Acceso usuarios
Debra Castillo
This article studies the 1919 novel Eugenia by the prolific Yucatec writer and medical doctor Eduardo Urzaiz, focusing on gestational surrogacy and its implications as it is represented in this short novel. I argue that Urzaiz's fantasy of mainstreamed assisted reproduction technology and gestational surrogacy echoes current, more dissimulated discussions of what it means for affluent members of society with disposable income to place an order for a designer baby. While eugenics received a bad name after the excesses of the Nazi regime, its underlying principles certainly remain salient, as do the questions raised by contemporary watchdog institutes about what happens when science is not monitored by ethics. Novels like this speculative fiction presciently ask us to interrogate more fundamentally, what ethics are, and from whose limited cultural perspective we make universalist claims.
