Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to ingvihar@uio.no.
What is reproduction?
Sarah Franklin says, '[…] genealogy and reproduction can be seen as two of the most important, but vague and undertheorized, terms in contemporary critical thought. This is evident among bioethicists, who commonly take genetic transmission to be the essential component of reproduction. But current and future reproductive technologies (IVF, surrogacy, reproductive ooplasmic transfer, artificial gametes, reproductive cloning) undermine the plausibility of a simple biological answer to the question 'what is reproduction'? It is becoming evident that different stakeholders might define reproduction in different ways. The World Health Organisation, for example, describes reproductive cloning as 'the replication of human individuals' and declares it 'contrary to human dignity and integrity'. Yet John Harris argues that reproductive cloning could be regarded as a part of the right to reproduce. With the increasing array of technological possibilities, one person's reproduction is another person's replication. My paper examines the impact of proliferating reproductive techniques on understandings of the role of biology in reproduction. I suggest that the tendency to seek a central biological answer to questions of reproduction is untenable in today’s world of reproductive technology. The ways in which members of the public interact with fertility services reveal a subjectivity and variability that cannot be encompassed in biological explanations. This has serious implications for regulation, legislation and social and ethical understandings of the place of reproductive technology in society. It is already possible with today’s technology to create offspring that could be argued to have seven ‘biological’ parents. I conclude that as technology develops further, the definition, and the ethical and legal status of reproduction, will need to be negotiated, rather than inferred from biological facts.