ABSTRACT
The mystery about how a child came into being started to be resolved by the eighteenth century, as scientific research began to more confidently assert that the male sperm and the female ovum had separate identities and therefore had separate functions. In Thompson’s far-ranging exploration of reproductive technology, Making Parents, she suggests that capitalism has moved from production to reproduction where ‘now bodies reproduce things that make profit.’ In Western culture there has been a far-reaching myth that a child could be produced without a man and a woman having sexual intercourse beginning with the story in Genesis where Adam gave birth to Eve from his rib. This knowledge, and the development of endocrinology, eventually led to opening the door on to the concept of artificial insemination and in particular the artificial insemination of animals.
