Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (review)

When I was about half way through Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology, I was sufficiently curious about public discourse on reproduction in the early part of this century to seek out sources of public information. Among several pages on eugenics in the second edition of The Child Welfare Manual: A Handbook of Child Nature and Nurture for Parents and Teachers (1919), I found this:

The value of the study of Eugenics will be seen when public sentiment demands that criminals, imbeciles, epileptics, chronic alcoholics shall be kept apart and prevented from having children. This will be the first safeguard. The next will be the necessity for publicity of the diseases and characteristics of families, so that young people may know the kind of mate they are choosing. It needs only the working up of a healthy sentiment to make it as desirable to marry “blood” as money. ¹

While I recoiled at this discussion of “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding,” I could not help thinking of my own fairly recent experience of “genetic counseling,” which was attached to my experience of chorionic villus biopsy, a prenatal testing procedure. My 1990 conversation with a genetic counselor was framed in terms of the individual (the idea was that one should think twice before taking on responsibility for an “imbecile”) and not in terms of “the human race,” but selective breeding was the common principle.

In Babies in Bottles, Susan Merrill Squier invites such a comparative move as she warns us against “accept[ing] the contemporary construction of reproductive technology as a scientific breakthrough without a past” (p. 13). Her own project is to historicize in modernism, and so make more available to criticism, postmodern reproductive technologies. From Squier’s introduction:

By considering how early-twentieth-century fiction and popular science writings negotiated the issues central to the project of achieving human control over reproduction, we can reclaim the origins of this postmodern technology. It is to those earlier images that we must look if we want to understand what acts of ideological construction have been carried out, and are currently being performed, in the name of reproductive technology.

(p. 23)

Squier’s central argument is sound, and her scholarship is satisfying. Squier weaves discussion of specific reproductive technologies (from artificial insemination to prenatal sex selection) through the biographies and writings of five scientific/literary figures of the first half of the twentieth century: Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, Charlotte Haldane, Aldous Huxley, and Naomi Haldane Mitchison. Moreover, Squier reads the literary/scientific history of reproductive technology against the 1978 birth of Louise Brown, “the first test-tube baby,” and the subsequent 1984 report in Britain of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology (the Warnock Report).

Each of the five chapters (exclusive of the Introduction) of Babies in Bottles performs an act of exploration and analysis through a single historical figure, and each study suggests an approach to the cultural criticism of reproductive technology. I provide here a sampling of Squier’s offerings, although I make no attempt to summarize her book.

Squier examines Julian Huxley’s work as zoologist and popular science writer to consider how “reproductive ideas circulate through the overlapping realms of literature, popular culture, and science via the operations of analogy” (p. 27). She textures her study of analogy with the notion, from Marilyn Strathern, of the “domaining effect,” the shift that takes place when ideas move from one social or cultural milieu to another, as from literature to the laboratory. ² In the course of this chapter, Squier explores the role of analogy in the construction and reception of technologies from eutelegenesis (artificial insemination for eugenic purposes) to parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization), and she attributes the persuasiveness of eugenics itself to the power of the analogical move from animal husbandry to improvement of the human stock. Writing particularly...