural and divine order by using these advanced technological procedures.
c) These technologies have to do with power relations and can be misused if they fall into the wrong hands.
d) NR Ts are a new form of male control where the · masculinist' nature of science becomes obvious

Some NRTs in India

Artificial Insemination: The woman's partner's or a donor's sperm is inserted into the woman's uterus. If the woman conceives, the rest of the process is natural.

In-vitro Fertilization (IVF): This involves fertilization outside the female body. The eggs and sperm (the couples' or donors) are placed in a dish where fertilization occurs. The resulting embryo is then transferred to a woman's uterus.

 Gamete Intra-fallopian Transfer (GIFT): Conception is facilitated by adding the man's sperm to a fluid containing his partner's eggs and transferring them together and directly to the fallopian tubes at the most favourable time of the menstrual cycle.

Zygote Intra-fallopian Transfer (ZIFT): The procedure is the same as IVF except that the fertilized egg is transferred a few hours earlier into the fallopian tube rather then in th~: uterus,, thereby mimicking a natural pregnancy more closely.

Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI): Through micromanipulation of sperm, it is immobilised,, and a single sperm is injected into the egg in a petri dish.

 In the contemporary globalised world, a range of reproductive possibilities are now available, many of which raise important socio-anthropological questions related to the balance of power inherent in such interactions, the different practices and regulations involved in the delivery of ARTs and the individual and cultural significance of these practices. One of the most controversial issues amongst feminist groups has certainly been the impact of ARTs in reinforcing patriarchal medical control and heteronormative expec­tations. While the prospect of ARTs initially seemed to offer women the opportunity to be free from the biological constraints associated with reproduction, such hopes rapidly gave way to major criticisms and the denunciation of several as­pects of ARTs which ran counter to women’s empowerment and well-being.In particular, many feminists opposed the strengthening of male surveillance over the female body and women’s reproductive capacity through the use of reproductive tech­nologies. This criticism was part of a wider movement that denounced the overmedi­calization of pregnancy and childbirth in a male-dominated medical system (Oakley, 1987). For some, ARTs were in fact the “very instrument of patriarchal oppression”  which allowed men to intervene and exercise greater con­trol over the female body . According to some authors, such as Catherine Waldby (2008), due to its reproductive capacity, a woman’s body also becomes a commodity with added value, a “biovalue”, which has the potential to be made available, transferable and open to commercializa­tion, in what has become a very lucrative market . More specifically, ova donation and surrogacy, even when altruistic (Konrad, 2005), place these women in the “reproductive bioeconomy”, which is based on reproductive “labor” and “tissues” . This notion of “labor” is precisely the perspective adopted in a number of papers published in a re­cent issue of the feminist journal Cahiers du genre  to gain an insight into the involvement of both ART users and suppliers. This issue fo­cuses on and develops further the concept of “reproductive labor” (“travail repro­ductif”), which essentially involves women and has remained invisible for a long time. This concept of reproductive labor was developed out of the notion of “productive la­bor” (“travail productif”) which originally emerged from the celebrated 1982 interdis­ciplinary symposium Femmes, féminisme et recherche, which took place in Toulouse and led to the recognition of feminist studies as an autonomous field of research in France.

Robert Snowden and his colleagues (1983: 34) claim that, with the advent of NRTs, we now need a total of ten different terms to cover the concepts of “mother” and “father.” The terms they propose are as follows:

1. Genetic mother

2. Carrying mother

3. Nurturing mother

4. Complete mother

5. Genetic/carrying mother

6. Genetic/nurturing mother

7. Carrying/nurturing mother

8. Genetic father

9. Nurturing father

10. Complete father

When such practices are paid for or traded for certain advantages, such as reduced fees for IVF services, some authors perceive them as potentially exploiting the most vulnerable females or, at the very least, pressuring them to consider such options. The neoliberal ideology that supports this reproductive market does, indeed, tend to exert excessive pressure on the most disadvantaged and marginalized populations populations in terms of socio-economic status and ethnic identity, leading some of them to exchange their reproductive capacity for financial reward. These inequalities are increasing as this market has become globalized, in large part due to the significant amount of reproductive tissues required for stem cell research. This can be seen in what has been termed “cross-border reproductive care” —or “the global chain of reproductive labour”, depending on which dimension one wishes to stress. This growing phenomenon relates to both the transfer of reproductive tissues and services between countries (Nahman, 2013) and the movement of individu­als suffering from infertility and seeking certain reproductive services or tissues, i.e. travelling to countries where such services and supply are more accessible legally or financially. However, though such travel for reproductive care does allow some people to improve their chances of having children, thus reinforcing their “agency”, it often remains complicated from a practical, emotional and legal standpoint.

