8 - Conclusion

Summary

I began this book with three vignettes: Diane Blood's attempt, conducted through the British courts, to use her deceased husband's sperm in fertility treatment; a Scottish woman's account of her search for her birth mother from whom she had been separated in infancy; and the debates of the Orthodox rabbinate over the procurement and use of non-Jewish sperm in Israel. What do these stories reveal, I asked, and what do they have in common? Above all, why do they matter?

In search of further inspiration, I have glanced through newspaper clippings from the turn of the new century on issues that are salient to public debate on family and kinship. I am struck both by the range of issues and by the prominence of their coverage. There are four that particularly catch my attention. The first is a report on the suffering of birth fathers whose babies had been put up for adoption (“I can still smell my baby's scent. It's always with me” [The Guardian, 9.8.00]). The second is the decision by the British government to allow cells to be taken from embryos less than fourteen days old for the purposes of research on degenerative diseases – the use of embryonic stem cells for therapeutic cloning (“Medical Science at New Frontier,” The Guardian, 17.8.00).