ABSTRACT
In a fertile new world in which men and women come together in a variety of combinations of gender, genetics, gamete donation, and gestational carriers to make a baby. As these adults collaborate to give birth to a baby, they create a heretofore unheard of family complex: the matrix of all the individuals involved in the conception, gestation, or parenting of the intended child, along with that child and all the other offspring. When Winnicott’s model, that there is no baby without a mother, is extended to accommodate new forms of conception, there is no baby without all the parties involved in making that baby—genetic parents, social parents, gestational parents, gestational carriers, surrogates, egg donors, sperm donors. The psychoanalytic account of oedipal triangles has undergone many renditions. In its original account, the child comes upon the shock that there is not just a mother–child dyad, but a father who has an independent relationship with the mother.
