Reconstruction 7.1 (2007)
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From Adulterous Gametes to Heterologous Nation: Tracing the Boundaries of Reproduction in Italy / Milena Marchesi
Abstract: This article traces discursive and political attempts to discipline the reproduction of the Italian nation by analyzing the approval of a controversial law disciplining access to new reproductive technologies (NRTs) in 2004. The restriction of new reproductive technologies in Italy reflects a contemporary re-negotiation of gender ideologies and a renewed ascendance of the Vatican in Italian politics and society. Although abortion remains legal in Italy, the NRT legislation recognizes the embryo as a subject while in political discourse demographic alarmism slides into warnings of social disintegration. The debate over the threat posed by technologically assisted reproduction to Italian families and society intersects with policies and discourses aimed at disciplining another form of "dangerous" national reproduction: immigration. The rejection of immigration and assisted reproduction as acceptable means of reproducing a nation concerned with its birth rates is consistent with feminist claims that women are the symbolic and material reproducers of group boundaries. The regulation of assisted fertilization, then, simultaneously disciplines different kinds of threatening reproductive bodies and multiple dimensions of social disorder. It also makes explicit the meanings and relations of power underpinning the heteronormative family and the imagined homogenous and heterosexual nation. Assisted fertilization and immigration threaten to disrupt imagined 'ties of blood' at the level of the family and the nation respectively and to reveal their constructedness. Preoccupations with the proper composition of the nation reflect anxieties about its increasing heterogeneity. Fears of disharmony and identity crises in families where children may not be genetically related to both parents echo cultural fundamentalist and new racist discourses that explain xenophobia as a "natural" response to difference.
Because gender is at the heart of ... socio-religious systems it is not surprising that issues of gender and procreation - marriage, family, birth control, abortion, sexuality, homosexuality, new reproductive technology - are at the center of contemporary debates in our society, for new beliefs and practices are not just about the private, domestic domain, but challenge the entire cosmological order .
Yanagisako and Collier 1995:9
Introduction
<1> An Italian political cartoon from December 2003 depicts the late Pope John Paul II blessing the New Year from his balcony at the Vatican with the words: "Italians! Be fruitful and do not multiply!" (Forattini 2003). This paradoxical blessing references contradictory discourses and policies of reproduction in Italy that include both a "baby-bonus" for European Union women having more than one child and legislation that outlaws fertility treatment for single women, same-sex couples, and third-party-donor-assisted fertilization.
<2> In this paper, I examine discourses and policies in Italy that construct, represent, and regulate reproductive bodies according to whether they are constituted as "natural" or "threatening" to the individual, the family, and the nation. Reproduction and reproductive bodies, particularly female bodies, constitute one of the central concerns of the nation-state, which disciplines its reproduction within boundaries that vary according to historical, social, political, and economic circumstances. Dangerous reproductive bodies transgress boundaries, thus threatening naturalized social relations and their "self-same" reproduction (see Heng and Devan 1992). In the context of Italy's demographic alarmism over very low fertility rates, the reproduction of the nation is a central concern. Yet, as the politics of immigration and new reproductive technologies make evident, the reproduction of the nation is not just a question of numbers. Policies and discourses surrounding immigration point to fears of attaining population growth through immigration (Krause 2005, 2006; Krause and Marchesi n.d.). Reproductive and family practices that escape those boundaries, such as single parenthood, same-sex couples, and the use of new reproductive technologies to biologically reproduce outside of the heterosexual contract threaten naturalized social relations.
<3> A less obvious but related discourse plays out in the debate over access to assisted fertilization technologies where ideological struggles over the constitution of the Italian family and nation are at play. Policy interventions into reproductive matters and political discourse related to the reproduction of the family and the nation reveal anxieties over changing practices and ideologies of gender, sexuality, and family-making in Italy. These concerns over the decline of the patriarchal family (see Krause 2005) dovetail with anxieties over migration and ethnic heterogeneity. In this context, "sterile" bodies threaten the nation through their refusal to reproduce for it [1]; women seeking to become pregnant outside of heteronormative relationships threaten the reproduction of the "natural" social order; couples seeking access to third-party-donor fertilization threaten the homogeneity and "harmony" of the family (Kahn 2000); and immigrants threaten the homogeneity and "social-cohesion" of the Italian nation (Krause and Marchesi, n.d.). This paper analyzes the 2004 legislation of assisted reproduction in Italy and the political debates surrounding it, with a focus on the striking affinities in the discourses over dangerous reproductive bodies and practices at the levels of family and nation.
<4> New reproductive technologies challenge naturalized kinship relationships as well as re-naturalize them (Franklin 1997; Strathern 1992), thus offering a rich site for the analysis of reproductive politics, ideologies, and meanings. Making sense of the politics of reproduction and new reproductive technologies requires attention to "the mobilizing metaphors and linguistic devices that cloak policy with the symbols and trappings of political legitimacy" (Shore and Wright 3). The language of policy-making "provides a key to analysing the architecture of modern power relations" (Shore and Wright 12). Critical Discourse Analysis, including Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Lazar 2005), offers a methodological toolkit for unpacking taken-for-granted discourses and ideologies. This paper presents an ethnographically informed discourse analysis [2] of the terms and tropes surrounding the regulation of assisted reproduction and the ways they intersect and articulate with social domains of gender, race, sexuality, and nation.
