Academic literature on the topic 'Artificial insemination, Human – Law and legislation – Italy'

Since the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the first human baby resulting from in vitro fertilisation (IVF), developments in reproductive medicine have opened up new opportunities to solve problems related to sterility/infertility and to avoid the transmission of serious genetic diseases to offspring. This article evaluates some challenges to human rights protection arising from medically assisted procreation (MAP), with particular reference to artificial insemination from a donor (AID) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). It analyses the regulation of MAP at the international, regional and domestic level. Specific attention is paid to two landmark judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on MAP (S.H. v. Austria and Costa and Pavan v. Italy), with a special focus on the interpretation of the concept of family and private life contained therein and on the effects of the ECtHR rulings on the Italian legal order. It concludes that national legislation concerning MAP should be minimal, i.e. should afford substantial freedom and autonomy to the couples in their procreative choices, in accordance with their right to respect for private and family life.

The present work aims to analyze whether the children conceived after the death of the parent by homologous fertilization have the right to inheritance, seeking to conceptualize the institutes of inheritance law and artificial insemination, analyzing the constitutional principles and the sources of law, so that find the best answer on the topic. The article will be divided into 3 parts. The first will try to explain the succession law (master of the law that regulates the transfer of assets, rights and obligations to the heir after the death of an individual) in the light of Brazilian legislation, explaining the existing Types of Succession. The second part of this article will address Assisted Human Reproduction, pointing out the different conceptions of the concept of family that has undergone significant modification over time. In addition, the second part will also deal with Artificial Insemination, which is an assisted reproduction treatment that expands the possibilities of fertilization of the egg, as well as its divisions. It also points out the principles of Brazilian law applicable to assisted human reproduction. The last part of this work will analyze post mortem artificial insemination and the effects on inheritance law based on legislation, doctrine and principles applicable to the subject, pointing out the three doctrinal currents that emerged with the aim of filling this legislative vacuum. This research is categorized as explanatory, as it aims to identify the factors that determine and contribute to the succession of the post mortem inseminated child, the procedure used in this study will be the bibliographic research.

In April 2014 The Constitutional Court in Italy was called to judge parts of the Law 40/2004 and canceled the prohibition of the methods of heterological artificial reproduction. !is decision opened a new stage of the public dispute about artificial reproduction that has been held in Italy for the last 20 years. The most significant principle of the legislation from the year 2004 was the recognition of the human embryo as a human being from the very moment of conception. The law in Italy forbade, among others, producing human embryos for scientific purposes, freezing and destroying human beings. The opponents of such legal regulations evoked the nationwide referendum in 2005 which did not manage to repeal the operative legislation. In 2015 the Italian Parliament will adopt a special law regulating the use of the methods of heterological artificial reproduction.

The public dispute about the methods of artificial reproduction has been led in Italy for many years, the most significant principle of the legislation from the year 2004 is the recognition of the human embryo as the human being from the very moment of the conception, the law in Italy forbids, among others, producing human embryos for scientific purposes, freezing and destroying human beings, using the methods of heterological artificial reproduction, the opponents of such legal regulations evoked the nationwide referendum in 2005 which - because of too poor turnout - did not manage to repeal the operative legislation.

Introduction: The article reviews issues of legal regulation of patients’ rights in Ukraine, analyzes the patient-doctor relationship, proposes the legislative approval of new patients’ rights and the need of adoption of a single legislation of these rights. The aim of this work is to conduct a detailed study of legal regulation of patients’ rights in Ukraine and the EU countries, to identify the areas for further improvement of the legislative regulation of patients ‘rights in Ukraine, ways of harmonization of national legislation with international standards, which regulate patients’ rights. Materials and methods: we analyzed national and international regulation of patients’ rights, case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), national court judgments. We also used historical, comparative-legal methods, and instruments of analytical research and empirical study. Conclusions: In Ukrainian law many patient rights are not defined, but are applied in medical practice, therefore, they require legal regulation. In particular, they include: the right to convene a consilium; the right to refuse medical interference; the right to terminate treatment, etc. In addition, with the development of medicine, scientific and technological progress, there are some issues, which arise and need to be legally defined, among them: the rights and responsibilities of the patient during transplantation, artificial insemination, medical research, etc. When making health policy, the concept of trust and respect for patients, their autonomy or constructive partnership with them should be taken into account. Doctors need to take a more active part in discussions and debates with patients. Independence of patients in decision making processes must be provided by law, and the rights and obligations of all parties must be clearly reflected in the relevant documents.

