Embryos, Ethics, and Women's Rights

Exploring the New Reproductive Technologies

Elaine Baruch, Amadeo F D'Adamo, Joni Seager

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317714255
• Subtopic: Medical Law
• Index: Social Sciences

Will procreation become just another commodity in the marketplace with "designer" sperm, ova, and embryos offered for sale? Will the attention and monies focused on the new reproductive technologies take away resources from infertility prevention, prenatal care, and adoption? If states move to regulate such practices, will this encourage widespread governmental interference in reproductive choice? How will society look at the biologically unique children who are the products of genetic manipulation--and more importantly, how will these children view themselves?This controversial book explores the answers to these questions that are frequently being asked as the battles over reproductive technologies and freedoms become more heated and touch more people's lives. Embryos, Ethics, and Women's Rights examines both the clinical and personal perspectives of reproductive technologies. Experts explain and debate the growing number of procreative possibilities--in vitro fertilization, genetic manipulation of embryos, embryo transfer, surrogacy, prenatal screening, and the fetus as patient. Some of the leading authorities in the field, including John Robertson, Ruth Hubbard, and Gena Corea, address the ethical, legal, religious, social, and psychological concerns that are inherent in the issues.Essential reading for every person concerned with control over basic issues of human destiny, Embryos, Ethics, and Women's Rights provides unique and comprehensive coverage on the subject of technologically controlled childbearing and particularly its effects on mothers and their unborn children.

Women and Reproductive Technologies: A Partially Annotated Bibliography

Donna M. Cirasole
Joni Seager

SUMMARY. This bibliography is a resource for further information about Women and Reproductive Technologies. The references are categorized as General Information, Law and Policy Considerations, and Information about Specific Technologies. It also lists periodicals, organizations, and other bibliographies relating to this subject and is current through March 1986.

Preface

Amniocentesis, in vitro fertilization, eugenics, surrogate motherhood, abortion — each of these processes, techniques, ideas, is part of the phenomenon of reproductive technology. Reproductive technologies have wide-ranging implications for women, as well as for family life and society as a whole. This bibliography lists some of the available literature on the facts and effects of such technologies. Many of the selections examine their ethical, political, and legal ramifications. Several related topics, such as contraception and family planning, genetic screening, and environmental reproductive hazards, have not been discussed here.

The first part of this bibliography deals with general issues relating to reproductive technology. Part II includes law and policy considerations. It focuses on the legal rights of the mother and of the fetus. Other political and legal issues are also discussed.

Part III distinguishes the individual techniques. The section on fetal testing includes information about amniocentesis and other techniques. It also deals with the use of fetal testing for abortion decisions. Abortion is discussed in general and in terms of its uses for sex preselection and in cases of disability.

Sex preselection is also a possible consequence of the techniques described in the next section: Technologies Affecting Conception. In this section, information about the techniques of in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination is presented. The process of surrogate motherhood is also addressed.

The last section in Part III includes information about sterilization and contraception. A subsection on Depo-Provera, a long-acting hormonal contraceptive, is included.¹

Part IV lists additional resources. These are grouped as periodicals, organizations, and bibliographies.

Many people assisted in the preparation of this bibliography. I would especially like to thank Dr. Ruth Perry and Cynthia Brown of the MIT Program in Women's Studies and Nachama Wilker and the other members of the Women and Reproductive Technologies group of the Committee for Responsible Genetics in Boston for their assistance.

I. General Information

A. Books

Arditti, Rita, Renate Duelli Klein and Shelley Minden, eds. TestTube Women: What Future for Motherhood? Boston: Pandora Press, 1984.

A collection of essays discussing the effects of reproductive technology: Are they liberating or oppressive? Consideration of outside controls over women, including technological interference, legal regulations, and social pressures.

Bennett, Neil G., ed. Sex Selection of Children. New York: Academic Press, 1981.

A comprehensive ethical and sociological analysis of the possible effects of sex selection of children. Consideration of the effects on parents, children, developed and developing countries, etc.

See especially chapter 3, "Sex Selection through Amniocentesis and Selective Abortion" and chapter 5, "Decision Making and Sex Selection with Biased Technologies."

Bernard, Jessie. The Future of Motherhood. New York: The Dial Press, 1974.

See especially chapters 13 and 14 on "Medical, Pharmacological, and Psychological Technologies" and "The Politics of Motherhood."