Reproducing the Nation
<5> The theoretical framework for this essay draws on feminist scholarship in anthropology and related disciplines. Feminist research on the symbolic dimensions of the body and its relationship to the social has been informed by anthropological works such as Arnold van Gennep's symbolic reading of rights of passage (1960) and Mary Douglas' (1996) influential writings on the symbolic connections between the "body politic" and the "body physical" (123). According to Douglas, "just as it is true that everything symbolizes the body, so it is equally true ... that the body symbolizes everything else" (123). Although not all anthropologists would agree with Douglas' totalizing statement, Lesley Sharp notes that "a pervasive understanding within anthropology is that the human body generates a host of potent metaphorical constructions for ordering the world" (cf. Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987) (315). In contemporary works the body continues to be theorized as a potent metaphor of the social, as a key site of state power and intervention, but also of resistance (Aretxaga 1997; Foucault 1986; Haraway 1997; Horn 1994; Martin 1988; Rapp 1999; Sharp 2000). Social and national concerns are often projected onto women's bodies, especially women's sexuality and reproductive capabilities. Theorizing the relationship between the "individual body" and the "social body" (cf. Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987; Comaroff 1985) in which the "body personal" and "body social" articulate in "a mutually constitutive relationship" (Comaroff 8) has proven a productive theoretical perspective in the politics of reproduction. A growing body of work has shown that when the reproduction of the "body social" is perceived as threatened, the gendered reproductive body is the first to be disciplined (Gal and Kligman 2000; Heng and Devan 1992; Inhorn 2000; Kahn 2000; Kananeeh 2001; Moore 1994; Stoler 1991).
<6> New reproductive technologies, according to Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (1995), "condense conflict and reveal the workings of social relations" (6). The potential destabilizing effects of new reproductive technologies to the normative understandings of gender roles and the assumed isomorphism of marriage and reproduction are explored by a number of scholars (Haraway 1991; Hartouni 1997; Kahn 2001; Paxson 2004; Strathern 1992) [3]. In the United States, the model of the 'natural mother' is informed by "assumptions regarding class, marital status, sexual orientation, and race" (Gailey 21). In her analysis of racist stereotypes that equate African-American women with welfare mothers, Leith Mullings (1995) notes that "women as mothers - who are involved in both biological and cultural reproduction - become master symbols of family, race, and civility, and are central to the authorized definition of the national community" (129).
<7> A growing literature has successfully argued the centrality of gender and reproduction to the nation and nationalism (Gal and Kligman 2000; Heng and Devan 1992; Haraway 1997; Kahn 2000; Kahnaneh 2001; Krause 2001, 2005; Inhorn 2000; McClintock 1995; Moore 1994; Mullings 1995; Stoler 1991; Williams 1989; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Yuval-Davis 1993, 1997). Since reproduction legitimizes and defines the national community, women's bodies and reproductive acts are of intense concern to the nation-state; thus it is not surprising that "when nations are institutionalized, some forms of reproduction are defined as the sole legitimate, genuine, authentic means of national reproduction" (Gal and Kligman 25). Particularly in times "when boundaries are threatened, rhetoric about fertility and population control escalates, and native Euro-American women, preferably those of the dominant class, are exhorted to have children" (Mullings 129). The political disciplining of reproduction and new reproductive technologies operates in the context of these articulations of reproduction, family, and nation.
<8> Reproduction and kinship are inherently naturalized notions in Western thought [4] (Franklin 1997; Gal and Kligman 2000), generally understood as "quintessentially natural activities" (Yanagisako and Delaney 6). The salience of "the family trope" is that it "offers a 'natural' figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests" in the nation (McClintock 63). Moreover, since the nation is often understood in terms of "domestic genealogies" (63), new reproductive technologies' disruption of naturalized kinship relations inherently calls into question the nation. After all, as McClintock reminds us, the etymology of the term "nation" "derives from 'natio': to be born" (63). In challenging "natural" kinship, reproductive technologies hold the potential to destabilize naturalized notions of sexuality, gender, and the family for "as soon as reproduction becomes unhinged from the nuclear family, and children are understood as the products of technological interventions as well as sexual relationships, then the whole notion that marriage is the natural, and indeed national, basis for kinship becomes exposed as a vulnerable social construct" (Kahn 86). New reproductive technologies, then, pose a serious threat to the naturalized social and gendered order.
<9> Like the family, the nation is imagined as a set of "horizontal" relationships of "brotherhood" ( Anderson 16). Central to this imagination of the national community, as it is to the imagination of the family, is a naturalized notion of kinship relations, one which can be disrupted by reproductive and family-making practices that escape the domain of the natural and taken-for-granted. Feminist works on nationalism push "canonical" works on nationalism, such as Anderson's, one step further by showing that kinship relations are gendered and always shot through with power (see Collier and Yanagisako 1987). The horizontal imagination of nation as kinship "overlay[s] the egalitarian model of fraternity with the hierarchical model of patriarchy" eliding its power dimensions (Tetrault and al-Mughni 148). Feminist readings of kinship and nationalism, then, are fundamental to making sense of ethnonationalist movements where "biological reproduction and continuity over time are the centerpieces of creating and imagining community" (Gal and Kligman 13).
Italy's Assisted Reproduction Law
<10> After two decades of debates and failed legislative proposals [5] in March 2004 Italy's controversial first national legislation regulating assisted reproduction became law. Immediately activists organized a referendum hoping to overturn or at least amend some of its most controversial provisions. Yet, the legislation survived the referendum in June 2005. The version of the legislation approved by the Chamber of Deputies was drafted, debated, and approved under the center-right governing alliance led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Forza Italia (FI) in alliance with the anti-immigrant and anti-southern Italians Lega Nord party (LN), and the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale (AN). The legislative proposal's framework was developed by a Parliamentary Commission, chaired by Member of Parliament Dorina Bianchi [6]. The Bianchi Commission proposal was more "extreme" than the legislation eventually approved by the Parliament at large, particularly in regards of its claim that the embryo "has three fundamental rights: the right to life, to family, and to his or her genetic and affective identity" (Bianchi 10). The proposal also bans "heterologous" (or third-party-donor assisted) fertilization and justifies this restriction on the "the need to guarantee certain rights of a social and psychological nature to the child," who could suffer from "the fragmentation of parental figures" and the "distancing from socially-accepted models of parenthood" (10). In fact, the Commission found that "the very identity of the subject" is potentially at stake. The right to life of the embryo justifies a provision, dropped in the final version of the law, which would have allowed for the adoption of surplus frozen embryos [7]. The Report concludes with a warning of the dangers posed by unregulated assisted fertilization to children thus conceived and their families. Due to the gravity of the matter, the Commission Report calls for political consensus and speedy approval of the legislation.
