Assisted Reproductive Technology

This weeks readings can be put in three groups:
1) Two articles by Franklin and one by Inhorn & Birenbaum-Carmeli, which discuss the implications of the “new biologies” (particularly new reproductive technologies) for kinship studies, a crucial site of traditional anthropological study
2) Three excellent articles (by Kahn, Inhorn and Handwerker) that explore the distinctive practice of ART in three different cultural, religious and legal contexts: Israel, the Middle East, and China.
3) A (to my mind remarkably silly) article by Stefan Helmerich which attempts to trace the purported breakdown of a longstanding connection between genealogy and classification in biology, through an examination of “lateral gene transfer” in marine biology. Helmreich identifies an emergent biopolitics organized around a “politics of transmission” rather than “practices of sex”.

Inhorn & Birenbaum-Carmeli’s piece is largely a review of some of the assisted reproductive technologies (IVF, including donor conception, surrogacy, PGD, the posthumous use of gametes and embryos) that are transforming notions of relatedness. ARTs represent a “brave new world” for anthropologists of kinship, because they denaturalize and blur the nature/culture intersection. They emphasize two major findings from anthropological research on ARTs. First, is that biogenetic relatedness is privileged (perhaps even fetishized) in the Euro-American culture. (I find their description of this biogenetic fetishism as a specifically Euro-American phenomenon strange, given that Inhorn’s own research on ARTs in the Middle East amply demonstrates that biological relatedness is even more highly valued in that context than in the West). The second finding is that pluralized notions of relatedness are emerging from the use of ARTs. Third party assisted conception and surrogacy are reformulating the notions of motherhood and fatherhood and multiplying modes of relatedness, in which genetic, gestational, and social parenthood do not necessarily coincide. Various socio-legal practices are emerging to cope with this fracturing and multiplication of parental relations (as when the law defines parenthood, or secrecy is adopted as the strategy for concealing donor origins).

The two articles by Franklin focus on the ways in which feminist studies of science are challenging conventional anthropological accounts of the nature/culture divide that had previously been foundational to kinship studies (of which Schneider’s Kinship in America is exemplary). Schneider saw kinship as comprised of two components – at base the biological facts of heredity, and an additional (we might say “super-structural”) symbolic dimension supplementary to biological facts. This account is challenged by authors (such as MacCormack and Strathern and Donna Harraway) who “shift away from the notion of biological facts and toward an examination of the knowledge practice through which such claims acquired legitimacy, authority and “obviousness”’. These authors stress the “constitutive effects” or “world building consequences” of biological knowledge. This whole conceptual shift in thinking about the nature/culture relationship is informed by the feminist inversion of the sex/gender relationship (exemplified in the work of Judith Butler). Where sex had been previously seen as the (immutable) biological basis upon which (contingent) cultural formations of gender identity are erected, some feminists claimed that the scientific “facts” about biological sex are cultural products, the effects (rather than the causes) of gender categories. This tradition opens up a new line of enquiry for thinking about the “new biologies” and ARTs; namely, as a means of constituting biological categories and concepts of relatedness (such as male and female, father and mother). According to Franklin, emergent practices like the formation of alternative families through ART “undoes the very fixity the biological tie used to represent”. With a lengthy excursus on Haraway’s use of the metaphor of kinship, Franklin argues that they also prove disruptive of the discipline of anthropology.

I am a little skeptical of the radical deconstuctionist or “postmodern” conception of natural facts as constituted by social knowledge. This is a point on which Latour’s injunction against attributing biological facts to “society” is instructive. I would not be so quick to dismiss elements of the older view that sees kinship as the symbolic processing of biological facts, as they are understood at a particular point in time, and analyses the reformulation of conceptions of kinship resulting from ARTs’ disruption of the temporal, spatial and bodily configurations that govern 'natural' reproduction. In addition, so much of this kind of work seems to reply upon rhetoric rather than rigorous analysis. So, for instance, Franklin approvingly quotes Hayden’s claim that various kinds of biotechnology form “a rich narrative field in which kinship, nature, and culture are woven together in complex and historically dense ways”. What does a “complex and historically dense” weaving actually mean?

I very much enjoyed the three articles which directly analyze the distinct ways in which ART is practiced in specific locales, and the extent to which different social, religious, and legal considerations shape the use of these technologies. However, I found both the Kahn and Inhorn articles a little unclear on the exact relationship between religious edicts and secular (i.e. state) law. For instance, Kahn begins by noting that eggs and wombs are “the determinants of maternal, religious and national identity in Israel”, and claims that “there is a direct correlation between the social construction of motherhood and the social reproduction of the nation”, specifically because Israel accords citizenship to all Jews. However, although she clearly demonstrated the unresolved dilemma of locating motherhood with reference to Halakhic law, it was not clear to me whether any such ambiguity exists in terms of the attribution of citizenship by the state of Israel. Is there any legal ambiguity about the citizenship of a child born to a Jewish woman who is an Israeli citizen, but who uses a donor egg from a non-Jewish Russian woman? Or, for instance, has the right of return been extended to the children of non-Israeli and non-Jewish parents who are the recipients of a donor egg from a Jewish woman? Similarly, reading Inhorn’s article, I was not quite clear on the extent to which the ART provisions set down in fatwas are enforced by the state.

I found Handwerker’s analysis of ARTs in the context of China’s one-child policy fascinating. But I was less convinced by her discussion of China’s “new eugenics”. Firstly, her evidence is highly anecdotal. Moreover, the desire for a “morally and physically superior baby” can be identified in media discourse around IVF (especially with relation to PGD) all over the world. Second, her contention that “the most recent development in NRTs, which include choosing the sex of one’s embryo, may create devastating consequences for female embryos in China” is specious. Couples who use IVF for other reasons may choose to add sex selection to their treatment (although this adds tremendous expense to a round of IVF). In general though, the cost of using PGD for sex-selection is far too high for this technology to have even the most marginal impact on the gender ratio; ultrasound and selective termination will remain the means to procure a male child, although ‘sperm sorting’ technologies and DI may be taken up as a relatively inexpensive means of selecting for male offspring while avoiding selective termination of an established pregnancy.