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This chapter argues that the complexity of reproductive choice is missing from much public discussion on assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Such discussions tend to focus on limits; this can make reproductive choice feel like a bad argument and lead to it being excluded from proper consideration. To help secure the speakability of choice, human rights lawyers should pay more attention to ethnographic studies of ART users. Ethnographies of decision-making in new technologies could help to change what human rights lawyers notice and, in turn, how they frame issues and conduct arguments.

This chapter discusses how the world of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) offers those who cannot reproduce the old-fashioned way various medical techniques aimed at achieving pregnancy by means other than sexual intercourse. By disaggregating sex from reproduction, ART is the story of both technical sophistication and social liberation. The shakeup of long-established medical, social, and familial norms has been one of ART's hallmarks, a distinguishing characteristic that often places it in the crossfire of contemporary culture wars. Though designed as mere medical techniques to overcome infertility, ART's increasing invocation by those historically deprived of reproductive opportunities invites scrutiny into its every use and its very existence.

This chapter explores the use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) by queer and transgender people and how they have to perform particular bodily and intimate selves in the processes of seeking ART (Mamo 2007, 2013; Armuand et al., 2017). The bioprecarity of queer and transgender people is produced by the enactment of certain kinds of categorical framing (Foucault 1966, 1976; Summerville, 1998) in the laws regulating ARTs. Prohibitive laws in some states are often circumvented by going abroad. This chapter therefore argues that queer and trans people’s bioprecarity also results from the intimate labour queer and transgender people have to undertake to overcome prohibitive laws and hetero- and cisnormative medical institutions as shown e.g. in studies about trans people’s experiences with ART (James-Abra et al., 2015, Armuand et al., 2017).

This chapter investigates the United States as a destination country for many of those seeking to avoid their home countries' restrictions on accessing reproductive technologies. It establishes the case that the laissez-faire U.S. attitude toward cross-border fertility care (CBFC) is a good thing that benefits those seeking CBFC. The United States is a world leader in providing assisted reproductive technology (ART). The diversity of ART regulation addresses the lack of international consensus on what is and is not acceptable reproductive behavior. A nation could refuse prenatal or neonatal care in high-risk pregnancies produced with ART in other countries. CBFC is one of many services that consumers seek in forums that are friendlier due to cost, availability of service, or less-stringent laws. The U.S. position that sees wide access to procreative tools as furthering other important societal goals warrants respect and should be sustained.

This chapter examines the regulatory trajectory of access to assisted reproductive technology (ART) in Taiwan since 1980s. The analysis focused on how diverse governing activities validate, challenge, or shape the social relationship at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and heteronormativity. Heternomativity and the discourse of absent fatherhood have reigned so that Taiwan has, from the first ethical guidelines in 1986 to the Human Reproduction Law in 2007, continued to prohibit unmarried women from using ART. Despite the legal exclusion, single women, lesbians and gays did gain access to ART secretly in Taiwan, and more openly abroad. Medical doctors, encountering these excluded women users in their clinics, once lobbied for their legal inclusion in the 2000s, with the rationale centering on women’s desire for motherhood —an acclaimed femininity. By comparison, women’s groups have been seldom involved with the access politics, for their agenda against compulsory motherhood and medicalization of women’s reproductive bodies. Since the mid-2000s, advocacy of queer reproduction, particularly lesbian motherhood, actively shared the information of ART use, and asked for legal inclusion. Their aim to reorder the sexuality hierarchy by asking for reproductive rights makes this unthinkable and unimagined group in early stage of policy-making become the strongest force in reconfiguring the politics of access to ART in Taiwan.

By enacting the Eugenic Protection Law in 1948, Japan legalized abortion to alleviate population problems following the defeat in World War II. Women welcomed this and the subsequent introduction of family planning. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the state tried to revise the law to curtail access to abortion because of falling birth rates, it gave rise to the women’s movement proclaiming reproductive freedom from the state. The eugenic character of the EPL also provoked a disability rights movement that not only protested against the law, but also questioned a woman’s claim of “right to choose.” Thus, the Japanese reproductive rights movement developed in a tension-ridden relationship with the disability rights movement. As a consequence many Japanese feminists remain critical of new reproductive technologies, such as prenatal screening, egg donation, and surrogacy, as well as their legitimization as a woman’s “right to choose.”