<11> Yet, despite this appeal for consensus, the ensuing Parliamentary debates were heated and confrontational, particularly regarding the issues of embryo rights and the ban of third-party-donor assisted fertilization. These questions split parties into surprising transversal alliances. For examples, Alessandra Mussolini, the Fascist dictator's granddaughter and a member of the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale party, aligned herself with left-wing feminist parliamentarians in opposing these restrictions. Conversely, Catholic MPs from left and center-left parties aligned themselves with the conservative opposition in their desire to restrict medically assisted fertilization.
<12> After almost two years of debates, in February 2004 the Parliament approved a version of the medically assisted reproduction legislation that retained most of the controversial restrictions proposed by the Bianchi Commission [8]. The first article of the law states that "recourse to medically assisted reproduction is allowed, on the conditions and according to the modalities envisioned by this law, which assures the rights of all subjects involved, including those of the conceived " [9]. This provision effectively constitutes the embryo as a subject [10], despite the existence of law n. 194/1978, which legalized abortion in Italy through the twelfth week of gestation. The ban of third-party-donor-assisted fertilization also survived into the final version of the law [11]. In addition to granting subjecthood to the embryo and banning techniques and procedures, the legislation also establishes moral criteria for access to assisted fertilization. The law states that only "couples of legal age; of opposite sex; married or cohabiting; of potentially fertile age; both living [12]" may make use of assisted fertilization techniques. These restrictions apply equally to state-run and private clinics in Italy.
<13> Despite serious concerns about its consequences for women's health, two of the law's eighteen articles are devoted to the protection of the embryo: one bans embryo research [13], the other governs how embryos should be handled [14], including a ban on their cryogenic conservation and the requirement that the embryo must be transferred into the woman's uterus, except under extraordinary circumstances [15]. A maximum number of three embryos can be created per cycle of assisted fertilization in an effort to reduce the surplus of frozen embryos. According to these provisions, even embryos exhibiting obvious abnormalities must be transferred. Once an embryo is conceived, then, the "genetic mother" loses the right to revoke consent for its transfer.
<14> Anthropologist Lynn Morgan has traced the emergence of embryos as "political actors and agents" (262) back to the beginning of the 20 th century when embryology was developing as a discipline. Morgan's work "denaturalize[s]" the embryo as an a-priori subject and instead argues that "embryos are discursively produced within particular social dramas" so that "social controversies provide the interpretive lenses through which embryos are imbued with meaning" (263). Embryos, according to Morgan, are ventriloqually animated to speak to the concerns of the time. Thus, different cultural and political contexts constitute and deploy different meanings around human embryos and fetuses. The embryo in contemporary Italy appears to be discursively constructed within a particular political and cultural context. The political discourses surrounding the Italian medically assisted reproduction legislation animate embryos to speak to a range of concerns. Supporters of restrictions to assisted reproduction animate embryos to speak on behalf of the "natural" reproduction of the family and thus the nation. Opponents of the restrictions animate embryos to speak on behalf of women's reproductive rights, their "natural" desire for biological motherhood, and differing conception of the family and sexual norms, as well as to support scientific and medical progress. In a different context, Susan Kahn's (2000) ethnography of assisted reproduction in Israel shows that the demographic subtext of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, combined with a matrilineal kinship system, makes it politically viable for the pronatalist state of Israel to finance and support the use of fertility services, even among single women.
<15> In Italy, with the approval of the assisted fertilization legislation, assisted reproductive techniques that had been available for two decades, and which continue to be available in most of the European Union, became illegal. The legal subjectivity of the embryo introduces a seemingly glaring contradiction into the Italian legal code by virtue of the fact that abortion remains legal in Italy through the 12th week of gestation. Thus, women may be required to undergo an embryo transfer against their wishes in the name of embryo rights while retaining the right to abort the ensuing fetus during the first trimester of pregnancy. Notwithstanding claims by supporters of the legislation that these regulations are equally aimed at protecting women from the pre-legislative "Wild West" [16] of assisted fertilization in Italy, the law actually intensifies the medical invasiveness and risks incurred by women undergoing medically assisted fertilization in Italy.
<16> Having failed to block the approval of the assisted reproduction legislation, the opposition collected signatures and organized a popular referendum. The precedents for such a move include the referenda that confirmed the liberalization of abortion and divorce in the early 1980s. The stamp of approval granted to changing social mores by these popular referenda revealed a diminished moral and political influence of the Vatican on Italian society. The parallels of the referenda on abortion and divorce with that of assisted fertilization suggest that medically assisted reproduction is the contemporary terrain for the negotiation of social changes in the family and gender ideologies in Italy. However, following months of heated political campaigning, which included an unprecedented level of political involvement by the Vatican, the June 2005 referendum on the assisted reproduction law failed to mobilize enough voters to even meet the legal quorum of 50% plus 1 eligible voters required by Italy's electoral law. In contrast to the referenda of the 1980s, the failure of the assisted reproduction referendum for many marks a renewed ascendance of the Vatican in Italian politics and society.
