Assisted Re­pro­duc­tion as a Social Question

Most public argument about assisted reproduction is organized around adults. There are those who want a child and cannot have one the ordinary way, and the question of whether the law should let them. Framed like that, it looks like a straightforward matter of liberty and equality: if some people may use these techniques, why not others? Mirkovic's central move is to shift the center of gravity. The one person who never asks for anything in this story, and who did not choose any of it, is the child who results from it.

That child, she argues, has a standpoint of their own — one the law already recognizes elsewhere. In adoption, no one speaks of a right to a child; they speak of finding a family for a child who needs one. The child's interest comes first by design. Assisted reproduction, by contrast, has largely been discussed as a service to adults, with the child appearing only at the end, as the happy outcome. Reversing the order changes what questions seem urgent.

Techniques raise questions; the law has to answer them, because a birth certificate cannot be left blank. Someone must be recorded as the parents, and that record is not a private note — it sets inheritance, nationality, custody, and the whole web of obligations that bind a family. Mirkovic spends much of the book on how different legal systems have tried to fill in that blank, and on how the answers keep straining against inherited ideas of what a parent is.

The hardest case, and the one she returns to most, is surrogacy — where a woman carries a child she has agreed to hand over at birth. Here the law faces a situation it was never built for: the woman who gives birth may not be the woman who will raise the child, and may share no genetic link with the child either. Traditionally, the law treated the woman who gave birth as the mother, full stop. Surrogacy breaks that certainty and asks the law to choose among candidates — the birth mother, the genetic mother, the intended mother who may be neither. Different jurisdictions have made different choices, and the resulting patchwork is one of the book's running themes.

Step back from the clinics and the statutes, and nearly every thread in Mirkovic's book runs into a single idea: filiation. It is a plain-sounding word for a profound thing — the bond that says this person is the child of these parents, and through them belongs to a line of people, a history, a name. For most of human experience, filiation was simply read off the facts of birth. A woman gave birth; a man was, by presumption, the father; the child's place in the world followed. It did not need to be invented, because it was already there.

Assisted reproduction, Mirkovic argues, is above all an event in the history of filiation, and that is why the debate is so hard to settle. These techniques can separate the strands that filiation used to hold together — the genetic contribution, the gestation, the intention to raise, the daily act of parenting. Each can now belong to a different person. When those strands come apart, the question of who a child belongs to is no longer answered by the body; it has to be answered by a decision. And a society that decides filiation must say, out loud, what it thinks a parent fundamentally is: the one who contributes the genes, the one who carries, the one who wants, or the one who raises.

Return to the couple in the clinic corridor. Their wish is real, their suffering is real, and nothing in Mirkovic's book treats either lightly. What she does is widen the frame until the third parties come into view — the donor, the surrogate, the registrar, and above all the child who will exist because of choices made before they could have any say. The private story was never only private; it reached, from the first appointment, into the rules a society keeps about kinship.