Blank, Robert. The Political Implications of Human Genetic Technology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981.

Boston Women's Health Book Collective. The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, 3rd edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

See Chapter 17: "New Reproductive Technologies." Ruth Hubbard, with Wendy Sanford.

Summaries of donor insemination, surrogate motherhood, in vitro fertilization (IVF), sex preselection, and future possibilities (artificial parthenogenesis, egg fusion, and cloning). Discussion of issues of invasiveness and manipulation, sexual and economic discrimination, long-range goals, society's valuation of fertility, and who will profit.

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

Definition of Foreground as the surface reality — in this case, technology itself — and Background as the underlying truths. Consideration of the effects of social and political context on women's choices: our motivation, society's valuation and exploitation of women, men as the dominant class.

Daly, Mary. GYN/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

See chapter 7 on "American Gynecology: Gynocide by the Holy Ghosts of Medicine and Therapy."

Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. New York: Perigee Books, 1983.

See chapter 5 on "The Coming Gynocide," in which the author discusses the history and future of the control of women's rights and abilities, with an emphasis on the spirituality of women. She uses the analogies of a brothel model and a farming model.

Edwards, Margot and Mary Waldorf. Reclaiming Birth: History and Heroines of American Childbirth Reform. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984.

See especially Chapter 4: "The Saga of Obstetrical Technology."

Historical and political discussion of electronic fetal monitoring (EFM), OB drugs, cesarean sections, ultrasound, episiotomies, etc.

Gordon, Linda. Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman, 1976.

An historical and political survey of birth control and abortion and some of their effects on American women.

Hastings Center Report, Journal of the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, 360 Broadway, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706.

Holmes, Helen B., Betty B. Hoskins and Michael Gross, eds. Birth Control and Controlling Birth: Women-Centered Perspectives. New Jersey: Humana Press, 1980.

From the Conference on Ethical Issues in Reproductive Technology: Analysis by Women (EIRTAW), June 1979, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.

Workshop to identify ethical issues, determine which values have been considered, discover alternative values, and recommend new approaches for determining policy. First of two volumes.

See especially Helen Holmes' introduction: "Reproductive Technologies: The Birth of a Woman-Centered Analysis" and the section on "Childbirth Technologies."

Holmes, Helen B., Betty B. Hoskins and Michael Gross, eds. The Custom-Made Child: Women-Centered Perspectives. New Jersey: Humana Press, 1981.

Second volume from the EIRTAW conference.

See especially "Prenatal Diagnosis" by Mary G. Ampola, "Technical Aspects of Sex Preselection" by Roberta Steinbacher, and the section on "Manipulative Reproductive Technologies."

Hubbard, Ruth, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried, eds. Biological Woman — The Convenient Myth: A Collection of Feminist Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1982.

See chapter by Jeanne M. Stellman and Mary Sue Henifin on employment discrimination and reproductive hazards in the workplace, chapter by Helen Rodriguez-Trias on sterilization abuse, and the bibliography.

Lappe, Marc. Broken Code, The Exploitation of DNA. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1984.

See section entitled, "Recombinant DNA: Prospects for Health."

Lappe, Marc. Genetic Politics: The Limits of Biological Control. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Women's Health and the New Reproductive Technologies
• Reproductive Technologies: The Two Sides of the Glass Jar
• In Vitro Fertilization, GIFT and Related Technologies—Hope in a Test Tube
• Fetal Imaging and Fetal Monitoring: Finding the Ethical Issues
• Power, Certainty, and the Fear of Death
• A Short Answer to "Who Decides?"
• What the King Can Not See
• Reproductive Technology and the Commodification of Life
• Moral Pioneers: Women, Men and Fetuses on a Frontier of Reproductive Technology
• In Vitro Fertilization and Gender Politics
• A Womb of His Own
• Psychological Effects of the New Reproductive Technologies
• Brave New Baby in the Brave New World
• In Vitro Fertilization: Ethical Issues
• Moral Reflections on the New Technologies: A Catholic Analysis
• Procreative Liberty, Embryos, and Collaborative Reproduction: A Legal Perspective
• Problems in Commercialized Surrogate Mothering
• Reproductive Technologies and the Bottom Line
• Technology, Power and the State
• Prenatal Screening and Discriminatory Attitudes About Disability
• Eugenics: New Tools, Old Ideas
• Women and Reproductive Technologies: A Partially Annotated Bibliography