1Our conversation explores the concepts of parenthood, reproduction and care in the context of the unfolding global environmental crisis. Arguing from the perspectives of queer theory, literary studies and climate justice, we call for new strategies and attitudes towards procreation, beyond the strictures of colonizing frames of knowledge and hegemonic cultural practices. More specifically, we seek to move the debate around assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in new, speculative directions that are centred on shared vulnerability and kinship, and which remain fully attentive to human and non-human relations and shared responsibilities on a warming planet. We come to this debate from related but distinct disciplinary backgrounds and with different urgencies, but agree on a set of assumptions. First, we share the belief that human reproduction is not in itself an inherent good and that a carefully reasoned case for the permissibility and desirability of procreation can and must be made in each and every case, in relation to the contingent factors that will be discussed in this text. Secondly, we are averse to coercive policies and mechanisms of population control that violate individual reproductive lives and futures. Finally, and most importantly for the purpose of this discussion, we object to what we perceive as a widespread tendency to discuss reproductive rights exclusively in relation to the needs of the well-resourced individualized user – frequently an inhabitant of the global North – in the face of persistent patterns of racist, colonial and heteropatriarchal violence. Against this trend, we insist that meaningful parental responsibility, not only in the context of ART, must be grounded in an egalitarian, transcultural and post-anthropocentric ethics of planetary care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). As gender theorist Michelle Murphy puts it, with memorable clarity: “If you cannot drink the water, there is no reproductive justice” (Murphy 2018: 109). Humans live, die and reproduce in the company of other beings. In light of this, our analysis of parenthood affirms the importance of versatile practices that hold the power to support planetary life and the more than human world, not as a mere backdrop or context for human stories, but as a co-constitutive presence that intersects with human culture and society in a single material and ethical force field.

 

F.M.: Let me begin by sketching the topic of our conversation from the perspective of my work in the environmental humanities. Since 2000, the concept of the Anthropocene has functioned as an important vector for cross-disciplinary research and artistic practice (Clark 2015; Davies 2016; Yusoff 2018). Novelists and visual artists have turned their attention to environmental degradation, planetary deep time and ecological entanglement. An increasing number of works have focused on natural processes and forms that are affected by human activities and impinge upon them: hurricanes, floods, unprecedented heatwaves, habitat destruction, pollution, mass extinction, and so on. These threats have already transformed our lives and, in a matter of decades or even years, will put an end to many familiar comforts and places. The climate crisis therefore requires not only urgent political action, but also a radical re-orientation of our technologies, ethics and values, and a re-assessment of what it means to be human. In this context, human procreation raises urgent and uncomfortable questions. If the human world population continues to grow in the way that it has, future humans will in all likelihood be condemned to vastly inferior lives, and may face resource wars and violence on a global scale. Other species will also suffer the consequences of human population growth, in even more direct and often fatal ways. (Wilson 2004; Heise 2016). But can and should we seek to reduce the number of human births? The problem is familiar to philosophers, and has – in recent years – been addressed with increasing urgency by social scientists, popular science authors, and ecocritics, among others (Weisman 2013; Collings 2014; Conly 2016). Several issues are at stake here: the conflict between individual rights and our entangled planetary future; mass extinction; the complexity of large social and ecological systems and the challenges they pose to demographic forecast; concerns about global inequality and about the abuse of state power; the unpredictable role of new ART. At an individual level, fears and hopes for our future and the future of our children also play a central role. How do you frame this set of concerns in relation to your research interests?

F.M.: Reflecting on the social categories of motherhood and fatherhood, I am struck by the fact that many influential thinkers have treated parental responsibility as a seemingly stable category, without adequate attention to its historical roots, shifting social functions, and uncertain future. British philosopher Onora O’Neill, for example, has argued in a landmark essay published in 1979 that “the basis of parents’ obligations and rights cannot lie solely or necessarily in a biological relationship between child and parents” but must reflect the obligation to rear a child “to at least that level which will minimally fit the child for independent adult life in its society” (O’Neill 1979: 26). This important definition of parenthood places an emphasis on epistemic and relational possibilities, but fails to engage with the external pressures that I have tried to summarise at the beginning of our conversation. How can we make sense of O’Neill’s definition of parental responsibility in a rapidly changing and potentially catastrophic world? Can we even decide what it means to raise a child to be “minimally fit” for life, given the unpredictability of post-holocenic societies and ecologies?

