10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17397
In both the expert and mass media cultures to which they simultaneously belong, ova and sperm have come to figure prominently as entities of potentiality, of expansion of the vital capabilities of bodies and of regeneration of their exhausted capacities. This article looks into the practices of gamete exchange in Argentina to argue, however, a different story. It contends that for all the good potentiality that gametes have come to represent, they are also entangled in webs of risk. They can be extracted too much or too often, decrease their provider’s expectation of good health, or create wrongful (i.e. incestuous and/or endogamous) bodily links between individuals. Drawing on analyses of the actual use of statistical measures in the clinic; and of ways of understanding kinship that are particular to Argentina, the article suggests that the handling of gametes as risky substances may ultimately work to produce the risks that it only aims to prevent. The study brought together the literature on kinship and science studies in order to frame the problematic of kinship and risk management in technoscience.
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Lucía Ariza
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
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Risky Mixings: Unravelling Gametes’ Bad Potential in Argenti
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2018-08-06
2023-06-25
2018-08-06
2023-08-28
49-78
TS
Lucía Ariza
2018/08/06
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17397
49
University of Buenos Aires
2038-3460
1
Argentina
en
78
Risky Mixings: Unravelling Gametes’ Bad Potential in Argenti
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17397/16255
9
                                                                                Essay

Risky Mixings: Unravelling Gametes’
Bad Potential in Argentina
Lucía Ariza
University of Buenos Aires


    Abstract: In both the expert and mass media cultures to which they simul-
    taneously belong, ova and sperm have come to figure prominently as entities
    of potentiality, of expansion of the vital capabilities of bodies and of regener-
    ation of their exhausted capacities. This article looks into the practices of
    gamete exchange in Argentina to argue, however, a different story. It con-
    tends that for all the good potentiality that gametes have come to represent,
    they are also entangled in webs of risk. They can be extracted too much or
    too often, decrease their provider’s expectation of good health, or create
    wrongful (i.e. incestuous and/or endogamous) bodily links between individu-
    als. Drawing on analyses of the actual use of statistical measures in the clinic;
    and of ways of understanding kinship that are particular to Argentina, the ar-
    ticle suggests that the handling of gametes as risky substances may ultimately
    work to produce the risks that it only aims to prevent. The study brought
    together the literature on kinship and science studies in order to frame the
    problematic of kinship and risk management in technoscience.

    Keywords: donor conception; gametes; numerical devices; risk; Argentina.

    Corresponding author: Lucía Ariza, Instituto de Investigaciones Gino
    Germani, University of Buenos Aires, Pte. José E. Uriburu 950, Piso 6,
    C1114AAD, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina – Email:
    lucia.ariza@gmail.com



1. Introduction

    In both the scientific and mass media cultures in which they are simul-
taneously implicated, ova and sperm have come to figure prominently as
sites of positive potentiality, of expansion of the vital capabilities of bod-
ies and of regeneration of their exhausted capacities. Figuring in the nar-
rative of modern biology as the basic units through which all forms of
sexual reproduction are possible on earth, human (and nonhuman) gam-
etes are metonymically assimilated to the idea of ‘reproduction’ per se.
They have for a long time condensed notions of procreation and propaga-
tion. In the West, many societies have become accustomed to regarding

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
9 (1) pp. 49-78- ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2018
50                                                            Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

them as the ending product of a process of maturation (Sutton et al.
2003) whose union with its opposite further enables life to develop.
    Since the advent of assisted reproduction technologies (ARTs) forty
years ago, ova and sperm’s association with positive potential has in-
creased. They have become the locus of a series of politico-scientific in-
terventions that are favouring their understanding as entities of potentiali-
ty (Taussig, Hoeyer and Helmreich 2013). Particularly through the cul-
tural significance of the use of donor gametes in ARTs, gametes have
come to be regarded as capable of renewing a lost or absent ability of the
human body (Simpson 2013). They are seen as aiding in the body’s re-
production when this is not achievable by other means, returning or reig-
niting a force or capacity for procreation that the body might have lost or
simply never had. Thus, eggs and sperm that can be scaled up and frozen
in vitro multiply their uses. They supplement what is missing or defective
in certain bodies, both fostering new life and bringing new capacities to
the lives already existent. Further, insofar as they can be stored in vitro
for a considerable amount of time, their potentiality can be deferred in
time, actually allowing for its futurity.
    In fact, as Taussig, Hoeyer and Helmreich (2013) point out, the ca-
pacity to envision, foster and promote particular human futures is part
and parcel of potentiality’s double bearing as a concept and object of
study. In their Introduction to a Current Anthropology’s issue devoted to
the anthropology of potentiality, the authors highlight the concept’s use
in biomedicine as an idiom employed to “imagine the benefits of new
medical interventions” (2013, S4) and thus a key element in giving shape
to the impending. These hopeful visions commonly articulated in bio-
medicine serve to socialise images of prosperous futures less determined
by contemporary evils like disease, hunger and pollution. However, they
are also strongly resonant with current anxieties in relation to food safety,
biosecurity, biological weapons, armed conflict and ill health (Taussig,
Hoeyer and Helmreich 2013; Vora 2013) that may derive from the sheer
actualisation of such futures. According to the authors, ‘potentiality’ is
thus a notion devised to capture the emergent, process and oriented to fu-
ture character of Western societies (cfr. Gammeltoft 2013), and it refers
both to promising and dystopian scenarios. In this context, gametes and
the technologies that make them detachable and manageable can be
thought as partaking of such contemporary biomedical fostering of the
positive potential of bodily fragments. Their capacity to survive freezing
and thawing; their ability to ‘live’ in vitro for long periods and to actualise
their generative capacities years after having been born to life, also makes
them naturally resonant with the biomedical thinking of good potential.
    Increments in the capabilities of bodies and gametes that are captured
by the idea of potentiality, can also be thought as inherently linked to a
Ariza                                                                       51
wider (Western) culture oriented towards the creation of economic and
social value, and where persons and things need to be permanently ‘en-
terprised up’ and transformed from their natural state (Strathern 1992b).
It is a logical consequence of this that gametes, and especially ova, are
now central to strategies like stem cell research and somatic cell nuclear
transfer, their good potentiality for curing and improving actually being
ever more explored and exploited in the creation of what Sarah Franklin
(2001) termed ‘the new biologies’. It is in this sense that authors like Sun-
der Rajan (2006) and Franklin and Lock (2003) speak of the different
forms of ‘biocapital’ that are now being created by developing the ever-
expanding potentialities of gametes, embryos and other tissues. Yet again
such advances, and the treatments they make possible, have also been
rendered in the advanced industrial democracies as rife with risk and
dangerousness. By now, a notoriously voluminous body of work in the
sociology and anthropology of medicine and health has been dedicated to
account for the many ways in which recent advances in biomolecular
technologies have been thought as, or directly posing, new and specific
risks for, and inequalities within, the bodies of persons and populations
(Fisher 2016; Simpson 2013; Cooper and Waldby 2013). As Taussig, Ho-
eyer and Helmreich (2013) also indicate, such notions about dangerous-
ness are intimately linked to ideas of, in this case, bad potentiality, entail-
ing a necessary part of the anthropology that studies it.
     This article focuses on this last set of associations of potentiality. It
deploys the notion of ‘potentiality’ as a concept that helps to elucidate
how gametes come to be handled, in the fertility clinic, as objects of risk.
The piece draws on insights gained from a wider project that explored
how nature and ‘natural norms’ work as normative ideals for fertility
practitioners in Argentina. It intends to think through some of the ways
in which ova and sperm are also implicated in a logic of risks, beyond
partaking in the contemporary biomedical promotion of the good poten-
tial. To show this, I look at the medical discussion regarding how many
times should a donor be allowed to donate her gametes. I explore notions
of danger enacted in connection with that limit being overflown, like the
fear of endogamy, the loss of biological variation and the risks for donors’
health. As part of this discussion, I consider in particular who are those
who are thought to be implicated in the risks that emerge with a potential
diminishing of variation. A key element of my argument is that ‘those’
who are the focus of the risks is a resultant of the specificity of Argentine
kinship. In fact, in this setting, kin relations are thought to pre-exist their
knowledge and their social elaboration: kinship connections are thought
to be eminently biological. The fact of sharing genes is already the fact of
being kin: people who descend from the same biological progenitors are
‘brothers’ independently of them knowing the fact that they are siblings.
52                                                            Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