Modern processes of globalization taking place in the field of law are a great challenge to the idea of human nature, which is recognized in Ukraine as the highest social value, as well as to the concept and essence of law itself. In our opinion, this is a threat on a global scale and necessitates the search for an adequate response to the threat from the scientific and technical process in the field of biomedicine, both for the natural (physical) existence of man and the preservation of his moral identity. In fact, these foundations have become the prerequisites for the development of the science of bioethics. Bioethics studies controversial and ambiguous issues and proposes a humanitarian examination, which aims to assess the arguments in favor of the development of human creativity, health and prevention of premature death, and arguments in favor of preserving human identity in its spiritual and physical integrity. The purpose of the article is to study the essence of controversial bioethical problems, the reasons for their occurrence and prospects for solving these problems. human, manipulation of stem cells and others. Bioethical issues usually include the ethical issues of abortion; contraception and new reproductive technologies (artificial insemination, surrogacy); conducting experiments on humans and animals; obtaining informed consent and ensuring patients' rights; determination of death, suicide and euthanasia; problems in relation to dying patients (hospices); demographic policy and family planning; genetics (including problems of genome research, genetic engineering and gene therapy); transplantology; health equity; human cloning, manipulation of stem cells and others. These issues related to the progress of genetics, genomics, pharmacology, transplantation, biotechnology, cloning are becoming increasingly important as a direction of international law in the context of ensuring and protecting human rights. IN legal literature indicates the formation of "biolaw", "bioethical legislation", "bioethical human rights". Thus there is a combination of possibilities and purposes of medicine and law. In our article, we have explored only some of these issues, which are currently the most relevant, debatable, and therefore require detailed analysis. These include, in our view, the legal status of the embryo, therapeutic and reproductive cloning, abortion, the use of assisted reproductive technologies and organ transplantation. In order to adequately cover these issues, we compare the rules of law governing these debatable issues with the views of church representatives and scholars on these issues. We also proposed changes that need to be made to the legislation of Ukraine so that the rules of law governing these issues meet the moral and ethical principles. As a conclusion is marked, that as bioethics as science dealing with survival combines in itself biological knowledge and general human values, then it is possible to consider natural human rights, her honour and dignity morally-legal principles of bioethics, a self right and law must become on defence of that, in particular, with the aim of providing of natural (physical) existence of man, and maintenance of her moral identity. Keywords: human rights, moral, bioethics, abortion, reproductive technologies, cloning.

The birth of a child is impossible or dangerous for the life and health of the mother due to physiological deficiencies, biological incompatibility of spouses, contraindications for pregnancy, a number of hereditary diseases, etc. Moreover, the causes of infertility are equally distributed between both sexes. All this leads to the disintegration of the family, the dissolution of marriage, as a result, to the deterioration of the demographic situation, and, consequently, to the violation of the human right to health, medical confidentiality and a prosperous life. One of the ways out in this situation is seen in the application of methods of artificial insemination, one of which is surrogate motherhood, and the improvement of legislative regulation of the most important relations that directly affect demographic processes. The author of the article proposes to consider the stages of the formation of the institution of surrogate motherhood, starting from the first mentions in social history and ending with the history of the emergence of assisted reproductive technologies in modern Kazakhstan. Particular attention is paid to the legislative regulation of assisted reproductive technologies in the USA, Great Britain, the USSR, the Russian Federation and in modern Kazakhstan. Conclusions are drawn about the need to improve national legislation in the field of protecting the rights of a surrogate mother and child, the development and introduction of a separate law on surrogate motherhood