C.D.A.: Are you suggesting that analytic philosophers ought to be more attentive to the climate catastrophe?

F.M: Your question makes me think of an extraordinary thought experiment by philosopher Tim Mulgan: Ethics for a Broken World (2011). In this book, Mulgan introduces and explains the key texts and theories of twentieth-century Anglophone political and moral theory from the perspective of a fictional philosopher on a tragically plausible future Earth. This “broken world” has nearly exhausted its capacity to sustain life as we know it. With an unsettling mixture of anger, regret, and profound disbelief, Mulgan’s future philosopher revisits what he calls “the age of affluence”: our present age, whose political and ethical theories, according to Mulgan, are tragically oblivious to the basic needs of future generations of human and nonhuman denizens. Ethics for a Broken World does not focus specifically on human procreation, but Mulgan’s project appears relevant to our topic. How would the inhabitants of a “broken world” judge twentieth and twenty-first century reproductive habits and values, and the irresponsibly consumptive behaviour of present-day global elites? Let me phrase this question differently, to engage more directly with your interest in conceptual definitions: in your opinion, does the concept of parenthood – with its rich and nuanced history of social responsibility, power and authority – offer an adequate guide to human procreation?

F.M.: Motherhood and fatherhood are relational concepts. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has argued that such concepts, in common parlance, are not simply expository devices (Strathern 2020: 13). They are frequently employed in a normative sense, to imply the desirability of close ties between people or mutuality of engagement…

C.D.A.: Evidence for this, as for the workings of social categories in general, is to be found in our experience of native speakers about the way language works. The principles I have just spelled out provide the underlying rationale for linguistic expressions like “giving one’s husband/wife a baby”, “becoming a mother”, “making one’s husband a father”, “making one’s wife a mother” etc. These phrases would not exist, and would not be conceivable, utterable, or comprehensible, without implicit reference to the category structure I have just outlined. This structure is also, in my opinion, one major reason why, despite any number of changes, both technological and social, in the way reproduction actually takes place (an egg and sperm harvested from donors can be brought to term by a surrogate, and the resultant infant be adopted by a gay man living in a polyamorous family of adults who will all rear the child together…) I believe the stories we tell about reproduction will not evolve; indeed, why I feel we are doing all we can to keep them from evolving by clinging to an outmoded, ultimately untenable, model of the mechanics, structure, and consequences of reproduction.

F.M.: I am surprised by your claim that stories about reproduction will not evolve. ART features in numerous recent works of literature. Surrogate motherhood, for example, is a prominent theme in many recent, darkly speculative novels that have been grouped together under the label of feminist dystopia (Ditum 2018). I am thinking, for instance, of Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011), Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), Helen Sedgwick, The Growing Season (2017), or Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks (2018). Many of these writers have been directly inspired by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). At a superficial level, the success of their narratives seems to contradict your claim that category structures have survived unchallenged. But I suspect that this sense of contradiction is only apparent. Indeed, most twenty-first century reproductive dystopias are permeated by fears about the future, and by a deep sense of guilt towards unborn generations. Rogers, for example, describes a world of dwindling human fertility, where the reproductive lives of pregnant women are literally sacrificed to a violently pro-natalist regime, in order to guarantee the bare survival of the species. Similarly, Red Clocks imagines a world where every form of birth control or abortion is illegal. Generally speaking, many contemporary narratives of parenthood do not seek to promote alternative patterns of kinship or more hopeful visions. Rather, at the intimate level of literary representation, our age appears profoundly pessimistic. In most literary accounts of the future, outmoded social structures persist, with fatal consequences.

