Women as Fathers: Confronting Surrogacy

• In Event: 187 - Regular Session. Rethinking Reproductive Risks

Abstract

The focus on the seed, on the genetic tie, which now dominates reproductive technology and discussion, is not remotely threatened by the ways that feminism challenges family and gender politics. Feminist politics did not, as some asked for, call for a radical reconsideration of how men live or are empowered – rather feminism as it developed in (white) America called for full equality of women, for women’s access to all of the privileges and power that belonged to men. This included the privileges and power of fatherhood. Women pointed to the fact of the egg, the ‘other half’ of the genetic essence, and rested their claims to equality on that egg. Children are half his and half hers – and might as well have grown in the backyard. Or India. The law and the technology, the technology and the law, follow from that claim to equality.

Author

• Barbara Katz Rothman, City University of New York