This article is a rewritten version of a keynote lecture given at The Scholar & Feminist Conference 2009, "The Politics of Reproduction: New Technologies of Life," held on February 28 at Barnard College in New York City.[1]

Watch video of Sarah Franklin's keynote lecture.
Listen to a podcast of Sarah Franklin's keynote lecture.

The 2009 Scholar and Feminist Conference coincides with the 40th anniversary of the first experimental fertilisation of a human egg, in 1969, and thus offers a timely moment to examine the cultural legacy of IVF. A good place to begin is the enormous, and largely neglected, feminist literature on new reproductive technology—or NRT. Even without Google Scholar, the most cursory search of this literature will confirm that NRT is one of the major themes of post-war 20th century feminist scholarship, and a field that is as rich in equivocation as it is impressive in its erudition. It is no exaggeration to say that thousands of books and articles have been written by feminists on reproductive technologies—old and new.

Artificial insemination, surrogacy, surgery, and hormonal enhancement of fertility, as well as contraception, can all be counted as forms of technological assistance to reproduction, or what are known as 'new' or 'assisted' reproductive technologies. But it is the rapid expansion of IVF technology, and its evolution as a platform for genetic as well as reproductive intervention, that gives rise to the acronyms ART and NRT from the 1980s onwards. The feminist scholarly literature that developed during this period is highly diverse and unusually international.[2] One of the most prominent strands of debate associated with this vigorous early period is the denouncement of new reproductive technologies from prominent radical feminists during the 1980s, including Maria Mies, Janice Raymond, Gena Corea, Renate Klein, Jalna Hanmer, and Robyn Rowland, among others. This group is also associated with the formation and leadership of FINRRAGE, the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering, founded in 1986.[3]

To the extent that there is a 'trademark' or 'generic' radical feminist position in this period, it can be characterised by its presumption of an identity between new reproductive technology and patriarchal culture. According to this view, new reproductive technologies encapsulate, enforce, and intensify the core values of patriarchal culture. IVF is the unadulterated offspring of patriarchal science, or, following Mary O'Brien, the manifestation, or even proof, of a masculine desire to colonise and control the female reproductive process.[4] Within this political framework, female consumers of NRT were perceived by some radical feminists, such as Renate Klein and Gena Corea, as not only victims of exploitation, but as collaborators with a male dominated medical establishment. This 'mirror theory' of new reproductive technology, and its accompanying rhetoric of female exploitation, victimisation, and collaboration, arguably did not always show feminist radicalism, scholarship, or politics at their very best.[5]

However, the emphasis on only one version of radical feminism in this period, and even the representation of it as dominant, are, like many retrospective accountings, both superficial and somewhat misleading. Like the feminist literature on NRTs more broadly, the 'FINRRAGE position' was somewhat more complicated.[6] Already, in the 1980s, the 'NRT = patriarchy' position, and its corresponding view of women who had amniocentesis or IVF as being, in Renate Klein's infamous phrase, 'dupes,' was resisted by many feminists—including other radical feminists, and large sections, if not a majority, of the FINRRAGE membership. Some feminists were motivated by alternative views of mothering, such as in the writings of Adrienne Rich, which differentiated between motherhood as a patriarchal institution and as a potential source of radical empowerment. Others, such as Naomi Pfeffer and Anne Woollett, sought to empower women to use new reproductive technologies to their advantage. Pfeffer and Woollett's sympathetic account of female infertility, published in 1983 by the London feminist publishing house Virago, was partly motivated by opposition to the 'feminists against women' who denounced women IVF patients as victims complicit with patriarchy. Similar studies exploring women's experience of IVF and infertility were generated from within FINRRAGE in the mid 1980s in response to the 'hard line' against NRTs, which increasingly, to some, resembled a caricature of radical feminist goals. Studies of women's reasons for choosing IVF were undertaken from the mid-1980s onward by FINRRAGE members Christine Crowe (Australia), Lene Koch (Denmark), Marte Kireczyk (The Netherlands), Linda Williams (Canada) and myself in the UK.[7] Conflict arising from these and other challenges to the FINRRAGE 'hard line' of complete opposition to all forms of reproductive technology led to the decline of the network from 1989 onwards.[8] These early FINRRAGE studies of women's experience of IVF in several countries, and the pioneering work of Margarete Sandelowski in the United States,[9] have since become part of a tradition of feminist studies of IVF that has been continued by Judith Lorber, Gay Becker, Charis Thompson, Marcia Inhorn, Karen Throsby and many others.[10] This comparative empirical tradition of feminist literature on IVF, largely focused on women's ambivalent experiences of it, is now a well established and rapidly expanding area of research, yet one that is rarely used to address questions of biotechnology more broadly.