C.D.A.: The novels you mention are a good example of the ubiquitousness of cultural representations of biological reproduction. Why is there such a wealth of representations of parents and children in social discourse? Because biological reproduction is a crucial part of the way societies and culture, literally, reproduce themselves and thus achieve continuity and also, in a manner of speaking, immortality. It is therefore vital that cultures get members invested in biological reproduction. How does this happen? Through the workings of a number of social mechanisms which direct members’ desires (which are always culturally constructed) towards children as a socially sanctioned object.

F.M.: The child as a symbol of futurity?

C.D.A.: Exactly. This is achieved by framing reproduction in a number of interesting ways. First, reproduction is conceived as metaphorical immortality: our children are supposed to provide us with social continuity beyond individual death. This is one major reason why people make such momentous investments (both financial and existential) in children. Secondly, reproduction becomes an overarching, unfalsifiable, all-purpose teleology, which has the added benefit of turning, by a form of social sleight of hand, selfishness and megalomania into far-sighted altruism, since the quest to achieve status and amass wealth well beyond what a single individual may under any circumstances reasonably expect to need or use in their lifetime can be justified as rational because the privileges are going to be handed down to the following generation. Of course, the children’s opinion about all this is never sought: if they display no interest in occupying the place their parents carved out for them this does not in any way cast doubts on the parents’ designs on them but is dismissed as evidence of ingratitude. Finally, reproduction is marked as the achievement of a hierarchically superordinate social identity: full adulthood, as defined by the relationship to dependents who owe their very existence to us.

F.M.: Does this persistent social framing of parenthood stand in the way of alternative conceptions of parental responsibility? Do we need new categories and stories that are less concerned with parenthood as a social marker and more attentive to our shared planetary future?

C.D.A.: The reason I feel it is important to spell out these considerations is that they are crucial to our ability to productively interrogate the desire to be a parent. Any human who desires to be a parent is necessarily part of a society, and therefore, by desiring to be a parent, implicitly desires not a personal relationship to an individual who does not yet exist and about whom she knows nothing, but the social role of a parent in a given society. Therefore it is impossible to interrogate the desire to be a parent without interrogating the role of parenthood in the construction of social identities. First of all, how can people become suicidally depressed because they cannot have something they never had, such as a child? It is one thing to become depressed if you no longer have the two legs which have been part of your body from birth; it is quite another to become depressed if you realize you are not going to have a third leg implanted.

F.M: Supernumerary limbs are not a widely recognised symbol of social success?

F.M.: Allow me to return to speculative fiction, for a moment. Atwood, Rogers, Sedgwick, Erdrich and Zumas imagine worlds on the brink of destruction: their bleak, impoverished, post-catastrophic futures are clearly recognizable as the uncannily protracted aftermaths of our own age. Their novels leave no room for progress, or for new forms of compassion and care, across and between species. Instead, ART is imagined as a bio-political nightmare. When I read these novels, I find them anxiously resonant with the vast transnational pressures of accelerating globalization, in the present: political, military and economic interests that operate on a planetary scale, weapons of mass destruction, industrialization, irreparable environmental degradation, forced mass migration, genocidal wars, and so on. What seems largely absent, by contrast, is any genuine sense of alterity: a future that is imagined not in terms of eschatological closure, but as a state of protracted uncertainty. It seems to me, then, that these fictions are involuntarily complicit with the mentality that you deplore. They mark a missed opportunity. If we want to assess the vulnerability and value of human and nonhuman life on a warming planet, we must learn to consider both the climate emergency and ART as dynamic openings: as invitations to re-think our categories.

F.M.: A more mature reflection on assisted reproductive technology, along the lines you suggest, would also have to account for the growing interconnectedness and inequalities brought about by global markets. So-called “reproductive tourism” has perpetuated and exacerbated social divides between and within nations. Our critical re-thinking of parenthood must be attentive to these phenomena, and to the inequalities and systemic violence that are inscribed in the current global political and economic order.

