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  • Decentering the Individual and Centering CommunityUsing a Reproductive Justice Methodology to Examine the Uses of Reprogenetics
  • Sujatha Jesudason (bio) and Katrina Kimport (bio)

Introduction

From prenatal testing and screening to in vitro fertilization, egg donation, and gestational surrogacy, new technologies allowing us to know and control more about reproduction are proliferating. Largely, the use of these technologies is unregulated and uninterrogated. When they have been discussed, extreme cases like Nadya Suleman (a.k.a. Octomom) giving birth to octuplets dominate the discourse and capture public attention. However, despite these kinds of sensational media stories there is no public consensus on the place of technologies that enable the manipulation or control of reproductive genetics, or reprogenetics as we refer to it below, in contemporary society.

Into this public vacuum several theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand the uses of reprogenetics, including feminist frameworks that aim to situate them in broader feminist projects. While feminist perspectives on abortion and contraception are relatively uncontroversial, there is no unified feminist position on emerging high-tech reproductive genetic technologies. The liberal feminist approach, which emphasizes choice and autonomy, premised on a core belief in individual freedom and with the primary goal of minimizing government intervention in women’s reproductive decision making, sees in the technologies the potential for increased reproductive choices rooted in notions of “procreative liberty” and reproductive freedom.1 Assisted reproductive technologies are seen as a tool to be deployed in the fight for expanded options against infertility with an individualist and antistatist/privacy agenda. The liberal feminist approach has thus asserted the importance of open access to these technologies on behalf of all women, positioning access to reprogenetics as a component of women’s empowerment. Fundamentally, it is a pro-choice agenda aiming to legislatively and administratively [End Page 213] advocate for access to treatments and the establishment of individually based ethical standards of care.2

Radical feminists, in contrast, have forwarded a different framework for understanding the uses of reproductive technologies, one grounded in this group’s broader focus on “stratified reproduction” and the recognition that some categories of women are empowered and encouraged to reproduce, while others are discouraged through the prevailing relations of power.3 Radical feminists initially critiqued these technologies as an expansion of patriarchal control of women’s bodies and a reinforcement of the essentialization of women’s role in reproduction. Emerging in response to the birth of the first “test-tube baby,” Louise Brown, radical feminists have focused on what they see as increased forms of medicalization of infertility in their analyses of reproductive technologies. They have denounced and opposed these technologies as tools of patriarchy, market-based commodification and eugenic ideologies that only decrease women’s reproductive choices by intensifying their subservience to their reproductive destinies.4 Early radical feminists opposed all uses of reprogenetics, even when this position produced strange bedfellows, including socially conservative and religious advocates who opposed reproductive freedom and access to abortion for women.

Despite being apparently opposed, both focus largely on the individual and her use of the technologies. In so doing, they miss important considerations about what happens when we think about individual uses in their broader human context and, more important, about social differences among individuals. To the extent that discussions of reprogenetics remain socially governed by concerns over the individual right to privacy and profit, frameworks about their uses neglect the potential impacts on communities, particularly communities that are socially and historically disadvantaged.

Reproductive justice is a relatively new and compelling approach to reproductive practices that explicitly begins at the intersection of race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality, understanding each as coconstructed and dependent on power relations. Centering the leadership of women of color, this approach attends to the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which we live. The differences between a reproductive justice framework and the liberal and radical feminist frameworks, however, go deeper and are not simply the result of different theoretical foundations. A reproductive justice framework demands a different methodology, one that explicitly attends to power. Key figures in the field define the core issue in reproduction as a systematic problem of the reproductive oppression of women on the margins, poor...

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