2
Being God

The metamorphosis of the world, I argue, includes the metamorphosis of the world picture, which has two dimensions: the metamorphosis of framing and the metamorphosis of practice and acting. This idea will be developed further in the present chapter. The worldview always also contains an image of humanity. Taking the example of reproductive medicine, I propose to trace, on the one hand, the metamorphosis of human life and, on the other, the metamorphosis of the image of humanity, the image of motherhood, fatherhood and parenthood that was valid for millennia. This means that a new cosmopolitan framework and space for action is emerging along with the new options presented by medical technology, in particular also where the old image of humanity still dominates people's thinking. To put it in a nutshell: what used to be an intimate and almost 'sacred' act has metamorphosed into a global cosmopolitized field of activities.

1    Why not Social Change, Why Metamorphosis of Parenthood?

Throughout human history up to the present day, two things were regarded as unshakeable. First, it was impossible to control human reproduction (except for very unreliable contraception practices and the possibility of abortion). Second, care and responsibility for children was a moral law (even if one that was frequently violated).

Whether war or peace, master or servant, early or late modernity, centre or periphery, an indissoluble, predetermined relationship qua natural law runs through all phases, situations and groupings of human history - namely, the biological unity of mother and child that marks the beginning of human life.

This unity can assume many manifestations and can even be adapted to the most diverse ideologies and worldviews. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the mother was transfigured into a mythical figure and placed on the altar of motherly love in philosophy, religion and education. In the twentieth century, motherhood was instrumentalized in Nazi Germany for the purposes of world conquest and was rewarded with the Mutterkreuz. A few decades later, in the course of the expansion of higher education, rising female employment and powerful women's movements, motherhood became a major stake in cultural struggles: on the one side, the 'uncaring mother' who neglects her children, on the other, the 'urban housewife', the over-solicitous homemaker.

Today we can find a new plurality of mothering arrangements - employed mothers, single mothers, stay-at-home mothers. But the background assumption even in feminist studies is often that mothers and their children live in one place. In reality transnational motherhood is emerging: mothers migrate to faraway countries, leaving their children back home, in order to earn money and give them better options in life (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997).

Some of these recent trends have been seen and described as dramatic. Nevertheless, all of them fall under the category of social change. While they represent major shifts in gender relations, the division of work between the sexes, and the position of women, they do not touch, interfere or meddle with the origins of human life. The metamorphosis of the world in relation to motherhood and fatherhood, by contrast, begins with the malleability of conception by medical technology. The genesis of human life is exposed to human intervention and creative will, but as a result also becomes the playground of the most diverse actors and interests scattered across the world (Beck-Gernsheim 2015).

What is taking place here cannot be understood as a 'crisis' of prenatal hominization or as a 'failure' of science which must be overcome in order to return to the natural process of procreation. Here, in the cooperation of medicine, genetics and biology and the successes resulting from this cooperation, thresholds of mutability and of interest intervention are being crossed irrevocably, with in vitro fertilization playing a key role. This term refers to fertilization in a test tube - IVF for short. It was performed for the first time in 1978 in Britain, and it instantly became a medical sensation. For the first time in human history, a child was born who had been conceived outside the womb.

2    Being God without Wanting to be God

What does metamorphosis mean here? A key is provided by the side-effects argument. The original aim was to treat the fertility problems of women - to be more precise, of wives (because, initially, nobody gave a thought to the desire of single women for children). In order to be able to perform this repair task informed by the conventional picture of the family, a more precise understanding of the functional processes in the area of fertility and infertility is necessary. This increasingly more precise understanding gives rise, in turn, as a side effect, to the possibility of increasingly more extensive interventions in the development of human life.

In other words, the pioneers of reproductive medicine were not trying to change our image of humanity. They were not driven by an ideology or a political programme, and they were not trying to bring about a revolution. On the contrary, their objective, as we must now observe in retrospect, was a very conventional one. It was to help desperate couples to have the child they so fervently desired by using medical technology to bypass a blocked fallopian tube. What was, biologically speaking, a major pioneering feat served initially in the social context to reproduce the traditional picture of the family. What could be more natural than to use a medical intervention to fulfil a deeply cherished 'natural' desire of married couples? The medical pioneers were far from wanting to play God, to act as lords of creation or to create the 'new man'. They simply wanted to enable desperate couples to fulfil their hope for a child.

But, however conventional this starting point, the discrepancy between thought and action is already apparent. While the pioneers' aims were still fixed in the framework of the old worldview and a traditional concept of the family, at the practical level the gates were thrown wide open to the ever more extensive manufacturability of human life. This is the first step towards the metamorphosis of the image of human beings and the world - or, to be more precise, of the framework for action with regard to conception, pregnancy and parenthood.

The second step is implicit in this technical horizon. The unity of conception, pregnancy and birth formerly stipulated by nature as a matter of fate in the person of the mother breaks apart, and these sub-processes become uncoupled in space and time and at the social level. This gives rise to new options, forms and relationships in the emergence of human life for which existing language still lacks appropriate words and concepts. The reason is obvious: all languages in the world are rooted in the old horizon of the pre-given unity of parenthood. The inflationary use of quotation marks testifies to this helpless attempt to capture in language what never existed before, what was previously unimaginable.

The act of procreation no longer occurs face-to-face or body-to-body in a personal, physical encounter between man and woman. It no longer calls for the presence of two people at the same time in the same place, but can be displaced into a laboratory somewhere in the world, in any random, rented womb at any arbitrary time. Indeed, more importantly, the biological 'father' and the biological 'mother' need not even live or have lived at the same time, because now even dead people can conceive and give birth to children.

This gives rise (independent of the intentions and self-understanding of reproductive physicians) to historically new, previously unknown options, and thus also social categories, of parenthood: 'social mothers' who 'order' and 'buy' a child; 'sperm donors' and 'egg donors' who sell the biological 'materials' for 'making' a child; 'surrogate mothers' who carry a child; 'fatherless mothers'; 'motherless fathers'; post-menopausal 'pregnant' women; 'gay fathers'; 'lesbian mothers'; mothers and fathers whose partners are (long since) dead; grandparents who have a grandchild conceived after the death of their son or daughter; and more of the like.

These linguistic formulas are all inadequate, misleading, controversial, provocative - even, for some, offensive. They reflect the breach of taboos prompted by the medical-technological manufacturability of human life. The method of rendering the new reality of parent-child relationships tangible and comprehensible by falling back on familiar concepts truncates and normalizes the process of metamorphosis that has been set in motion.

Another wave of side effects (metamorphosis) arises because the technical innovations mentioned coincide with a rapid transformation of lifestyles and family forms in Western societies. The result is that the set of potential clients of reproductive medicine has expanded enormously within the space of a few years. With the social normalization and legal recognition of forms of life and lifestyles that were previously taboo, targets of discrimination or even criminalized, new groups are now also declaring their desire to have children: unmarried couples, singles, gays and lesbians, post-menopausal...