C.D.A.: ART offer us an opportunity to rethink social categories, social relationships, and therefore processes of inclusion and exclusion. On a level, we are well aware of this: it is exactly because we are, and because this frightens us so much, that our reaction is to make all challenges to the traditional, simplistic narrative about parenthood (such as the genetic bond between egg or sperm “donors” and children, or the biological bond between children and “surrogate” mothers) not only socially, but legally invisible, and to uniformly choose to stick to the narratives we are already familiar with, even though they are no longer viable or helpful, but are, indeed, ridiculously inadequate to account for the facts.

F.M.: We need new narratives. I note how this basic claim has shaped our present discussion, as literary and cultural critics, about parenthood, ART and the climate crisis. All these phenomena demand new forms of linguistic and conceptual inventiveness that can alert readers to unfamiliar and counterintuitive scales. As ecocritic Timothy Clark has suggested, much environmental damage happens at a scale which cannot be fully expressed by traditional realist modes of literary representation (Clark 2019: 38). It is brought about by individual human actions that are not ecologically significant in themselves but that collectively, across space and over time, threaten much of what we value about humanity and the more-than-human world. If we apply Clark’s insight to the context of human reproduction, we observe that the relation between individual observable causes and vast global effects marks a stark challenge to traditional feminist accounts of agency: the personal is political, but it also resonates in planetary deep time. Cultural theorist Claire Colebrook has argued that the Anthropocene “requires us to open the classically feminist question of the scale of the personal: […] is my personal sense of gender meaningful only in terms of the history of the human family, or in terms of the narrower history of bourgeois marriage, or might we say that the personal is geological?” (Colebrook 2017: 1-2, author’s italics).

C.D.A.: On a different but related topic, it might be interesting to note that the distinction between genetic and social parents is in a way analogous to a number of other distinctions which are becoming more and more important in contemporary cultural discourse, and which invariably pit biology against social construction. An obvious example is the distinction between sex and gender, and its significance for gender studies and queer theory. To my mind this analogy is a potentially interesting and productive one precisely because of the ways it does not work. While in the sex/gender equation the biological component is used as a means of coercion, to “naturalize” what is a purely cultural connection between anatomy and social performance, in the genetic parents/social parents equation the social component is used to discursively marginalize and repress the significance of the biological one, as is obvious in the whole debate about donors and surrogates. I believe this is an excellent occasion to start questioning the analytically naïve and politically risky notion that there is something inherently theoretically shrewd and politically progressive about privileging the socially constructed above the biological: each situation is different, each deserves to be analyzed on its own terms, each may lead us to different, even to unsettling, conclusions.

F.M.: The success of concerted efforts to re-think parenthood depends on our ability to express and relate different scales and points of view?

C.D.A.: We also need to pay attention to changing historical and cultural contexts. As to the social viability of the opening up of parenthood to a larger number of actors, it might be interesting to mention in passing that in the history of the West our narrow construction of parenthood has been questioned, for instance, by the XVIII-century institution of “cicisbei”, the young aristocratic men who befriended the young wives of older aristocrats and in many cases were known to all to be the biological fathers of the children of the couple, a fact that nobody found shocking (Bizzochi 2008). Our present-day anxiety about the dissolution of traditional simplistic constructions of parenthood, and about the possible emergence of new social categories (“donor” mother, “surrogate” mother and “social” mother; “donor” father and “social” father, aunt/grandmother+”surrogate” mother, friend of the family+”donor” father, and so on…) is in my opinion one of the reasons why art (literature, film, performances, installations, you name it…) continues to pick at this sore. A brilliant Italian literary theorist, who would deserve to be more widely known abroad, Francesco Orlando, maintained that art is a form of the return of the repressed (Orlando1965). If you are not comfortable with this Freudian definition, I can offer you an updated queer one: art is about anxiety about emerging and liminal constructions of identity categories and their properties. Hard cases make bad law, but they make good art.

F.M.: I find both definitions of the artistic very illuminating: Francesco Orlando’s and yours.