Further, I suggest that these understandings entail that gametes potential
harmfulness is directly linked to notions of morally proper and improper
kinship between persons.
    By doing the above, I show that for all the promising capabilities (i.e.
fostering life, promoting reproduction) that gametes are deemed to have,
a different set of contrasting characterisations emerge. The latter are the
paradoxical result of gametes clinical circulation as entities of good po-
tential. Either by being extracted in amounts thought to be ‘too much’ or
‘too often’; by decreasing their provider’s expectation of good health; or
by mixing in ways considered to be both biologically and morally wrong,
gametes become known also as carriers of riskiness. Observing how this
capacity to create risks adds up to their ability to promote generation and
propagation, I show that ova and sperm epitomise ARTs’ long double
implication in both utopian and dystopian rhetoric, simultaneously con-
nected with hope and moral wrong1.
    In this article, I first provide a theoretical framework followed by a
contextualisation of ARTs and kinship in Argentina. I then go on to ex-
plain the methods used. The first analytic section introduces the two main
types of risks that are regulated in the clinic (‘endogamy’ and ‘health’),
and explore what is understood by the ‘endogamy risk’. I follow by dis-
cussing the ethnographic valence of the term ‘siblings’ in the context of
fertility doctors’ discussions of the risk of ‘inbreeding’. I then examine
ideas of biological variation among Argentine doctors, and how they are
used to justify the potential harmful character of gametes. The fourth ana-
lytic section recaps the second type of risk (‘health’) regulated in the clin-
ic, and considers how probabilities work in practice. I conclude by sug-
gesting that promoting the control of the bad potential of gametes is one
of the ways in which humanness is enacted.


2. Kinship and Technoscience

    This section explores the work of selected feminist theorists on repro-
ductive technologies, technoscience, and their interfaces with kinship. I
aim to show how this body of work provides tools to acknowledge the
different ways in which ideas about what kinship is can become norma-
tive, that is, part of projects to be enforced on particular groups and pop-
ulations, mainly by the same participants.
    A core concept in anthropology since the late 19th century (Carsten
2004), kinship re-emerged as a relevant category during the ‘90s and early
to mid-2000s, amidst an interest in the ‘new’ reproductive technologies
and what was perceived as their re-articulation of the ‘natural facts’
Ariza                                                                    53
thought to be a central feature of Western models of family (Viveiros de
Castro 2009). The reasons for the decline of kinship as an analytic catego-
ry during the ‘70s and ‘80s lies in the waning of the functionalist and
structuralist schools in anthropology. Its revival was linked to the works
of Marilyn Strathern, Jeanette Edwards, Sarah Franklin and Charis
Thompson, among others. In the following, I discuss some of these con-
tributions together with Donna Haraway’s (1997) understanding of kin-
ship as a technology.

2.1. Inherent and Extraneous Nature

    Theorising about nature as a domain of mixture and recombination,
Donna Haraway (1997) states that nature (together with race, sex and
kinship) represents the paradigmatic domain of the impure, a realm of
cross-fertilisation and hybridisation that has always evolved, even before
the collapse of science and technology into each other two hundred years
ago, on the basis of contamination and mixing between species, orders,
genera, etc. Beings of different orders have always co-evolved on account
of inter-species assimilation and recombination, exchanging genetic in-
formation unaware of and unregulated by taxonomic systems of organisa-
tion. This is (was) nature’s natural order, one whose capacity for mixing
orders makes industrial recombination pale beside it. In Haraway’s
words: “History is erased, for other organisms as well as for humans, in
the doctrine of types and intrinsic purposes, and a kind of timeless stasis
in nature is piously narrated. The ancient, cobbled-together, mixed-up
history of living beings, whose long tradition of genetic exchange will be
the envy of industry for a long time to come, gets short shrift” (1997, 61).
    The above suggests that for Haraway pre-technoscientific nature had
an inherent normativity, one characterised by the underlying kinship of
all natural living beings, and one where the human lacked any precedence
over the nonhuman. This inherent normativity might be called non-social
or ‘natural’ in the sense that it opposed what for Haraway may be a char-
acteristically ‘moral’ (and racist) normativity, one concerned with human
affairs in the form of modern political projects of classification and depu-
ration. Haraway refers to the latter as the ‘arguments about purity of nat-
ural kinds’, and they entail what Rosengarten (2001, 169) has termed the
“suggestion that all creatures have their rightful place”. These projects,
Haraway maintains, predate modern biology in the form of classificatory
regimes, and paradigmatic examples of it are Linnaeus’s taxonomic sys-
tem of kingdoms, orders, genera, etc., and Mendeleyev’s periodic table.
    In this sense, Haraway shares with Bruno Latour (1993) a characteri-
sation of modernity as intolerant to impurity and infection, and sees it as
consequently attempting to make distinctions where orders seem to be
54                                                            Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

confused or contaminated. This project entails a typically modern and
moral form of normativity, one where the human is produced, detached
and elevated as part of the categorisation of all ‘natural’ elements, as in
Linnaeus’s and Mendeleyev’s attempts. It is a work of depuration that
distils nature as its product while producing new normative forms of nat-
ural kinship and disambiguation. By ordering creatures and elements and
according them a place in an orderly nature, (kin) relations are built be-
tween some elements and entities and a purity of lineage normatively en-
forced, while other ‘impure’ connections (for example, inter-species, in-
ter-kingdoms, inter-races, intra-family, intra-sex), are discouraged. Signif-
icantly, Haraway calls ‘kinship’ these normative (and moral) modern de-
vices whose material and semiotic effect is the production of ‘natural
kinds’: “Kinship is a technology for producing the material and semiotic
effect of natural relationship, of shared kind [...] The periodic table is a
potent taxonomic device for what my people understand as nature”
(1997, 53-54).
    Yet it can also be said that there is at least one sense in which Hara-
way’s work can also be thought as involving a certain form of (political)
normativity. In effect, Haraway’s politics can be described as one which
opposes critical theory projects which feature prominently a critique of
technoscience as a form of domination and instrumentation of nature. If
pre-technoscientific nature was capable of ever novel combinations and
hybridisations, technoscience’s ability to mime nature’s ways of reproduc-
tion by increasingly enhancing the mixing of orders and the production of
contaminated kinship needs to be promoted rather than ‘critiqued’. Har-
away sees in this project the possibility of countering racist ideologies
based on the classification and disambiguation of entities, and problemat-
ically opposed to the mixing of the wrong kinds.
    Also conceptualising kinship as mixture, the account by Sarah Frank-
lin (2000) has points in common with Haraway’s. She explores how na-
ture is being re-conceived in the context of thinking about the new forms
of genealogy that are emerging as a result of the work of biotechnologies.
She examines what she alternatively calls ‘technologically assisted geneal-
ogy’, ‘artefactual genealogy’ or ‘respatialisation of genealogy’ as a result of
a series of reductions in the understanding of nature (from nature to biol-
ogy, from biology to genetics, from gene to information). Sustained by the
‘information analogy’, new ways of producing genealogy have material-
ised the ‘literal and metaphorical prospect of reprogramming biology’
(2000, 190). In Franklin’s view, once the gene begins to be understood as
“information, message, code or sequence” (2000, 190), its flexibility is al-
so enhanced, affecting directly its reproductive capabilities. A technologi-
cally assisted type of genealogy results from mastering knowledge about
how to reprogram the information contained in the gene, so that it now
Ariza                                                                        55
fuses laterally − and not only vertically − with information coming from
other species. This information reproduces itself now as a new hybrid, a
mixture of codes once statically duplicated only within a given species, but
now recombined not only diachronically within the same species, but also
synchronically and between species. The significance of this ‘detonation’,
which has made possible mice that express human genes and plants which
have genes from fish, is that it has transfigured “familiar models of kinship
and descent, by demonstrating that patterns of filiation and succession once
considered irrevocable because they are fixed by nature can be transcended
by technology” (2000, 224). Worth noticing, this conception has points in
common with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2009) proposal of a ‘post-
complex kinship’, one where both consanguinity (biology) and alliance (so-
ciality) have come to be submitted to the logic of choice.
    Thus, Franklin refers to a new genealogical time and space which are,
respectively, faster than the conventional brachiations of familiar descent,
and post-arboreal. This new ‘artefactual’ kinship shares with Haraway’s
an acknowledging of the blurring of boundaries between the well-
differentiated and solid families and species through which modern biol-
ogy traditionally organised its understanding of living beings. Yet what
characterises Franklin’s re-spatialised genealogy is the fact that it is specif-
ically technoscientific (that is, it is different from the principle of cross-
mixing and shared co-evolution of living beings that for Haraway is only
re-produced − and not produced for the first time − in contemporary
technoscience). Franklin’s technologically assisted genealogy is specifical-
ly post-Darwinian in that it implies both a decrease in time and a re-
spatialisation of genealogy, while Haraway’s industrial recombination
matches nature’s own capacity for mixed evolution only with difficulty.
Significantly, close to Rabinow’s (1992) ‘biosociality’, Franklin’s techno-
scientific post-arboreal genealogy implies imprinting on nature extrane-
ous purposes, predominantly guided by the search of commercial gain,
while Haraway’s principle of transgenic border-crossing is already inher-
ently contained in pre-scientific nature itself. In Haraway’s case then, it is
the political, racist projects of modern biology which, by imposing exter-
nal rules and re-categorising its elements, manufactured a new nature
which allowed only certain forms of kinship. Such projects resemble what
Rabinow (1992) has termed ‘socio-biology’, a set of (eugenic, philanthro-
pist, liberal and moral) operations upon the social that constructs it using
the language of biology. For Franklin, however, the projects to which pre-
scientific, self-referential nature subsides are similar to those that Rab-
inow has identified under the rubric of ‘biosociality’, the reprogramming
of nature’s own intrinsic norms on the basis of an extrinsic normativity
that enabled new, lateral and fast forms of kinship, mostly geared towards
the making of economic profits.
56                                                          Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)