Another important tradition of feminist work on NRTs that avoided the 'renounce and defame' politics of a minority of FINRRAGE members was modelled on the women's health movement. Three British feminists in London—Gail Vines, Sue Himmelweit, and Linda Birke—produced a guidebook for women seeking to use new techniques such as IVF in 1990 entitled 'Tomorrow's Child.'[11] This practical approach drew inspiration from Barbara Katz Rothman's pioneering work on amniocentesis in the mid-1980s, which she ended with an Appendix offering 'Guidelines for Personal Decisionmaking' to help women navigate the arduous choices offered by prenatal screening and to cope with the condition she identified as the 'tentative pregnancy.'[12] The defining feature of tentative pregnancy was its uncomfortable ambivalence: paradoxically, having more information and more reproductive choice could be oppressive and disempowering. This ambivalence was not used as a basis to reject the technology, but rather to enable women to negotiate its demands more effectively. Rothman's study drew direct inspiration from Rosalind Petchesky's highly influential 1980 article "Reproductive Freedom: Beyond a Woman's Right to Choose," in which she famously claimed that:

The 'right to choose' means very little when women are powerless ... women make their own reproductive choices, but they do not make them just as they please; they do not make them under conditions that they themselves create but under social conditions and constraints which they, as mere individuals, are powerless to change.[13]

Rather than the need to denounce IVF or amniocentesis, it is the difficulty of navigating 'the right to choose' that has proven to be the most consistent theme in feminist literature on NRT, as well as abortion. Somewhat paradoxically, this has proven to be as much of a challenge in the context of the 'new' reproductive choices—such as egg donation, IVF, or PGD—as for the 'older' choices of abortion, amniocentesis, or contraception. If there is any single take-home lesson from this entire body of feminist scholarship, it is that the relationship between technology and reproduction can never be separated from wider questions of women's status and empowerment. In the disappearing margin between limited choices and having-no-choice-but-to-choose-one-of-them lies the signature paradox of feminist debate over new reproductive technologies.

It has, of course, been argued that no one needs to choose IVF, amniocentesis, egg donation, or PGD (Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis) at all (indeed this is exactly what the early feminist critics of NRT were advocating). It has also been argued that feminists concerned with reproductive choice might have more pressing issues to worry about than infertility, IVF, or ultrasound—such as reducing maternal mortality, and protecting access to contraception, as well as legal abortion. Indeed the difficult reproductive choices for women who can even afford IVF or PGD might seem most politically legible as a measure of widening health inequalities. This view of IVF and its ilk as an elite gambit for which, like cosmetic surgery, the rich who can pay should rightly serve as the guinea pigs for a change, may well be one of the reasons IVF remains a virtually unregulated industry in almost every country in the world. I suggest, however, that part of a re-evaluation of IVF, and feminist politics toward it, should include greater consideration of its biopolitical implications for the general population. Especially now that IVF makes up as much as 5% of the birth-rate in some countries, and has become the gateway to new genetic technologies, such as PGD, and new treatments, like regenerative medicine and tissue engineering based on human embryonic stem cell derivation and cloning, its implications have been greatly magnified. This rapid expansion of the IVF platform is particularly significant given that many basic aspects of IVF remain both problematic and controversial.

Let's begin with two salient facts about IVF. One is its extreme popularity. Here is an experimental technique involving several radical departures from conventional conception. The artificially matured and surgically removed egg cell is washed, buffered, incubated and fertilised in vitro. Successfully fertilised egg are passaged through sequential media and stored in a sterile incubator for up to a week. Surplus embryos may be frozen in liquid nitrogen, or vitrified—for as much or sometimes more than a decade—before being thawed for transfer, research purposes, or disposal. Screening preimplantation IVF embryos for aneuploidy, or diagnosing them for genetic disease, involves having an entire cell removed and biopsied, while ICSI (Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection) involves the injection of sperm directly into the egg through a microsurgical technique that bypasses the egg's own mechanisms of natural selection. You could be forgiven for imagining twenty years ago that these treatments were not likely to become as popular or as commercially successful as they are today. Indeed, the popularity of IVF treatment, as witnessed by the huge demand that is responsible for its rapid transformation into a largely private global biomedical service industry, is all the more remarkable given that the core technique on which it is based does not work very well. Although its success rates have risen dramatically in the past 30 years, they are still well below 50% at the very best clinics, and less than half of that in most others. Despite improvements, IVF continues to carry considerable risk, including that of mortality as a result of ovarian hyperstimulation. The risks of multiple births, which IVF increases by over a 1000%, are routinely underestimated, despite the fact that even twinning is associated with significantly increased level of neonatal and maternal morbidity and pathology, and with triplets or more these risks increase exponentially. Much culture media is proprietary (aka made of secret ingredients), and it has become increasingly evident that IVF treatment is associated with a slightly increased incidence of developmental abnormality that may involve errors in genetic imprinting, such as those that lead to large offspring disorder in cloned livestock. These and other rare adverse effects of IVF have become more evident as the population of IVF offspring has become large enough to detect them.[14]

It is not so much that no one is worried about the fact that IVF is in some senses the most dramatic form of experimental intervention into human reproduction ever undertaken, nor that IVF is unusual in both its technical chutzpah and now monumental scale. Many unsuccessful efforts have been made to collect more basic data on IVF patients and their offspring in order better to evaluate the clinical and biological sequellae of this technique. The problem is that because IVF is largely private and unregulated, such data is all but impossible to collect.[15] Patients are not unaware of the risks of IVF, and most empirical studies confirm that patients worry about them. Interestingly, however, the risks of IVF can be part of its appeal. To the extent that part of the logic of choosing IVF is that even if you fail you can be confident you've tried everything, a bit of hardship and even what might otherwise be considered unacceptable risk, may become tolerable in pursuit of a miracle baby.

