Introduction

Outlining Social Justice Implications of Reproductive Technologies

I noted that this issue draws on feminist science and technology studies (STS), that branch of feminist inquiry that deals with the reciprocal influences between social structures, especially those concerning gender, sexuality, race, and class, on the one hand, and science, on the other. In looking at new reproductive technologies, a feminist STS approach entails asking how assumptions about masculinity, femininity, sexual morality, the good citizen, and so on get incorporated into scientific practices that shape the new technologies as well as the ways they are distributed and taken up. It also entails looking at how the mere existence of these technologies may reinvigorate, transform, or challenge the social landscape of parenthood, especially as notions of the “good parent” are tied to gender, sexuality, physical ability, class, and race, and are bound up in national identity. Sarah Franklin refers to such effects when she identifies “the disappearing margin between new choices and having-no-choice-but-to-choose-them.” A feminist STS approach also directs us to ask about the assumptions that underpin research in reproductive technology. Assumptions are the “givens” in research; they are not tested. While scientists’ assumptions within studies simply go along for the ride, as it were, they nonetheless emerge looking as though they have been tested—so folk notions get new life and new authority by their association with scientists and their work. ¹

One of the most important folk notions that gets added traction from association with new reproductive sciences is the idea of genes as a “blueprint” for our development, influencing or even determining a major and predictable proportion of everything from our physical attributes to our personalities, behaviors, and achievements. As Wendy Chavkin suggested at the Scholar & Feminist “New Technologies of Life” conference, the field of new reproductive technologies, “is a jumble of high science and low science and no science. I mean, anybody who thinks that SAT scores and ‘good at tennis’ resides in the egg, or the sperm ….” ² Chavkin’s comments point out the need to clear up elisions that are too often made (even in the critical literature on reproductive technologies) between reproduction in the idealized versus “realist” mode. The idealized version entails “gee whiz” miracles of science that offer clean, smooth, predictable, progress—a technologically complex but manageable project of, in the words of the Critical Art Ensemble, “building a better organic platform.” Genes are idealized as “master molecules” that churn out faithful replicas of the traits displayed by the people from which they came. After all, a person’s genes added together construct a clone—the popular version of which entails an identical “second self” right down to the ideas, desires, and the haircut. While the eugenic fantasies of “optimizing” human offspring are worrisome because of the politics and values they mobilize, countering those dystopic fantasies must be done in a way that points out the factual errors they contain.

In addition to countering the idea that genes (or “collections” of genes found in eggs and sperm) neatly program for offspring with complex traits, it is important to expose other promises of “quality-controlled offspring” that reproductive medicine makes (sometimes in the abstract, sometimes more explicitly), but on which it cannot, in fact, deliver. Chavkin’s 2009 talk also noted that for all the promise and expense of reproductive technology, the success rates (especially when measured via healthy, live births) are surprisingly low. Several pieces in this issue touch on the ambivalent achievements of reproductive technology. Judith Helfand’s classic documentary Healthy Baby Girl traces the devastating personal and social consequences of the pharmaceutical attempts to “improve” reproduction by administering the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) to pregnant women at risk of miscarriage in the third quarter of the 20th century. Eggsploitation, a film from The Center for Bioethics and Cultures highlights the way that commercial interests have created a vacuum of information on the risks that egg donation poses to donors, as well as to women whose eggs are harvested for use in their own IVF cycles—even though existing data point to (probably) rare but very serious consequences, including ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, future infertility, and even death. Michele Goodwin points out that reproductive technologies like IVF convey risks to the fetus that are significantly greater than the risks posed by illicit drug use among pregnant women—though the former are celebrated and supported, while the mere threat or possibility of the latter justifies elaborate systems of surveillance targeting women whose poverty or race calls into question their fitness to bear and raise children. Noting that the unintended consequences of ARTs “reverberate through the life cycle,” Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp follow the long-term consequences (for individuals, families, and communities) of the high prevalence of disabilities among children who are conceived or sustained as premature neonates via new technologies.

Stepping back, social justice implications of reproductive technologies appear to fall into two basic arenas of concern. First, reproductive technologies engage ideas about “ideal” parents and “ideal” offspring, as well as the flipside of those ideals: “unfit” parents (especially mothers), and “faulty” offspring. Second, the technologies are situated in the global political economy, and the market values attached to the labor and bodies of workers in this highly stratified context transfer with uncanny fidelity onto the market values assigned to people and their parts in what Debora Spar has dubbed “the baby business.” ³

1. Rebecca Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).[↑]
2. See also Chavkin, 2010.[↑]
3. See Debora Spar, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), as well as Spar and Harrington reprinted in this issue. [↑]