New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment

Feminist and Material Resolutions

Carla Lam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367599676
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317088059
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

With attention to the ways in which new reproductive technologies facilitate the gradual disembodiment of reproduction, this book reveals the paradox of women's reproductive experience in patriarchal cultures as being both, and often simultaneously, empowering and disempowering. A rich exploration of birth appropriation in the West, New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment investigates the assimilation of women's embodied power into patriarchal systems of symbolism, culture and politics through the inversion of women's and men's reproductive roles. Contending that new reproductive technologies represent another world historical moment, both in their forging of novel social relations and material processes of reproduction, and their manner of disembodying women in unprecedented ways - a disembodiment evident in recent visual and literary, popular and academic texts - this volume locates the roots of this disembodiment in western political discourse. A call to feminist political theory to re-remember the material dimensions of bodies and their philosophical significance, New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment will appeal to scholars of sociology, gender studies, political and social theory and the study of science, technology and health.

PART I
Reproduction in the Twenty-first Century

Chapter 1
New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment

In this chapter I shall investigate a third moment of ‘world historically’ significant change in reproductive process as evident in the distinctions between the mass contraceptive technology of Mary O’Brien’s era and the conceptive and other new reproductive technology of mine. The latter is part of the globalization of capitalism evident in the biotechnology revolution and includes industrialized agriculture as well as the commercialization of medicine. I build upon the work of this long-time midwife turned political theorist as an interpretive framework for those conceptive technologies that enable new choices for women and profoundly alter the material and normative milieu in which they might exercise them.

In theorizing a third moment of change in reproductive praxis, I retain the designation ‘world historical’ significance in the senses of a change in the dialectical social, ideational, and material aspects of reproduction; and of a shift in the human to nature relationship which creates a critical distance from and new perspective on reproduction, especially for women. New reproductive technology is a ‘new’ moment because it alters, once again, the material experience of reproductive process by estranging the reproducer from nature because it involves disembodiment of reproductive process. Conceptive reproductive technologies (physically and conceptually) take human reproduction outside women’s bodies. While contraceptive technologies let women choose not to bear children, at least in ideal circumstances and for some women, new reproductive technologies (NRT) take this for granted and add new choices for women; whether to have children, when and how to have those children; and increasingly what kind of children to have. NRTs are a new form of rationalization of reproductive process that is increasingly interventionist in bodily processes and alters our understandings of reproduction.

NRT, using O’Brien’s concept, involves a further ‘transformation in human consciousness of human relations with the natural world’.¹ Arguably since the discovery of paternity, but certainly since Aristotle, men have understood themselves to be apart from and above nature, whereas women have been considered close to nature.² But with NRTs, women have begun to alienate themselves from nature, and to relate to it more like men, who often understand themselves as distinct from, if not in opposition to, it. This realignment radically alters women’s material experiences of reproductive process and consciousnesses such that women may be ‘liberated’ by it; at the same time, they may become more deeply estranged and alienated from reproduction. Consider, for example, the recent consideration in Ontario, Canada to make a C-section an elective procedure as opposed to a strictly medically necessary one.³ Such practices are emblematic of the experience of reproduction as increasingly technological; the central metaphor for women’s reproductive bodies in such a time is one of ‘separation’ leading Arditti to conclude, ‘We are now at the point where biological motherhood is in question and in need of explicit definition, just like fatherhood used to be’.⁴

Significantly, with conceptive technology women can both separate sex from reproduction and reproduce without intercourse, which has long been possible for men as sperm donors.⁵ For example, women can donate their eggs in the same way, giving rise to legal situations that disadvantage and devalue the pregnant ‘surrogate’ mother’s contribution, denying her parental rights, which accrue to the ‘real’ parents who are the gamete donors. Equally problematic, a recent New Jersey ruling collapsed distinctions between traditional (genetic) and gestational surrogacy, adopting what some would call paternalistic moral tones that pre-empt women’s choices, including to act as surrogate mothers.⁶

Conceptive technology provides the conditions for a heightened displacement of reproduction from women, who in unmediated procreation have a dominant role, to other interests including states, the medical industrial complex, and techno-science. As O’Brien understood, the commodification of women is a central feature of this displacement. Ingrid Makus explains that this is why many feminists endorse old reproductive technologies (especially abortion) but oppose NRTs. The contradiction presented by NRTs for feminists is that they simultaneously reinforce the separation between sex and reproduction which many feminists believe provides women greater control over their bodies, yet are a part of another moment that threatens their reproductive autonomy. ‘[T]he new reproductive technologies, by introducing new players into the game … threaten to diffuse women’s first access to the “new life”, dispersing it among physicians and medical researchers’.⁷

Furthermore, the disembodiment of NRTs and commodification of women’s bodies heighten present inequalities between women, such as economically disadvantaged minority women who provide various services to usually Caucasian middle class women, who can afford them. A clear global example of this ethically fraught scenario is evident in ‘reproductive tourism’, which offers prospective parents the ability to pay for reproductive services in countries where the economic costs are lower than their home country. For example, in Mumbai, India, prospective parents from Britain or the US can find a surrogate mother for about a third of the cost at home. On the other hand, the surrogate’s fee of about $7,500 is more than they would otherwise make in fifteen years.⁸