This chapter examines the structural and cultural barriers to using assisted reproductive technology—barriers based on marital status, sexual orientation, and racial and ethnic background. There are numerous barriers to fertility, including financial difficulties. Some European countries provide routine funding for in vitro fertilization (IVF), while American health care does not tend to cover IVF costs. Reasons for infertility may also differ by race. Cultural factors may be a determinant of who will seek infertility treatments. This chapter focuses on three barriers to conception: medical infertility, structural infertility, and cultural infertility. It also considers controversial questions such as whether there should be a right to use reproductive technologies to have a child. More specifically, it explores whether the state has a right to interfere with an individual's reproductive interests. Finally, it discusses debates over genetic screening.

This chapter examines the cultural and moral concerns arising from future regulation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and other reproductive technologies, including the potential of ART to challenge the traditional two-parent heterosexual family and the ability of technology to allow parents to engage in prenatal screening. Four main issues are addressed: the ability of reproductive technology to allow for only one legal parent; the unavailability of reproductive technology to certain socioeconomic classes; the concern that beneficiaries of reproductive technology are playing God by altering natural reproduction; and the way reproductive technologies are intertwined with more controversial issues such as cloning and stem cell research. The chapter takes into account a variety of religious, historical, and philosophical objections with different aspects of reproductive technology, from preimplantation genetic diagnosis to the moral status of embryos and embryos as property. It also considers how domestic and foreign courts and legislatures have addressed reproductive technology issues and concludes by analyzing the power of private contracts in agreements involving sperm donation and surrogacy.

This book examines the processes by which biology, medicine, human determination, and the law bring babies into being. More specifically, it tackles the fundamental legal issues that underlie reproductive technologies, including assisted reproductive technology (ART). It highlights three distinct issues and their relationship to the law: the market in gametes, the creation of familial relationships through ART, and the identity interests of the resulting children. It proposes an ethical approach for legal regulation of the fertility market that respects human dignity. The rest of the book explores the technology market, including the fertility clinics and gamete suppliers; the structural and cultural barriers to using ART based on marital status, sexual orientation, and racial and ethnic background; the jurisprudential and practical issues surrounding the commodification of sperm, eggs, and embryos; and the cultural clashes affecting future regulation of ART. The book concludes by offering recommendations for future regulation of the fertility market.

This chapter studies the various horror fantasies of women's role in reproduction and their reproductive choices. Pregnant horror films exhibit anxieties over women's reproductive capacities and desires, most prominently the fantasy of women's wombs nurturing evil and releasing inhuman spawn. These anxieties are related to dread over women's reproductive choices, particularly abortion and new Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs). In films such as Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Astronaut's Wife (1999), Species (1995), and Splice (2009), the possibility of women giving birth to nonhuman species threatens the entire human race; this threat of animality and hybridity generally display anxieties about new reproductive technologies, “octomoms,” and fears of miscegenation.

This chapter continues the examination of anxieties over new reproductive technologies as they appear in Hollywood film. Pregnancy films illustrate that whether or not the protagonists resort to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) or in vitro fertilization (IVF), the worst that can happen is that they do not conceive by the end of the film. The chapter reviews themes of shame associated with ART pregnancies; ideals of romantic pregnancies over technological ones (techno-pregnancy); and images of choice in discussions of the so-called “designer babies,” including monstrous births, various forms of miscegenation and hybrids, and uncertainties over paternity and maternity.

How we define who are the members of our family is evolving. With the medical advancements of assisted reproductive technology there are now more avenues for someone to become a parent. In contrast, adoption has deep roots in history, but there are new issues. For example, we know more about the stigma of adoption and racial, or cultural, issues related to adoption. Case law on wrongful adoption also raises important issues about the mental and physical health of a child. We also have more ways to avoid or control reproduction with contraception and greater access to abortions. With each of these constants, or advancements, there are important psychological and legal antecedents and consequences to consider.

