Generously SUPPORTED by the society for applied philosophy
CREATING ChILDREN, creating parents
Accidents, intentions & interventions
SPEAKERS
April 29-30th
University
Park Campus
CREATING ChILDREN, creating parents
PROGRAMME
Monday 29th April
10:00 - Herjeet Marway (University of Birmingham): A decolonial commercial surrogacy? A tripartite-hybrid model
Some may dismiss the prospect of a decolonial commercial surrogacy as a contradiction in terms. After all, there is an uncontrollable takeover and expansion of the foetus into the host’s body; and the labour is often unfairly extracted by those in the global north from those in the global south. However, I suggest that it is not necessarily a misnomer. To either ban such surrogacy entirely or allow it fully under the current system falls into the trap of discussing binaries within limited frameworks that decolonialism seeks to resist. I argue that, if there is to be a decolonial surrogacy, it entails a different system altogether; one that goes beyond the siloed approaches offered so far. As such, I present a ‘tripartite-hybrid’ model to decolonise surrogacy: an expanded relational unit, basic services, and targeting multiple norm-based hierarchies. While requiring fundamental changes to current conceptions of family and to broader social structures, the proposals together are ways to deal with the ‘ontological difference’ (limki, 2018) in surrogacy and to meet decolonial feminist aims. If, and only if, this is done, is a decolonial commercial surrogacy possible.
11.30 - Grace Halden (Birkbeck): Cyborg Conception: The Social Reality of One Parent Conception
Donor gamete conception (donation of sperm and eggs) has enabled the development of diverse family models for years. Today, many people are choosing to conceive solo through donor conception, a decision which is lauded as empowerment but also demonised as unethical. In this talk, I consider how the rise of solo mothers by choice (often abbreviated as SMBC or solo parents by choice, SMPC) through donor conception (sperm, donor eggs, and/or donor embryos) is the realisation of cyborg conception initially made popular in the 1980s with the rise of the SMC (solo mother by choice) movement and organisation. In the same decade, in 1985, Donna Haraway in her ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985) argued ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ (1991, 181). In the Manifesto, Haraway imagines the cyborg as the disruption of traditional ways of understanding natural/unnatural, organic/technological, and other related dichotomies. This talk, Cyborg Conception, identifies solo parents as those who exist in a space beyond binarity (male/female, dual-rearing dynamic) and heteronormative discourse; the solo parent represents, among other diverse family constructions, a critical intervention in the dominant narrative of the nuclear family which defines the “ideal” reproductive model. This talk also examines the struggle SMBC/SMPC experience for positive recognition in popular culture as the cyborg, single parenthood, and donor conception are often aligned with the monstrous, unethical, and reckless.
13:30 - Kate MacKay (University of Sydney): Disputed Eggs and Stolen Sperm: The Harms of Reproductive Misappropriation
What is the nature of moral harms that might accrue in the misappropriation of reproductive genetic material (sperm, eggs, or embryos)? In this talk, I will share my and my co-investigators’ tentative explorations of this question. By ‘misappropriation’ we mean such things as taking or using reproductive genetic material to procreate without the knowledge of the person from whom it came, or under misleading circumstances. A central example of this kind of misappropriation would be removing a used condom from a rubbish bin, with the intention of using the semen inside for procreative purposes. Though cases of reproductive misappropriation are rare, they are not unheard of (in popular culture, ‘stealthing’ and ‘spermjacking’ are two possible versions of misappropriation), and technological developments are already making them more likely. Concurrently, advances in reproductive technology such as mitochondrial donation have prompted socio-normative interrogations of relevant adjacent concepts such as genetic relatedness and parentage. While there is a small legal scholarship focussed on reproductive misappropriation, there has not yet been a scholarly account of the kinds of moral harms involved that make this misappropriation especially egregious or different from other kinds of theft or deception. We aim to identify and explain the potential unique harms of such reproductive misappropriation, which we think may be applicable to a variety of reproductive cases, as well as other disputed cases of genetic appropriation. Co-authors: Sam Shpall (USyd), Lisa Dive (UTS), and Jon Ives (Bristol)
15:00 - Elselijn Kingma (King’s College London): What Harm in Taking a Newborn (from its mother’s arm)? In defence of a maternal newborn non-separation right.
