148 R.P. Fitzgerald and M. Legge
like who will be who? The sister will be the mother and the daughter and
her stepfather are actually having the baby together and all the boundaries
have been crossed.Another worker spoke of such practices as things:
... getting weirder and weirder... it seems like there are boundaries and
then one boundary gets pushed and then the next. Because it’s like OK
we did it once for A and Case B is only a little bit different and so it
goes... onto really bizarre situations.Others became troubled over issues that are unlikely to appear in public
debates about the uses of IVF, such as behaviour that seemed to demon-
strate the potential family might not be good parents. One frequently
cited example was of a gentleman going through IVF procedures with
his wife and his mistress simultaneously (each unknowing of the other’s
presence and purpose). Single career women were sometimes pointed
out as creating doubt as to whether such seemingly ‘driven’ women
would ever take sufficient time off work to create a loving home. An
interest in gender selection on the parent’s part was also disturbing for
some workers:
These people will usually phone when the children are there – you can
hear them in the background – and they’re saying: “I only want to know
if it’s going to be a boy. I’m not going through all that to get another girl.”
And I think: “Well you know the children are there and they might not
show that they’re hearing – but they are!”Only one staff member out of the 14 interviewed on this project con-
sidered themselves perfectly comfortable with all and any legal uses of
HART.
In other publications we have discussed how the ethical dilemmas of
reproductive scientists are effaced rather than explored in contemporary
public debates about the ethics of reproductive technologies and such
‘tricky situations’. To some degree, this is because of the role of ACART
and ECART in commenting on unusual or problematic uses of these
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