Reproducing Italians
<17> The debate over the regulation of medically assisted reproduction in Italy is particularly interesting in the context of alarmism over the country's low birthrates (Krause 2001, 2005, 2006). For a number of years, women's reproductive "choices" and fertility rates have been the objects of alarmist "expert" knowledge and public discourse. Recently, the Italian Parliament approved legislation aimed at supporting (and even stimulating) birth rates; in official public discourses—including a speech delivered by Pope John Paul II to a unified session of Parliament in November of 2002—demographic alarmism slides into warnings of social disintegration [17]. The politics of reproduction are interwoven with "narratives of nationhood" because they are central in defining the boundaries of the nation (Gal and Kligman 22). According to NiraYuval-Davis, "demographic policies, whether they entice or discourage women to reproduce" are "determined, to a great extent, by the specific historical situation of the collectivity, and by no means exist [...] as a 'laissez faire' institution even in the most permissive societies" (Yuval-Davis, "Gender" 629) [18]. Women represent the actual and symbolic gatekeepers of the nation, its "symbolic 'border guards'" (Yuval-Davis 627). The fear that immigrants will replace Italians, and thus weaken Italian civilization, is one of the subtexts of this concern (Krause 2001, 2005, 2006; Krause and Marchesi, n.d). Former Minister of Equal Opportunity Stefania Prestigiacomo argued in a 2002 interview that "certainly the low birthrate poses a problem for the future of our country, not only in economic terms, but also in terms of culture and national identity" (Pa 7). Despite the pervasiveness of demographic alarmism in Italy, the debate over medically assisted fertilization rarely explicitly references the demographic "problem". An exception was left-wing parliamentarian Giorgio Bogi who noted with irony that those politicians most vocal in their alarmism over immigration and low-fertility were also those most opposed to assisted reproduction: "some colleagues who are quite against immigration are also against this fight against infertility, which in some cases is only possible through reproductive technologies; thus they give up on an increase in birthrates" [19]".
<18> Though paradoxical at face value, the rejection of migration and assisted reproduction as means to reproduce the nation is consistent with what feminist scholars of nationalism have been arguing: women are the symbolic and material reproducers of group boundaries. As NiraYuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (1989) argue, for example, women are called upon not just to reproduce for the nation but also "in terms of the 'proper' way" to have children so as to "reproduce the boundaries of the symbolic identity of their group or that of their husbands" (9). In nationalist discourses "the reproduction of those not recognized as ...[citizens] - for instance, immigrants or stigmatized minorities - is seen, for that very reason, as dangerous, out of control, and polluting". (Gal and Kligman 23). In the case of the Italian legislation those minorities include same-sex couples and single women. Since kinship, gender, nationalism, and power are inextricably linked (see Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Alonso 1994), reproductive policy can be read as an allegory of nation-building (Gal and Kligman 2000). The boundaries within which a national or ethnic group can be reproduced vary, however, depending on the particular historical, political, and cultural circumstances. In Italy, supporters of legal restrictions on assisted reproduction, including the Vatican [20], claim that only the "traditional" family can ensure the psychological well-being of its members, which depends on the isomorphism of social and biological relatedness within the heteronormative family. Third-party-donor-assisted reproduction, on the other hand, represents "biological adultery" (MP Angelo Sanza, Parliamentary Debate March 2002) within the "gametic marriage" (Lombardi Ricci 2005).
Adulterous Gametes
<19> Emily Martin's work on the gendered metaphors of science (1989, 1997) has been influential for scholars interested in interrogating the cultural assumptions underlying scientific knowledge. Martin shows that scientific narratives and metaphors of fertilization inscribe culture onto bodies only to be read back as nature (94). Her project to disrupt the "sleeping metaphors in science" highlights the political consequences of "projecting cultural imagery" (95) onto biological processes. One of the main ways in which heterosexuality is naturalized, for example, is through "the reification of the (patriarchal) 'family' as 'pre-political' - as 'natural' and non-contractual" (Peterson 59). The need to protect the "natural" family and its reproduction runs as a consistent thread in the transcripts of the Italian parliamentary debates on assisted reproduction. Politicians across the ideological spectrum, from the far right to the center-Catholic, to the Green Party, deployed "the natural" in their comments on the law and claimed that embryos and children have a right to a biological (and thus heterosexual) and "harmonious family". The Vatican lobbied heavily to make donor-assisted fertilization illegal because the Catholic Church views it as a threat to, and violation of, the natural family. This deployment is not particular to the Italian case. For example, Marylin Strathern notes that "against a background of concern about the natural environment, constant reference is made to what is also natural in human behaviour, and nowhere is it more emphasized than in the debates over the new reproductive technologies" (55).
<20> These arguments resonate with preoccupations about the proper composition of the nation and with anxieties about its increasing heterogeneity. Naturalized forms of sexuality, reproduction, and the family contrast with artificial modes of family-making, via test-tubes, surrogate mothers, post-mortem fathers, and post-menopausal mothers. Political discourse about new reproductive technologies makes explicit the meanings and relations of power underpinning the heteronormative family and the imagined homogenous and heterosexual nation. The provision of the Italian law that most obviously reveals shared concerns over assisted and national reproduction is the ban on "heterologous " or third-party-donor fertilization. At a time when "life itself" is increasingly conceived in genetic terms, the heteronormative family now begins with the "gametic marriage". Opponents of heterologous fertilization techniques viewed its inclusion of genetic material from outside the heterosexual couple as a threat to the natural family. Some among the political detractors of heterologous assisted fertilization argued that third-party-donor-assisted fertilization brought a "stranger" (by virtue of the child potentially being biologically related to only one of his parents) and thus "disharmony" into the family. The distinction between "heterologous" and "homologous" conflates the socially constructed institution of heterosexual marriage with biology, thus re-naturalizing the very social relations that reproductive technologies are perceived to threaten (Neresini and Bimbi 2000). Appeals to the "natural" abound in the debate transcripts. Conservative Parliamentarian Francesco Paolo Lucchese, for example, argued that heterologous
fertilization is unacceptable because it is out of line and does not respect nature; I could define it as unnatural. ... In fact, it's been said that it creates distortions and imbalances, especially within the couple and the family nucleus in which this situation is created. It's been proven that, in cases when this situation has been created, the families are imbalanced. (Parlamento Italiano 2002b:44)
The potential destabilizing threat posed by NRTs to the taken-for-granted social order is obvious in these debates. So is their vulnerability to political and legal "domestication" (see Hartouni 1997) to the harnessing and folding of their disruptive potential back into biological determinism and claims about "the natural".
