ABSTRACT

In 2014 there was a Round Table in Russia on the legal regulation of surrogacy organized by the Committee on Family, Women, and Children1 – a committee of the Russian Parliament (Duma) (Round Table in the State Duma 2014). Its purpose was to make recommendations to Parliament regarding amendments to the existing legal regulation of ARTs in Russia. As a part of the Russian Parliament, the Committee is entitled to initiate legislative work within its jurisdiction, which covers questions related to the Family Code of the Russian Federation, issues relating to the social support of orphans, material benefits to parents of minors, rights of minors, and other matters concerning minors and family support (Reglament komiteta n.d.). The Round Table was chaired by Elena Mizulina, a deputy of the Russian Parliament, Doctor of Law, Professor, and a well-known member of the social democratic political party “A Just Russia” (Spravedlivaya Rossiya n.d.) which occupies 64 seats in Parliament (out of 450). Mizulina is a member of the State Parliament, a chairman of the Committee on Family, Women, and Children, and a member of multiple interdepartmental work groups aimed at implementing national priority projects in the sphere of demographic policy, health care, and the rights of minors. The aim of this chapter is to investigate how the need to limit access to ARTs is argued for, how the “problem” is located and the legislative interventions justified, and what kind of practices are rendered normative within the framework of contemporary legislative initiatives in the sphere of ARTs in Russia. My engagement with this issue was provoked by an article on a web forum devoted to ARTs in Russia (Lebedev 2014). The article reported on the Round Table, in which the author had participated. It seemed that the Round Table resonated all too well with current family policy-making in Russia, which has been heavily criticized by (feminist) researchers.2 This triggered my interest and I sought out more material on the issue. I decided to explore the productive and representative short-cuts and silences (un)consciously employed by many Round Table participants in order to reduce the complexity of the social world to a state of reductive and simplistic clarity. According to Foucault (2007), the law is highly normative. It codifies norms and leaves no space for alternatives, it prescribes and prohibits. The law produces discursive, subjectifying, and lived effects on bodies and subjects (Bacchi

2009). Any transgression of the law is punishable. Legal incentives are generated as a response to social problems, but what is “a social problem”? In line with feminist researcher Carol Bacchi (2009), it is the discursive construction of “social problems” that attracts my analytical gaze in this chapter. From this analytical perspective, borrowed from Bacchi, policy-making is a process of framing and constructing representations of social problems and transporting them into the legal code (Bacchi 2009). Therefore, it is of crucial importance to critically interrogate the way in which a “problem” is shaped within the logics of a legislative initiative. The main object of my analysis in this chapter is the Recommendations of the Round Table “Legal regulation of surrogacy: a family-legal aspect” (Recommendations 2014), presented to the Parliament of the Russian Federation, and two verbatim reports of the debate at the Round Table (Verbatim Report of the Round Table 2014 and a Report from the Round Table of the Russian Association of Human Reproduction Members 2014). Apart from addressing the rights and responsibilities of the people involved in surrogacy arrangements, the Recommendations suggest limiting access to ARTs to married heterosexual couples in need of infertility treatment. One of the verbatim reports, written by a Round Table participant, can be publicly accessed on his blog (Verbatim Report of the Round Table 2014; Moskovkin 2014). The text provides a useful insight into the debate at the Round Table meeting, even though it only represents the specific perspective of its author. Another source is a report from the Russian Association of Human Reproduction (Kruglyi stol v Gosudarstvennoi Dume. Vpechatlenia chlenov RARCh. “Pravovoe regulirovanie surrogatnogo materinstva: semeino-pravovoi aspekt 2014 )3 which also participated in the meeting.4 This report provides an account of the event, including a detailed description of procedures.