Kinship, Heteronormativity and Citizenship: The Case of Cross-Border Surrogacy

This paper concerns access to citizenship at birth in the context of assisted reproduction. Assisted reproduction is an increasingly central feature of the complex social world within which citizenship acquisition is situated. And while citizenship is predominantly an inherited status, assisted reproductive technologies have added considerable complexity to how ‘inheritance’ is understood in this context. This paper examines this complexity in order to expose the ways in which particular imaginaries of kinship function to structure the parameters of citizenship-as-inheritance. To do so, the paper explores citizenship acquisition in the context of cross-border surrogacy. Through this practice, parent(s) may commission a baby to be born via surrogacy in another country. While the practice is prohibited in many countries, its legality in a small number means that each year many babies born through cross-border surrogacy encounter significant challenges in acquiring citizenship status. The paper focuses specifically on three case studies of children born into same-sex families with US-citizen parents, but who were denied US citizenship as a result of complexities in the recognition of parenthood arising from the sexual orientation of their parents and their biological relationship to the children. It was only after appeals to the US Supreme Court that the families were able to secure citizenship status for their children. Through the analysis of an archive of legal and media materials associated with the cases, the paper exposes the role of heteronormative ideals of the family in shaping both access to citizenship for children, and the right to family life for citizen-parents. It does so by highlighting both the ways in which the sexuality of parents was a limiting factor for children’s access to legal identity in these cases, and also how in its remedy to these problems, the law has further entrenched the centrality of heteronormative ideals to inherited citizenship leading to further exclusions from status. The paper draws on this analysis to engage with theoretical work that is problematising the idea of citizenship as an inclusionary force in contemporary societies. It contributes a kinship perspective to this literature, showing the role of heteronormative ideals of family life in perpetuating exclusionary practices.