<21> "Culture" as Strathern argues "consists in the way analogies are drawn between things, in the way certain thoughts are used to think others" (33). In the Italian debate over assisted reproduction the heteronormative family has been used to think the homogenous nation and vice versa and both family and nation have been constructed as vulnerable to non-normative modes of reproduction. Notions about "natural" boundaries and relationships also seem to be applicable to other contexts: thus, the discourse on the natural family and its reproduction echoes that of the "natural" nation and its reproduction. The discourse over the disharmony and imbalance of unnatural reproduction within the family echoes cultural fundamentalist and new racist discourses that justify xenophobia as a natural response to difference (Stolcke 1995). Just as "new" racisms de-emphasize ideologies of biological racial superiority in favor of notions that xenophobia and the desire for national cultural homogeneity is natural, the discourse against donor-assisted reproduction draws on assumptions about the naturalness of familial "homogeneity". The outsider, then, represents a threat to the identity of both family and nation.
<22> Political arguments against heterologous fertilization hinged on the "need" to safeguard the identity of the child in relation to that of the parents, including through references to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990) [21]. Two main arguments emerged in the debate over assisted reproduction in Italy: first, that the conceived and future child has a right to a clear and well defined identity without which he will be confused and without roots; and second, that without the genetic isomorphism of biological reproduction the child will be a stranger and outsider to one or both of his parents, a source of "disharmony" that threatens the family itself [22]. These arguments were at play at a political roundtable following the approval of the law. A senator who voted to ban heterologous fertilization justified her position by arguing that donor-assisted fertilization instigates an existential "search for the father" and that children have a right to "a genetic identity" (fieldnote Baio-Dossi 2/25/04). Politicians and commentators critical of heterologous fertilization claimed that a child born in a family where social parenthood was not isomorphic with genetic parenthood would likely suffer an existential identity crisis:
When the coincidence between those who conceive a child and who will be his parents, between those who bring him into the world and those who will keep him in the world, is lacking one must also take into account that child. We know that the child will not be given the opportunity of finding in the paternal and maternal code and history the story of his own identity ... With donor-assisted fertilization not only are we deciding that we can affect the procreative process, but we are also intervening on the delicate process of the construction of the child's identity and sense of belonging (Marcella Lucidi, Member of Parliament, Parlamento Italiano 2002b:37).
[Is it] not inhuman to pass a law that compromises deep aspects of the human psyche? The person who will never know the author of his biological origin will thus be deprived of a future right to satisfy a deep existential need which might cause permanent psychological anguish (Gerardo Bianco, Member of Parliament, Parlamento Italiano 2002a:16).
The best situation for a child - I think that we could all agree on this - is to be able to call father and mother a man and a woman who are truly that in every way, genetically, emotionally, and legally ... the fundamental assumption for the application of any medically assisted reproductive technology [should be] the right of the offspring to have a family, both before and afterbirth" (Domenico Di Virgilio, Member of Parliament, Parlamento Italiano 2002b:23, emphasis added).
<23> Similar themes emerged in the Senate debates of December 2003. A Senator from Prime Minister Berlusconi's party argued that "as far as the heterologous couple is concerned, in this case too we retain the weakest right, the right of the child to have a serene childhood, possibly without trauma, and in the certainty of founding values" (Gaetano Fasolino, Senator, Senate Debate, December 2003; emphasis added) [23]. As noted above, the term "heterologous couple" is biologically meaningless; its salience is social (Neresini and Bimbi 2000). Yet, in the context of its repeated deployment, the term "heterologous fertilization" is discursively naturalized. What the term indexes is a concern with the heterogeneity introduced into the family by donor fertilization. Marilyn Strathern noted a similar concern with identity in the British debates over assisted fertilization of the 1980s where "the simple transmission of the substances themselves is thought to confer identity. Self-consciousness about identity in turn is interpreted as part of the individual's rights as a person" (Strathern 21). The insistence that this identity only can be transmitted by the heterosexual family to its genetically related offspring highlights the ways kinship, sexuality, gender, and national identity are inevitably implicated.
<24> Opponents of the restrictions introduced by the Italian assisted reproduction legislation critiqued the terms of the debate on donor-assisted reproduction. Feminist parliamentarians and commentators sought to re-gender the discourse. For example, MP Maura Cossutta argued that the disciplining introduced by the assisted reproduction legislation is related to concerns over "belonging, to the identity-related needs that today require ethical certainties about the embryo; in the face of the great challenges of modernity there is a need for ethical certainties even with respect to territorial, blood, religious, and racial belonging" (Parlamento Italiano 2002b:30). For critics of the law, the ban of heterologous fertilization represents an attempt to re-instate a patriarchal and religiously informed social order out of touch with contemporary Italian society. For example, the president of a patient advocate organization opposed to the law argued that though assisted fertilization refers to both sperm and egg donation, the political and public debates are almost exclusively focused on paternity (fieldnote 3/04). She attributed this "obsession" with heterologous fertilization to concerns about the "adulteration of the genetic patrimony of the father" (fieldnote 3/04). The importance of unadulterated patrilineality is evident in historical legislation of Italian citizenship: until 1949, the "genetic patrimony" of the father, but not that of the mother, included the transmission of citizenship [24]. This again points to the centrality of gender and sexuality to the imagination and constitution of the national community.
<25> The regulation of assisted fertilization and its debates simultaneously disciplines multiple dimensions of social disorder. Opponents of the legislation in Parliament, especially feminists from leftists' parties named and critiqued this disciplinary intent of the assisted fertilization law. Elettra Deiana, a Member of Parliament from the Communist Party, argued that the aim of the legislation was none other than "to discipline and keep under control the social body" particularly "the female aspect of the social body" (Camera dei Deputati 2002c: 23). Another parliamentarian opposed to the law pointed to its boundary-marking nature: MP Maura Cossuta accused the law's supporters of caring only about "reestablishing the biological social order" (Camera dei Deputati 2002a: 9), including the patriarchal control of women's sexuality and reproduction. In fact, Italian feminist politicians and commentators read the codification of the embryo's legal subjectivity as another step toward the weakening of abortion rights in Italy [25]. Even as this legislation had not yet been approved, a center-right Senator was quoted in the media claiming "that having obtained the recognition of the principle that the embryo is a human being, we will now have to undertake a profound revision of the law on abortion in order to avoid a clamorous contradiction [26]". A failed amendment to the national budget of 2003 proposed to give women seeking an abortion a cash bonus of 1500 Euros for continuing the pregnancy and waiving parental rights at birth. In an editorial critical of this proposal, noted Italian sociologist Chiara Saraceno highlighted the contradictions and paradoxes of reproductive politics in contemporary Italy: "Donor artificial fertilization, no; but carriers of babies for others, yes. What else are women, if not walking uteri, containers of male desires?" (Saraceno 2003).