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Access to ARTs indeed continue to be a privilege enjoyed by those possessing sufficient means, especially within countries where reproductive assistance is not subsidized or even available. This is why many feminists have drawn attention to the social disparities that ARTs contribute to replicate, and even reinforce with respect to gender, social class, ethnic origins, age, nationality, or sexual orientation. Such disparities are not caused and reinforced only by ARTs, but they are also strongly linked to existing social structures. Furthermore, although ARTs have over time contributed to querying the biocentric and bilateral family model, by facilitating the emergence of new family structures (we shall come back to this later), they may nevertheless participate in reinforcing a profoundly heteronormative logic. Marylin Strathern’s work has been influential in this area and demonstrates how ARTs blur the boundaries between what is considered as “natural” and what is deemed to be “cultural” . Indeed, when in vitro fertilization is substituted for sexual intercourse, not only does it replicate “natural conception” and make one lose sight of the “natural” character of conception by “artificialize[ing] the very facts of life”, but it creates biology itself, making these techniques capable of producing “the effect of naturalized origins”. Nature henceforth appears both manipulated and manip­ulatable ) through “these new assisted conception techniques ‘born’ of the union of reproductive substance and technological innovation” .

More generally, ARTs highlight the dissociation between several aspects of procrea­tion: the desire for a child, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and child-raising. They thus permit a diffraction of the paternal and maternal roles. This distribution of parental functions amongst several people is not always new or even limited to ARTs. It has been observed by ethnologists in many societies where a distinction is made, for example, between the mother who bore and breastfed the child and the one who nurtures them. However, it was ARTs that introduced a groundbreaking change into the concept of “parent” by involving third parties who are active in the conception of the child. In particular, now, the maternal role may be shared between two or even three women: she who desires motherhood and intends to parent the child, she who donates the egg required for con­ception of the embryo, and, where a surrogate mother is required, she who carries the child. The arrival of the surrogate mother—a situation that, unlike gamete donation, is difficult to conceal—thus constitutes “an intrusion in the childbirth scene” (.

Prior to the development of ARTs, the paternal function could already be shared by two men in situations where procreation was not possible by the couple alone. Such a situa­tion has been the classic theme of many stories in which, subsequent to years marked by unsuccessful attempts with her husband, the wife very discreetly takes on another man and allows him to become the procreational substitute for her husband. The major change brought by medical sperm donation is not so much related to the technical as­pects of it, but rather the status of such donation. Indeed, this donation is generally anonymous, since in many countries the identity of the gamete donor is not revealed and the intending father is automatically declared to be the legal parent, and thus seen by all as the child’s genetic father. Additionally, such intervention within a medical framework that avoids a sexual encounter between the sperm donor and the future mother means that using a procreational substitute for the husband is no longer con­sidered as adultery.

However, it is sometimes not acceptable for a couple to use another man’s sperm to fertilise the female partner’s egg (Fortier 2005). Such an arrangement may also lead the intending father to be unsure of his identity as man or parent. It is not insignificant that many parents who have used sperm donation hide the details of their conception from their children, even in countries where such anonymity has been eliminated. One should point out that in some communities and societies, such as amongst Sunni Muslims, gamete donation remains taboo and subject to marginalization .

Where the solicitation of third parties is authorized for reproductive purposes —a so­lution which is increasingly common— non-biological parenthood becomes relatively acceptable and visible, and as a result challenges the dominant biocentric model of parenthood. The affirmation of this non-biological parenthood is part of a wider movement of recognition and promotion of elective parenthood, reflecting the commitment and daily involvement in raising and caring for a child. However, ARTs generate a paradoxical situation in this respect. Indeed, these technologies are often sought out and used with a view to having a child that is biologically, either through the genes or blood, related to at least one of the intending parents, thus reinforcing some kind of biologism. Empirical studies examining the uses of ARTs have highlighted the fact that in some societies, especially those where there has been broad dissemination of biomedical knowledge regarding the body and its functions, bioge­netic knowledge appears to have become more important than ever before with re­spect to the way in which people today perceive the world around them. At the same time, the proliferation of reproductive techniques involving the intervention of third parties is helping to normalise non-biological parental practices. Parenthood through non-traditional routes such as adoption or with the use of third party genetic material has become a highly valued and respectable route to parenthood, even though, as found by Martha Ramirez Gálvez, and discussed in her paper in this issue, such a route to parenthood can also be regarded as a second best substitute to conceiving naturally.

