ABSTRACT
This chapter looks more closely still at how the “own” child that underpins and justifies reproductive technologies is defined. The idea of the “biological” child is ubiquitous in writings and discussions around reproductive technologies, and it has been pointed out by a number of anthropologists working in this area that the “biological” and the “own” are understood in a range of ways by those involved in reproductive technologies. Two areas that are key to ideas of the biological and the own are genetics and anthropological kinship studies. Like Dion Farquhar, Janet Carsten clearly finds the possibility of a “geneticist” determination unsettling, and is happy to read in the formulations of kinship around reproductive technologies instead liberation from constraint, and a possible proliferation or increasing diffuseness of relationship and identity. If science discovers new facts about biogenetic relationship, then that is what kinship is, and was all along, although it may not have been known at the time.
