Identity in Postgenomic Times: Epigenetic Knowledge and the Pursuit of Biological Origins

As genetic knowledge continues to strengthen notions of identity in Euro-American societies and beyond, epigenetic knowledge is intervening in these legitimation frameworks. I explore these interventions in the realm of assisted reproduction—including adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy. The right to identity is protected legally in many states and receives due attention in public and private international law. Originating from the context of adoption, donor-conceived and surrogacy-born persons have recently demanded the same protections and focused on the right to genetic knowledge. This article explores possible implications of epigenetic knowledge on identity. I start by articulating the deep influence of genetics on the notion of identity, and how this unfolds in legal contexts. Next, I examine how epigenetic findings that stress the importance of seeing biological life as situated and embedded in environments can challenge how adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy are experienced and understood. While I argue that epigenetic knowledge can reify identity with the same determinism underpinning genetics, it can also allow for more biosocial understandings of identity that consider history and experience as entangled with biology.

The Racializing Womb: Surrogacy and Epigenetic Kinship

In gestational surrogacy arrangements, the womb is often figured as a holding environment that brings the child of commissioning parents to fruition but does not shape fetal identity. This article probes the racial imaginary of such a figuration—what I term the “nonracializing womb”—where gestation is seen as peripheral to racial transmission. Drawing on feminist science studies frameworks and data from interviews with parents who commissioned surrogates, this article traces the cultural politics of the nonracializing womb, positioning it as an index for broader understandings of race, reproductive labor, and kinship that hinge on nuclear and biogenetic forms. It then problematizes this figure of gestation by engaging emerging research on environmental epigenetics, which offers a lively model of pregnancy as shaping fetal biology, blurring the lines between surrogate and fetus. I argue that epigenetics offers a resource to reimagine gestation as a racializing process, by theorizing race not as solely genetic, but as relational, socio-environmental, and forged through distributed kinship lineages.

Societal Views of Surrogacy—Responding and Reframing: Gay Israeli Fathers

The present study aims to explore gay Israeli fathers’ responses and resistance to societal criticism on their decision to become parents through transnational surrogacy. The authors interviewed 39 Israeli gay men who became parents via transnational gestational surrogacy using in-depth, semistructured interviews. Analysis of the interviews suggest that the gay fathers responded to societal perceptions on their choice of surrogacy, which they interpreted as heterosexist and hostile, by relating them to Israeli dominant ideologies and constructing a counter discourse that frames surrogacy as an intimate process fostering gender and parental change. Yet, while the participants portray surrogacy as a catalyst for social change, their accounts are embedded within an Israeli context defined by pronatalist and neoliberal ideologies, showing how accounts of change are intertwined within hegemonic ideologies.

“Doing it Our Way” Participation and Kinship in Traditional Surrogacy Narratives in Aotearoa New Zealand

The practice of traditional surrogacy gives rise to multiple discourses around women’s autonomy and kinship practices globally. In the Aotearoa New Zealand context, traditional surrogacy (where the surrogate donates her own egg as well as gestating the foetus) is legal only on an altruistic basis. Furthermore, it is subject to neither medical nor state oversight, unlike gestational surrogacy which is heavily regulated. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, this article focuses on both traditional surrogates in Aotearoa New Zealand who have children of their own and those who have chosen a childfree life. Their narratives reveal multilayered motivations that align with and diverge from the ‘help’ narrative often associated with altruistic surrogacy. By drawing on and contributing to current debates on surrogacy globally, I show that traditional surrogates take on their role with clear ideas about kinship and different interpretations of reproductive participation. Their narratives bring to the fore the under-researched topic of traditional surrogacy, and in particular of women who do not want children of their own but choose to donate their eggs and gestate the foetus for another woman. I argue that their negotiation of stigma to make/resist kin disrupts pervasive heteronormative modes of kinship.

Kin-making in the Reproductive Penumbram: Surrogacy in Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>As many as one in four New Zealanders experience infertility. Some choose to pursue surrogacy as an option to make a family because traditional surrogacy and gestational surrogacy are legal in Aotearoa New Zealand on an altruistic basis. Straddling the two reproductive worlds – ‘traditional’ and ‘technological’ – surrogacy in Aotearoa New Zealand offers us a ripe site for analysis and rethinking how kinship is made and unmade within what I refer to as the reproductive penumbra. Surrogacy as a reproductive practice exists outside of, or in the shadows of, heteronormative reproduction and mainstream Euro-American kinship. Surrogacy also asks people to enter an unknown reproductive space and navigate myriad processes, institutions, and legislations to realise their plans to make kin non-normatively. Drawing on three years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, in this thesis I unpack what kin-practices, narratives, rituals, rules, and relationships are mobilised within and between the various landscapes involved in surrogacy in Aotearoa New Zealand. I outline how people make kin in the multiple shadows they inhabit and move through during their surrogacy journeys. These range from the intimate and inter-personal relationships in the surrogacy community, the fertility clinic, and inside the embryology laboratory, to the institutional and regulatory processes and the state. Through their negotiation of these spaces that are situated in the shadows of the colonial state, everyday legality, and motherhood ideologies, intended parents and surrogates disrupt, to varying degrees, pervasive ideas about kinship with different interpretations and enactments of reproductive participation. Through detailed narratives of people wanting to and helping make kin in the shadows, this research on surrogacy complicates societal understandings of the co-constructed nature of kinship, motherhood, and reproductive medicine. Rather than positioning kin-making in shadows as inherently negative, this thesis celebrates the potentiality and plurality of reproduction that underpins and emerges from surrogacy.</p>

Who Are Your Patients, and What Happens When They Disagree?

Third-party reproduction carries significant legal and ethical challenges. Although well-intentioned mutual desire typically guides parties entering a gestational surrogacy or egg donation arrangement, the potential for conflict cannot be avoided. Because the physician’s role includes treating both their patient (the intended parent/s) and the “third-party patient” (the egg donor or surrogate), the physician should be aware of potential conflicting desires about medical treatment (i.e., an intended parent may desire a triplet pregnancy, while the surrogate may prefer to reduce). Systematic bias should also be considered, as it may result in favoring one patient’s medical needs over the other. The laws in this area are unsettled and in many situations no definitive legal answers are available. Prior to engaging in third-party reproduction each patient should be fully informed of potential medical risks and consult with mental health professionals and independent lawyers to confirm agreement with respect to the arrangement.