<26> As Bakhtin noted, there are "no 'neutral' words" (293), thus "the necessity of having to choose a language" (295) . The choice of terminology to describe third-party-donor assisted fertilization, "heterologous fertilization," and assisted fertilization through a couple's gametes, "homologous fertilization," deploys a surplus of meaning. The terms "homologous" and "heterologous", like the technologies and techniques of assisted reproduction themselves, derive from veterinary science where they describe cross-species fertilization. Despite the existence of other terminology, such as "donor-assisted" or "third-party-donor-assisted" fertilization, "heterologous" fertilization, with its connotations of species-levels of difference, is the term adopted in legislative documents, and most commonly used in the parliamentary debates and in public discourse [27]. Italian Sociologist Chiara Saraceno describes this use of the homologous/heterologous terminology as an example of the "grotesque language" (241) of the assisted fertilization law.
<27> Political discourses in defense of "homologous" reproduction reflect fears of cultural, ethnic, and racial boundaries under threat. The "homologous"/ "heterologous" dichotomy resonates with the broader political and discursive context of demographic panic in which the homogenous and internal reproduction of the nation is privileged, while its increasing social and ethnic heterogeneity carries connotations of adulteration, disharmony and danger. Member of Parliament and sociologist Franca Bimbi read the assisted fertilization law as drawing "on fears, on the need for security, on the need to identify the internal and the external [28]". "Heterologous" fertilization indexes heterogeneity and difference in the reproduction of the family and the nation as family-writ-large. The discourse on the threats of heterologous fertilization parallels the assumptions of cultural fundamentalism, such as the notion that xenophobia is natural (see Stolcke 1995). In contrast, "homologous" fertilization indexes homogeneity, sameness, even harmony; the continuation of the same, which as scholars suggest is central to nationalist ideologies (Smith 1998; Yuval-Davis 1993, 1997). For example, Susan Gal and Gail Kligman argue that "although populations are often enlarged and diminished by migration and assimilation, nationalist ideology commonly ignores or erases these processes, instead highlighting and constructing ties of blood" (25). Assisted fertilization and immigration threaten to disrupt these imagined "ties of blood" at the level of the family and the nation respectively and to reveal their constructedness. Thus, the context of Italy's changing demographics is key to making sense of the policing of assisted reproduction in Italy.
<28> The pervasiveness of anti-immigrant feelings in Italy is well documented (Angel-Ajani 2000; Campani 1993; Carter 1997; Cole 1997; Jacquemet 1995; Mai 2002: Maritano 2002). Asale Angel-Ajani examines the criminalization and high rates of incarceration of migrants in Italy arguing that it reveals the Italian state as a "racial state" (Angel-Ajani 332) where "state institutions organize and enforce the racial politics of everyday life" (Angel-Ajani 332; cf Omi and Winant 1994) . The criminalization of migrants and their representation as "a dangerous threat to the Italian public" is starkly reflected in statistics that show the doubling of the migrant prison population in Italy over a period of two years (Angel-Ajani 346) . Italian sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago argues that the Italian media and state policy and practices contribute to make immigrants into "non-persons" (1999) who face increasing public and institutional rejection and restrictions. An example of these restrictions is the 2002 Bossi-Fini immigration law, which Merrill and Carter describe as the "most highly restrictive legislative reform since the fascist period," one that has contributed to "a national iconography of immigrants as criminals who breed social disorder" (168). Few scholars, however, have focused on the relationship between reproduction, the family, and immigration (but see Krause 2005, 2006) [29]. When viewed in the context of the criminalization and de-personalization of migrants, the unborn's accruing of personhood, subjecthood and citizenship rights is all the more striking. This extension of subjecthood and citizenship to embryos and fetuses produces paradoxical effects, such as the case highlighted by Casper and Morgan (2004) in which a US immigration judge granted US citizenship to the fetus of an undocumented Mexican migrant, thus temporarily halting her deportation. The implications of the political ascendance of the unborn are different depending on one's positionality. Clearly, populations that are already structurally vulnerable, including migrant women, women of color, queer women and working-class women are differentially affected by the increase in fetal rights.
<29> Analysis that simultaneously attends to reproductive and immigration policy and discourses is particularly relevant in the context of demographic alarmism (Krause 2005). In the context of anti-immigrant policies and sentiments in Italy, and more broadly in Fortress Europe, "heterologous embryos" threaten the social body with undisciplined and heterogeneous reproduction. The intersections of the social domains of gender, sexuality, and race in the reproduction of the nation is unusually explicit in the comments of national politician Umberto Bossi. The leader of the rightwing and xenophobic political party Lega Nord, one of three main parties in former Prime Minister's Berlusconi's governing coalition - and the co-sponsor of the Bossi-Fini legislation - Bossi argued that his party would fight
those ... who want to impose a single state, a single race, a single government through instruments that are aberrant and against nature, such as cloning, the granting of child custody to homosexual couples, the destruction of the natural family, and the invasion of immigrants. We are for the natural: the left ... sides instead with the artificial (Savoini 2000).
