Babies: Kinship and Relations

This chapter focuses on reproductive technologies and demonstrates how they alter the social meaning of biological relations and legal parenthood. The conventional legal arrangement relying on gestational maternity, on the one hand, and social paternity, on the other, is being reorganized by in vitro conceptions, mitochondrial replacement techniques, cryopreservation of gametes, gestational surrogacy, and embryo adoptions. This new potential for engineered reproduction fractionalizes parenthood, making possible various, and new, forms of biological and social parenthood: genetic, gestational, mitochondrial, intentional, adoptive, etc. Nonetheless, many contemporary cases reveal the extent to which legal systems struggle with the normative implications of these new arrangements. Here we investigate the mutating constructions of kinship, maternity, and paternity in and outside of courts as they go through the motions of scientific developments and global processes.