Assisted Reproduction Is Coming of Age: ARTs before the legislative and social claims of the conceived

In 2025, 20 years will have passed since the UK lifted donor anonymity in its 2005 HFE Act. Consequently, the people born through donation under that Act are now reaching adulthood, therefore gaining access to comprehensive information about their donors. Meanwhile, other European countries like Spain maintain anonymity; neighbouring countries like France only recently (2022) legislated in favor of banning anonymity. What underlying currents do these legislative processes embody? How does social debate, or its absence, intersect with them? What role have the discourses and claims of children born through assisted reproduction played in these processes? What are the consequences for the conceptions of family, kinship, and filiation?
Biopolitics teach us that reproductive practices sit at the very core of power: legislative, economic, ethical, and moral instruments shape and affect these practices and the associated ideas and representations on family and kinship. Assisted Reproductive Techniques (ARTs), especially those involving third-party intervention, offer a privileged perspective on these processes, yet a transdisciplinary approach is required to fully account for the roles of the various actors involved in their development and implementation.
Among these actors, individuals born through ARTs have undoubtedly received the least attention, both in social and political discourse and in scientific analysis. They constitute an emerging collective actively advocating for their rights, often in conflict with the interests of the “reproductive industry.” We aim to examine their discourses, underlying representations of family, genetics, and kinship, and how these are being translated by the law. Cultural, political, social, economic, technological, and ideological influences on legislative conceptions and public policies related to these issues will be addressed, scrutinizing the disparity between the social importance and acceptance of ARTs and the limited public debate on the topic across different countries. Interdisciplinary socio-legal visions are best suited to account for how these emerging interests are being translated legislatively and how representations of family and kinship are being reconfigured to accommodate them.