Over the past few years, a flurry of insightful books have examined the meaning of reproduction and family beyond blood, heteronormativity and the nuclear unit.
In 2022, journalist Gina Rushton published The Most Important Job in the World, a reflection on how her experience covering reproductive health and abortion – and a diagnosis of endometriosis – shaped her ambivalence about becoming a mother.
Review: Kin: Family in the 21st century – Marina Kamenev (NewSouth)
Last year, Alexandra Collier’s brilliant memoir Inconceivable: Heartbreak, bad dates and finding solo motherhood chronicled her path to single motherhood through sperm donation. And in their respective memoirs, authors Dani Shapiro, Sarah Dingle and Lauren Burns explore the impact of discovering, as adults, they were conceived through sperm donation.
Sydney-based journalist Marina Kamenev departs from this personally inflected approach in her book-length investigation Kin. A survey of non-traditional family-making, it canvasses experiences of surrogacy and donor conception by infertile couples, gay and lesbian parents, and single mothers by choice.
Kamenev’s main aim is to demonstrate how the nuclear family has been displaced as a result of changing social norms and the alternative approaches enabled by reproductive technology. She also considers the social and ethical implications of emerging reproductive technologies such as gene editing and ectogenesis (an artificial womb).
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The book is divided into ten chapters. Themes include “rainbow families” (focusing on gay and lesbian parents), “online mating” (examining informal arrangements outside of a clinic) and “the baby carriers” (centring on surrogacy).
While this structure appears logical, Kamenev’s integration of the histories of reproductive technologies and evolving laws around them is often hard to follow.
She is also fond of an anecdote where a succinct historical summary would suffice. Do we really need a historical tour of the materials used to make condoms to appreciate the struggles women went through to access the Pill? Is rehashing Bill Clinton’s infidelity necessary to demonstrate the nebulousness and hypocrisy of traditional family values?
This propensity for wandering is exacerbated by the book’s lack of jurisdictional specificity. While most interviewees are Australian, Kamenev peppers her discussion with examples reported in the US and UK media. Some of the latter didn’t seem to serve a clear purpose, leaving chapters both overstuffed yet under-cooked.
A focus solely on the Australian context seems warranted on legal grounds alone. Our legislative and ethical frameworks governing gamete donation and access to reproductive services differ from state to state. Guidelines issued by the National Health and Medical Research Council plug any legislative gaps.
This preference for breadth over depth seems to reflect Kamenev’s insecurity about her position as a researcher. She has no personal experience of the struggles she reports on. Rather, she comes to them as a seasoned journalist with a longstanding interest in reproductive technologies.
But it seems she has not fully reconciled her coverage of these issues with her lack of a personal stake in them. In the introduction she describes her original interest in sperm donation as “inexplicable”. By the book’s end, she still “only felt comfortable as an observer” whose own views are “irrelevant”. Her project has been to “capture the opinions of those who […] used the technology or were products of its use”.
Read more: It's hard to find a surrogate in Australia. But heading overseas comes with risks
Minimal interrogation
Kamenev’s suspension of her judgement during the research process might have been a good tactic for challenging her own biases. But minimal interrogation of the perspectives of interviewees makes for a bland and occasionally frustrating reading experience.
There is inadequate scrutiny of her interviewees’ motivations and ethical dilemmas. For instance, Kamenev interviews Jeff and Rodney, a gay couple of Taiwanese and European heritage respectively. Each man wanted to use his sperm to conceive a child who appeared “Eurasian”, to construct familial resemblance. To achieve this, their respective egg donors had to be of European and Asian descent.
While they admit to Kamenev that opting for anonymous donors was a mistake, there is no discussion here of the potential for the reification of race through sperm or egg donor selection. Exploring fewer case studies in more depth would have permitted a richer, more nuanced discussion.
As Kamenev’s book progresses, the inadequate conceptual focus becomes increasingly evident. In her opening chapters, she frames the nuclear family as her critical target, but Kamenev’s beef, it seems, is really with patriarchy. Rather than embarking on a comprehensive critique of the way patriarchy continues to structure contemporary life, she emphasises the post-war origins of the nuclear family. She explores stereotypes such as the American housewife, to emphasise its outdated nature. But this feels a little detached from the subsequent discussion about reproductive technology.
Read more: Friday essay: matrilineal societies exist around the world – it's time to look beyond the patriarchy
Kamenev acknowledges Australia’s poor record with regard to racism and child welfare, but this is dispensed with via a brief mention of the Stolen Generations in the introductory chapter. There is also an acknowledgement here of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities’ more expansive conceptions of kinship roles (which have gained legal recognition in Queensland). But there is little attempt to mount a sustained critique of contemporary family life incorporating considerations of class and race.
Similarly, her discussion of gender equality largely centres on women achieving financial independence through white collar or elite careers. Kamenev disregards “having it all” as a “genius piece of marketing” as many women have no choice but to take on the lions’ share of the domestic load alongside full time work.
However, she immediately undercuts this point by using Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, as an example. Having promised to work through her maternity leave after the birth of her first child, Mayer went on to have two more children and amass vast personal wealth. Hers is hardly an example of the daily struggles of ordinary people.
Artificial wombs
In the final chapter, Kamenev looks at the potential risks and benefits of technologies currently in their infancy, such as ectogenesis. She floats the possibility that gestation outside the (female) body could “provide a level playing field for the battle of the sexes”. The onus of child-rearing “wouldn’t automatically fall on the mother”.
The main benefit to women she envisages here is the ability to avoid career disruption after giving birth. The example she uses is that of Serena Williams, who “returned to the pro tour eight months after giving birth to find that her world ranking had plunged from number 1 to number 451.”
This example seems odd to me for several reasons. Firstly, there is no mention of the fact that Williams nearly died from complications following childbirth. Nor that Black women disproportionately suffer complications from pregnancy and childbirth in the United States.
Read more: 9 ways racism impacts maternal health
“Feminism lite” is also in operation here. Advocating for women who are already financially privileged overlooks the need to lift disadvantaged women out of poverty. Alternatively, a universal basic income could remove women’s financial dependence on men, alleviating poverty and exploitation more broadly.
Similarly, while an artificial womb would prevent women suffering the debilitating effects of pregnancy and childbirth, it won’t necessarily mean male partners stay home to look after the children once born. Without a societal shift in how gender roles are structured or perceived, women will still find themselves having to do it all.
Currently in Australia mothers have greater access to part time or flexible work than fathers. Rectifying this situation would be a more constructive way to facilitate a rebalancing of the domestic load than using an artificial womb.
In this disappointing final chapter, the conceptual problems evident at the beginning of Kamenev’s book come full circle. For while expanding access to gamete donation and surrogacy for gay and lesbian couples and single mothers is a marker of social progress, reproductive technologies are bound up with capitalism.
Both bodies and human tissue are commodified. Biology is co-opted in the pursuit of personal wealth accumulation. Reproductive technologies may, in fact, increase the stranglehold of capitalism and the patriarchy on our lives in ways that make the nuclear family look like small fry. A better book would have acknowledged this.