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 emphasising 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 personhood 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.
