ABSTRACT
New Reproductive Technologies (NRTs) do not feel so new to me since they
have been a focus of my research and reflection since the mid-1980s. Likewise,
readers and viewers of Western media are less easily shocked by reports of the
practices, the complex kinship patterns (see Franklin 1992; Haimes 1992; Stra-
thern 1992c) and other consequences of relatively new modes of procreation in
the early twenty-first century. Indeed, genomics and genetic engineering have
rather usurped the place of NRTs as the strand of recent biotechnology which
now musters most controversy and concern.1 Nevertheless, NRTs have been
kept in the public eye in recent years as they have generated countless new
stories in the Western mass media which range from controversies about frozen
embryos to ‘sibling replacement’ or to the reports about ‘Britain’s oldest mum’
(see note 40).