2.2. Modern English Kinship and Lay Knowledge

     Focusing closely on the increasing social significance of the new as-
sisted reproduction technologies, Marilyn Strathern (1992a; 1992b) and
Jeanette Edwards (1999; 2000), among others, investigated during the
1990s the impact that the latter may have for the lived experience of kin-
ship. Their accounts also make sense, as do Haraway’s and Franklin’s, of
the changing ideas and ontological status of nature in the face of growing
intervention into the life processes. But their chief concern is to examine
forms of lay knowledge about kinship, and what knowledge might in fact
have to do with kinship in England, once ARTs became more common as
a way to have children.
     In her analysis of kinship in late modern England (19th and 20th centu-
ries), Marilyn Strathern (1992a) suggests a way of theorising the norma-
tive workings of kinship. According to Strathern, central to English un-
derstandings of kin relationships are the concomitant tropes of diversity
and individuality. During the 19th century, the diversity of the stock was
thought to ensure the true unique character of the descendants, insofar as
more plurality at the outset increased the potential for novel combina-
tions in the progeny: “Kinship delineated a developmental process that
guaranteed diversity, the individuality of persons and the generation of
future possibilities” (Strathern 1992a, 39). In a version of this model, the
uniqueness of the English character was thought to be a resultant of the
slow amalgam of races that took place in the early formation of its popu-
lation: “The greater the genetic diversity, the more rugged the offspring
[...]. If England formed the basis of a hybrid nation, it was a vigorous hy-
brid, created centuries ago by waves of conquerors each of whom added
their genes and skills to the stock” (Strathern 1992a, 36).
     In these accounts of English kinship, a normative ideal emerges about
what ‘better nature’, and thus ‘better kinship’, are. This ideal normatively
enforced frequent genetic exchange, one which, if realised, had the po-
tential to influence culture, the character of a nation or group of people.
Thus, the more mixed nature was, the more diverse the genetic pool, the
better the cultural prospects of a group. According to this, nature was
graded with regard to its degrees of mixture and its potential to foster
novel combinations. Genetic variety was also conceived as a foundation
for personal individuality, and the latter ensured the reproduction of
new diversity, achieved over time and as a result of procreation. This
suggests that for English kinship the uniqueness of the person, enabled
through genetic exchange and mixing, also performed as a normative
core. Those not sufficiently ‘mixed’ were deemed not sufficiently
‘unique’.
Ariza                                                                     57
    Writing at the beginning of the ‘90s, Strathern saw that the morally
praised individuality that had so far been seen as the result of mixing na-
tures was increasingly represented in the ‘public mind’ as disappearing.
English and European publics evinced a progressive anxiety over new
means of assisting nature, or of reproducing people, perceiving them as
possibilities that hampered the potential for more differentiation in na-
ture. Thus, Strathern identified a ‘postplural’ nostalgia (1992b) in the
paradoxical fear that more choice for artificially assisting nature eventual-
ly entailed less diversity in nature. Directly connected with a sense of re-
duction in human genetic diversity, the paradigm of these fears was the
use of gamete donors and surrogacy to create persons who would be ge-
netically connected to a number of unknown others. The image of the
clone, which in Strathern’s view is colloquially associated with eugenics
and the reduction in genetic diversity, fully expresses the apprehension
attached to such increases in culture that imply ultimately a loss of nature
and of the very nature of Western kinship: “The present anxiety concerns
interference with natural relations. Civilisation is not so much under
threat; Nature very much is” (1992a, 41). This social feeling of being in a
world where there is less nature than before is powerfully associated,
Strathern suggests, with the notion that less nature implies less diversity,
or less individuality, or less of both.
    Jeanette Edwards’ ethnography of narratives of conception in an Eng-
lish town also focuses on the importance of knowledge of biological con-
nections for modern English kinship. Her fieldwork leads her to affirm
that “knowing is central to what constitutes a person in late twentieth-
century English kinship” (Edwards 2000, 243). According to her inter-
viewees, knowledge about one’s roots implies that one is connected (and,
in opposition, not knowing one’s origins conveys a danger of being un-
connected, as in offspring from donated gametes who are denied the
chance to know the identity of the donor). This suggests that ‘knowing’
(what a person’s roots are) becomes normative, a requirement to be com-
pleted as an individual and to be connected with others, insofar as to be
connected one has to know. Those who do not know are considered to be
less related; knowledge of roots becomes thus a (normative) way of estab-
lishing relationships per se.
    Yet what ‘things’ are known in this knowledge about connection? Re-
lying on an English idiomatic expression, Edwards (2000) talks of being
‘born and bred’ as a specifically English form of knowledge about kinship
and connectedness. She refers thus to forms of creating connections
among people that involve both ‘shared substance’ (idiomatically ex-
pressed in the term ‘blood’) and effort and care; they include simultane-
ously biological ties and social bonds. In Born and Bred (2000), Edwards
explains that the roots that connect a person to others are never exclu-
58                                                          Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

sively circumscribed to the biological aspects of substances that get
transmitted in the genetic recombination of the fertilised egg, through
sexual intercourse and pregnancy. They also involve the knowledge of
places where one’s family has lived and where one grew up; the ties creat-
ed through frequent visiting of relatives, and the bonds sustained through
care and love.
    Having revised key concepts in the debate on kinship, knowledge and
technoscience, I provide in the following section a contextualization of
the development of ARTs in the Argentine context.


3. ARTs in the Argentine Context

    ARTs have been used in Argentina for more than thirty years. Their
beginnings were linked to an early implementation of such technologies
by a group of entrepreneurial doctors who envisaged the potential de-
mand for them, and managed to replicate them successfully after a few
months of trial and error. As in many countries around the world, the lo-
cal adaptation of procedures developed elsewhere implied more than the
capacity to reproduce technical know-how: it required also the design of
a whole new set of moral justifications and medical accounts of the need
to make ARTs available to the local population. This was particularly true
in the context of a declared majority of Catholics2, the Vatican’s banning
on ARTs for its congregation, and the vast adherence of the population to
pro-life discourses and their promotion of the ‘unborn life’, especially
during the first two decades of the local existence ARTs.
    As a particular case of the Catholic countries, techniques for aiding
conception were implemented in Argentina slowly but steadily, targeted
(almost through exclusively private provision) for the middle and high in-
come sectors that could afford to pay its high costs. Since 1986, when the
first successful birth took place, ARTs have been satisfactorily challenging
the impact of economic and political crises on their demand, increasing
each year the number of cycles they perform3. Despite the Vatican’s posi-
tion and the standing of Argentina as a country of Catholics, even the
most controversial types of ART treatment, like donor conception and
Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis, have now been widely accepted, and
ARTs are certainly an important part of the local culture, as can be de-
duced, for example, from its recurrent featuring in the mainstream media
(Ariza 2013). Moreover, Argentina’s ART field has had a dynamic per-
formance, actively and promptly incorporating technical innovations,
sending tens of its members to train in the prestigious centres of the
North (especially the US), fostering local research and the professionali-
zation of the sector.
Ariza                                                                        59
    Due to this vocation of the ART field for increasing its reach over so-
ciety, Argentina has consistently been the second country in Latin Ameri-
ca, after Brazil and before Mexico, in relation to the annual number of
cycles it performs, a position which is better apprehended bearing in
mind that Argentina’s population is about a third of Mexico’s, and a fifth
of Brazil’s. In 2013, Argentina performed the 22.8% of all ART treatment
carried out in Latin America and recorded by the RedLara Register4,
while Brazil contributed with the 44.1% and Mexico with the 12.9%
(Zegers-Hochschild et al. 2016). This percentage, and the elevated ratio
of annual cycles per individual (unique in the Latin American context),
speak of the prevalence and high visibility of ARTs as the most sought-
after solution in the event of infertility. Other factors, such as the relative-
ly recent (July 2010) passing of the Egalitarian Marriage Act, which con-
fers parental rights on same-sex couples, have also fostered local demand
for ARTs.
    The numbers mentioned above are even more poignant if only egg
donation is considered. In effect, this type of treatment increased from
281 transferred cycles with fresh embryos in 2004 to 1136 in 20085, and
from 26 transferred cycles with frozen embryos in 2004 to 323 in 2008
(Mackey 2011), a 400% rise and 1200% rise respectively.
    Likewise, the pregnancy rate has had an increasing tendency from
2004 until 2010, during which it grew from 35.5% to 42.2% (Mackey
2014). These results, which show the rising importance of egg donation in
Argentina, have had a distinct facilitating factor, and this is the large
availability of donors, which distinguishes the country from the current
situation in other parts of the world6. Women donate a lot in Argentina
and, despite the investments arranged to ‘altruistisize’ them (Ariza 2016),
for many practitioners the reasons for this are mainly economic. In this
context, the analyses below discuss the emergent preoccupation of practi-
tioners with the notable local increase of gamete (and particularly egg)
donation treatment in Argentina; a concern that surfaces given the fre-
quent practice of donating more than the stipulated amount of times to
different centres, once that there is no centralised control of the number
of donations by a single donor.
    Finally, in spite of the relentless presence of ARTs in Argentina, they
remained unregulated until June 2013. Once passed, the Human Repro-
duction Law failed to define a number of important issues, including the
creation of a central donor register. Interestingly for the discussions that
follow in this chapter, it has been the ongoing commitment of the medical
corporation to supplement the lack of local regulation with self-imposed
medical guidelines, many of which are adaptations of internationally ac-
cepted parameters.
60                                                           Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

