A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories by Rachel Bowlby (review)

In a fascinating and neatly argued study of parenthood as identity, Rachel Bowlby explores the history and current culture of assisted reproductive technologies, adoption, and surrogacy. Drawing on stories from mythology, the Bible, and canonical nineteenth-century British and American authors, she identifies precedents for current longings and anxieties, as well as family-creating practice. When it comes to debating what is “natural” and who is the “rightful” parent of a child, Bowlby argues that there is “nothing new under the sun.”

A Child of One’s Own can be divided into two parts that feel quite distinct. In chapters 1–4, Bowlby places the current spectrum of roles in genetically creating and socially raising a child in historical context. Artificial reproductive technologies (ART), she argues, created new methods of producing children but also changed the act and meaning of becoming a parent for all adults, in part because ART evolved hand in hand with habitual contraception. Together, ART and contraception rendered the steps of producing a baby, regardless of how or where sperm meets egg, both intentional and visible via practices of “trying,” at-home pregnancy tests, and ultrasounds.

“Fathering a child” has traditionally been understood as a prenatal, biological act and “mothering” an ongoing social one. Bowlby argues that ART played an important role in altering these societal understandings. In some ways, it leveled the playing field, enabling the role of either mothering or fathering, by gay or straight people, to be exclusively biological or exclusively social. A woman who has frozen her eggs can choose to become a parent at an advanced age; through use of surrogacy, she can also become the biological mother of children unknown to her. As Bowlby notes, “IVF had the effect of separating biological maternity into two distinct functions, gestation and egg provision” (37). Yet the idea that two women could have competing claims for biological motherhood is not unique to our time. Eighteenth-century discussions about wet-nursing, for example, make clear that questions about who the “real” mother is, the one who feeds a child from her body or the one whose actions initially produced the baby, has a long history. Importantly, eighteenth-century writers generally agreed that “good” mothers chose to nurse and raise their own children—precedent for today’s thinking that the “real” mother is the woman who raises the baby.

While the arrival of contraception made it possible to separate heterosexual sex from childbearing, leading to the intentional production of a child, the advent of IVF (which separated childbearing from heterosexual sex) transformed the idea of “choosing to have a baby” by making it possible for almost anyone to become a parent. Once seen as the inevitable, even unintentional, result of marriage, parenthood has now become “a form of personal fulfillment, a valid lifestyle option” for people of any age, sexual orientation, or marital status (1).

Bowlby’s adept analysis of the complexities of today’s childbearing and their meaning for society at large could easily stand alone. But as a literary scholar, she turns her attention, in the second half of the book, to canonical literature. Here she finds evidence of the long history of new parenting realities. Individual chapters at times feel far afield from the argument at hand, with perhaps too much attention to details of textual plotting. But the collective effect is entirely convincing: Bowlby’s re-readings push us to realize that “where there is a child, or where there is a love story, there may very well be an interesting parental story too” (3). We simply have not been conditioned to look for it.

A Child of One’s Own engages exclusively with English-language literature. At various points, however, Bowlby offers examples of French terminology and policy (contemporary and historical) around parenthood, surrogacy, and adoption. It is clear that cross-cultural studies of current practice and fictional parenting are desirable, especially considering the fact that the language used to...