How parents are conceived with IVF
Look at me, writing not a symbolic reading of some Old Testament text, but rather a hot take about a recent news article. We truly live in strange times.
ABC News reports that Monash IVF has mixed up some embryos and implanted the “wrong embryo” in one of their patients, thus resulting in the extremely weird statement that the woman has unknowingly given birth to a stranger’s baby.1 Such a statement should strike us as unintelligible in the same way that “I was born in the wrong body” does—or, at least, should.
But this statement is somewhat intelligible for us, and we all know what the PR team at Monash IVF mean when they say it. Just what is it that makes that statement intelligible? It is a transformation in our understanding of what it means for a child truly to belong to a particular set of parents, and that transformation has been necessitated by in vitro fertilisation. What makes a child the “correct” child relative to the mother who bears him is no longer that the conception of that child took place in that mother’s womb in the course of an intimate act with the father of that same child; rather, it is that a competent and attentive scientist employed by Such and Such Pty Ltd has successfully carried out the appropriate techniques according to certain company and government policies, as well as standards of reasonable care derived from tort law and contract law.
Where did it all go wrong? How did this horror come about? The flaw, it turns out, was with those humans who are involved in the process. As “family creation”2 lawyer Sarah Jefford is quoted as saying, “Science is what it is, but humans are using it.” Put another way, it is the assortment of techniques, “robust protocols” and institutional safeguards—Science—that ensures that the “correct” child will be born to a given mother; it is the (regrettable) involvement of various fallible humans that might undermine Science from time to time.
But alas, humans were involved in the human reproductive process, and now the possibility arises that, should the genetic parents wish to claim parentage of this child, there might be an interesting and very hairy legal case on the cards soon. While such a mix-up might indeed be rare and isolated, the social and legal implications of this will surely not be.
Australian law so far has held as a rebuttable presumption that the birth parents of a child are the child’s parents. What now? I do not have a precise sense of what law might be involved in determining this particular case, and I suspect it will simply be a case of fitting these facts into whatever statutory definitions of Father, Mother or Parent we already have on the books. In the longer term, though, we will surely end up replacing the concepts of Father and Mother with concepts that better fit the kinds of parties involved in the “family creation” process: the Father will have to give way to to the Sperm Donor and the Male-with-parental-responsibility, and the Mother will have to give way to the Egg Donor, the Gestator and the Female-with-parental-responsibility.3 These would need to be co-equal categories; that is to say, we wouldn’t have any reason to say that the Egg Donor is the Mother any more than the Gestator is.
If these concepts are applied to all children in general, and not only to those conceived via IVF, then we would be looking at the abolition of the concept of Fatherhood and Motherhood entirely. For any given child, there may happen to be one Man who is both his Sperm Donor and his Male-with-parental-responsibility, and there may be one Woman who is his Egg Donor, Gestator and Female-with-parental-responsibility—but such overlap would be unnecessary as far as these new concepts themselves are concerned. No child will have a Father or a Mother.4 Once that move is made, every child will be a bastard.
As I say, strange times.
My wife Jemimah, who also writes over at Ab Initio Ad Finem, is our household’s resident authority on all questions of IVF; in particular, I would refer you to her recent-ish article for Ad Fontes (which is paywalled).
The term “family creation” should send shivers up your spine.
Given same-sex mirage, this gets even more complicated: there may be no Female- or Male-with-parental-responsibility, or there may be multiple, depending on the sex of the couple.
Alternatively, we might see IVF and the legal regime it will demand as a perverse attempt resurrection; every individual in this new human race could understood to be “without father, without mother, without descent […] but made like unto the Son of God…” (Hebrews 7:3).