Dopo vivacissisimi dibattiti e diverse decisioni giudiziarie, il Parlamento irlandese ha approvato nel luglio 2013 la legge sull’aborto Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act (2013) che però non ha fatto cessare le discussioni né sopito le inquietudini. Il contributo, supportato da un’ampia documentazione, si muove contemporaneamente su tre piani: vengono esaminati i profili giuridici (costituzionali, referendari, legislativi e giurisprudenziali) della storia dell’aborto in Irlanda, evidenziando gli aspetti che rendono peculiare la vicenda irlandese rispetto a quella degli altri Paesi europei; affronta la questione dello statuto giuridico dell’embrione umano nell’ordinamento irlandese sia nell’ambito dell’aborto, sia in quello della fecondazione artificiale (diffusa nella prassi e legittimata dalla giurisprudenza); offre interpretazioni e prospettive concrete per tutelare la vita umana sin dal momento della fecondazione in un contesto che, invece, tende a sottrarre la protezione nei primi 14 giorni di vita dell’embrione umano. One of us, l’iniziativa dei cittadini europei, promossa sulla base del Trattato di Lisbona, si presenta come una straordinaria occasione per svolgere un ruolo di contenimento delle possibili derive negative della legge recentemente approvata e per mantenere nella società la consapevolezza che la dignità umana è uguale per tutti gli esseri umani, così tutti, sin dal concepimento, sono titolari del diritto alla vita. I cittadini irlandesi potrebbero confermare con la vastità delle adesioni a “Uno di noi” la stessa volontà manifestata nei referendum del 1983, del 1997 e del 2002: “lo Stato riconosce il diritto alla vita del bambino che deve nascere”. ---------- After several lively debates and judicial decisions, the Irish parliament passed a law on abortion in July 2013 Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act (2013) which, however, has not put an end to the discussion or calmed anxieties. The contribution, supported by extensive documentation, moves simultaneously on three levels: 1. examining the legal aspects (constitutional, referendums, legislation and judicial decisions) of abortion’s history in Ireland highlighting those that make that history unique compared to other European countries; 2. dealing with the question of the legal status of the human embryo into the Irish legal system regarding both abortion, and artificial insemination (widely practiced and legitimized by law); 3. offers interpretations and concrete prospects for protecting human life from the moment of fertilization in a context which, however, tends to deprive human life of protection in the first 14 days of life. One of us, the European citizens’ initiative, promoted on the basis of the Treaty of Lisbon, is presented as an extraordinary opportunity to play a role in limiting the possible negative tendencies of the law recently passed and to maintain awareness in society that human dignity is the same for all human beings. So everyone, from conception, is entitled to the right to life. In particular, One of us gives Irish citizens the great chance to confirm the same desire expressed in the referenda of 1983, 1992 and 2002 – “The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn child” – by signing in great numbers the “One of Us” citizen’s initiative.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. California: Sage Publications, 1998.Carnochan, Peter. “Containers without Lids”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16.3 (2006): 341-362.Cixous, Hélène. “To Live the Orange”. The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1979/1994. 81-92. ---. “Preface.” The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1994. xv-xxii.Coull, Kim. “Womb Tongues: A Collection of Poetry.” Honours Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2007. ---. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Durey, Judith. Translating Hiraeth, Performing Adoption: Art as Mediation and Form of Cultural Production. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 2010. 22 Sep. 2011 .Ekis Ekman, Kajsa. 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Defence date: 4 June 2013
Examining Board: Professor Martin Kohli, EUI (Supervisor); Professor Joan Bestard Camps, University of Barcelona (External Co-supervisor); Professor Fabrizio Bernardi, EUI; Professor Enric Porqueres i Gené, EHESS.
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
The phenomenon of people crossing regional and national borders to seek assisted reproduction occurs in many countries across the world and involves different actors, including patients, doctors, fertility clinic practitioners, law-makers, donors, surrogates, children, brokers, and others who take part in the globalised industry of assisted reproductive technologies. This dissertation focuses on the experience of Italian reproductive travellers who seek donor conception treatments outside national borders, as a reaction to Italian regulations on assisted reproduction banning gamete donation in Italy. Through the qualitative analysis of the narrations and practices of heterosexual couples, same-sex couples and single women, this work explores the ways in which people face different reproductive itineraries with the aim of achieving reproduction through donor conception in a context of law evasion. In particular, it takes into account the process that leads people to choose donor conception abroad and investigates the ways in which people make sense of this choice in relation to their understanding of kinship formation. The feelings that accompany this process, the concepts that people mobilise to make both law evasion and donor conception practice coherent with their reproductive goals, and the strategies that they employ to "kin" their donor-conceived children are presented and analysed. This study highlights the fact that Italian CBRC travellers who seek donation treatments abroad mainly consider their reproductive experience as a transgressive act, because by doing so they circumvent laws that forbid those treatments locally. They tend to support the moral validity of their choices by arguing that it aims to accomplish what they perceive as a "normal" goal (having a child). Nonetheless, the recourse to such a reproductive experience challenges existing cultural understandings and the social organisation of kinship.

Surrogate motherhood is one of the most controversial issues of our time. The increase in infertility and the shortage of babies available for adoption, have provided an incentive for research in assisted reproductive techniques. Rapid advances in this field have caught the legal system unprepared in many ways. The object of this thesis is to investigate the legal aspects of surrogate motherhood. A background is provided by an in depth examination and analysis of the practice of surrogacy in foreign jurisdictions. For this purpose a selection of interdisciplinary, medical and juridical reports, court decisions and legislation is analysed. The surrogacy agreement is affected by principles of both public and private law. As the agreement is based on consensus between the parties, Roman Law principles of the law of obligations, provided a valuable point of departure in establishing a theoretical basis for the classification of surrogacy agreements. Having determined the nature of the agreement, the content is analysed with due regard to statutory and other relevant considerations, such as the boni mores, and submissions made regarding the enforceability and legality of such agreements. A surrogate mother agreement model is proposed and analysed in the light of existing South African law. The various ways in which surrogacy contracts may be breached are examined and recommendations put forward regarding possible delictual or contractual remedies. The legal relationship between the surrogate child and its gestational (birth) mother and her husband on the one hand and the intended parents on the other is investigated. The role of the courts in custody issues - related to surrogacy - is examined and recommendations put forward as to how they may be included in the process by determining the best interest of the surrogate child prior to artificial insemination. The civil and criminal liability of medical practitioners involved in assisted reproductive technology and specifically surrogacy are expounded. Key issues in the practice of surrogate motherhood are interpreted in the light of existing statutory and common law principles. Recommendations are put forward on these issues and a bill proposed for the regulation of surrogate motherhood in South Africa.
Private Law
LLD