Abstract
Anne Charnock foretells the coming era of motherless births depicting the future of reproductive technologies and its myriad consequences for homo/heteroparents in Dreams Before the Start of Time (2018), which narrates how ectogenesis and parthenogenesis can coerce their productive choices of women across the generations because of social circumstances and public domains that regard the public presence of pregnancy as “a social anomaly.” Charnock’s novel is concerned with social inequality and questions of ableism, as the genetically engineered children potentially will create another class distinction between “GenRich”-genetically superior and “GenPoor” natural-born humans. This chapter demonstrates how reproductive choices distinctly altered by biotechnology affect parent-child bonding and relationship, offer new family forms, and change the social status of parenting, and shows the importance of being a parent, a child, and a family in each generation to follow.
“Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphorical extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females.”
—Haraway 1991, 180
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Notes
- 1.
The term “test tube baby” does not mean that she/he was decanted from a bottle, but fertilized in a test tube and then gestated and born as normal.
- 2.
SCNT differs from cloning, which creates the embryo without sexual reproduction, by creating the embryo through removing and replacing the nucleus of an egg from a mature body cell.
- 3.
The license goes to Professor Alison Murdoch and Dr. Miodrag Stojkovic at the Newcastle Centre for Life. The first human-cloned embryo using SCNT was announced six months ago by a group of scientists at the Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea, but the project was under investigation due to ethical misconduct. See https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL31358.html#ifn13.
- 4.
Charnock’s novel does not mention about breast milk or feeding for any gender; we do not have an idea how women feed their artificially conceived machine-human babies, or whether men can breastfeed their babies through hormone injection as in the case of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of the Time.
- 5.
Ectogenesis became famous with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), yet works like Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017) weave ectogenesis in, speculating on whether both men and women would share procreation though artificial wombs, called pouches, carried as backpacks.
- 6.
As depicted in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), in which clones are raised in orphanages for organ transplantation.
- 7.
See Gregory Pence (2006).
- 8.
Nancy is the sister of Nicol, who is the skating instructor of Toni and Millie, who can skate with the help of high-tech exo-skel human-assisted technology.
- 9.
- 10.
The term GenRich is borrowed from Lee Silver (1999), who predicts a new digital divide as GenRich-humans and Natural-humans for the year 2350.
- 11.
This part of the novel reminds readers of the genetic determinism and technoeugenics in dystopian sf films such as Gattaca (1997), in which people are categorized into a hierarchy of genetic classes as superior or inferior, as the siblings Vincent (GenPoor) and Anton (Gen Rich) are.
- 12.
Toni from the second generation also finds her fourth-generation granddaughter’s decision of natural gestation wrong.
- 13.
This work was supported by TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) under Grant [2219-International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship] Program for the grant-awarded research project titled “Violence Against Women in British Science Fiction” to be performed at the University of California Riverside under the supervision of Sherryl Vint, to whom I express my sincere appreciation and gratitude for helping me get started on this project and for her valuable suggestions and comments on this chapter. Some parts of this article are the revised and extended version of my article “Biyogenetik Posthüman Bilimkurgu: Yarının Gen-Tasarımlı Çocukları ve Gen-Kapitalist Sınıfları” published in Turkish language in the collection Edebiyatta Posthumanism (Ed. Sümeyra Buran), 2020: 163–184.
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Buran, S. (2022). Being an Artificial Womb Machine-Human. In: Vint, S., Buran, S. (eds) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_3
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