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In shifting emphasis from the term "union" to that of "unity" O'Brien has glossed the moment of the lovers' embrace as an exchange of genetic material or seeds.  However such a mixing of materials implies two notions that Hegel takes pains to remove from his account of the interaction of the lovers.  The separation of seeds as envisaged by O'Brien introduces a moment of loss.  This she will emphasize by referring to such a separation as an alienation.  Hegel in the fragment on love explicitly states that in giving there is no loss.  Giving between lovers results in enhancement, acquisition of the "wealth of life".  In O'Brien's reading the lovers remain distinct entities.  Hegel's lovers embrace in a union that sublates all differences into a whole without distinctions.  From the philosopher's formulation it is difficult to derive the necessary distance between the lovers to found a moment of exchange.

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In Hegel's description there are no seeds that mingle.  Generation is a result of the full union of the lovers.  A living child does, as Hegel indicates, "come into existence." However, O'Brien misses the intercession of a third party.  "God has acted and created.  What has been united is not divided again" [text transposed]" (Knox 307).  Divine agency is never discussed by O'Brien (n6). 

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Also, despite what O'Brien alleges, Hegel never generalizes such a union as the basis for all human reproduction.  The tripartite process is not that of reproduction.  In the paragraph referring to the process being one of union, separation, reunion, Hegel is describing the development of the seed:

Everything which gives the newly begotten child a manifold life and a specific existence, it must draw into itself, set over against itself, and unify with itself.  The seed breaks free from its original unity, turns ever more and more to opposition, and begins to develop. (Knox 297)

O'Brien takes this breaking free as birth, overlooking Hegel's assertion that "[e]ach stage of its development is a separation".  O'Brien privileges birth.  She brings the seed's development into the ambit of production.

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The alignment of the domains of reproduction and production allows O'Brien to articulate a relation between social and biological reproduction.  As well, this alignment allows her to enact her gesture of supplementation.  What she finds lacking in Hegel is an account of the labour, specifically female labour, in the process of bringing beings into the world.  For her the infant does not simply break free.  It is produced.

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This fundamentally recasts the telos of unification.  If Hegel's focus is upon the union of lovers, O'Brien's is upon the relation of parent to child.  The synchronic union is converted into a diachronic unity.  Throughout O'Brien's discourse unity is keyed to a temporal mode, or rather a dichotomy based in the different valorization of temporal modes, a difference itself rooted in a theoretical approach that regards the oppressor class as diseased.  She adopts a discourse of pathology stating men necessarily develop "ideological modes of continuity over time to heal the discontinuous sense of man the uncertain father." (The Politics of Reproduction 131)

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Continuity is her prime concern.  For O'Brien relation to a child constructs relation to species continuity.  Men produce no children of their own.  Men mediate their relation to species continuity through the creation of political institutions that enforce paternity rights ­­ physiological paternity being uncertain.

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Species continuity is the translation into biological terms of her concern with social continuity.

One crucial dimension of political activity is the creation of stability over time, of permanence beyond the individual life span.  Political institutions, at least from the perspective of those who uphold them, are able to do what their human content cannot.  They defy death by auto-regeneration.  ("The Politics of Impotence" 149)

While recognizing that the organic metaphors and the "[m]ale and sexual" imagery of political theory are "modes of expression" she insists they are "something more".  Indeed verbal expressions signal something more.  However in her move from organic metaphors to empirical constructs O'Brien elevates the generative function of political activity.  She unhinges drives towards destruction from political praxis (n7).  Operative in her formulations concerning reproductive consciousness is a birth/death dichotomy mapped onto woman/man.

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O'Brien does not crudely restate or invert an axiology derivable from such a dichotomy.  She uses periodization.  Two events cause changes in reproductive consciousness.  The first is the discovery of the principle of physiological paternity.  Second is the invention of contraceptive technology (n8).  O'Brien's periodization contains an implicit narrative.  One recognizes a union, separation, reunion, pattern.  The historical dialectic that O'Brien would discern in this transformation of reproductive consciousness and the relations of reproduction registers as the history of a dyad:  the establishment of asymmetry between two protagonists of opposite genders and the overcoming of that asymmetry.

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The dance of the dyad is staged within an economy.  A commodity logic rules the operations of O'Brien's dyads.  Producer meets appropriator.  The assumption here is that women make babies.  Such an assumption rooted in an ethnoscience of reproduction is not universally held.  Feminist anthropologist, Marilyn Strathern notes that

maternal work presents itself to Western industrial and market minds in terms of its natural status as the prime source from which all else comes and as a resource to be valued. (Gender of the Gift 316)

She stresses the difference with Melanasia where

Women do not replicate raw material, babies in the form of unfashioned natural resources, but produce entities which stand in a social relation to themselves (316)

and "Children are the outcome of multiple others. " (n9) 

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If an ethnoscience of reproduction is sensitive to the number of players, so too is an ethnoscience of perception.  The shift need not be in the number of sensory modalities at play.  Significant consequences stem from varying the unit of interaction.  Descriptions based on non-dyadic units stage dances not only nuptial in nature.

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