SPECIAL ISSUE: INTIMACY

Winter 1998
Volume 24, Number 2

Can a woman be the mother of a child with whom she has no genetic connection--as was the case for Johnson [who was implanted with the fertilized egg of two other parents and then filed suit against them and fought for the rights to custody for the child]? Or does the genetic material provided by the egg and the sperm donated to create the child determine who its natural parent or parents are? When does a woman become a mother--while she is pregnant or after she has delivered a baby? What of the bodily experience of pregnancy? Does a woman's participation in pregnancy--her carrying the fetus in her uterus--have any bearing on who the "true" or "natural" mother is? In light of the choices made available by new reproductive technologies, can we sensibly argue, as was done in Anna J. v. Mark C., that genes and genes alone should be the determining factor in defining parental rights and relationships, or that custody disputes should be decided solely on the basis of the parental intent of the persons who supplied the genetic material? Who and what is a mother? Can a child, as Justice Joyce Kennard asked during the California Supreme Court hearing of Johnson v. Calvert, have two biological mothers?

[. . . . ] In this essay I argue that what happened in Johnson v. Calvert is symptomatic of a general crisis in American culture over what constitutes a family. Section 1 addresses the ways in which the law tries to regulate familial property and the norms of what makes a family and explores the incoherence of the logic of courts and the law in making these determinations. Surrogacy extends the boundaries of intimacy and of traditional notions of familial kinship patterns by dispersing what was once thought of as a unified entity--mother--and making it into something without a definitive aspect or dimension. No longer belonging simply to the realm of the private acts and decision making of couples, the procreative process has also become a collaborative process that takes place in the public spaces of the lab and the clinic. Within these public spaces, assisted reproductive technologies such as artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, and surrogacy allow a multitude of individuals to participate in a couple's attempts to conceive. For many couples, procreation now includes the participation of additional parties such as health professionals; surrogates; donors; and, increasingly, the state. Now not only is birth a process mediated by the intervention of physicians but the process of conception has become a more complex, drastically mediated process as well. The "private act of love, intimacy, and secrecy" of creating a child, as Sarah Franklin argues, has become a "public act, a commercial transaction, and a professionally managed procedure." 8 Nevertheless, despite the increasingly public and collaborative process of procreation, the courts in Johnson v. Calvert and other such cases have attempted to maintain the priority of the metonation of a private, genetic family.

Section 2 addresses the complicated and never fully articulated relations among gender, economics, and race and the ways they get expressed in the family form. I delineate the euphemized quality of repro-discourse that enables the family form to take such discursive priority that race, gender, and class hierarchies are ignored. Although these hierarchies are central, their stories aren't being told at all because the family is perceived as an interlocked unit--an intimate, guarded entity that serves as a stand-in for the issues that don't get worked out. Facilitating the lack of resolution of matters of family in Johnson v. Calvert is the iconicity of Johnson's family and race. Johnson's body as at once too much body--a body that is laden with multiple meanings--and too little body--a body that is reduced to meaning very little at all. . . . Indeed, during and after the various trials, Johnson was depicted as everything from a welfare queen and con artist to an extortionist. Her body is, then, both a site of explanation and a body that creates, in a new way, a problem of meaning.

[ . . . . ] Motherhood, in Johnson v. Calvert, is a tightly policed border where racial, class, and sexual hierarchies are defined and maintained in the name of familial affliation.

Finally, in section 3, I suggest ways to move beyond the limited definitions of who and what is a mother. At issue is the question of whether or not the national public can imagine a public family. What does a family stand for in American culture? More specifically, how does surrogacy raise the questions about tacit knowledge of race and familial kinship? I argue that more diverse definitions of mother and, by extention, of father and of family are both possible and necessary to accomodate the diffrent methods used to (re)produce and introduce babies into families. Drawing on Patricia Hill Collin's concept of shifting centers in her analysis of motherhood and reprduction, I argue that practices of assisted conception such as surrogacy require that we find ways to acknowledge rather than diminish or ignore the participation of all parents in these processes even if the effect is to destabilize previously held notions of the family.

8. Sarah Franklin, "Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berekley, 1995), p. 336. See also part 1 of a four-part series on infertility published in the New York Times. This article on high-tech pregnancies and the fertility market focuses on clinics and hospitals with specialties in in vitro fertilization (IVF). This branch of medicine is reported to be part of a "virtually free-market branch of medicine" that is a "$350 million-a-year business." The article describes mostly affluent couples paying upwards of $25,000 or more for procedues, usually IVF, to assist them in conception. Very few insurance companies cover IVF, making most of the financial burden fall on the couples themselves. Prices for the procedure described in the article include a $2,000 to $3,000 fee for egg donors for those women who are unable to produce their own eggs to a median cost of $7,800 for one procedure of IVF that lasts about the length of a menstrual cycle. Since most couples are not successful on the first try, many couples end up trying three to four more times before giving up. See tripp Gabriel, "High-Tech Pregnancies Test Hope's Limit," New York Times, 7 Jan. 1996, p. A1.

Deborah R. Grayson is assistant professor on the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is currently completing a book on black women, beauty, health, and culture and another on contemporary black women's health activism.