The ultimate question therefore seems to be about whether one prioritizes blood or elective ties. In other words, is it blood—a metaphorical synonym of genes—or is it parental commitment that ultimately decides the child’s lineage? Though such ques­tions may appear relevant, they do nonetheless tend to reduce this issue to a dichot­omy between the blood ties on the one side and the social ties on the other, whilst this distinction is not supported by current empirical research on this topic. Janet Carsten therefore suggests using the term ‘relatedness’ rather than ‘kinship’ (Carsten, 2000), a term that could be translated in French by apparentement, in order to cover both the biological and social aspects of parenthood, while underlying the relationship between them.

Additionally, above and beyond the assumed tensions between blood ties and social ties, what contemporary family structures really call into question is the exclusiveness of kinship (Schneider, 1968, Fine, 2001). A growing number of Western societies have now opened up, socially and legally, to forms of parenthood that are not based on biol­ogy. Furthermore, they sometimes even recognise same-sex parenthood, thus moving beyond the heterosexual . However, it is still difficult to envisage and accept the integration of additional parental figures as part of the life and identity of a child, particularly from a legal point of view.

Marilyn Strathern(1992), in particular has used discourses about recent technological developments to question the place of nature not just in kinship, but in wider knowledge practices in Euro American culture. Nature, she argues, can no longer be considered as the grounding for culture or as simply there to be revealed or discovered. It is partly produced through technological intervention. Kinship, Strathern argues is of particular significance precisely because, in Euro American ideas, it has been thought of as a realm where nature and culture interconnect. Nature is of course the necessary ground from which culture emerges, and kinship like culture is thought of  as being based in nature. Strathern argues that in the late 20th century English culture, nature which had previously had the status of a prior fact, a condition for existence has lost its grounding function as a condition for knowledge. This does not mean that nature has disappeared; to the contrary, it has become more evident. What is taken to be natural has itself become a matter of choice. Whereas kin relationships previously would have been seen to have their basis in nature, and could be socially recognized or not, the effects of assisted reproduction are that relations can be perceived either as socially constructed or as natural relations assisted by technology. Apart from the distinction between nature and culture, ARTs have challenged the Western kinship model, based on biological reproduction, i.e. “characterized both by its bilateralism (transmission by the two family branches, paternal and maternal) and by blood ideology, this being seen as responsible for transmitting physical and moral characteristics of the same lineage”

Helena Ragone’s(1994), study of surrogate motherhood and American kinship shows how surrogacy contradicts a number of cultural norms. Surrogacy deemphasises the blood tie between the surrogate and the child and second, it deemphasises the surrogate’s tie to the father vis a vis the child. Thus the traditional symbol of unity between the surrogate and the father created by the child is circumvented, along with any lingering notions of adultery. Fathers and adoptive mothers each develop different strategies to resolve the problem posed by surrogate motherhood. Ragone shows how surrogate mothers are anxious to negate an image of themselves as motivated primarily by commercial concerns. By invoking an idiom of the gift, surrogate mothers substitute altruism and generosity for the financial gain that is deemed inimical to the realm of kinship. This substitution bypasses the relation between genetic father and surrogate mother, which carries connotations of adultery and illegitimacy, and focuses instead on sharing, reciprocity and even sisterhood between the two women. Jennifer Harington, Gay Becker and Robert Nachtigall(2008), examine the absence of biological relatedness in couples where the use of third party gamete donor casts doubt on the notions of conventional kinship. The authors observe that individuals who use technology to create a family remediate relatedness through a dehistoricized idea of kinship in which the traditional concept is replaced with the concept of chance. The use of donor gametes precludes the possibility for a conventional biological reproduction. 

Jeanette Edwards (2004), carried out residential fieldwork in “Alltown” in the Northwest of England, between 1987 to 1988, then in 1990 and again in 2000. In 2000 his aim was to reinvestigate the ways in the residents think about the developments of NRT’s. Incest emerged frequently and unexpectedly in the conversations of NRT’s to the residents of Alltown. Many Alltown people describe a scenario in which children born of gametes donated from the same person will meet up as adults, and not knowing that they are related, fall in love, marry and have children together. Another danger identified is that children born of the same surrogate mother, again not knowing that they are related, will 3 meet up, fall in love, marry and have children together. It was reported that children born out of such unions will be disabled or deformed. Incest then can inadvertently and accidently stem from surrogacy arrangements. Incest is thus not confined to the inappropriate mingling of certain biogenetic materials but is a function of closeness. In the English kinship children gestated in the same womb are too close regardless of their genetic connection. In this kinship thinking a man donating sperm to his daughter, or a woman donating ova to her son, is self evidently incestuous. Sexual intercourse is not a prerequisite for incest. The point to underline here is that the concept of incest connotes a boundary that ought not to be crossed and requires neither sexual intercourse nor genetic connection to arouse a real sense of concern or distaste. Moreover there will be disruption of family norms if a father will provide sperm to his son or mother will provide ova to her daughter. It was also pointed out that later gamete donors who are also the relatives of the child born will interfere in the upbringing of the child. So most of the residents preferred anonymous donors or non relatives. 

