The Uncanny Embryos: Legal Limits to the Human and Reproduction Without Women

Abstract

Law through both regulation and prohibition carries us forward in the imaginary leap that is necessary to take us from the embryonic being to the post-human being. Such beings include the hybrid, the chimera, the genetically enhanced, the inheritably genetically manipulated, the embryo with three genetic progenitors and the embryo produced by the fusion of same sex gametes. In this paper I explore how the law, by prohibiting the creation of certain kinds of embryos, is nevertheless giving legislative life to entities that are yet to be made. I consider how the law currently defines these entities and how it would define them if they were developed from the embryo to a fully birthed (human) being. In the process I discuss the way in which the technologically produced embryo is constructed as a phantasmal premonition of the child to be. However, existing outside the gestating body of the woman, it is uncanny in the Freudian sense of the unhiemlich, or unhomely. It evokes sympathy and horror in the same moment. Unhinged from the all-encompassing female body and equipped with its own genetic identity, it attains an individuality that pre-figures its birth. In this way even in the absence of the mother, the embryo is assigned a holding place in the (human) family. But the hybrid/manipulated embryo amplifies its uncanniness evoking the horror of an alien presence, apparently the same but yet not so.

I argue that in new legislative responses to reproductive genetic technologies and embryo research, an alternate phantasmal premonition should be foregrounded that of the not yet pregnant pregnant woman. By emphasizing the pregnant woman who is not yet pregnant, I want to evoke the underlying assumption that where there are embryos, there are also women who will become pregnant with them and are therefore already premonitionally pregnant. In this way the provisionality of these embryos is highlighted because the embryo is only ever connected with its potential for person-hood by female embodiment. In the end, then it is the decisions women make, in light of the information before them, that should determine who and what they reproduce.

Keywords: embryos, reproductive rights, genetics

JEL Classification: K10, K30, I10, I18, K32