Importantly however, there is both conformity and resistance to these framings among users of ART. This, as we shall show, is particularly evident in the field of ART where biotechnologies are routinely deployed to screen disability out. Therefore, when exclusionary practices are framed as a common sense feature of the social imaginary, as they tend to be in the context of disability, they limit our vision of a desirable future. A social imaginary is a governing set of images, symbols, values, and emotions that fashions how something is understood or felt and within which people both construct their social existence and come to know it. Within the social imaginary, understandings of disability are shaped by contemporary and historical discriminatory practices of social exclusion. Our examination is grounded in a close analysis of a small selection of interviews drawn from data gathered during a 4-year project funded by the Australian Research Council exploring the Australian experience of cross border reproductive treatment, looking particularly at surrogacy, and gamete and embryo donation. It is through users’ deliberations, choices, responses, meaning making, and expectations that we come to understand how these imaginaries are perpetuated and resisted and how maintaining them is also dependent upon the individual actions and actors who have internalized them. We investigate how some users of ARTs understand and deploy these imaginaries in ways that are both concordant with and resistant to the understanding of disability embedded within the broader sociotechnical and social imaginaries. This special issue provides a space for the development of diverse understandings of imaginaries and their role in law and regulation, in science and technology studies, and in the field of biomedical technoscience. This study is part of a special issue that examines the way that imaginaries underpin the engagement of law with biomedical technologies and science. In this article, we examine how disability is figured in the imaginaries that are given shape by the reproductive projects and parental desires facilitated by the bio-medical techniques and practices of assisted reproductive technology (ART) that involve selection and screening for disability. Participants discussed their views on testing, screening, and future disability. Our interviewees were individuals or couples who used gamete or embryo donation, coupled at times with surrogacy in attempting to have a child. It is through users’ deliberations, choices, responses, and expectations that we come to understand how these imaginaries are perpetuated and resisted, and how maintaining them is also dependent upon the individual actions and actors who have internalized them. In this article, we examine how disability is figured in the imaginaries that are given shape by the reproductive projects and parental desires facilitated by the bio-medical techniques and practices of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) that involve selection and screening for disability.
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