One of the biggest implications of IVF, however, is not the biological consequences of its widespread use three generations from now, but the cultural changes its rapid normalisation has engendered. Marilyn Strathern was the first to begin to chart these in two 1992 publications, Reproducing the Future and After Nature.[16] In both books, Strathern drew on anthropological theories of kinship to examine changes to the meaning of natural or biological facts engendered by the advent of new reproductive technologies. She argued that NRTs revealed the contingencies of how different domains of facts provide the ground for others, comparing this movement to the function of analogy. NRTs, with their new analogy of kinship as the outcome of technological choice, made explicit the 'hybrid' logic of kinship connection—which was not fixed by biology, one-way, or given by nature but rather digital, plural, and merographic—i.e. always switching back and forth. What makes a person biological is not the same as what makes them social: what makes them kindred is not the same as what makes them an individual, and so forth. NRTs, and the discourses surrounding them, added into the switching back and forth of kinship analogies and new elements of choice and technological assistance. This had a displacing effect. In Strathern's terms, the analogies 'travelled back' to renaturalise conception as an act of technological choice rather than natural fact. Human reproduction was now explicitly 'after assistance,' 'after culture,' and 'after IVF.'

This displacement of the prior ground of natural biological conception by technologically-assisted conception is evident today in the way that pregnancies are described as being 'spontaneous' or 'unassisted' when they are not the result of NRT. Post-IVF, non-miracle babies are no longer un-marked. We are thus 'after IVF' in another sense—IVF has to an extent become the model for 'normal' reproduction. IVF at once 'reproduces' conception as an in vitro replica of 'natural, existing biology' and inaugurates a powerful new domain of 'artificially constructed' biology that is simultaneously understood to be 'just like' the 'real thing' and completely different from it—being improved, redesigned, cleaner, and more manageable. IVF is in this sense a classically hybrid technology—a technology that has become second nature, and so normalised and naturalised it establishes a new 'ground' against which more radical innovations, such as human cloning for example, are compared.

One reason the history of IVF deserves to be reconsidered, I suggest, is because it turns out that this hybridity is very characteristic of the logic of post-genomic biology more generally today, which constantly vacillates between naturally existing and technologically assisted biologies. Arguably, IVF inaugurates precisely the doubled, hybrid logic of being just like the real thing, only not—as in genetically modified foods, artificial skin, or cloned sheep.[17] This is why the importance of IVF has been underestimated: the number of people who use the procedure may be small, but the power of its logic—and its core analogies—are vast. Both sides of the IVF analogy have importance for feminism: the idea that new biomedical techniques or biotechnological applications are 'just like' their 'natural biological' counterparts—i.e. that they are 'mere' imitations—naturalises synthetic applications such as hormone replacement therapy. Conversely, emphasis on the 'designed' or 'engineered' character of IVF aligns it with the many other contemporary practices that challenge a model of biology as fixed, inevitable, or determining—including plastic surgery, transgenesis, and the transsex movement. By this logic, IVF brings us to another set of questions about how technology and choice operate as denaturalising idioms not only for reproduction and kinship, but for gender and sex?

Schematically it is often asserted that the Pill brought about a separation of sex from reproduction. Artificial insemination and embryo transfer enabled reproduction without sex. Both the Olympic Committee and feminism had a hand in confirming the separation of gender from sex. And with the publicity surrounding Oregon's Thomas Beatie, the pregnant trans man, we can rethink Gayle Rubin's sex-gender system once again. Recalling Rubin's definition of the sex-gender system as 'the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed needs are satisfied,' we have to ask if the term 'biological sexuality' has any meaning anymore.[18] Or indeed 'biological' anything? We have to ask whether the transformation of biological sexuality—or for that matter biology full stop—into products of human activity is not a precise description of what The Economist magazine has recently dubbed "The Age of Biology." Arguably, it is in part the condition of being 'after IVF' that will enable the sex-gender system of what is now known as 'big biology' to be mapped.

To think through these questions I want to delve further back into the feminist archives, to an earlier feminist writer, Shulamith Firestone. Firestone is of course famous, or infamous, for her advocacy of new reproductive technologies as a means of freeing women from the tyranny of biology by liberating them from pregnancy. For this prediction, her 1970 publication The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution has long drawn regret and vitriol from critics accusing its author of all manner of folly—from technological determinism and biological essentialism to sheer naïveté.[19]

Maria Mies characterises the dangers of the "technocratic illusion many feminists pursue in the wake of Shulamith Firestone:"

They think the new reproductive technology and genetics could, if they were in the control of women be used for finally abolishing men (by cloning them off). These women not only fail to realize that economic/political and military power is not in the hands of Lesbians .... Ultimately, all these arguments are based on a biologistic interpretation of a historical and social relationship. They are without doubt going in the direction of racist and fascist thinking.[20]

Mies is hardly unique in her accusation that Firestone and her fellow travellers unwittingly promoted the same totalitarian reasoning they allegedly sought to oppose by attempting to take control of human biology, and in particular biological reproduction. To the contrary, it could even be claimed that criticism of Firestone's famous fallacy has become iconic of a retrospective dismissal of second-wave radical feminism more broadly as being anti-family, anti-maternity, and even anti-woman. The 'Miss Firestone Regrets' version of 70s feminism includes a lengthy list of malapropisms—from over-reliance on out-dated polarities to unforgivably bad tailoring.

Revolutionary manifestos rely on hyperbole and foreshortening, as well as cheek and verve, and Firestone's 245-page instruction manual for the overthrow of sexual difference, racial discrimination, class inequality, environmental degradation, marriage, aging, disease, monogamy, boredom, religion, culture, neurosis, depression and the nation state was clearly ambitious. The ending paragraph of the book, which is among its least convincing, promises no less than "paradise on earth." Still, in the 21-year-old Firestone's own words it was only "a very rough plan" intended to "make the general direction of a feminist revolution more vivid."[21]

Firestone was not so simplistic a technological determinist as many have claimed, and she didn't promise that IVF would liberate women. Indeed of all her arguments in The Dialectic of Sex her views on science and technology were probably least representative of 70s feminism. In contrast to many of her contemporaries, it was Firestone's utopian faith in technological progress that was unusual.