This paper revisits a question originally posited by Rawls: should the social institution of the family be abolished, given that it is a powerful disruptor of equality of opportunity? I first examine existing defences of the family, all of which I find both intellectually and emotionally unsatisfying. I then change tack to to argue that people who give birth have fundamental rights against the removal of their newborn. I believe that can give us a novel, though rudimentary, justification of the family that is robust in face of challenges discussed; I also think the claim has implications for the literature on parenthood.
Tuesday 30th April
9:00 - Giulia Cavaliere (King’s College London): What is infertility? (And why we should care)
What is infertility? Who is infertile? My aim in this paper is to address these questions and develop an extensionally adequate and explanatory account of infertility. Further, I argue that addressing these questions requires meeting the adjudication and the unifying challenges. Firstly, an account of infertility needs to be able to distinguish between cases of infertility and cases of what I refer to as cases of ‘x’, i.e., non-infertility. In this paper, I contend that we cannot rely on existing definitions of infertility and we should not rely on the causes of people’s inability to conceive to meet the adjudication challenge. While the former approach fails to be appropriately explanatory, the latter fails to be extensionally adequate. Secondly, ‘infertility’ captures a number of heterogeneous conditions, some of which can be aptly described as ‘pathologies’, while others have puzzlingly different characteristics to what we would normally classify as such. To meet the unifying challenge, some separate cases of ‘social’ and ‘medical’ infertility. However, I argue that the neat binary conceptualisation of ‘bio-stuff’ and ‘socio-stuff’ as distinct natural kinds is difficult to sustain when subjected to rigorous interrogation and is especially misguided in the case of infertility. In response to these challenges, I defend an approach to the study of infertility informed by Sally Haslanger’s (2012) idea of amelioration. Following this approach, I argue that ‘infertility’ should be conceived as: ‘A state of affairs X (inability to conceive) that an agent (A), or a couple (B), does not want to find herself in due to a desire for Y (having children)’. The rest of the paper defends this approach against objections and shows that it has several advantages over existing accounts of infertility.
10:30 - Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton): Creating Mothers
To be a mother is not simply to be a parent who is a woman. Instead, to be a mother is to have a female gendered-parental role. Motherhood, like other gendered roles, is implicated in gender injustice. Those seen as mothers are typically held to unreasonable ideals of self-sacrifice with bad effects on both individuals and the structure of society. So should we get rid of gendered parental roles and have only parents, no mothers and fathers? I argue that we should not get rid of mothers. Instead we should recognise first person (plural) authority over whether a parent is a mother to a given child: with some rare exceptions, whether the parent counts as the child's mother is determined by the parent-and child's shared understanding of how the parental role is gendered. We should enable parents and children to negotiate individualised, and potentially emancipatory, understandings of how the parental role is gendered, including making room for gendered parental roles beyond the binary.
12:00 - Teresa Baron (University of Nottingham): Nobody puts the container in Baby: Ectogenesis and justice for the womb
In this talk, I examine the pursuit of ectogenesis, both in terms of the scientific research projects that have been undertaken at various times over the last half-century, and in terms of the narrative pursuit of ectogenesis. By the latter, I refer to ethical and/or political arguments – made by bioethicists, scientists, and sci-fi writers alike – promoting and motivating ectogenic research. What assumptions have shaped or motivated our pursuit of the artificial womb? In this talk, I argue that this is a project that has grown out of a deeply distrustful and misogynistic biomedical landscape. I posit that there are two highly interrelated forms of injustice at play in the scientific and narrative pursuit of ectogenesis: the symbolic injustice of misrepresenting the nature of gestation and presuming that an artificial replacement for the womb is both achievable and desirable; and the political and moral injustice of pursuing ectogenesis as a solution for existing injustices themselves caused by the historical failure of medical science to attend to the female body with respect. The quest for the artificial womb provides us with an important lens to consider how it is we approach problems associated with reproduction, from the inequality of burdens involved in human gestation to the inequality of access to parenthood.