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6. Conceptions of Contention: Donor Challenge to the Dimensions of Relatedness 121 GAIL: And how I got over . . . well my own faith issues surrounding using donor sperm was when I was in the shower one day and I suddenly realised that Jesus was the ultimate ‘donor baby’. And you know I thought if Mary and Joseph could raise a baby that not only wasn’t his but was also the Messiah . . . Well you know I wasn’t going to have to deal with the Messiah bit! So that really was the last hurdle for me to overcome. Conventional definitions of parenthood often employ biology in order to naturalise ethical and moral assumptions implicit in social relationships. Eggs and sperm are important symbols in the construct of nature and parenthood as they are the biological building blocks of both offspring and relationships. In previous chapters, I have discussed the importance of motherhood not only as a social role in Ireland but a subjectivity produced in complex and contested relations of power. Stories about donor eggs allow us to tease out the ways in which biology is used in the service of relational, social and political definitions of motherhood. While nature and science could sometimes dance together in an ethical embrace with IVF, when egg and sperm donors enter, the rhythm changes, the steps falter and neither science nor nature provides the necessary discursive moral framework. Conceiving with another person’s egg or sperm produces a fractured sense of parenthood and poses news possibilities for a child’s identity. David Schneider, in his work on Euro-American kinship, has suggested that the system is based on a logic that assumes ‘kinship is defined as biogenetic. This definition says that kinship is whatever the biogenetic relationship is. If science discovers new facts about the biogenetic relationship, then that is what kinship is and was all along.’1 Reproductive technologies at once facilitate parenthood, complicate it and make the biological processes highly visible and external to the embodied identities of the progenitors. New kinds of relationships are thus mediated in a scientific and disembodied context.2 In this chapter I will examine how the use of donor eggs and sperm (gametes) relate to wider social and political discourses on motherhood, gender and sexual identity, morality, kinship and family responsibility that shape the local moral world in Ireland. The exchange of gametes creates not only complex gendered and sexual identities, but also a whole range of social identities and kinship relations for producers, recipients, and the children that are produced in the exchange, whether in assisted clinical reproduction or sexual reproduction. New concerns are created with respect to what Monica Konrad calls ‘conjugal chaos’ when procreation is no longer contained within marital relationships.3 As Schneider argues, science plays a role in shaping the social understanding of biogenetic facts. But science has reduced our notion of individual identities to the importance of the gene even as it creates ever more complex ways of defining and manipulating genetic material. In fact, donor conceptions represent a contradiction to the conventional biogenetic framework that emphasises genes and biological heritage as key to identity and future health and well-being. Blood is no longer the most powerful symbol of kin relations. The use of donor gametes also invites a re-examination of the role of genetics and birth in determining who is kin. McKinnon and Silverman challenge the growing modernist tendency to equate aspects of social personhood with genetics, locating the characteristics of individuals within a biological frame that reduces social relations and families to mere artifacts.4 An emphasis on the role of nature as a basis for family relationships is both commonplace and contested , and we revisit again the malleability and constructedness of the concept of nature itself, particularly where it becomes the foundation for other constructed ‘social facts’5 and legal definitions of social relationships . In light of the importance of moral responsibilities attributed to motherhood and the family, Irish people who use donor eggs or sperm and ART must also navigate the meaning of biogenetic concepts in relation to the contested and changing social, legal and political ideas of family in Ireland. Donor projects also constitute gametes more directly as body parts or objectified commodities, gifts or natural resources. As objects that are ‘of the body’, with embodied meanings, and yet necessarily disembodied, donor gametes are productive of complex identities and ethics as they transcend bodies in ways that contravene the norms of reproduction. Rhonda...

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