In her advocacy of "the benefits of modern embryology", Firestone had more in common with the revolutionary socialist biologists, geneticists and embryologists who invented biofuturism in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the UK, where the terms 'ectogenesis', 'cloning,' and 'transhumanism' were invented. At that time a progressive political and intellectual tradition of literature, science, and cinema united figures such as H.G. Wells, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Charlotte and J.B.S. ('Jack') Haldane, Naomi Mitchison, Vera Brittain, and John Desmond Bernal—many of whom were members of the Communist Party and espoused the same methods, such as ectogenesis, as Firestone. At the heart of this tradition was the utopian aspiration to take control of evolution through technology—a project that has often been invoked as part of progressive causes, and is evident in both the birth control and radical ecology movements, as well as having played a major role in many revolutionary governments, including those of China, Cuba and the Soviet Union.

For Firestone, the importance of technology to assist women ingaining control over their reproduction was uncontroversial. Since the origin of sex distinction is "biology itself—procreation," its elimination requires technological control of the means of reproduction in order for the tyranny of biology over women to end:

Just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and ... their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the control of reproduction. [This will require] not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility—the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of childbearing and childrearing. And just as the end goal of the socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not only the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.[22]

The "new population biology" referred to by Firestone in this passage, and elsewhere in her book, refers to the new sciences of reproductive endocrinology, reproductive physiology, and reproductive biology that all emerged during the first half of the 20th century, and the immediate post-war period. To Firestone, the pace of developments in the life sciences, and in particular, understandings of the reproductive process, was both breathtaking and full of promise:

Now, in 1970, we are experiencing a major scientific breakthrough. The new physics, relativity, and the astro-physical theories of contemporary science had already been realized by the first part of this century. Now, in the latter part, we are arriving, with the help of the electron microscope and other new tools, at similar achievements in biology, biochemistry, and all the life sciences. Important discoveries are made yearly ... of the magnitude of DNA ... or the origins of life. Full mastery of the reproductive process is in sight, and there has been significant advance in understanding the basic life and death process. The nature of aging and growth, sleep and hibernation, the chemical functioning of the brain and the development of consciousness and memory are all beginning to be understood in their entirety. This acceleration promises to continue for another century, or however long it takes to understand the goal of Empiricism: total understanding of the laws of nature.[23]

In the contemporary era of stem cells, cloning, genetic screening, and transgenic organisms, as well as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, Firestone's references to major scientific breakthroughs and significant advances in the understandings of life and death, aging and disease, and the functioning of the brain sound remarkably familiar. Also familiar in her celebration of scientific progress is the evocation of hope, aspiration, and ethical purpose. She thus returns us to the recurring challenge to feminism on the question of technology—what kind of science and technology do feminists want or desire?—as well as to the perennial matrix of this question for feminists, which is reproductive technology.

As Susan Squier notes at the outset of her erudite and still very prescient 1994 account of 20th century visions of reproductive technology, entitled Babies in Bottles, reproductive technology has long been a prominent but "puzzling" theme for feminists.[24] It is puzzling, Squier notes, in part because of the "disjunction" or "gap" between feminist artists and writers, who have often produced "emancipatory interpretations" of reproductive technology, as opposed to theorists and activists, who largely have not:

I have long been interested in the contemporary cultural prominence of images of reproductive technology, particularly in the works of women writers and feminist theorists. I have wondered what work of ideological construction was being carried out through the production and dissemination of those images. I have been fascinated by the rich and diverse literary representations of this new medical-scientific field, most notably in the works of Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Jolley, Angela Carter and Faye Weldon. But I also noticed the puzzling disjunction between the emancipatory interpretations of reproductive technology in many, though not all, of those novels and in some of the literary critical writings on them, and the negative responses of feminist theorists and activists to the actual implementation of these technologies in Europe and North America.[25]

At the time she was writing, in the early 1990s, Squier was in the midst of the remarkable outpouring of feminist work on NRT described at the outset of this paper. Bookending this prolific period of feminist scholarship on new reproductive technologies were two works published in the same year, 1985, that Squier selected to represent the "emancipatory" and "negative" conventions of feminist representation. In The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs, health journalist Gena Corea offered the first book-length feminist critique of new reproductive technologies, arguing they exploited women and represented a male need to control reproduction. Drawing on extensive historical and investigative research on the history of artificial insemination, embryo transfer, IVF, surrogacy, cloning, sex selection, and ectogenesis, and the theoretical work of radical feminists such as Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary O'Brien, Corea was unequivocal in her denunciation of so-called 'ART' and her feminist call to arms.

