Children of One’s Own

Abstract

Technologies for assisted reproduction often aim explicitly at giving hitherto infertile couples a ‘child of their own’ – that is, a child that is genetically related to them. And many couples find themselves spending enormous amounts of money, time, and energy attempting to have a child via these techniques. But why should a genetic relationship make a child any more ‘one’s own’ than other kinds of relationships – for example, those parent-child relationships forged through adoptions? There is a wide-spread assumption in much of contemporary society that genetic parenthood is important because of what it implies about the relationship between the (physical and behavioral) traits of the parents and those traits of the child; arguments relying on these assumptions have even been accepted in some legal cases. I argue here that this state of affairs is particularly unfortunate, and that the over-blown rhetoric of the Human Genome Project and related research programs is at least partially to blame. This rhetoric includes the metaphorical language of genes as ‘master controllers’, ‘blue-prints’, ‘recipes’, and as ‘carrying information’. But as none of these metaphors is well-justified by contemporary understandings of the roles played by genes in the organismal development, the metaphors ought to be rejected, and with them, the social emphasis on a genetic relationship as the most important aspect of parenthood

More than anything in this world, I want a child of MY own. When the time is right for my husband and I, we plan to do whatever it takes to make that dream come true.

Anonymous visitor to babycenter.com 12/16/2002, http://www.babycenter.com/comments/preconception/fertilityproblems/6111