ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on preoccupations concerning a particular kind of erasure of the mother from the procreative process as a function of biotechnological intervention, as these preoccupations emerge in feminist theory and autobiographical accounts of those who use, or are the product of, such interventions. It argues that feminist concerns in the 1980s over the sidelining of the mother in the procreative process by the male pioneers of reproductive technologies have given way in the 2000s to questions of how new family formations produce anxieties over relation that potentially sideline mothers in new and different ways. The chapter discusses that the search for the sperm donor or biological father, coupled with a sidelining of the mother, can result in the former becoming the overriding focus of a donor offspring's search for her or his sense of self, and not necessarily in a productive way.