Despite the unwillingness of male supremacist society to hear us, we must speak .... It will not be easy for us to speak at first. The issues surrounding the new reproductive technologies are confusing. Sometimes our heads spin. The benevolent rationales for the technologies and images of kindly, smiling pharmacrats swirl around in our brains along with our sense that when we are called 'living incubators' and 'oöcyte donors' all is not well. We are supposed to be confused. The confusion keeps us speechless and powerless. It is as a Native American friend once told me: Confusion is a tool of oppression. While we are struggling out of our confusion into speech we must stubbornly stay with our sense of uneasiness and think it through. We can not allow ourselves to be bullied into acquiescence with a 'tolerant' view of technologies simply because we are not yet able to fully articulate why the benevolent rationales for these technologies clash with our sense of our own dignity and worth. We can stand here stubbornly and say: 'Something is wrong here' and explain that 'something' to the best of our ability. Each time we do it we will get better at it. When many women break the silence, when many women finally speak their truth, and speak it again and again and again, the world will have to change.[26]

Such a call to arms, familiar in its appeal to the hidden and forbidden truth of women's experience of patriarchal oppression, and to the potential for political change through consciousness raising and collective 'speak outs,' could hardly have been further from the vision presented by Donna Haraway in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," published in the same year as The Mother Machine.[27] Rejecting the universal, transhistorical, and essentialist constitution of 'women's experience' as either singular or even 'real,' Haraway advocated the affinity model used by women of color to ground a vision of an ironic, unnatural politics inspired by a love of both biology and technology. Like Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, and Ursula Leguin, whose transgressive science fiction inspired her to imagine fruitful couplings with animals, machines, and even plutonium, Haraway saw in 'technoscience' the possibility of ironic offspring who were neither pure nor whole.

Significantly, Haraway's work is also closely connected to the socialist-inspired promise of politicised biology that is a legacy in many ways epitomised by the British inter-war biofuturism. This tradition inspired Joseph Needham, one of the subjects of Haraway's PhD on embryology, and later strongly influenced Gregory Bateson—the son of British geneticist William Bateson, and one of the founders of the History of Consciousness program at th University of California, Santa Cruz where Haraway has taught since 1980.

As many feminists have argued, Haraway is in many ways the torch-carrier both for Firestone's impatience with Goddess-loving, pregnancy-worshipping, feminist Luddites, and her enthusiasm for technologically-assisted, disloyal, and perverted, evolution. The difference between their two manifestos is an effective measure of the rapid dissolution of the primary categories grounding Firestone's analysis in the relatively brief 15-year-period separating her cybernetic manifesto from the birth of Cyborg feminism. It seems that in this intervening period—punctuated by the birth of Louise Brown (the world's first IVF baby)—quite a few 'natural biological' categories, including those that were taken for granted by prominent feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, had begun to dissolve.

For Firestone, the hyphen alone in her reference to "biology itself—procreation" tells us more than enough about her inheritance from De Beauvoir, her heroine, to whom the Dialectic is dedicated, "because she endured." It was similarly De Beauvoir who motivated Sherry Ortner to pen her famous thesis that woman is to nature what man is to culture,[28] and it was finally De Beauvoir's insistent pessimism about the enslavement of the human female to the reproduction of the species that finally led Judith Butler to reconstitute De Beauvoir's famous pronouncement by revealing gender as the true primordium of "the sex distinction."[29] As even the Olympic Committee now knows, biological sex is a continuum. It is chromosomally unstable and even the germline switches sex.[30]

Without 'natural biology'—'itself' or otherwise—both the apparent fixity of sexual difference, and its 'essential' connection to reproduction, lose their foundation and their self-evidentness. Today, post-stem cells and Dolly, this truism has become so well established in both the life sciences and popular consciousness that it has become unclear what the adjective 'biological,' or the expression 'biological fact' mean anymore. Following the model of experimental embryology, in which parts of wholes are transferred, fused, and recombined in order to understand the basic mechanisms of development, the life sciences are increasingly oriented toward molecular biology, synthetic biology, and nano-biology under the sign of the new mantra of biological redesign: in vivo, in vitro, in silico. This is transbiology: a knowledge-production system that no longer differentiates between life and non-life, or even organic and non-organic, at the level of the basic component of bioengineering.

What is striking about IVF is its dual importance to this shift—in terms of changing both the cultural logic of biological reproduction as well as the nuts and bolts of how it is accomplished. These are what IVF 'models'—in both the literal experimental and the wider cultural senses suggested by Strathern. As Strathern predicted, a change in how we think about kinship inevitably affects how we think about relationships, as well as the difference knowledge makes by making things explicit. As Firestone might add, this process is dialectical: with new knowledges come new relationships and with new relationships come new knowledges. We can see this in the case of Thomas Beatie, and from his highly publicised re-scripting of the relationship between gender, sex and, reproduction will come others. This is how the future does not reproduce itself exactly. It is also what we might call transbiology in the form not only of transgender, but transpregnancy, and transkinship (if not trans-parency).

The concept of 'trans-' was instructively hijacked by Haraway in her effort to imagine what a feminist politics of biology might look like shorn of loyalty to blood, lineage, families, mother nature, or purity. She used the 'trans-' of the transgenetic and the transuranic to extend the cyborg's mission to live perversely and blaspheme ironically. The rogue prefix trans- does important figurative footwork for Haraway by highlighting the shape-shifting, categorically non-compliant events that engender unexpected alliances and break out of restrictive norms. Indeed, for Haraway trans- is both a model and a method of feminist biosociality.

So what are the lessons this review of feminist positions on new reproductive technologies and the legacy of IVF offer to us today?

Haraway shares a feminist kinship with Firestone in her attempt to imagine a technologically-assisted reproductive future as both liberatory and transgressive. She also shares with Firestone a radical distaste for the normative structures of kinship, parenting, and family—taking her inspiration from feminist writers such as Joanna Russ, whose gender-free worlds precisely enact many of Firestone's prescriptions. Both theorists belong to a socialist-inspired tradition of progressive humanism laced with biofuturism, and yet one which, because of its feminism, does not translate easily into contemporary idioms of transhumanism, posthumanism, autopeoetic emergence, rhizomatic becoming, the new vitalism, or postmodern cybernetics. Significantly, both Haraway and Firestone share an abiding concern with women's labor, and in particular with women working within the sciences. As Firestone writes in The Dialectic of Sex.