During the election campaign of 2001, Bossi indirectly criticized the opposition's candidate, who has an adopted son from Ecuador, by quipping that "the next Prime Minister should give assurance of having a traditional family, children that are certain because this is part of the natural cycle of life" (Rassegna Stampa 2000). Bossi later clarified and justified his controversial statement by saying: "I am in favor of natural adoptions, not artificial ones" thus making it clear that the problem lies not with adoption per se, but rather with the supposed artificiality of international and "interracial" family-making. The specter of uncertain paternity, then, seems to be particularly problematic when family relationships cross both "racial" and heteronormative family boundaries. As the representative of Italy, the Prime Minister's family should reflect the "natural" order of social relations.
<30> Although Umberto Bossi's statements are often extreme and sensational, the underlying assumptions have been voiced by others during the debates over the law. For example, at a political roundtable debate, a well-known gynecologist justified the regulation of assisted fertilization on the grounds that "we cannot let doctors do extraordinary things such as letting a Chinese baby be born from a Russian woman [30]". Even though, as a gynecologist, the speaker was obviously aware of the range of technologically-assisted reproductive possibilities, he identified in the crossing of racialized national boundaries an example of the "extraordinary things" these technologies make possible. Yet, these boundaries, like those attributed to the normative heterosexual family, are social rather than biological, and they do not require any technological assistance to be "crossed". Instead, this slippage between nationality and biological boundaries reflects nationalist assumptions about the equation of state, nation, and "race". Similarly, former Italian Minister of Health Girolamo Sirchia backed his support for the strict regulation of assisted fertilization by claiming that "to overturn the [assisted fertilization] law would mean a return to the chaos that preceded it, which saw white couples giving birth to black babies" (Casadio 2004). These statements reveal the conflation of "artificial" reproduction with "unnatural" social reproduction and the threat of "racial" mixing.
<31> The "heterologous/homologous" discourse that consumed the Italian Parliament in June 2002, December 2003 and through the campaigning for the referendum of June 2005, speaks to broader conflicts over threatening bodies within the nation. The call for homologous familial and national reproduction, while biologically meaningless, is socially relevant. It reflects the desire to reproduce the social order, a nationalist project of homogeneity, and a rejection of heterogeneity within the family as a synecdoche of the nation. As Brackette Williams notes, "in constructing boundaries between groups based on categorical identities and their links between these boundaries to cultural systems in nation-states, humans create purity out of impurity" (429). That impurity can become a disease of the national body itself: In Italy, as Angel-Ajani argues, "the flow of 'illegal' immigrants is understood as a sign of Italy's national decline" (342).
Conclusion
<32> Political debates related to the governing of assisted reproduction speak to broader concerns over social and national heterogeneity, concerns that are naturalized in the process of being regulated. Notions of the "natural" normalize hierarchical social configurations, including the normative heterosexual family and its associated gender roles. According to Gal and Kligman,
not only ideas about nationhood, but also about health, respectability, sexuality, and idealized gender are often involved. These ideas, when legislated, enacted, and so institutionalized, corporeally create the boundaries by which national selves, and ultimately national groups are systematically produced (28).
Both "natural" and "national" bodies are discursively and at times legally constituted as products of heterosexual homogenous families. In fact, the state, as Begoña Aretxaga argued, "excises from the polis those subjects and practices that question or threaten homogenous models of territorial sovereignty and heterosexual forms of political control, which are fundamental to national narratives of harmonious domesticity" (403). The nation can only be reproduced within socially meaningful boundaries. Italy's assisted reproduction legislation defines these boundaries around "natural" reproduction within the heteronormative family. The legislation and its associated debates, then, suggest a link between technologically assisted reproduction and immigration as two artificial and potentially dangerous modes of reproduction of family and the nation [31].
33> Heterologous fertilization disrupts that narrative of "harmonious domesticity" (Aretxaga 403) by introducing a "stranger" into the family, much as immigrants are constructed as "strangers" to the nation. Yuval-Davis argues that heterogeneity represents a particular threat to nationalist projects that conceptualize the nation as "a natural extension of the family and kinship relations" (15). Political arguments for the protection of the "harmonious," homologous, biologically-determined family, resonate with primordial conceptions of the nation and with cultural fundamentalist claims that naturalize xenophobia (Stolcke 1995). Yet, despite the pervasiveness of natural metaphors of the nation, Alonso observes that "the substantialization of nations and states through tropes of blood and kinship, although noted frequently, is rarely analyzed fully" (384). This analysis of the tropes informing the debate on assisted reproduction in Italy has sought to explore the articulations of the politics and meanings of reproduction, the family, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and the nation. The transferability of concerns with heterogeneity across social and physical domains and scales - from the homologous "gametic marriage" to the homogenous nation - underscores the symbolic and literal importance of containing bodies that threaten to disrupt the reproduction of the social order.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge Elizabeth Krause, Lynn Morgan, and Jackie Urla for their comments, references, and encouragement. The research on which this paper is based was made possible through the Field Program in European Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Endnotes
[1] See David Horn 1994 for a discussion of this in the context of Italian fascism; also Elizabeth Krause 2005; 2006. [^]
[2] This paper draws on four years (June 2002 through June 2006) of textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork related to technologically assisted fertilization in Italy, including the Parliamentary Commission Report that set the stage for the current legislation; legislative proposals and proposed amendments; transcripts of parliamentary debates; and the public discourse in the Italian media. From February to May 2004 I conducted interviews and engaged in participant observation research with activists opposed to the legislation and with doctors and biologists at a Rome fertility clinic. [^]
[3] However, other feminists have been more concerned with the problematic implications of new reproductive technologies, including their potential to reify the very relations they are supposed to challenge (Stolcke 1986). [^]
[4] See Paxson 2004 for a different reading of sex/gender in Greece. [^]
