Whose Bodies? Which Selves? Appeals to Embodiment in Assessments of Reproductive Technology

Abstract

This passage from Gena Corea’s book, The Mother Machine typifies the reaction of one important strand of feminist thought to the new technologies of reproduction and birth. It is fairly representative, for example, of the grave suspicion with which feminists associated with FINRRAGE (Feminists International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) have greeted such possibilities as in vitro fertilization, embryo flushing and transfer, and gene therapy. According to this general line of thinking, the new reproductive technologies should be resisted because they concentrate power in the hands of a predominantly male and patriarchal medical establishment by disembodying procreation. By separating procreation from women’s bodies, reproductive technology simultaneously reduces women to bodies, or body parts, and strips women of one traditional source of power, namely, the power to procreate. Hence Corea’s warning. Previously men were denied direct control over the process of procreation; they might give birth symbolically or intervene medically in this process, but these were only simulacra of control. The existence of in vitro fertilization, however, and the distinct possibility of in vitro gestation turn resemblance into reality. Laboratory conception and gestation are a threat to women.

Now men are far beyond the stage at which they expressed their envy of women’s procreative power through couvade, transvestism, subincision. They are beyond merely giving spiritual birth in their baptismal-font wombs, beyond giving physical birth with their electronic fetal monitors, their forceps, their knives.

Now they have laboratories ([3], p. 314).