3.1. Argentine Kinship

    In order to understand how the development of ARTs both has an
impact, and relies on, understandings of kinship that are particular to this
setting, I explore in the following paragraphs two examples taken from
popular culture. I use them to illustrate widespread forms of conceiving
kinship that resonate with the ways in which Argentine ARTs’ doctors
make sense of the sharing of ancestors between people.
    The boom hit Celeste, a 1991 Argentine soap opera whose successful
performance entailed the extension of the original 154 chapters to 1727,
had as its central plot the story of two young persons who meet by chance
and fall in love. After a lot of coming and going, ‘Brother Sun’ and ‘Sister
Moon’, as they agree to call themselves secretly, conceive a child shortly
before Sister Moon learns that she and Brother Sun are actually biological
siblings. She spends the rest of the series avoiding a relationship with
Brother Sun, foreclosing a romantic relation considered morally impossi-
ble due to the pre-existent biological connectedness. She is moreover
confirmed in her thinking by being misleadingly told that the child born
of her union with Brother Sun has died due to congenital malformations,
which she attributes to the couple being siblings. By the last chapters,
both ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ are finally told the truth (which had been kept
from them in order to prevent them inheriting money): that they are not
actually biologically linked, to which they respond giving free course to
their love.
    Celeste’s story is one of a number of popular culture products (includ-
ing novels, movies and other soap operas) that reflect on the tension be-
tween genetic relationships and their knowledge in Argentina. In fact, in
Celeste the whole plot is arranged according to the idea that the relation
between Brother Sun and Sister Moon is already there, independently of
the protagonists being aware of it or not. The riskiness of the relation em-
anates precisely from this fact, and it manifests both biologically (the con-
genital malformations due to its supposedly endogamous origin), and so-
cially (it is morally incorrect to marry your brother). Although this rela-
tionship may be socially elaborated throughout the series (in the fluctua-
tions between having and not having a romantic relationship), a main
theme is the biological link that the characters are thought to have8, its
potential riskiness in the face of an eventual relation, and the conse-
quences of having or not knowledge about it: ‘knowing where one comes
from’ allows people to act in morally proper ways (for example, rejecting
a relationship), while not knowing is dangerous: it might lead people to
act improperly, with dire consequences (congenital malformations).
    Another relevant example can be found in the Argentine TV series El
Donante (The Donor), broadcast during 2012. The story features a re-
Ariza                                                                      61
cently divorced, depressed middle-aged man who has no children of his
own. However, this successful engineer used to donate semen as a young
student, something of which he has almost forgotten. The plot starts
when one donor child, Violeta, locates him and reveals him that she is her
‘daughter’. Together, the engineer Bruno and Violeta initiate the search
for each of the remaining 143 persons that have been born out of Bruno’s
donations. In the last chapter of the series, when all the 144 children have
been reunited and a ‘club’ formed, he is asked by his therapist (whom
both know is a donor children procreated from Bruno’s semen) if he is
remorseful of having had donated. He answers that he is not, since ‘where
there was going to be nothing, there are now 144 offspring’. In this case,
knowledge plays a key part in acknowledging the existence of the social
link of ‘paternity’, insofar as were it not for such knowledge, Bruno
would have ended with ‘nothing’. However, it is again the fact of sharing
genes which testifies to the pre-existence of paternal relationships, insofar
as it is only because such biological links exist that the social paternal
connection can be established. In a previous shot of the series, there is an
exchange between the therapist and the donor, where the latter tells the
therapist “Be calm, you will not make out with him without knowing, be-
cause I am your donor”. Here, again, knowledge is put in service of ac-
knowledging a previous link, while it serves to ‘calm’ the anxieties over a
potential wrongful doing (as would be people making out with someone
with whom they are related). Again, the question of riskiness appears as
an inherent aspect of a relation thought to be already there, and
knowledge allows characters to act dutifully.
    I have examined these two examples as illustrations of the significance
of genetic connections in Argentine culture, the way in which they are
culturally rendered to be relatively autonomous from knowledge (cul-
ture), and how this autonomy is understood to be potentially dangerous. I
have also stated that knowledge may be a gate to act properly. These ex-
amples allow me to highlight the extent to which kin relations based on
biological substances appear to have, in this particular milieu, a sort of
independent or self-evident existence, one that is already there even if it is
not socially acknowledged. A person might not know that they are biolog-
ically related to someone, but the relationship is still there; the family
connection has an actuality given in the sole and very fact of sharing
genes. Knowledge is not, therefore, the key defining feature of kinship;
rather, biology is. This, in turn, allows me to ask: how are these concep-
tions of kinship important for the enactment of gametes as risky sub-
stances in the Argentine clinic?
    The fact that kin relations are thought to be independent from
knowledge is a key element in enacting gametes’ potential harmful char-
acter in the clinic, insofar as when people are procreated from gametes
62                                                             Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

from the same persons, the relation is thought to be already there, beyond
the manners in which it is known. Moreover, relations that are there, but
which remain unknown, are thought to be potentially harmful, because
those who are already mixed should (in the opinion of doctors and fic-
tional characters) not re-mix. My purpose in bringing in examples from
popular culture has been, furthermore, to show how doctors’ understand-
ings of persons procreated from gametes from the same donors is rooted
in, or at least has profound resonances with, how such links are thought
about in the wider popular culture. This points to how expert and lay
understandings of kinship appear not to be clearly distinguishable in Ar-
gentina.


