Reproductive technologies and the family in the twenty-first century

Abstract

The first IVF baby was born in 1978 in the UK, following an intervention that had not been preceded by any clinical trials. After Louise Brown’s birth, legislators and policymakers rushed to create an ethico-legal framework within which this new development could be practised without outraging public sensibilities. Since then, the speed and direction of scientific research as well as the practice and regulation of reproductive technology have been inexorably shaped by assumptions concerning family, fertility and reproduction. Research towards ever more sophisticated medical technologies for the purpose of the relief of infertility has raised relatively few concerns, provided the procedures were proven to be satisfactorily safe, and insofar as they were used to facilitate and reinforce existing norms about family structure and relationships. Ideas of what a family is (or should be) have a powerful influence on determining which potential technological innovations in human reproduction are developed and funded, and who can access them. Social, legal and biological parenthood did not invariably coincide in the past. Different jurisdictions have various approaches to the ascription of parental rights and responsibilities. However, the default legal position is that a woman who gives birth to a child is that child’s mother and her husband is the father – regardless of whether she is the genetic mother or he the genetic father. Embedded in this view is the expectation that the two members of the married couple are the legal and social parents and also the biological parents of the child. These legal measures have not been extended in the same way to the case of same-sex married couples. Furthermore, the child’s ‘right to know’ her genetic origins, which features as a core argument for transitioning from anonymous to non-anonymous gamete donation in many countries, has not persuaded legislators that children who are born to married couples via sexual reproduction should also be aware of who their genetic father is (Ravelingien and Pennings 2013). These assumptions indicate that biological relationships are subservient to the nuclear family in the eyes of the law – and