The ‘Child as Project’ Versus the ‘Child as Gift’: Expert Imaginations of IVF and Kinship in Switzerland

Abstract

This article addresses how experts imagine family-making with IVF in Switzerland, and how their imaginations reveal the kinship rationale and the political tensions behind it. In 2008 prominent institutional representatives of reproductive medicine, reproductive health, politics and ethics took part in a public panel discussion on ‘modern reproductive medicine’ organised by the Medical Faculty at the 175 th anniversary of the University of Zurich. That discussion shows in an exemplary way, how professionals in Switzerland imagine ‘the IVF act’ through bodily substances and biomedical technologies, and how they imagine ‘social technologies’ of family-making and citizenship that are closely related to these notions of conception. It is argued in this article that the debate can be read as the staging of different and contested narratives, in particular of secular and sacred origin stories, that include a concerned conception or embryo tale and that pivot around the good ‘child as gift’ versus the bad ‘child as project’. These globally informed narratives have a strong cultural, political and economic stance, and they are driven by hopes and particularly anxieties about human reproduction, kinship and gender in Switzerland at the beginning of the 21st century.