4. Methodology

    The analyses are based on 34 interviews with (and observation of the
practices of) experts of the Argentine ART medical community. These in-
cluded gynaecologists, biologists and biochemists, embryologists and ge-
neticists, mental health professionals and researchers in basic science in
the field of fertility. The interviews were carried out throughout two
fieldwork trips to Argentina that took place in 2008 and 2009. They con-
sisted in conversations with practitioners on their daily work, where as-
pects of how gamete donation treatment is provided and/or researched
into in Argentina were discussed. Interviews were taped in all cases where
permission was granted to do so, and a transcription of relevant extracts
followed the identification of themes key for the research objectives. All
interviewed practitioners signed an informed consent agreeing to be so.
The research also included analysis of other types of empirical material
(clinics’ brochures, pieces of legislation, informed consent forms, medical
and psychological guidelines, research papers, etc.) as well as of fieldwork
notes from observation.
    The research adopted a STS approach, and sought to acknowledge
the role of practicalities (Mol 2002) in the empirical realities of the fertili-
ty clinic. In paying attention to some of the forms in which human practi-
tioners interact with their nonhuman counterparts, the study assumed the
sociotechnical quality of the fertility practices it studied. The project bor-
rowed from Callon (1997; 2007) the idea of ‘investment’ and of ‘perfor-
mation’ to describe the sociomaterial configuration of an entity. Descrip-
tion and analysis of the ethnographic material benefited also from related
terms like Annemarie Mol’s enactment (see also Law 2004) which, to-
gether with the concepts above, can be thought of as ultimately inspired
by Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) use of the notion of ‘construction’. Such
terms are of high currency among the STS literature. They are designed
Ariza                                                                        63
to pay attention to how scientific, medical, expert practices produce ob-
jects of intervention rather than merely intervening or describing them as
pre-constituted objects. They are terms that point to the way in which
“reality is not independent from the actions of scientists” (Law 2004,
140), or to how both the natural and the social sciences also enact the re-
alities that they describe (Callon 2007; Law and Urry 2004). Such an in-
sight is crucial insofar as it allows to problematize the ‘pre-arranged-ness’
of objects, like the ‘obvious’ risk of ‘inbreeding’, showing how such ‘giv-
ens’ are never so; they are always at least partially the result of the per-
formative capacity of science and technology. Finally, the research ad-
hered overall to a pragmatist vision of practice whereby discursive and
material deeds need to be thought alongside their success or failure (But-
ler 2010; Callon 2010), more specifically in addressing the efficacy of en-
actments in actually constituting, or not, what they purport to do.
     Having provided an explanation of the methods deployed during the
study, I now turn to the analyses of kinship, risk and technoscience in the
Argentine fertility clinic.


5. Enacting Risky Gametes

    When asked about how many times a given donor is allowed to do-
nate their gametes, Argentine doctors are usually fast in providing a
number. They might say, for example, that they or their clinics allow
twenty-five pregnancies per donor, one donor per million inhabitants or
six donations per donor. That is, there is always a limiting number, yet
this number is different between centres and between practitioners work-
ing in the same clinic. This variation through which the limiting rule is
given and reinstated is telling in itself: it speaks of the coexistence in prac-
tice of two different types of measures that aim, in fact, to regulate two
different types of risks. One of these measures attains, in effect, the aim of
avoiding the risk of ‘inbreeding’9 or endogamy (if a donor donates ‘a lot’
then it is thought that there might be less biological variation). Yet the
other number that is used is oriented to prevent a wholly different risk:
the potential risks caused to the egg donor’s health. In the following par-
agraphs I look, first, at the endogamy risk, its relation to local conceptions
of kinship and the significance of the ‘variation’ narrative for Argentine
doctors. Towards the end of the article, I examine the other type of risk
regulated by limiting measures (the ‘health’ risk), and consider how this
number is actually combined in practice with the first.
64                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

5.1. The Endogamy Risk

    To prevent the ‘risk of endogamy’, Argentine doctors have been im-
plementing measures that limit the number of times that donors should
be allowed to donate. The joint ASRM/SART “2008 Guidelines for
Gamete and Embryo Donation”10 provide (for the case of sperm dona-
tion)11 a measure aimed at regulating the ‘risk of endogamy’12. This is a
population-based measure. It belongs with the sort of probabilistic calcu-
lation and the logic of the wager. It works by stipulating a number of al-
lowed donations in relation to a certain amount of population. Such a
measure readily exemplifies a concern with the risk of consanguinity, as it
gives a number of pregnancies or births calculated as an amount which is
contrasted with a number of inhabitants in the general population. The
latter are imagined by practitioners, as I suggested in the introductory
paragraphs above, as producing separation between those whose mixing
or re-mixing is considered harmful. I argue that the formula in which they
are invoked works not only to control but also to produce the risk it aims
(only) to regulate.
    Examples of the ways in which measures aimed to avoid endogamy
are formulated are the statements:

When you increase above one child born from the same donor per million [inhab-
itants], the chances that they meet and marry are increased. (Gynaecologist 4)

You have to remember that the limit is twenty-five pregnancies per donor per
700.000 people. (Endocrinologist 1)13

If I use twenty pregnancies for a population of a million, this means that [...] to-
morrow the probability of encounter between two half-siblings14 is one in 50.000
by one in 50.000. This means… [calculates] five by five [is] twenty-five and then
here you have four zeros, and here another four zeros. What is the result of that?
[Surprised] Look at that, [it’s] 2.500.000.000. One in two thousand five hundred
million. This means that if I impose myself this figure, the probability is very very
low. So far as I increase, this will decrease and it may be that they meet, two half-
siblings. (Geneticist 1)

    The extracts above are part of the answers I received when enquiring
about ‘phenotype matching’. This refers to the coordination of the physi-
cal appearance of gamete donors with gamete recipients, in order to in-
crease the probabilities that donor children and their parents physically
resemble each other. The clinic appears thus as a communicating space
between two opposite practices: coordinating donor and recipients
(through appearances) and dis-coordinating donor children from each
Ariza                                                                      65
other (by reducing the probabilities that they ‘meet’). This connection be-
tween coordination and dis-coordination attains in fact to the double-
sided character of gametes that I recounted in the Introduction: their po-
tential as entities that generate and relate (for example through physical
resemblance) people; and their ability to reverse such ‘good’ potential,
that is, the possibility that gametes generate harm. In fact, I argue that the
answers of the practitioners quoted above are exemplary of a form of
clinical thinking that, cast in the language of probabilities, is imagined as
producing a necessary (both, as I will show, moral and biological) separa-
tion between hypothetical individuals.
    To understand how this separation is attempted, it is useful to consid-
er a theoretical subpopulation of ‘donor children’ procreated through
gametes coming from the same ancestors, and imagine how their ‘mixing’
might be avoided once ideas about the healthiness of biological diversity
suggest this. So, if one needed to ensure diversity between such donor
children, one way of doing this would be to interpose ‘other’ persons
(that is, persons not procreated from the same individuals) in between
‘donor children’. This is, arguably, how the measures above are imagined
by the practitioners who use it. In this form of representing the action of
probabilities, the ‘million people’ or ‘inhabitants’ that come to be intro-
duced in that hypothetical subpopulation of donor children, are imagined
as producing diversity by actually separating donor children from each
other, thus avoiding their possible mixing (or re-mixing, insofar as they
come from the same donors).
    Further, I suggest that these formulas need to be understood not only
as mechanisms that control endogamy, but also as devices that stabilise
the very terms (‘one child born’, ‘twenty-five pregnancies’) that they pur-
portedly only represent. They actually identify those born or conceived in
relation to a certain population as individuals that should not mix (or re-
mix, given that they descend from the same ancestor). Thus, by helping to
circulate, and thus configure, the very terms that they aim only to repre-
sent, the formulas make possible the fact that babies born as consequence
of their use are identified as being siblings, and thus in risk of future re-
mixing.

5.2. ‘Blood Brothers’

    As explained above, the use of statistical formulas is a mechanism to
produce separation between individuals. Yet why are separation (with its
expected result) and the existence of diverse persons important at all for
the Argentine doctors that I interviewed? Where do such requirements
come from? Who necessitates them, and why? An answer to these ques-
tions lies in what people procreated from gametes from the same persons
66                                                                   Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

are thought to be in Argentine medical practice, and in the concomitant
preoccupation with a potential diminishing of diversity. On the basis of
conversations about numbers, endogamy and the future of the species
held with practitioners in the field, I look in the following paragraphs into
how donor children are conceived by fertility doctors. I further argue that
such ‘conceptions’ have strong resonances with the ways in which donor
children are represented in popular culture presented above, with effects
for ideas of relatedness and family connection. The analysis of these scien-
tific and lay notions of kinship allow me to show why gametes are han-
dled in Argentine clinical practice as if they were carriers of potential
harm.
     In the previous sections I have quoted the words of a geneticist. In
explaining to me how he calculates the probabilistic numbers he uses in
his practice, he gave away some characteristic forms of qualifying those
procreated from similarly originated gametes. In effect, in linking the
number of donations to the capacity of his probabilities, the geneticist ar-
gued that:

So far as [he] increase[s] [the number of children born from the same gamete
donor], [...] [the probability that donor children from the same donor do not
meet] will decrease and it may be that they meet, two half-siblings. (Geneticist 1)

    This is, he explicitly links the fact of having a shared ancestor to that
of being immersed in a relation, in this case a relation of siblinghood.
    Such ways of referring to those procreated from gametes from the
same ancestor are characteristic of how donor children are talked about
in the Argentine clinic. For example, a gynaecologist said that:

When you increase above one child born per million from the same donor, the chances
that [children from the same donor] meet and marry are increased. It might even be
that... it wouldn’t occur to you to date your brother15. But you may do it without know-
ing that he is your brother. (Gynaecologist 4)

    Another one tried to convey the risks involved in endogamy by exem-
plifying that:

[The risk] is that in the future people [born] from the same ova start to inter-
breed [...]. It would be like having a child with your brother. (Gynaecologist 1,
my emphasis)

    I take these quotations as telling interview data that show how Argen-
tine doctors think of people procreated from the same donors as holding
a relationship, that is, as being already entangled in terms of kin connect-
edness, independently of people being aware of so or not. In the case of
Ariza                                                                     67
the geneticist, he gauges the strength of his probabilities against their
power to avoid the encounter of two ‘half-siblings’. In the case of both
gynaecologists, and by referring more explicitly to the domains of both
sexuality (‘meet and marry’) and procreation (‘having a child’), they refer
to the concomitant difficulties when such domains might be implicated
with the fact of people being ‘brothers’. I want to propose that under-
standing that people are related (through ‘siblinghood’ and ‘brother-
hood’) in the absence of knowledge of such a relationship (‘without
knowing that he is your brother’) is in itself a model of kinship, one that
highlights the significance of the biological link, or at least makes it suf-
ficiently important to be able to establish a relationship in its own right,
independently of a social rendering of such connections between those
who are implicated. Furthermore, the sheer artificial (i.e. culturally spe-
cific) character of such a model is evident, insofar as (natural ‘evidenc-
es’ like ‘genes’ and ‘blood’ notwithstanding) it could clearly be other-
wise. That is, it could clearly be the fact that, for Argentine doctors,
people who share ancestors, but who do not hold a social relationship
(i.e. are mutually anonymous, are in lack of knowledge of such a rela-
tion), were not considered to be kin.
    If, as has been already very well established, Western kinship models
are characterised by the presupposition that biology is crucial to the
definition of what kinship is (Edwards 2000; Schneider 1984; Strathern
1992a), the Argentine model might actually bring a nuance to this: biol-
ogy might already be enough to establish kinship. In fact, according to
the interviewees above, relations have already been established biologi-
cally, independently of them being known, with knowledge figuring
here as a representative of culture. This is a model which is less mero-
graphic16 than that narrated by David Schneider, Marilyn Strathern or
Jeanette Edwards in their ethnographies of the Global North. For them,
biogenetic ties are being submitted to the logic of choice (Schneider
1984); “kinship systems and family structures are imagined as social ar-
rangements […] based on […] processes of biological reproduction”
(Strathern 1992b, 3); and whereas “kinship embraces connections peo-
ple trace to each other through notions of shared substance […] at the
same time it places […] emphasis on the creation and maintenance of
social relationships through intimacies of care and effort” (Edwards
2000, 27). In these models, kinship partakes both of nature and nurture,
without being in fact subsumed totally in either system (that is, it main-
tains with both the natural and the cultural realm a partial or mero-
graphic connection). Yet in the Argentine medical milieu, kinship ap-
pears as being less composed of nature and culture; less characterised
by both the fact of being born as well as of being bred. In this regard,
nurture/culture would seem to have a secondary character to the bio-
68                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

logical aspect; an almost superfluous standing in relation to the true de-
fining character of kinship, that is, the biological link. Rather than mer-
ographically or partially, the nature system captures the totality of kin-
ship.

5.3. ‘Lest They Meet and Marry’

    As established, above, central to the handling of reproductive dona-
tions in Argentine fertility clinics is also a concern with the physical inter-
nal variation of the species, with instating both the biological and cultural
goodness of diversity, and hence with ensuring proper degrees of separa-
tion between those who are already mixed (like children from the same
donor), so that they do not re-mix. The latter are shown explicitly in ideas
of the badness of inter-breeding, and of potential endogamy due to pro-
creation between descendants from the same ancestors, that flourish re-
currently in the practitioners’ talk regarding gamete donation in Argenti-
na. For example, discussing the work of numbers and the need to limit
how many times a donor donates, a practitioner explained in the follow-
ing way what in the field is known as the ‘endogamy risk’ or the ‘genetic
risk’:

G: [with more children procreated from the same donors] endogamy begins to
increase, and endogamy is not good for the species. It is detrimental to the spe-
cies. Endogamy perpetuates many of the traits but also those which are useless
[...].
I: But [...] would you say that there are [emphatic] biological arguments against
endogamy?
G: Yes, of course. The improvement of the species is achieved by bringing in new
races. Not by the mixing of all those who are the same
I: Which are the worst evils? What could happen?
G: [...] The more races are interbred, the higher the possibilities that they inherit
beneficial genes. Also because those specimens that begin to have detrimental
traits begin to be infertile, because they stop reproducing
I: But has that happened in humans?
G: In humans as well, in humans there are endogamous groups that tend to dis-
appear, precisely because of endogamy [...]. That’s why the improvement of spe-
cies implies bringing in new specimens, from other species. (Gynaecologist 4)

    The extract quoted above exemplifies the high stakes placed on varia-
tion, and on variation as a prerequisite for improvement, by Argentine
doctors (and modern biology more broadly). Such high stakes, I want to
argue, are a key element of the enactment of reproductive donations
through a logic of risks and bad potential. In this narrative, insofar as the
evolution of species by means of natural selection is the result of changes
Ariza                                                                     69
in species’ make-up that enable some individuals to adapt better to their
environments, biological diversity is regarded as a fundamental prerequi-
site to ensuring evolution (or ‘improvement’), providing a constant source
of potential recombination and thus of the possibility of novel adapta-
tions. When a population is varied, individuals inherit genes from differ-
ent ancestors, and this mixing is considered to be the basis on which evo-
lution takes place in the long run, as part of the appearance of individuals
with genes that enhance their adaptation. Darwin ([1859] 2008) famously
coined the expression ‘evolution by natural selection’ to name this pro-
cess.
    Moreover, not only is variation enthroned as the basis for evolution in
this biological narrative, but also the lack of variation is made responsible
for reducing the potentialities of genetic recombination and thus for the
potential sickness and extinction of a population. In this account, endog-
amous practices thought to derive from ‘the mixing of all those who are
the same’ lead to the production of less variation (‘Endogamy perpetuates
many of the traits’), an outcome that is regarded as having detrimental ef-
fects on a population (‘many of the traits but also those which are use-
less’), and potentially conducting to its extinction (‘in humans there are
endogamous groups that tend to disappear’). In such explanations, the
health of a population appears as depending on ensuring disconnection
between certain (already connected) individuals, thus making some forms
of kinship a ground for population wellbeing, and other the reason for a
population’s sickness.
    Explanations such as the one above were part of those provided by
doctors when asked about the use of probabilistic calculation and the re-
currently stated need to limit the amount of donations allowed from a
single donor. What is also significant in these accounts of the need for
variation is how such a need is seen as originating in the ‘sameness’ of
those procreated through gametes coming from the same ancestor (as ev-
idenced in the talk by Gynaecologist 4 quoted above: ‘the improvement
of the species is achieved [...] not by the mixing of all those who are the
same’), a sameness that further qualifies, as shown in the previous section,
their being regarded as siblings.
    These arguments are in noticeable contrast with prevalent ideas of Ar-
gentina as a ‘white nation’ comprised mainly by descendants from Euro-
peans who alighted ‘from the ships’ (Perelman 2016); a mythical and rac-
ist account of the nation’s formation whose ideological valence lies in ex-
cluding indigenous and the non-European migration from the myth of or-
igins. Although I do not have the space to dwell on this issue here17, it is
clear that the practitioners’ emphasis on ‘sameness’ as problematic and
variation as desirable described above clashes with an account of Argen-
tina as a country composed mainly of White people. Numerous studies
70                                                                Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

have recently started to look at racist discourses and to incorporate the
conceptual framework of race into understandings of contemporary Ar-
gentine society (e.g. Adamovsky 2012; Frigerio 2010; Grimson 2006). The
previous relative underdevelopment of this academic area is a clear proof
of the ubiquity of ideas about the prevalence of Whiteness in Argentina.
My point in bringing this up is merely to observe that narratives of same-
ness as carrying bad potential exist side-by-side with those that take for
granted, and that to a great extent rely upon reproducing (Ariza 2015),
also a certain kind of White sameness. The relatively easy coexistence of
these two narratives may be attributed to them being regarded as refer-
ring to different scales of the social (the family in the first case, race
and/or ethnic background in the second), therefore to a certain degree
independent from each other. Thus, if biological heterogeneity appears as
valuable insofar as it ensures the prosperity and ‘improvement’ of the lot,
that heterogeneity seems to be conceived as taking place exclusively be-
tween those whom, in other way, are thought to be ‘the same’ (the Argen-
tine-Europeans).


