The Political Geographies of Pregnancy

2. New Reproductive Technologies: Medicalizations of Pregnancy, Birth, Reproduction, and Infertility

27 2 New Reproductive Technologies: Medicalizations of Pregnancy, Birth, Reproduction, and Infertility A fashion photographer, hoping to cash in on would-be parents’ wishes for a beautiful baby, is offering the eggs of eight models in an online auction set to start Monday. . . . The Web site, , has pictures of eight models offering their eggs for sale. —The State, October 24, 1999 Genetics isn’t just a science. It’s becoming more than that. It’s a way of thinking, an ideology. We’re coming to see life through a “prism of heritability,” a “discourse of gene action,” a genetics frame. —Barbara Katz Rothman, Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations New reproductive technologies are a modern “mixed blessing .” While they enhance choices for a few people, they might restrict options for most women and constrain women’s bodily autonomy. History has taught us that control of women’s bodies is often sold as being good for women. Behind seemingly benign, neutral, and objective scientific practices and research are often subtle systems of power. Murray Edelman (1977), for instance, reveals the way phrases implying progress, therapy, and empathy toward patients by mental health professionals disguise and justify systems of control and dominance. Similarly, modern feminists view medical and legal power in reproduction skeptically. These technologies bring a new series of policy issues to courts and 28 The Political Geographies of Pregnancy legislatures as they address how to incorporate new reproductive arrangements into our legal system (Harris and Holm, 1998). “Ethics has a kind of desperate post-hoc character these days,” Jean Elshtain writes. “First, certain techniques are perfected or modeled; then, we consult professional ethicists to advise us on whether we ought to be doing what we are, in fact, already doing” (1989: 19). Woven within efforts to develop such reproductive technologies as an artificial womb is a distrust of women and their bodily powers to reproduce humans without these technological devices and enterprises. Jeremy Rifkin notes that at least one prominent medical ethicist believes women’s wombs are hostile, dark, dangerous environments where future children could not be adequately watched and monitored for their own safety (1998: 30; see also Corea, 1985b: 252; and Rowland, 1987: 524). I am reminded here of the bumper sticker against legal abortion that claims, “The most dangerous place in America is inside a womb.” Ann Oakley found from her study of the history of the medical treatment of pregnant women in Britain that “if one single message emerged, it was that pregnant women were themselves deficient: they lacked the necessary intelligence, foresight, education or responsibility to see that the only proper pathway to successful motherhood was the one repeatedly surveyed by medical expertise” (1984: 72). Within this context, such new reproductive technologies as ultrasound seem revolutionary because, in Oakley’s words, “for the first time, they enable obstetricians to dispense with mothers as intermediaries, as necessary informants on fetal status and life-style” (1984: 155). Dystopian visions, such as Huxley’s Brave New World, decouple women from producing babies in order to enhance state power and control. Today ultrasound is like “a window on the womb,” a long desired goal for the professional providers of maternity care (Oakley , 1984: 156). Research is progressing on artificial wombs (ectogenesis). Justifications for the new technologies often assume a male-standardized measure of what freedom and equality would be. For example, in discussing artificial wombs, John Robertson speculates, “A more revolutionary, though far distant, development would be the complete extracorporeal gestation of human beings. Perhaps ectogenesis is necessary to cut the female tie with childbearing, and thus provide full, substantive equality with men” (1986: 1032). The standard that women should aspire to, this viewpoint reveals, is male. “There is a pattern in Western culture,” Robbie Pfeufer Kahn notices, “of trying to improve upon women by making them into men” (1995: 188). For many women, however, their experiences of pregnancy, birth, lactation, and nurturing, even in this imperfect world, are already invaluable and irreplaceable. New Reproductive Technologies 29 The new reproductive technologies are marketed as gifts to women because they appear to give infertile women the ability to reproduce. However , as Janice Raymond points out, “when women look this ‘gift horse’ in the mouth, they will see that it comes accompanied by the persistent medicalization of women’s lives. This means that more and more areas of female living have been colonized by medical intervention, and staked out as...