The absence of women at all levels of scientific disciplines is so commonplace as to lead many (otherwise intelligent) people to attribute it to some deficiency (logic?) in women themselves. Or to women's own predilections for the emotional and the subjective over the practical and the rational. But the question cannot be so easily dismissed. It is true that women in science are in foreign territory—but how has this situation evolved? Why are there disciplines or branches of inquiry that demand only a "male" mind? Why would a woman, to qualify, have to develop an alien psychology? When and why was the female excluded from this type of mind? How and why has science come to be defined as, and restricted to, the 'objective'?[31]

In thinking about the cultural legacy of IVF from a feminist point of view we should continue to ask critical questions about the unregulated 'baby business' and its risks, as well as its global expansion and commercialisation as a highly stratified market in reproductive tissue and services.[32] Simultaneously, we should remain concerned about access to these technologies and the value systems that are perpetuated through them. We should add to this list an appreciation of the extent to which IVF, while reinforcing some gender, racial, and kinship norms, has subverted others, and contributed to the collapse of biological foundationalism.[33] We should not forget the life sciences are an increasingly feminised transnational workforce, and we should look for new and unexpected alliances here. If there is an as yet under-realised feminist movement within the sciences, this is something to which we might want to pay attention in our teaching, our reading, and our politics. Above all we need to be brave and think about our biological future in a transbiological age. If it can rightly be said that rethinking the biological is already one of feminisms most important contributions to contemporary thought, the time is ripe to stretch the envelope. But listen to me; I am starting to write another manifesto.

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Sarah Franklin - Podcast Description
Sarah Franklin delivers the keynote address at the 2009 Scholar and Feminist Conference. Increased demand for assisted reproductive technology (ART) and transnational adoption has been propelled by a number of factors, including the development of new technologies and changes in familial form - such as childrearing in second or third marriages; lesbian, gay, and transgendered families; and delays in childbearing and subsequent difficulties in conception - that make ART helpful. Other relevant factors include environmental changes that have negatively affected fertility levels, new levels of transnational migration and interaction that have fueled awareness of babies available for and in need of adoption, and concerns about genetic diseases and disabilities. Effectively, the various imperatives and the desires, both cultural and personal, that the use of ART fosters and responds to, have created a "baby business" that is largely unregulated and that raises a number of important social and ethical questions. Do these new technologies place women and children at risk? How should we respond ethically to the ability of these technologies to test for genetic illnesses? And how can we ensure that marginalized individuals, for example, people with disabilities, women of color, and low-income women, have equal access to these new technologies and adoption practices? And, similarly, how do we ensure that transnational surrogacy and adoption practices are not exploitative? These questions and many others on the global social, economic and political repercussions of these new forms of reproduction were the focus of this year's Scholar and Feminist Conference, "The Politics of Reproduction: New Technologies of Life," which took place on February 28, 2009 at Barnard College.

Endnotes

1. This article is a rewritten version of a keynote lecture given at the Scholar and Feminist conference in 2009. My thanks to the organizers of this wonderful event, and to both the editors and reviewers of The Scholar and Feminist Online for helpful advice, criticism, and feedback. Portions of this article are forthcoming in "Revisiting Reprotech: Shulamith Firestone and the Question of Technology" in Shulamith Firestone Revisited, Mandy Merck, ed. (London: Palgrave, 2010). [Return to text]

2. Compare, for example, the back-to-back feminist anthologies on NRTS published in the late 1980s: Patricia Spallone and Deborah Steinberg, eds., Made to Order: the Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (London: Pergamon, 1987) and Michelle Stanworth, ed., Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). [Return to text]

3. Influential publications by members of the FINRRAGE network include Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Renate Klein, Infertility: Women Speak Out About their Experiences of Reproductive Medicine (London: Pandora, 1989); Janice Raymond, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women's Freedom (New York: Harper, 1993); Robyn Rowland, Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technology (London: Octopus, 1992); Jocelyn Scutt, ed., The Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the Commercialisation of Motherhood (London: Merlin, 1990). [Return to text]

4. Mary O'Brien. The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge, 1981). [Return to text]

5. For a review of early feminist work on new reproductive technologies, see Sarah Franklin and Maureen McNeil, "Reproductive Futures: Recent Literature and Current Debates on Reproductive Technologies," Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 545-61. For a later analysis and overview see Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1996). [Return to text]

6. See, for example, the wide diversity of feminist positions represented in the founding anthology of the feminist debate over NRTS: Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein, and Shelley Minden, eds., Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood (London: Pandora, 1984). Similarly see the discrepancy between the "hard line" position advocated in the introduction and the somewhat less unequivocal positions advocated by the individual chapter authors represented in the 1988 FINRRAGE anthology edited by Deborah Steinberg and Pat Spallone in Made to Order: the Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress. [Return to text]

7. Naomi Pfeffer and Anne Woollett, The Experience of Infertility (London: Virago, 1983). [Return to text]

8. Christine Crowe, "Women Want It: In Vitro Fertilisation and Women's Motivations for Participation"WSIF 8 (1985): 547-52; Linda Williams, "Its Gonna Work for Me," PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1988; Lene Koch, "IVF—An Irrational Choice?," Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 3 (1990): 225-32; Sarah Franklin, "Deconstructing 'Desperateneness': The Social Construction of Infertility in Popular Media Representations," in The New Reproductive Technologies, M. McNeil, I. Varcoe, and S. Yearley, eds., (London: Macmillan, 1990): 200-229; Sarah Franklin, "Contested Conceptions: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception," PhD dissertation, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Study, University of Birmingham, 1992; Sarah Franklin, "Making Sense of Misconceptions: Anthropological Approaches to Unexplained Infertility," in Changing Human Reproduction: Social Science Perspectives, M. Stacey, ed. (London: Sage, 1990): 75-91. [Return to text]

