Preliminary Programme

The emergence of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) resulted from a redefinition of the borderlines between ethical and non-ethical medical procedures. In the early 70s, the pioneers in non-clandestine artificial insemination with donor (AID) considered that the sufferings of infertile couples justified putting their “humanitarian” ethos over conventional moral values (most of the physicians saw AID as a practice “against nature”).

Both a technological and ethical experiment, “official” sperm banking and AID was developed in a legal vacuum and framed as a medical matter. The same logic shaped the “bioethics laws” in 1994: their purpose was to regulate medical practices (with a particular focus on eugenics) and to control possible indications for AID, rather than satisfying couples’ human right to build a family.

Today, this limited legal framework does not fit with every social demand. In particular, single women and LGBT couples increasingly seek access to ART. How and when did the claim for “non-medical” ART emerge in France? Drawing on sources from various organisations (especially infertile couples’ associations and feminist or LGBT movements), this paper will analyse the complex and difficult confrontation between the historical development of subjective rights and the institutionalisation of the French “bioethics” system. (Show less)

The international research on adoption -historical or otherwise- is heavily focused on America, frequently situating transnational adoption into the broader context of domestic and transracial adoptions in North America, or into the history of U.S. immigration and foreign policy. The American historian Barbara Melosh for example calls adoption “a quintessentially American institution." In her view, the history of the nation as a country of immigrants created a climate that welcomed family formation across geographical and ethnic boundaries.

The Scandinavian nations are usually not associated with the kind of individualism and pluralism that is commonly linked to America, nor are they immigration countries in the same tradition as the USA. However, Denmark, Norway and Sweden have had some of the highest rates of international adoptions in the world, measured per capita and received the most children in relation to their population size.The exact reasons behind these high numbers have never been thoroughly examined, but it is unimaginable that they are not intimately linked to that most famous of Nordic institutions, the Social Democratic Welfare State. The Scandinavian welfare state is well known internationally for its expansive family policies, that support gender equality in work, provide childcare and financial aid for parents in need. All of which are done not only out of concern for individual families but also to support the nation-state and its continual reproduction.

The Scandinavian countries also have a history of close cooperation on child welfare policies and with regards to adoption, Denmark, Norway and Sweden showed exceptional willingness to accommodate and modify their legislation for the sake of developing a joint legal framework on adoption or "rätslikkhet" for all Nordic children. But the extent to which this Nordic cooperation have affected the Scandinavian countries responses to the transnational and most often also transracial adoption of Non-Nordic children – which started massively supplanting domestic ones in the 1960’s – have not been studied in detail.

This paper argues that the rapid growth of transnational adoptions in the 1960’s and 1970’s is an example of how clients of the welfare state are not passive in the face of policy dicta and how family policies are not always administered or received as intended. Adoptive parents in Scandinavia organized politically to lobby policymakers and promote transnational adoption as a progressive, global and humanitarian form of parenthood. In doing so, they employed arguments that emphasized the duty of the welfare state to accommodate and alleviate their human right and need for children, which had been denied them by nature. This need was recognized by governments and state officials in Denmark, Sweden and Norway who enacted legislation and created intuitions, that fundamentally were not based on the principle of "rätslikkhet" but on the desire for children. (Show less)

The WWII conditions entailed a whole host of factors affecting the quality of life of people, such as emotional stress, poor hygiene, food deprivation, poor quality of nutrition, loss of family members, and devastation of property or increased prevalence of diseases. The Second World War caused a widespread deterioration of the Polish economy and left extensive long-term social and psychological consequences in society: death of family members or their disappearances, disintegration of marriages, resettlement, devastation of homes, farms, estates, etc. The influence of the trauma of World War II on the Polish population has received little attention. There are no studies on the war impact on pregnancy, its outcome and the perinatal state of children. The purpose of this study was to estimate the influence of stress caused by WWII conditions on perinatal state of offspring, i.e. birth weight and birth length. The study also verified whether war prenatal orphans had lower birth weight and body length as compared to children having both parents. Medical documentation, deposited in the archive of the Gynaecology and Obstetrics Clinic of the Medical University in Poznan, was used for this study. It contained 15,000 individual data on birth weight and birth length of children born in 1933-1952 and socio-economic status of their mothers. General linear models (GLM), using their time of pregnancy relative to WWII (the period before the outbreak of WWII, during and after it) as an independent variable were applied. A set of candidate models were developed by introducing combinations of independent variables (marital status and mother's profession, size of the centre of residence, mother’s age at the moment of giving birth, number of births, etc.), including the full model with all explanatory variables, on birth weight and length of new-borns. (Show less)