Born With Two Mothers

This television drama deals with an IVF mix-up which results in a white woman giving birth to a black boy.

(Please note this transcript of the panel's review is taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MARK LAWSON:

Channel 4's Born With Two Mothers. This material could end up as soap opera in dramatic handling or it could end up as sociology. You have to steer a path between them. Have they done that?

DOTUN ADEBAYO:

Yes, they have. It's clearly a drama with elements of documentary in it. They have tried to give us an idea of what was going on in the different characters, the different families' heads at the time, but at the same time bring the legal side of it into play as well, which I thought dragged the drama down slowly.

LAWSON:

Germaine, this format of actors and professionals are used for "what if" scenarios. This is a "what did" scenario, but did it work?

GERMAINE GREER:

It depends how much you know about the whole hideous panoply. You can have three mothers! You can have a genetic mother, a uterine mother and a legal mother. We have surrogacy, for example. In every such case, you have two mothers, and you have a conflict between them. We have never dealt very well with the actual fragmentation of the idea of motherhood. It's going to make people crazy. In this case, it's making the woman crazy who is the genetic mother of the baby that's been born in somebody else's womb, but the woman who carried the baby for nine months is also viscerally attached to it. It should prompt questions about how far down this road do we want to go.

ADAM MARS-JONES:

We are already there. Both mothers used the word "nature" to back their claims, whereas if you have had IVF, you have no claim on that word because your pregnancy is not possible with nature doing what nature wants to do. But humanly you can't say that. I thought this was like a zig-zag, the way it worked, because the bits of information poured cold water on what was otherwise going to be a soap opera, and I never knew which it was going to be. I loved the fact that all our professionals are so gloriously uncharismatic! It was wonderful, that they were so dull!

GREER:

No Lord Winston there!

MARS-JONES:

But it bothered me when you had someone in there to counsel people who talks to actors and comes up with a judgment. He is doing our job as a critic. I won't have it. It made sense for the lawyers to talk about the issues, but when we get into the therapy arena, it was not right.

GREER:

The professionals were reacting to the situation as it was presented to them by the drama, but you wouldn't go to the mother whose ovum had been mistakenly transferred and warn her of the fact. And the chance that she would find the mother, one of the problems is that the HFEA from the beginning disempowered the parents and gave control to a kind of mythical rabinate, or something, who were going to make decisions in the best interests of the ovum, embryo, or whatever, and it's gone berserk since then.

LAWSON:

I got a real feeling, the language the professional uses when he says, "Something has happened but legally we can't tell you what that is", I thought that was a fantastic moment...

GREER:

You wouldn't have actually courted that encounter. That encounter was dramatically necessary, but in the clinical situation it wouldn't necessarily happen.

MARS-JONES:

So with the facts as given, it was only with the birth that anybody would discover anything?

GREER:

That's what's happened in the past, even though they probably had a pretty fair idea that something had gone wrong. The problem here is it suggests to you that these problems arise when the system goes wrong. What worries me is that these problems arise when the system goes right!

MARS-JONES:

Philosophically these problems arise?

GREER:

They are saying we have to know where the genetic material comes from, no more anonymous donors. Children have to be allowed to know their genetic parents even though their parents won't necessarily be told at the time of the implantation, pregnancy and birth. It's a moral and political mess. We have been left in a mess by the HFEA, which will probably soon be wound up. This is the real drama in which all of this is going on.

Newsnight Review, BBC Two's weekly cultural round-up, is broadcast after Newsnight every Friday at 11pm.