9. Margarete Sandelowski, "Women's Experience of Infertility," Journal of Nursing Scholarship 1986; "Fault Lines: Infertility and Imperilled Sisterhood," Feminist Studies 16.1 (1990): 33-51; "Compelled to Try: the Never-Enough Quality of Reproductive Technology," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 5.1 (1991): 29-47; With Child In Mind: Studies of the Personal Encounter with Infertility (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). [Return to text]

10. See for example: Gay Becker, The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Sarah Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (London: Routledge, 1997); Judith Lorber, "Choice, Gift, or Patriarchal Bargain? Women's Consent to in vitro Fertilization in Male Infertility," Hypatia 4.3 (1989): 23-36; Marcia Inhorn, Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Charis Thompson Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Karen Throsby When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (London: Palgrave, 2004). [Return to text]

11. Linda Birke, Sue Himmelweit, and Gail Vines, Tomorrow's Child: Reproductive Technologies in the 90s (London: Virago, 1990). [Return to text]

12. See Barbara Katz Rothman, The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Changes the Experience of Motherhood (New York: Norton, 1986). [Return to text]

13. Rosalind Petchesky, "Reproductive Freedom: Beyond 'A Woman's Right to Choose'," Signs 5.4 (1980): 661-685. [Return to text]

14. For useful histories of the IVF technique, see: John D. Biggers, "In vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer in Historical Perspective," in In-vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer Alan Trounson and Carl Wood, eds. (London: Churchill Livingstone, 1999): 3-15); Jack Challoner, The Baby Makers: The History of Artificial Conception (London: Macmillan, 1999); Adele Clarke, Disciplining Reproduction: American Life Sciences and 'The Problems of Sex' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); R. G. Edwards, "The Bumpy Road to Human In Vitro Fertilization," Nature Medicine 7.10 (2001): 1091-1094; R.G. Edwards and P. Steptoe, A Matter of Life: The Story of a Medical Breakthrough (London: Hutchinson, 1980); S. Fishel and E.M. Symonds, eds., In Vitro Fertilisation: Past, Present, Future (Oxford: IRL Press, 1986); Ruth Henig, Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004); Naomi Pfeffer, The Stork and the Syringe: A Political History of Reproductive Medicine (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). [Return to text]

15. As the authors of one of the largest meta-reviews of the literature on IVF and birth defects, published in 2005, note: "Since it appears there is an increased risk of birth defects in infants born following ART treatment and we cannot yet identify the cause, it is now very important to collect detailed and accurate information about all treatments that couples have undergone and their underlying causes of infertility; and to be able to identify children born following ART procedures so they can be followed." Michelle Hansen, Carol Bower, Elizabeth Milne, Nicholas de Klerk and Jennifer J.Kurinczuk, "Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Risk of Birth Defects—A Systematic Review," Human Reproduction 20.2 (2005): 328-338. [Return to text]

16. Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). [Return to text]

17. Eco-futurist Stuart Brand uses the IVF analogy, for example, to lobby for greater acceptance of genetically modified foods. In an interview in the Financial Times in January 2010, he argues IVF is a key example of how an initially threatening technology can come to seem "just as good" as what it is replacing: "We've had 12 or 13 years of genetically engineered food in this country and it's been great. My prediction is that in a couple of years we'll see a soya bean oil that has Omega 3 fatty acids to cut down heart disease. Who would refuse that, any more than people refuse to take medicine?" In the long run, he insists, opposition will die out. "IVF is the big example. I remember when that was an abomination in the face of God's will. As soon as people met a few of the children, they realized that they were just as good as the 'regular' ones. My hope is that, unlike nuclear, which involves almost a theological shift, getting gradually used to genetic foods will be a non-issue." (Brand quoted in Honigman 2010). [Return to text]

18. Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Towards an Anthropology of Women, Rayna Reiter, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975): 157-210. [Return to text]

19. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1970). [Return to text]

20. Maria Mies, "'Why Do We Need All This?': A Call Against Genetic Engineering and Reproductive Technology," Women's Studies International Forum 8.6 (1985): 553-560. [Return to text]

21. Firestone, 181. [Return to text]

22. Firestone. [Return to text]

23. Firestone, 180. [Return to text]

24. Susan Squier, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994). [Return to text]

25. Squier. [Return to text]

26. Gena Corea, 323. [Return to text]

27. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-108. Interestingly, in an earlier version of her manifesto, submitted to Socialist Review in 1984 for their "Orwell Issue," Haraway discusses new reproductive and genetic technologies at length, arguing that IVF "is part of the infra-structure of any future genetic engineering, so it is worth looking at some of the political questions developing here to see if feminist practices might establish a foothold." See Haraway (PDF) 1984, 6. [Return to text]

28. Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture," Feminist Studies 1.2 (1972): 5-31. [Return to text]

29. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). [Return to text]

30. "Biology itself" is a revealing phrase. When Foucault refers to "life itself" he invokes a technology of representation—a means by which life could be given a newfound unity through a genealogical model of nature. Epistemologically this new unity of life gave birth to biology, the first discipline of the modern life sciences, which, as Foucault reminded readers of The Order of Things in 1966, did not exist until the late 19th century. [Return to text]

31. Firestone. [Return to text]

32. Debora Spar, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). [Return to text]

33. For a discussion of feminist perspectives on the biological see: Sarah Franklin, "Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies," in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 302-22. See also: Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey, Global Nature, Global Culture (London: Sage, 2002). [Return to text]

References

Arditti, Rita, Renate Duelli Klein and Shelley Minden, eds. (1984) Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? (London: Pandora).

