Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-17T15:34:42.698Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Blood Is Thicker than Water: Policing Donor Insemination and the Reproduction of Whiteness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Seline Szkupinski Quiroga
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

On the most general level, this essay addresses the ways race is deployed in biomedical solutions to infertility. Szkupinski Quiroga begins with general assertions about fertility technology. She then explores how fertility technology reinforces biological links between parents and children and argues that most options reflect and privilege white kinship patterns and fears about race mixing. She illustrates these observations with interviews she has collected.

Type
Miscegenation and Purity
Information
Hypatia , Volume 22 , Issue 2: Special Issue: The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body , Spring 2007 , pp. 143 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ABC. 2004. Fertility screw‐up, woman impregnated with wrong sperm. Good Morning America, July 15.Google Scholar
Adams, David Wallace. 1995. Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience, 1875‐‐1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Agigian, Amy. 2004. Baby steps: How lesbian alternative insemination is changing the world. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
American Anthropological Association Working Group. 1998. American anthropological association statement on “race.” Anthropology Newsletter 39 (6): 3.Google Scholar
Becker, Gaylene. 2000. The elusive embryo: How women and men approach new reproductive technologies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
California Cryobank, Inc. 2006. Vial color coding system. http://www.cryobank.com/racial.cfmpage=3&sub=4 (accessed November 18, 2006).Google Scholar
Callahan, Joan C. 1995. Reproduction, ethics, and the law: Feminist perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Chambers, Ross. 1997. The unexamined. In Whiteness: A critical reader. ed. Hill, Mike. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Christoffersen, John. 2004. Pregnant woman claims sperm mix‐up. Associated Press, July 14.Google Scholar
Colen, Shellee. 1995. “Like a mother to them”: Stratified reproduction and West Indian child care workers and employers in New York. In Conceiving the new world order: The global politics of reproduction. ed. Ginsburg, Faye D. and Rapp, Rayna. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Dill, Bonnie Thornton. 1994. Fictive kin, paper sons, and compadrazgo: Women of color and the struggle for family survival. In Women of color in U.S. Society. ed. Zinn, Maxine Baca and Dill, Bonnie Thornton. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Donchin, Anne. 1996. Feminist critiques of new fertility technologies: Implications for social policy. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 21: 475–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Everson, Courtney. 2003. Commodified sperm: Creating a hierarchy of male worth. Focus. http://www.focusanthro.org/ (accessed November 4, 2005).Google Scholar
Garcia, Richard. 2003. The misuse of race in medical diagnosis. Chronicle of Higher Education, 49: B15.Google ScholarPubMed
Hanson, F. Allan. 2001. Donor insemination: Eugenic and feminist implications. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15 (3): 287–311.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hardesty, Monica, and Black, Timothy. 1999. Mothering through addiction: A survival strategy among Puerto Rican addicts. Qualitative Health Research 9 (5): 602–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartouni, Valerie. 1994. Breached birth: Reflections on race, gender, and reproductive discourse in the 1980s. Configurations 2 (1): 73–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hing, Bill Ong. 1993. Making and remaking Asian America through emigration policy, 1850 to 1990. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hollinger, Joan Heifetz. 1989. Beyond the best interests of the tribe: The Indian Child Welfare Act and the adoption of Indian children. University of Detroit Law Review 66: 451–501.Google Scholar
Ikemoto, Lisa. 1995. The in/fertile, the too fertile, and the dysfertile. Hastings Law Journal 47: 1007–61.Google Scholar
Jordan, Brigitte, and Davis‐Floyd, Robbie. 1993. Birth in four cultures: A crosscultural investigation of childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Kemper, Robert. 1982. The compadrazgo in urban Mexico. Anthropological Quarterly 55: 17–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Renate. 1984. Doing it ourselves: Self insemination. In Test‐tube women: What future for motherhood? ed. Minden, Shelley Klein, Renate, and Arditti, Rita. Boston: Pandora Press.Google Scholar
Lasker, Judith N., and Borg, Susan. 1994. In search of parenthood: Coping with infertility and high‐tech conception. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Lock, Margaret M., and Kaufert, Patricia A. 1998. Pragmatic women and body politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Marks, Jonathan. 2000. Scientific and folk ideas about heredity. In The human genome project and minority communities: Ethical, social, and political dilemmas. ed. Zilinskas, Raymand A. and Balint, Peter J. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Morgan, Kathryn Pauly. 1996. Gender rites and rights: The biopolitics of beauty and fertility. In Philosophical perspectives on bioethics. ed. Sumner, and Boyle, .CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, Julien. 1999. Making our families: Anti‐lesbian discrimination in assisted reproduction practices. In Embodying bioethics: Recent feminist advances, ed. Donchin, Anne and Purdy, Laura. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Nsiah‐Jefferson, Laurie, and Hall, Elaine. 1989. Reproductive technology: Perspectives and implications for low‐income women and women of color. In Healing technology: Feminist perspectives. ed. Strother Ratcliff, Kathryn, Marx Ferree, Myra, Mellow, Gail O., Drygulski Wright, Barbara, Price, Glenda D., Yanoshik, Kim, and Freston, Margie S. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Patterson, Orlando. 1998. Rituals of blood: Consequences of slavery in two American centuries. Washington, D.C.: Civitas/CounterPoint.Google Scholar
Philp, Kenneth R. 1999. Termination revisited: American Indians on the trail to self‐determination, 1933‐‐1953. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Ragoné, Helena. 1994. Surrogate motherhood: Conception in the heart. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.Google Scholar
Rapp, Rayna. 1999. Testing women, testing the fetus: The social impact of amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Matthew, and Moore, Lisa Jean. 1999. Constructing a “good catch,” picking a winner: The development of technosemen and the deconstruction of the monolithic male. In Cyborg babies: From techno‐sex to techno‐tots. ed. Davis‐Floyd, Robbie and Dumit, Joseph. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schneider, David Murray. 1980. American kinship: A cultural account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, David Murray. 1984. A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shanner, Laura. 1996. Bioethics through the back door: Phenomenology, narratives, and insights into infertility. In Philosophical perspectives on bioethics. ed. Sumner, and Boyle, .CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherwin, Susan. 1992. No longer patient: Feminist ethics and health care. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Simpson, Bob. 2000. Imagined genetic communities: Ethnicity and essentialism in the twenty‐first century. Anthropology Today 16 (3): 3–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smedley, Audrey. 1993. Race in North America: Origin and evolution of a worldview. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.Google Scholar
Stack, Carol. 1974. All our kin: Strategies for survival in a black community. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. 1995. Displacing knowledge: Technology and the consequences for kinship. In Conceiving the new world order: The global politics of reproduction. ed. Ginsburg, Faye and Rapp, Rayna. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sumner, L. Wayne, and Boyle, Joseph eds., 1996. Philosophical perspectives on bioethics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Charis. 2002. Fertile ground: Feminists theorize infertility. In Infertility around the globe: New thinking on childlessness, gender, and reproductive technologies. ed. Inhom, Marcia Claire and Van Balen, Frank. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Weston, Kath. 1991. Families we choose: Lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
WHDH. 2004. Fertility nightmare. WHDH Healthcast Channel 7, July 14.Google Scholar
WTNH. 2004. Woman pregnant with wrong sperm plans lawsuit. WTNH News Channel 8, July 9.Google Scholar
Zack, Naomi. 1993. Race and mixed race. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar