Single Mothers as Bricoleurs: Crafting Embryos and Kin

Abstract

Single mothers by choice who delay having a child without a partner can choose to conceive with donor sperm and eggs. When they do, however, they face twin paradoxes: (a) advances in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) make it easier to have a child but harder to make an unquestioned claim to being a mother in light of a conventional genetic narrative; and (b) children who come from the same batch of donor embryos have more in common with each other genetically than they do with their gestational mother. Those paradoxes pose fundamental questions about motherhood and kinship. For example, does gestational motherhood with two donors alter the motherhood narrative? What becomes of the role of egg donor? How do single mothers manage their extra embryos and what role do extra embryos play in kinship? In-depth interviews with 42 single women suggest that they respond to the paradoxical effects of ARTs by engaging in a new process of motherhood—maternal bricolage—first in crafting embryos and then in finding homes for the ones they do not use. As bricoleurs, they challenge extant definitions of motherhood and kinship.