Becker, Gay (2000) The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Biggers JD (1984) "In vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer in Historical Perspective" in: In-vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer. Eds. Trounson A, Wood C, London: Churchill Livingstone, pp. 3-15.

Birke L., Himmelweit S., Vines G. (1990) Tomorrow's Child: Reproductive Technologies in the 90s (London: Virago).

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge).

Challoner, Jack (1999) The Baby Makers: The History of Artificial Conception (London: Macmillan).

Clarke, Adele E. (1998) Disciplining Reproduction: American Life Sciences and "The Problems of Sex" (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Corea, Gena (1985) The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row).

Crowe, Christine (1985) "Women Want It: In Vitro Fertilisation and Women's Motivations for Participation," Women's Studies International Forum 8: 547-52.

Cussins, Charis (1996) "Ontological Choreography: Agency Through Objectification in Infertility Clinics" Social Studies of Science 26:3: 575-610.

Edwards, R. G. (2001) "The Bumpy Road to Human In Vitro Fertilization" Nature Medicine 7:10: 1091-1094.

Edwards R. G., Steptoe P. (1980) A Matter of Life: The Story of a Medical Breakthrough (London: Hutchinson).

Farquhar, Dion (1996) The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge).

Firestone, Shulamith (1970) The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam).

Fishel S., Symonds E. M. (1986) Eds. In Vitro Fertilisation: Past, Present, Future (Oxford: IRL Press).

Franklin, Sarah (1990) "Deconstructing 'Desperateneness': The Social Construction of Infertility in Popular Media Representations" in M. McNeil, I. Varcoe and S. Yearley, eds., The New Reproductive Technologies, (London: Macmillan, pp. 200-229).

Franklin, Sarah (1992) Contested Conceptions: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (PhD diss, CCCS Birmingham).

Franklin, Sarah (1992) "Making Sense of Misconceptions: Anthropological Approaches to Unexplained Infertility" in M. Stacey, ed., Changing Human Reproduction: Social Science Perspectives (London: Sage, pp. 75-91).

Franklin, Sarah (1997) Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (London: Routledge).

Franklin, Sarah and Maureen McNeil (1988) "Reproductive Futures: Recent Literature and Current Debates on Reproductive Technologies" Feminist Studies 14:3: 545-61.

Franklin, Sarah (2001) "Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies" in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 302-22).

Franklin, Sarah, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (2000) Global Nature, Global Culture (London: Sage).

Hansen, Michelle, Carol Bower, Elizabeth Milne, Nicholas de Klerk and Jennifer J.Kurinczuk (2005) "Assisted Reproductive Technologies and the Risk of Birth Defects—A Systematic Review" Human Reproduction 20(2): 328-338.

Haraway, Donna (1985) "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" Socialist Review 80: 65-108.

Henig, Robin M. (2004) Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution (Boston, Houghton Mifflin).

Inhorn, Marcia (1994) Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

Klein R. (1989) Infertility: Women Speak Out About their Experiences of Reproductive Medicine (London: Pandora).

Koch, Lene (1990) "IVF—An Irrational Choice?" Reproductive and Genetic Engineering 3: 225-32.

Mies, Maria (1985) "'Why Do We Need All This?': A Call Against Genetic Engineering and Reproductive Technology" Women's Studies International Forum 8:6: 553-560.

O'Brien, Mary (1981) The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge Kegan & Paul).

Ortner, Sherry (1972) "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture" Feminist Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 5-31.

Pfeffer N. (1993) The Stork and the Syringe: A Political History of Reproductive Medicine (Cambridge: Polity).

Raymond, Janice (1993) Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women's Freedom (New York: Harper San Francisco).

Rothman, Barbara Katz (1986) The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Changes the Experience of Motherhood (New York: Norton).

Rowland, Robyn (1992) Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technology (London: Octopus).

Rubin, Gayle (1975) "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" in Rayna Reiter, ed., Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, pp.157-210).

Sandelowski, Margarete (1986) "Women's Experience of Infertility" Journal of Nursing Scholarship.

Sandelowski, Margarete (1990) "Fault Lines: Infertility and Imperilled Sisterhood" Feminist Studies 16:1: 33-51.

Sandelowski, Margarete (1991) "Compelled to Try: The Never-Enough Quality of Reproductive Technology" Medical Anthropology Quarterly 5:1: 29-47.

Sandelowski, Margarete (1993) With Child In Mind: Studies of the Personal Encounter With Infertility (Philadephia: U Penn Press).

Scutt, Jocelyn, ed. (1990) The Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the Commercialisation of Motherhood (London: Merlin).

Spallone, Patricia and Steinberg, Deborah Lynn (1987) Eds. Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (London: Pergamon).

Spar, Debora (2006) The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press).

Squier, Susan M. (1994) Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

Stanworth, Michelle (1987) Ed. Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine (Cambridge: Polity).

Strathern, Marilyn (1992) Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Thompson, Charis (2005) Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Throsby, Karen (2004) When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (London: Palgrave).