ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which egg donors, surrogate mothers, and intended parents in India imagine and unimagine their relationship with children born through third-party reproduction. Third-party reproduction is inseparable from plural parenthood and the question of who the ‘real’ parents are. In a legal and medical context, gestational surrogacy in India treats surrogates as not ‘real’ mothers, in favour of the ‘natural’ relationship between the intended mother and child. Here, the ‘genetic tie’ may ignore gestation in giving predominance to ‘genes’, but this logic is inverted in the case of egg donation, in which it is not uncommon for people to regard egg donors as ‘real’ mothers. Who is regarded as a ‘real’ parent, and who is not, is deeply embedded in the social process of creating kinship, shared notions of bodily substances, corporeal reality, and social recognition of ‘one’s own child’. The elements of gestation, genetic relations, and nurturing compete and coexist in the practice of third-party reproduction. This paper explores the multiple aspects of ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ kinship and its entanglement in making ‘a child of one’s own’ in third-party reproduction in India.

摘要

本文研究了印度的卵子捐献者，代孕母亲和有意的父母如何想象和想象不到他们与通过第三方繁殖而生的孩子之间的关系。第三方复制与父母身份多元化以及谁是“真正的”父母这一问题密不可分。在法律和医学上，印度的代孕将代孕视为“真正的”母亲，而有利于预期的母子之间的“自然”关系。在这里，“基因纽带”在赋予“基因”优势时可能会忽略妊娠，但是在捐赠卵子的情况下这种逻辑是相反的，在这种情况下，人们通常不认为卵子捐赠者是“真正的”母亲。谁被认为是“真正的”父母，而谁不是，则深深地植根于建立亲缘关系，身体物质的共同观念的社会过程中，有形的现实，以及对“自己的孩子”的社会认可。在第三方繁殖的实践中，妊娠，遗传关系和养育的要素相互竞争并存。本文探讨了“真实”和“虚拟”亲属关系的多个方面，以及在印度第三方复制中使“亲生子女”的纠缠。