This chapter examines reproductive liberty and autonomy and considers whether constraints on either can be justified. Reproductive liberty is the view that people should be free to make their own, unfettered choices about reproduction insofar as these do not have unreasonable harmful impacts on others. This includes choosing to have children and choosing to avoid doing so. Those afflicted by infertility or inherited conditions, those who wish to create a saviour sibling, and those who prefer to use a surrogate cannot achieve their reproductive goals without Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs). If there is a lack of choices, or those choices are restricted (such as by restricting access to ARTs), then they may not be able to achieve their goals. The concept of reproductive autonomy comes into play at this point. Reproductive autonomy goes beyond the notion of merely permitting choice and demands more: that people’s choices about reproduction are facilitated.

This chapter examines the cultural and moral concerns arising from future regulation of assisted reproductive technology (ART) and other reproductive technologies, including the potential of ART to challenge the traditional two-parent heterosexual family and the ability of technology to allow parents to engage in prenatal screening. Four main issues are addressed: the ability of reproductive technology to allow for only one legal parent; the unavailability of reproductive technology to certain socioeconomic classes; the concern that beneficiaries of reproductive technology are playing God by altering natural reproduction; and the way reproductive technologies are intertwined with more controversial issues such as cloning and stem cell research. The chapter takes into account a variety of religious, historical, and philosophical objections with different aspects of reproductive technology, from preimplantation genetic diagnosis to the moral status of embryos and embryos as property. It also considers how domestic and foreign courts and legislatures have addressed reproductive technology issues and concludes by analyzing the power of private contracts in agreements involving sperm donation and surrogacy.

This chapter considers the problematic and complicated status of legal regulation of three issues underlying assisted reproductive technology (ART) and other reproductive technologies: the market in gametes, the creation of familial relationships through ART, and the identity interests of the resulting children. It begins with an overview of the case of Brittany Johnson, the first to allow for breach of the promise of confidentiality to a sperm provider. It then considers other events reported in May 2006 involving human gametic material and the dilemmas of applying conflicting values to egg and sperm donation. It also discusses market regulation and relational regulation of gamete provision and argues that states should adopt legislation specifying the relationships resulting from gamete transfer. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of developing new legal approaches to the reproductive technology market that take into account the relationships between sperm and egg providers, recipients, children, and the state.

This chapter discusses reproductive rights in Israel. Both narrow interpretations of Jewish law among Orthodox lawmakers and overzealous pro-natal passions among Zionist politicians continue to cast a cloud over Israeli women's reproductive decisions. Israel maintains a policy that neither provides women with easy access to birth control nor to an abortion after an unwanted pregnancy. Accessibility has been made difficult in order to add scores of Jewish children to the population without crossing any clear moral boundaries. In contrast, the government is keen on promoting fertility treatments using assisted reproductive technologies. By far the most prevalent new technology adopted by Israel's medical system is in vitro fertilization (IVF).

The development of assisted-reproductive technologies sharpened perceptions of the differences among three major criteria for parental status—biological (genetics and gestation), volition/intention, and caregiving/functional. This chapter surveys the development of these justifications. It argues that of these, caregiving—and the underlying philosophic framework of the ethics of care—is the most satisfactory grounding of parental status for three reasons: first, it places relationship at the centre of its theoretical and practical concerns; second, caregiving focuses attention on the child; and third, thinking about relationships of care ensures that we consider the impact of social factors, such as race and class, on reproduction and family formation. But despite its strengths, this chapter concludes that caregiving is not fully satisfactory for grounding recognition of a parent–child relationship. It advocates a pluralistic account that regards the relationships established by all three criteria, as significant to both social and legal groundings of parental status.

The introduction outlines the meaning and rise of bioprecarity and the bioprecariat, here understood as those who seek help with bodily interventions and those who provide such interventions. It discusses core concepts of importance for this volume, including shifting understandings and regulations of the body and bodily interventions, questions of bodily ownership and of agency in the age of the commodification of the body, and the issue of power and unequal relations in the seeking and providing of help around bodily interventions. It also provides an overarching introduction to the chapters presented in this volume.