C.D.A.: If we are willing to take a good hard look at what actually happens, as opposed to what is supposed to happen, in assisted reproduction we will get a sense of the irrepressible proliferation of “hard cases”; how messy this tangle of physiology, technology, emotions, and social relations can become, and of how unpredictable, and ultimately insoluble, this mess is. A lot of what we are used to taking for granted as “good practices” in surrogacy is designed to keep the mess at bay; for example, it is widely known that the form of surrogacy doctors like the least is the one between sisters because it creates lots of what the doctors define as “problems”, and that I, as a queer scholar, would instead define as the collapse of the neat repressive compartments which are supposed to keep social categories neatly apart.

F.M.: Why does the collapse of these pigeonholes cause so much anxiety?

C.D.A.: Because the way social categories work is predicated on neat compartments, while life is messy, and the messiness of life is exactly what culture is supposed to keep at bay. Surrogacy necessarily makes things messier because the neat social construction of parenthood is complicated by a proliferation of actors most of whom are then edited out of the story. And the reason why this happens is that we need to cling to a normative narrative even when the narrative is clearly inadequate to make sense of the facts, because the only roles we know how to play, and which therefore do not fill us with unmanageable anxiety, are the roles provided to us by the normative narrative. As a queer scholar, I tend to find messiness much more interesting than neatness, both theoretically, existentially, and politically. Therefore my practical, indeed political, recommendation is: by all means, keep the babies coming, but do not edit their three mothers, two fathers and mother-aunts or mother-grandmothers out of their lives, or of our society, or of our culture.

F.M.: Until now, our conversation has focused on the concept of parenthood and on the notion of “parental responsibility”. I suggest that we shift our attention to the debate about reproductive rights.

F.M.: In a recent exchange with anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar, bioethicist David Wasserman has offered what he calls “a piecemeal defense of procreation” (Benatar and Wasserman 2015: 257). While Benatar regards any form of human procreation as morally unjustifiable, Wasserman holds that there can be no categorical argument against human reproduction. But he shares Benatar’s suspicion of those who argue that procreation – in all or most circumstances – requires no defence. In this context, Wasserman also rejects the idea of so-called “procreative liberty”, and suggests that liberal moral-political theory, with its traditional focus on the abstract, interchangeable, autonomous individual, is not an appropriate context for debates about procreation. Your own critique of the idea of procreative rights appears to strike a similar chord.

C.D.A.: I believe we should face the unsettling but ultimately inevitable realization that our present-day notion of “having a right to children” is incompatible with the equally present-day ubiquitous abhorrence of patria potestas. Either children are a right we can demand (which they could very well be, as long as our relationship to them was framed in the terms of patria potestas), or they are autonomous beings whose welfare we are responsible for (as they are now that we conceive of our relationship to them as parental responsibility); they cannot logically be both. For instance, health care is (at least for the time being…) a right, and therefore the personal preferences of medical personnel are not taken into account when it comes to caring for patients; indeed, the notion that they might be is intrinsically abhorrent. Patients, on the other hand, are autonomous beings health practitioners are responsible for and to, and therefore medical personnel are obliged to take their wishes, preferences, and values into account every step of the way.

F.M.: So would you agree that it is productive to imagine parenthood, first and foremost, as a practice of responsible care?

F.M.: Please carry on.

C.D.A.: At this point I would like to turn to “responsibility”. Responsibility is, of course, a Latin word. The English equivalent is “to be answerable for, to answer to”. This has two profound implications. The first is that responsibility arises in a relationship: we can never be responsible in the abstract: we are always responsible to someone for someone or something; in the case of legally sanctioned obligations like parental responsibility, to the law. The second is that our responsibility takes the form of “answering for” what we do or did not do: responsibility is expressed verbally in a dialogic relationship to whoever we are answerable to. These two implications have one important consequence: that unless social discourse makes it possible to articulate parental responsibility, to make it something we are called upon to answer for, parental responsibility does not exist. Of course, one major area in which parental responsibility does not exist at present is in relation to the over ten billions of creatures we cause to be born in order to eat their corpses. But since none of them would be born unless we, as consumers, literally had them manufactured to order, just like parents using donors and surrogates, it could be argued that we are, in a way, their parents. I believe the consequences of this application of the concept of “parental responsibility” to be deserving of further exploration.