Sunday, March 16, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
In the early 1980’s, Sweden became one of the first European countries to pass laws restricting the use of reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and sperm donation. Legislators claimed these laws protected future generations: just because reproduction without sexual intercourse was possible, it did not mean that such reproduction was ethical. The ethical reproduction of people, they argued, entailed prioritizing the interests of people-yet-to-be-conceived.
This paper draws on Reinhardt Koselleck’s notion of historical time to consider the passage of Sweden’s Law on Insemination (Lag om Insemination, 1984) as a moment animated by the imagination of a specific future and specific subjects. It contrasts this imagined future with some of the unintended results of the law. As part of a broader project on the generation conceived after the law’s passage, it poses the question of how a future imagined in the past comes to bear in the study of kinship’s boundaries in the present.