The social relations of reproduction that can mediate the newest forms of alienation engendered in NRTs have not yet emerged, although one response is clear in many women’s and feminists’ flight from the body. The new social relations of reproduction and the female and male reproductive consciousnesses to accompany the material experiences of the new reproductive technology will reflect its paradoxical nature: conceptive technology offers a greater degree of technological control over the processes of reproduction which can be perceived as a threat to the embodied integrity of women who bear children, and also as potential liberation of women from the toils of traditionally conceived heteronormative sexuality and reproduction including traditional reproductive ages. The use of NRT will, undoubtedly, liberate some women who would otherwise be unable to reproduce biologically. I wish, however, to problematize the material transformation of reproductive praxis within a socio-historical context of patriarchal hegemony, especially regarding the domination of a problematic androcentric liberal ‘equality’ discourse and legal framework.

Technology as Theory (or ‘a way of seeing’)

Technology fundamentally affects how we understand our world and our place within it. As Jacques Ellul says, ‘when technique enters into every area of life … it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance. It is no longer face to face with man but is integrated with him, and it progressively absorbs him’.⁹ Most importantly, what we consider ‘natural’ changes.¹⁰ We become less capable of critical reflection because the technologies become a fundamental part of our lives and consciousness. When Marshall McLuhan stated that ‘the medium is the message’¹¹ he captured how the significance of technological change was not in a particular technology’s ‘apparent content’ for example ‘(the transportation that a car provides or the news program that the television supplies) but in the systemic changes that they catalyze’.¹² Consequently, the more meaningful questions raised by technology have to do with the constitution of the self and his or her environment: ‘How does it alter our experience of everyday life? How does it change our concepts of self, community, politics, nature, time, distance?’¹³

NRTs refer to any of the ‘conditions, technologies, procedures and practices’ that contribute to the creation, gestation, and birthing of (human) life outside the female body.¹⁴ ‘New’ reproductive technologies are distinguished from ‘old’ reproductive technologies in terms of their focus on the (technologically-mediated) creation of new life (conception, gestation, and birth) rather than intervention in its (embodied) creation through contraception and abortion. At times I use ‘conceptive technology’ interchangeably with NRTs since biotech’s relocation of conception is what is new about NRTs, though they are referred to differently in various legal or policy contexts, for example, ‘assisted reproductive technologies’, (in Canada) and ‘human assisted reproductive technologies’ (in New Zealand).

There are many grey areas when comparing disparate technologies under the banner of ‘disembodiment’ which can be clarified by understanding the many dimensions of disembodiment. The technologies I include under the rubric ‘NRTs’ vary widely in terms of their level of technological intervention and routine use. For instance, the process of egg extraction for IVF is quite different from ultrasound imaging. However, it is clear that ultrasound (especially the newer 3 and 4D varieties) is part of conceptual disembodiment because it enables a foetocentric worldview that is separate from the pregnant woman’s and has coincided with a rise in perception of a foetus/embryo as a rights-bearing individual, something that Valerie Hartouni has termed ‘the visual discourse of foetal autonomy’.¹⁵

While there are good reasons to evaluate reproductive technologies separately I address them thematically. I recognize that different reproductive technologies involve ‘separate emotional and physical dilemmas’, have different ‘social meaning’, and even within a particular category (i.e. contraceptive or conceptive technology) vary widely in terms of the level of intervention in the body (for example diaphragm versus tubal litigation); I also see the need for comprehensive frameworks for assessment, especially regarding NRTs and birth appropriation.¹⁶

(Dis) embodiment

The term ‘embodiment’ conveys the boundaries of human corporeality that are the condition of possibility for one’s relative autonomy and community. I draw from Lisa Mitchell’s useful discussion of ‘embodied perception’ where she distinguishes between the ‘body … defined as “a biological, material entity”’, and ‘embodiment as “the existential condition of possibility for culture and self”’.¹⁷ Embodiment also signifies the interplay of biological and social forces in construction of gendered selfhood, identity, and agency. To be an embodied self, or subject, acknowledges the rootedness of subjective experience in bodies that are lived out materially, but never wholly determined by their biological features. This suggests that embodiment involves a perceived/perceiving self-inseparable from its body in any complete sense (out of body experiences and plastic surgery aside), and the possibility of making autonomous decisions about what happens to that body, as far as is possible.

While the body implies at least partial autonomy of a self-legislating and self-governing being, embodiment means that each is discursively linked to others (collectively and individually). Subjectivity arises in awareness of this separation and connectedness, but it also defies Cartesian dualism for there is no true separation between one’s body and one’s self. Mitchell notes that ‘A central assumption of this approach is that “our bodies are not objects to us … [rather] they are an integral part of the perceiving subject”’.¹⁸ This perception affects self and other in an inter-constitutive fashion. While a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Disembodiment
• PART I: REPRODUCTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
• PART II: FEMINISM AND NEW REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
• PART III: MATERIAL RESOLUTIONS
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index