2023-04-28 05:00:00
All the controversy surrounding Ana Obregón and “surrogacy” forgets a very banal assumption: that it is only possible because science has separated the reproduction of sexuality, the reproduction of maternity and the reproduction of life, three operations that nature seemed to have united indissolubly. To have a child, a woman was forced to have sexual relations, gestate in…
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All the controversy surrounding Ana Obregón and “surrogacy” forgets a very banal assumption: that it is only possible because science has separated the reproduction of sexuality, the reproduction of maternity and the reproduction of life, three operations that nature seemed to have united indissolubly. In order to have a child, a woman was obliged to have sexual relations, gestate an embryo in her own womb and, of course, be alive. Today a dead person can have a child in another body, whose womb will only be considered “pregnant” and no longer “mother”. Beyond the commercial context of this process, the truth is that science has made it possible to disconnect instances on whose fusion the material reproduction of humanity has depended for thousands of years.
The curious thing in this case is that the traditional ideological distribution is inverted, so that the left, very distrustful of the idea of ”nature”, strongly manifests itself against “surrogacy” while the right, which considers unnatural abortion, homosexuality and sex change, is in favor of this “artificial” disconnection. The contradiction is only apparent. Neither of them is thinking about nature. The left thinks of the woman’s body and of the child born or to be born; the right on “biology” as a perpetuating myth of race and class.
From the beginning, the human condition consists of a certain disconnection from nature, one of whose most fruitful and ambiguous expressions is science. Now, there is no necessary continuity between science and rights. Cain had to resort to a donkey’s jaw to kill his brother Abel, but no one would think of saying that this murder would have been legitimate if Cain had used a knife or a gun, great technological achievements of civilization. It is not forbidden to kill with your hands and it is allowed to kill with a cannon; what is prohibited is the act of killing itself. No technological advance constitutes in itself a human advance, much less a legal conquest. The internal combustion engine, for example, was an extraordinary innovation from which the right to use a private automobile did not follow inexorably; Today, in the midst of climate change, we understand that it was a non-generalizable right and that it could happen that we have to renounce it. Others for organ transplants, medical progress from whose wonders no one can apostatize, but which, in a context of scarcity of kidneys and livers, does not constitute an individual right. Nor is adoption a right or, at least, not a parental right, since no one could adopt a child if (contrary to what happens with organs) there were no more abandoned children in the world than potential parents. If adoption is a right, it is undoubtedly a right of children: the right to life, to food, to care for the most fragile. Homosexuals have no less right to adoption than heterosexuals; they have the same right; that is, none. Or they will only have it —one and the other— as long as there are orphaned children in need of protection.
Therefore, even less will there be a right to be “biological parents”, which is one of those things that occurs or does not occur “naturally”; Infertility can be experienced as a misfortune and seek a remedy in fertility treatments and specialized clinics, just as one can seek solutions to baldness. But it is not a right. Here “biology” and “nature” are opposed in a revealing way that explains the contradiction noted above. The “natural” thing is to want to care for, hug, clothe, nurture a child, regardless of its biological origin. I think that on the left we are not against nature but against biology: against biology deciding our lives and the social order; and we are in favor of nature imposing itself against it, even in the form of a vaccine, an incubator or a bottle.
Now, the case of Ana Obregón, with all its dystopian shadows and macabre fringes, is part of a broader debate on science, desire and law. What desires must science satisfy and law approve? The principle is clear: we neither should nor is it our right to do everything that science and technology allow us to do. From there everything is dark. What criteria will we follow to rule out or at least regulate some of these innovations? If God is dead, not everything is allowed, as Dostoevsky claimed; what happens is that now everything can be renamed. That means the famous Nietzschean sentence on the death of God: that modernity has broken the “natural” connection between words and things; that we don’t know the meanings anymore and therefore we have to find out. It’s less about renaming it all than to accept that, under happy and unhappy pressures, it is inevitable to explore and revise the names of things. The question is: who will now be the nominator instead of God? Neoliberalism? Vox? An identity group? If there is no longer a Nominator with a capital letter, we will have to constitute a tiny one: a democratic and republican assembly that deliberates on tradition and innovation, on what must be preserved and what must be transformed. Unfortunately, in neoliberal market conditions and reactionary illiberalism, this assembly of scientists, lawyers and ordinary citizens is difficult to establish; and it will not be easily heard. The debate, in any case, is fundamental. We cannot surrender tradition to reaction or innovation to neoliberalism. For this reason, in this deliberation that cannot be postponed, the law is so important and is seen in so many troubles: because it is the arbiter between these two instances —tradition and innovation— that necessarily regulate our lives.
Be that as it may, if things have to be renamed —and there is no other choice, whether we like it or not—let us stick to these two criteria: vulnerability and universality. The law has to protect the most fragile and for this reason, in the case of surrogate motherhood, we must deny the individual right to any kind of genetic prolongation of the bodies, especially if the condition is money; and even less if there are thousands of abandoned children asking to be returned to human nature. As for universality, no one can be entitled to any scientific or technological advantage that cannot be generalized to the whole of humanity; or not generalizable without harm to the whole of humanity. No one has the right to eat if we don’t all eat; and no one has the right to eat the other, since cannibalism is incompatible with general survival. No one has the right to electricity in the Salamanca district either if they do not also have it in the Cañada Real; and no one has the right to an ecological footprint that, if universalized, would make human life impossible. With these precarious and old criteria we have to learn to distinguish between the market, science and rights where in fact capitalism has exceeded all the limits of ancient humanity. Our task is to create others—limits—tailored to a child, an immigrant, and a transsexual.
#Surrogacy #Nature #biology #Opinion