Rebecca Jordan-Young,
"Introduction"
(page 4 of 6)
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.[17]
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 ...."[18]
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."[19]
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