 Charis Thompson’s (2001), study examines gestational surrogacy and in vitro fertilisation by ovum donation that leads to different kinds of kinship configurations. Thompson sites the examples of six cases where donor egg or surrogate mother is a close friend or a family member. In one of the cases a women gestate embryos made from a close friend who is also from the ethnic background as hers and sperm from her husband. In another case a women will gestate embryos made from either her sister or a close friend and sperm from her husband. In yet another case a sister will be the gestational surrogate for her brother’s child. Although it could have been a case of incest if nature would not had been denaturalized. In another interesting case a women will gestate embryos made from her daughter’s eggs and sperm from the women’s second husband. This is also a case of incest. In all the above cases new reproductive technologies are implicating kinship relations. It is at this stage that law and state comes to play a very important role. 

Kahn’s (2000), work on assisted conception in Israel vividly illuminates the extraordinary lengths to which the state and the religious authorities in Israel go in order to reproduce citizens. In Israel unmarried woman are allowed to assess sperm donation free until the birth of two live children. But according to Rabbinic law a Jewish woman is allowed to inseminate through the sperm of non Jewish men only. Since Jewish status is transferred matrilineal, a child conceived by artificial insemination using non Jewish sperm is fully Jewish. The use of non Jewish sperm also resolves the issue of the prohibition of masturbation for Jews, which is not binding for non Jews. As far as legal issues are concerned jurisdiction in various countries have held different views regarding new reproductive technologies. The Warnock report or the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology appeared in July 1984. It is the law only which resolves the ethical issues regarding new reproductive technologies. In the case of surrogacy the surrogate is not considered the legal mother as she does not have any genetic connection with the child. A contract is signed between the surrogate and the couple that after the child is born she will have no rights on the child. While in the case of artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization by using a third party donor gamete the husband and wife are considered to be the legal parents and not the donors. The semen or ovum donor will have no relation to the child. In India, according to the National Guidelines for Accreditation Supervision and Regulation of ART clinics, evolved in 2005 by the Indian Council of Medical Research and the National Academy of Medical Sciences, the surrogate mother is not considered the legal mother. The Assisted Reproductive Technology Regulation Bill was passed in 2008 which provides some rights and regulations in relation to surrogacy. The case of India is quite different. 

Aditya Bharadwaj(2003), tries to examine why adoption is not an option in India in case of infertility. In Hindu normative order the birth of a child, a son in 4 particular helps an individual to achieve moksha. In India fertility like infertility is socially visible. The Hindu cosmology conceptualises an intimate connection between the body and the progeny. This corporeal connection between the married body and its offspring is at once biological and social. It inextricably binds mother(womb), father(semen) and child(foetus) in an immutable triad. Infertility becomes a stigmatized condition when these superimposed triads are destabilised. So couples resort to treatment but prefer to keep it a secret. The need to keep it secret becomes more pronounced in case of an alien biological input because if it is known publicly then it would be disastrous for the couple. Couples who turn to assisted conception do so in the hope of restoring the visible social triad and to create an illusion of culturally unproblematic visuality of fertility. The resort to assisted conception and its presentations are attempts to manage infertility and the stigma attached to it in a manner that causes minimum injury to the relationship between the accepting donated sperm than choose the option of adoption, an option that evokes widespread fears of making infertility permanently visible. 

Amrita Pandey (2010), conducts ethnography of transnational surrogacy in Gujarat, India and argues that existing Euro centric and ethics oriented frames for studying surrogacy makes invisible the labour and resistances of women within this process. Surrogacy often equated with sex work is usually stigmatised in India. As a consequence all surrogates in this study decided to keep their surrogacy as secret from their community, society and parents. They usually hide in surrogacy hostels in the last months of pregnancy. Most of the surrogates are very poor and so they decide to become a surrogate for the purpose of earning money either to build their own house or for the education of their own children. Also India becomes a destination for foreign couples because either surrogacy is banned in their countries or the cost of surrogacy in India is very low compared to the other developed countries.   

 

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