6. The Health Risk

    As said above, Argentine doctors also use another measure to regulate
how many times does a (female) donor donate. In effect, in the case of
egg donation there is the concern to limit how much a woman donates.
This limit number is not directly addressed in the ASRM/SART guide-
lines18, but it does appear in the talk of some practitioners. This is the risk
that may be posed on the donor’s health if she donates frequently, a pre-
occupation specific to Argentina given the large number of times that do-
nors tend to donate19. One practitioner said:

It is generally said that there is no relation between [taking ovulation induction
drugs and] an alteration in fertility, and no relation to cancer. (Gynaecologist 2)

   Yet it is clear that for some practitioners the evidence for this
lack of association is either not satisfactory or not sufficient20. For
the gynaecologist above, for example:
Six is like a limit number, because you have to imagine that it is a polyovulation
what they are doing every three months, and that is a lot for the ovary, and a lot
for the body. (Gynaecologist 2)

     Another practitioner also pointed out that:

All the studies carried out, they are done on the basis of donors of twenty years
Ariza                                                                        71
ago, ten years ago. What happens tomorrow to girls donating now, it’s not known.
Today’s donors don’t donate like before. They donate more, everything is much
more widespread. (Gynaecologist 1)
    As these extracts show, some practitioners and the institutions they
work for are indeed concerned about egg donors’ health. This concern
stems from the specificity of Argentina as a country where lack of state
control and high monetary compensation foster repeated donation by the
same donor. Moreover, this preoccupation is in line with some of the ob-
servations posed by ASRM (2006, S216), who has indicated that “[…] It
is presently not known whether repetitive follicular aspirations could af-
fect the donor’s future fertility”. Doubts persist to the extent that limita-
tions on the grounds of individual health are also taken into account, and
besides the need to ensure variation. Enforcing ‘good practice’ implies
taking institutional account of the eventuality and locality of these risks,
even if, as I show below, such taking this into account needs to be practi-
cally combined with the need to control endogamy.
    Protecting donors’ health is then another reason to limit the number
of donations taken from the same egg donor. Measures of this type are
usually formulated in relation to the donor rather than the population
where the donor donates. They are given as a number of pregnancies or
donations per donor (for example, six donations per donor, eight preg-
nancies per donor21). As in the case above, I propose to think of the use
of a preventive formula not only as a way of avoiding a purported risk,
but also as an uncanny form in which the risks inherent to donation are
actually stabilised as a matter of concern, in fact enacting the use of donor
gametes as a matter of risk and bad potential. Explanations about which
measures are being used need to be thought, therefore, as part of the ar-
rangements that perform gametes as eventual agents of bad potential,
while also contributing to produce the doctors as those who are con-
cerned about donors’ health.

6.1. Which Numbers?

    The ‘health’ risk posed to female donors shows that there are two
types of measure that regulate the number of donations per donor, and
hence two ways of enacting the bad potentiality of gametes. Yet how do
these two types of measure/risks relate? And how are the different de-
mands they represent coalesced in the actual limitations to donate? In
fact, because for practitioners it is impossible to use the two measures
separately, the measures are used together22.
    In effect, the difficulty of disentangling what each measure does by it-
self that stems from applying two ultimately incompatible measures as al-
72                                                             Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

ternative answers to one single demand (i.e. ‘how many times should a
donor donate?’), has effects in the very production of the risks at stake.
And insofar as the investment in which such measures conjointly act
needs to be understood as an investment that aims to performate, simul-
taneously, variation and health, the risks produced by risk-avoiding
measures attain, precisely, the diversity of the species as composed of
healthy individuals.
    In effect, on the one hand the application of the norm that prevents
risks to donors needs to be understood as a false number (Lampland
2010); that is, as a number whose use is inaccurate yet at the same time
productive23. This means that even if the measure that prevents risks to
donors is not strictly appropriate for the use to which it is put (i.e. is not a
measure devised to control endogamy), it is still productive insofar as it
helps to materialise the norm of variation in a simple(r) sort of way. By
stipulating that donors are to donate, for example, only six times, it helps
to perform medical practices as concerned with variation, that is, with the
health of the collective, without having to enter into the more complex
calculations entailed in applying the proper endogamy measure (i.e. twen-
ty-five in 800.000). Practically applied to produce variation and avoid en-
dogamy, the health formula stabilises those procreated through it as sib-
lings, commanding their disentangling (only six). This productivity of the
prevention-of-risks-to-donors measure working as a false number does
two things. First, it performs those who are regarded as siblings (‘six’) as
pertaining to the same kind, and therefore in need of avoidance of a po-
tential re-mixing. Second, the measure also produces the donor and the
offspring as individual bodies whose re-union needs to be avoided24.
    On one hand, to use the health measure as a way of controlling en-
dogamy is, thus, to use the measure as a false number, deploy it inaccu-
rately yet focus instead on the other result that it can bring (i.e. helping to
easily materialise the norm of variation). The prevention-of-risks-to-
donors measure is, however, a false number. It is ultimately inaccurate
and as such the investment in which it acts is also bound to fail in some
way. In effect, as much as the six-per-donor measure helps to practically
materialise the norm of variation, its inaccuracy is responsible for the
production of a biological relatedness between individuals that ultimately
complicates the achievement of disentangling. This means that while the
measure creates the circumstance that those born from the same donors
are identified as siblings and therefore as kinds who should not re-mix, it
also generates biological relatedness between individuals in ways that do
not come to be acknowledged, in the investment in which they happen,
as forms of ‘siblinghood’. Thus, the investment is unsuccessful (or fails)
in its own terms, insofar as it produces relatedness between those who
Ariza                                                                     73
are thought to be, and performed by the very formula, as in need of dis-
entangling.
    Yet on the other hand, given that the measure that prevails in the clin-
ic (or ‘happens first’) is that which prevents the risk of endogamy, it
might be worth enquiring about the success of the investment that seeks
to prevent damage to donors’ health. This investment is not unrelated to
the one that aims to perform variation, insofar as sometimes the endoga-
my measure is used to produce health. Then, if the measure according to
which a donor is allowed to keep on donating is that of, for example,
twenty-five pregnancies per 800.000, how does this investment adequately
monitor the potential risks to the health of donors? The answer is that it
monitors them poorly, since the application of the rule of three gives an
allowed number of ten pregnancies per donor for the City of Buenos
Aires25. Ten pregnancies per donor is a considerably higher number than
the six (or eight) pregnancies per donor allowed according to the risks to
donors’ measure, an increase which, in the terms of the investment, con-
siderably rises the risks to donors’ health.
    The above analyses show, then, that the concrete arrangements by
which numeric calculations are normatively deployed in Argentina as part
of the enactment of what are taken to be the natural norms of variation
and health has consequences for how bodies, individuals and populations
are intervened in and constituted as a result. Specifically, it allows to see
how the combined use of measures devised to do different things is para-
doxically productive of the risks that the investment aims explicitly to
avoid (an increase in the ‘sameness’ of those who constitute the species; a
decrease in egg donors’ health). In the examples shown above, this means
that genetic variation between people is not produced according to a
measure of twenty-five per 800.000 or its variants, but according to
measures such as six donations per donor, eight donations per donor, etc.
The failure of the investment produces relatedness in ways that are not
acknowledged within the investment, thus failing to biologically discon-
nect those whom it otherwise constitutes as in need of disconnection. For
similar reasons, the failure of these arrangements results equally in the
fact that it is not healthy bodies that are produced through them, but ra-
ther bodies whose exposure to the risks deriving from repetitive ova do-
nation has been increased (as is the case when ten donations per donor
are allowed, a limit which results from applying the twenty-five in
800.000 rule for the city of Buenos Aires).