[5] No majority consensus could be reached because of the particular configuration of Italian politics and its legislative process, including the secular-Catholic divide and the system of perfect bicameralism (Neresini and Bimbi 2000). Parliamentary bicameralism has a tendency to gridlock because for a proposal to become law identical versions of it have to be approved by both branches of Parliament (the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate) (see also Ramjoué 2002). [^]
[6] The Parliamentary Commission convened from May 28, 2001 to March 26th 2002. [^]
[7] It is ironic that the Commission suggested that embryos, which would be completely genetically unrelated to potential parents, be allowed to be adopted whilst banning donor-assisted insemination. [^]
[8] The Chamber of Deputies version of the legislation was approved on June 18 th, 2002, with 268 votes in favor, 144 against, and 10 abstentions. The Senate approved the legislation on December 11, 2003, with 169 votes in favor, 92 against, and 5 abstentions. http://www.senato.it/leg/14/Bgt/Schede/Ddliter/13464.htm [^]
[9] Law 40/2004, Article 1, Comma 1, emphasis added. [^]
[10] Anthropologist Lynn Morgan has written extensively on the intertwined scientific and social constitution of embryos and fetuses in the United States, as well as in Ecuador (1998). Rosalynd Petchesky (1987) and Janine Taylor (1992) have examined the imbrication of political and visual technologies that have brought the fetus to life, while feminist scholars like Valerie Hartouni (1997) have emphasized political technologies of reproduction. A thread of the most recent scholarship on fetal and embryo subjects is in fact concerned with their biopolitical constitution; see Janine Holc 2004 for a thorough analysis of fetal citizenship in Poland and Casper and Morgan 2004 for the United States. [^]
[11] Article 4, Comma 3. Prior to this law, third-party-donor fertilization was already banned in state hospitals and clinics. Only available in private clinics, third-party-donor fertilization was not covered by the Italian national health insurance. [^]
[12] Article 5. [^]
[13] Article 13. [^]
[14] Article 14. [^]
[15] "In the case of impossibility of embryo transfer into the uterus because of grave and documented unavoidable cause related to the health status of the woman and not predictable at the moment of fertilization, the cryoconservation of embryos is allowed, up until the date of transfer, which is to be realized as soon as possible". [^]
[16] The notion that prior to the medically assisted legislation Italy was the "Wild West" of fertility medicine was deployed ubiquitously in the parliamentary debates and the media. Though Italy lacked a national statute covering medically assisted reproduction, the Italian Medical Association had adopted regulations into its code of conduct. Additionally, a number of administrative regulations governed certain aspects of assisted fertilization in Italy, including the ban of third-party-donor-assisted fertilization in public clinics. The president of a fertility patient-advocacy organization opposed to the assisted fertilization law claimed to have coined the term herself when she was lobbying for a "reasonable" legislation in the 1990s (personal communication 3/23/04). The term had subsequently, and to her great chagrin, been appropriated by opponents of medically assisted fertilization. [^]
[17] Similar warnings are sounded by some Members of Parliament who see unmanaged reproductive technologies as a threat to the social fabric. [^]
[18] The focus on women as reproducers is consistent with demographic statistics, which calculate fertility rates per woman (Krause 2006; Paxson 2004). [^]
[19] MP Bogi also noted that "at this time infertility is on the increase: calculations show that each year there are at least 50,000 new infertile couples, due to both male and female sterility. The demographic balance has only recently started leveling out, but was negative for a very long time (and I don't need to underlie the importance of the aging of the population, with is economic, social, and human consequences)." [^]
[20] The Vatican's role in Italian society and its growing influence in the politics of reproduction are beyond the scope of this article. Religion plays a key role in defining gender roles and reproductive meanings, as well as in influencing policies in a number of contexts around the world. According to Ranchod-Nillson and Tétrault, "religion continues to be an instrument of modern nationalist movements" as well as being "a primary ideological and institutional force for creating, maintaining, and providing cosmic justification for a wide variety of sex-gender systems" (2000: 16). See also Carole Delaney's ethnography on the articulations of gender, reproduction, and monotheistic religions (1991). [^]
[21] I am indebted to Jennifer Musial for this point. [^]
[22] The implications of these arguments for adoption are troubling. See Gailey (2000) for a discussion of how adoption also challenges Euro-American notions of 'natural' kinship. [^]
[23] The gendered aspect of this debate is evident in Senator Fasolino's contention that reproduction is "the highest moment of the feminine function," and that the embryo is "the reason for female sacredness" (Senate debates, December 2003). [^]
[24] Descendants of Italians who migrated abroad can seek Italian citizenship based on ancestry but for claims involving individuals born prior to 1949, only the paternal line can confer citizenship . Feminist theorists have challenged universalistic theorizations of citizenship by arguing for its intrinsic genderedness (Tetrault and al-Mughni 2000: 146; see also Mosse 1985; Peterson 1994; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). [^]
[25] Abortion was legalized in Italy in 1978 following widespread activism and was later reaffirmed through a popular referendum held in May 17, 1981. Law n. 194/1978 makes abortion legal through the 12 th week of gestation but requires medical certification and for minors parental or judicial consent. [^]
[26] Senator Maurizio Ronconi, Udc. In L'Unita" website, 10/12/03. http://www.unita.it/index.asp?SEZIONE_COD=HP&TOPIC_TIPO=&TOPIC_ID=31220 [^]
[27] Yet, human reproduction is always homologous, unless one subscribe to discounted "biological" racial theories that equate so-called different races with human sub-species. Although most politicians and scientists would not admit to such racist ideologies (van Dijk 1993), technologically assisted reproduction seems to bring out racial assumptions in new configurations (see Hartouni 1997). [^]
[28] Personal communication 3/24/04. On. Franca Bimbi's party, the Margherita, (Daisy Party), is a center-left party with Catholic affiliations located in the opposition coaliton against then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition. Most members of this party voted in favor of the assisted reproduction law. [^]
[29] Other exceptions include Maritano's (2002) work on the discursive representations of cultural differences and immigration in Italy. Maritano shows that the Italian family is often contrasted with the 'deviant' sexuality of immigrants who are perceived as "a threat to family and to the proper upbringing of children" (2002:73). [^]
[30] Fieldnote 2/25/04. [^]
[31] These distinctions have a historical precedent in Mussolini's celebration of the Italian country-side as the site of natural reproduction in contrast to the artificial reproduction of "sterile cities" that grew only via migration (Horn 1991, 1994). [^]
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