Feminist Assessments of New Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

While objections to IVF in the first stage of the debate came mostly from the religious side, between 1984 and 1987 particularly feminist voices galvanized the discussion. Yet feminist assessments of new reproductive technologies predate the actual birth of the first so-called test-tube baby. Two important feminist predictions on the consequences of artificial reproduction for women were published in the 1970s: Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) and Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time (1975). Both Firestone and Piercy envisioned reproductive technologies to be liberating instruments, which could help women achieve a non-sexist society. Their views have had substantial impact on feminist contributions to the debate on new reproductive technologies in the 1980s.

A regulated percentage of each household — say one-third — would be children. But whether, at first, genetic children created by couples within the household, or, at some future time, children were produced artificially or adopted, would not matter … [W]e must be aware that as long as we use natural childbirth methods the ‘household’ could never be a totally liberating social form. A mother who undergoes a nine month pregnancy is likely to feel that the product of all that pain and discomfort ‘belongs’ to her.

(Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex)

It was part of women’s long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding.

(Marge Piercy, Women on the Edge of Time)