7. Conclusions: How to Become Human

    The analyses above have shown the surfacing of a growing biopolitical
74                                                           Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

concern with the species and its health that is currently emerging from
the use of donor gametes in Argentina. This preoccupation, which is part-
ly the result of the frequency and repetitiveness with which donors (par-
ticularly egg donors) donate here, is also notably characteristic of the kind
of alertness, ‘moral panic’ and dystopian imaginaries brought by ARTs
elsewhere (see for example Franklin 1993; Simpson 2013). Such concerns
can be understood as evincing what Marilyn Strathern (1992a) already
pointed out long ago, that technology may strip life of individuality; that a
culture made of sameness may in fact make do without (its) people.
     Yet the anxiety over a disappearance of (different) persons, culturally
understood in the West as a reduction of diversity, and hence, of kinship as
we know it, is important also because it speaks not only of the ways in
which ARTs are still denaturalising kinship, but also of how much kinship
is still shaping the practices of ARTs. In effect, far from allowing an unlim-
ited number of donations from each donor, the Argentine fertility commu-
nity strives, copying or adapting legislation from around the world, to per-
form gamete donation according to that which is expected from proper
kinship, thus enacting itself as guarantor of appropriate (detached, differen-
tiated) kinship links. Furthermore, anxieties over ‘too much connection’, or
too much kinship, are signs of the limits of a post-plural world in Marilyn
Strathern’s terms: in the end, it appears that the overflow of ‘choice’
brought in by ARTs needs to be countered by a choice that limits, epito-
mised by the use of regulative numbers; that is, by the reduction of choice.
     Apart from illuminating forms of doing ARTs in other parts of the
world that have been less examined than those in the North, the analyses
above illustrate as well a particular way in which kinship thinking (denot-
ed in terms like ‘endogamy’, ‘brother’, ‘sibling’, or ‘genetic risk’) evokes
nature and culture, the given and the made. Thus, on one side, practi-
tioners’ idioms are those of biological language (‘endogamy’, ‘inbreeding’,
‘improvement’), and this is consonant with shown ideas about kinship be-
ing thought in strongly biological terms. Yet at the same time,
‘knowledge’ plays a key role in turning those biological concerns into
moral ones and, ultimately, into human ones. In fact, it is clear from these
set of discourses and practices that what distinguishes humans qua hu-
mans is not so much their capacity to identify moral horrors like incest,
but rather their ability to worry about, and try to prevent, the possible bi-
ological risks entailed in further remixes of those who are thought to be
too similar. This is a set of risks posed by technoscience. They are not in-
herent to nature, since the latter is conceived by Argentine doctors in line
with Haraway’s understanding of nature as a domain of pure mixing, con-
tamination and cross-fertilisation. What makes humans (doctors, patients)
human is therefore their preoccupation with where to cut the network
(Strathern 1996) of relatedness, where to stop connecting. In the views of
Ariza                                                                            75
the actors of this special milieu, the inherent risk of gametes lies in their in-
herent capacity to incessantly re-mix; ordering and limiting the potential
profusion of connection (and risk) is also about enacting what is uniquely
human; that is, to bring an artificial limit to biological connection.


Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the very helpful comments generously provided by the
anonymous referees and the editors of the special issue.


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     1
       I thank one of the anonymous referees for pointing this out.
     2
       According to data from 2013, 76.5% of the population identifies as Catholic,
11% as atheist or agnostic, and 9% as evangelical (Mallimacci 2013).
     3
        Demand for ART treatment is still and likely to keep on growing in
Argentina. Between 2000 and 2014 (the last year for which data is available in the
RedLara Register), the number of initiated ART cycles (a cycle being each
initiated treatment) increased steadily, with the exception of 2000, 2001 and 2006,
when annual numbers remained the same or decreased by about 100 cycles per
year. The 2000-1 stagnation was likely linked to the 2000-2001 financial and
political crisis, which affected a great number of people.
     4
       The Latin American Assisted Reproduction Register records data on ART
treatment in the Latin American region since 1990. Centre participation in the
Register is voluntary.
     5
       2008 is the last year for which separated data for egg donation is available in
the Argentine Register of Assisted Reproduction (RAFA).
     6
       See for example the warning tone of an article appeared in the NRGT news
portal Bionews (London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre):
“Gamete Donation in the UK: Time to Think Again”, Bionews, April 12, 2010.
Retrieved October 10, 2012 from Bionews website: http://www.bionews.o-
rg.uk/page_58241.asp?hlight=shortage+of+gametes).
     7
       Celeste was sold to all countries of Latin America. It was also broadcast in
the US by the channel Univision, and in Spain and Italy among other European
countries (“El fenómeno Celeste”, Way Back Machine Internet Archive, available
Ariza                                                                                79


at https://web.archive.org/web/20090823042752/http://www.quovadis.com.a-r/–
telenovelas/celeste/fenomoceleste.html, accessed online 10 October 2017).
    8
       In fact, the names under which both protagonists agree to call themselves,
‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’, perfectly captures what they are also thought to be for
much of the extent of the soap.
    9
        I examine the meanings associated with inbreeding and a potential
diminishing of biological diversity further below.
    10
        These are the instructions most closely followed in Argentina on this regard.
    11
        The fact that the ASRM/SART guidelines only regulate the potentiality of
endogamy for the case of sperm donation further sustains my point below that the
concern with egg donors’ health is an emergent preoccupation specific to
Argentina in view of the high frequency with which donors donate in this
particular context.
    12
        In Argentina, the ASRM/SART measure for sperm donation is also used for
egg donation.
    13
        Measures of this type were not always reported with the same values. In
fact, the endogamy measure was reported by different practitioners as being
twenty-five in 800.000, twenty-five in 700.000, one in a million and twenty in a
million. I do not have the space here to reflect on the significance of this fact for
the overall question of how statistical, risk-avoidance measures are actually
complied with in the Argentine clinic, yet I have done this elsewhere (Ariza 2012).
    14
        The term used in Spanish is the masculine form: ‘medio-hermanos’.
    15
        I translate here more literally as ‘brothers’ (as it is said using the universal
masculine form in Spanish) and not by ‘siblings’ since the interviewees are
obviously talking to me, the interviewer, a woman, of whom they assume her
heterosexuality.
    16
        Marilyn Strathern (1992a) defined a connection as ‘merographic’ when the
parts that come together partake simultaneously of other ‘wholes’; this is, a
merographic connection is one which only engages parts partially.
    17
         I have reflected on the importance of fertility doctor’s ideas of racial
sameness for Argentine ARTs in Ariza (2015).
    18
        The 2008 ASRM/SART guidelines refer in point VI. H to ‘Multiple oocyte
donations’, yet they do not tackle the issue directly, re-directing instead to the
ASRM Practice Committee Opinion entitled ‘Repetitive Oocyte Donation’
(ASRM 2006). This latter document was, however, never mentioned by the
interviewees, and it is unknown the degree to which it is actually used.
    19
        Egg donation has been known for a long time to imply some risks for the
donors, insofar as it entails use of anaesthesia, surgical methods and the potential
of multiple pregnancy and of hyperstimulation syndrome due to hormone intake.
These risks are related to the donation as a single event, and they do not accrue
over time (i.e. the risk of having a surgery-related complication is the same for
each donation). They are different, in this regard, to risks to donors’ health that
derive from repeated egg donation (each time a donor donates, her risk of
acquiring some sort of hormone-related cancer or having her fertility reduced may
be increased).
80                                                                Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)


     20
        An absence of association with cancer is in principle supported by research
done in the field, although studies looking into this have given mixed results and
are ongoing. Cancer Research UK enumerates a number of Danish, Dutch,
Australian and British studies that have shown there is no association between
ovarian, breast and womb cancer and the intake of fertility drugs (Does test tube
baby treatment increase cancer risk?, from Cancer Research UK website:
http://cancerhelp.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-questions/does-test-
tube-baby-treatment-increase-cancer-risk, retrieved August 27, 2012). Similarly, a
2006 revision of the oocyte donation guidelines by the ASRM states that
“Recently published data have not demonstrated an association between the use
of ovulation-inducing agents and ovarian cancer, although definitive conclusion
await further follow-up” (ASRM 2006, S216, emphasis added). A 2004 report by
the NHS’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence indicates however that
“Women who are offered ovulation induction should be informed that a possible
association between ovulation induction therapy and ovarian cancer remains
uncertain” (NICE 2004, 34). The potential reduction of the donor’s fertility is,
however, a different matter, as shown in the observation by ASRM (2006).
     21
         As in the case of the endogamy measure, measures of this type
characteristically differed in value from practitioner to practitioner. Examples
include eight donations per donor, six donations per donor, eight pregnancies per
donor.
     22
        According to Gynaecologist 1, they do “whatever happens first: that there
are more than twenty-five born alive every 800.000, or that she donates more than
six times”.
     23
        For Lampland (2010) ‘false numbers’ are temporary devices that enable
rationalisation, stability and fixity. For her, this means understanding false
numbers as formalising practices. I follow Lampland in her overarching claim,
namely that the use of a false number can have productive effects, can help to
performate things.
     24
        By enacting variation, the health measure performs ‘siblings’ (six) as those
who should not mix, therefore enacting those who share genes (the donor and the
offspring) as figures who (so as to ensure variation) need to be disentangled.
     25
        According to Gynaecologist 1, this figure comes out of applying the rule of
three to the City of Buenos Aires: “If in Buenos Aires there are 3.000.000 people,
then the application of the rule of three implies that there can be ten [children]
born alive [per donor]”.
