Tech’s Masculine Mystique: Reproductive Technologies (Part 2)

October 16, 2023

Author addresses the question of whether reproductive technology liberates women in a way making it possible to make one’s known and informed choice?

The following is a book review of the “Polity Reader in Gender Studies” (Chapter 20), authored by Michelle Stanworth. Through this book review, Important claims have been made with respect to the role of women in STEM. We hope we engage you through the very end, only to realise that mere statistics about lesser women in STEM fields don’t do justice to the gendered complexities this field encompasses.

The creation of reproductive technologies acted as a spur to public debate about the implications of research on embryos, in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, and the whole range of technologies concerned with human reproduction.

The scope of reproductive technologies examined in this chapter – from techniques for the medical ‘management’ of childbirth to genetic engineering – is such that few women in the Western world, and smaller and smaller numbers in the third world, escape their influence. What then is their impact: on the process of reproduction, on family life and particularly on women?

Does it liberate them or enforce more control over them?

This chapter explores the problem of infertility which is used to validate reproductive technologies; the way assumptions about biological parenthood continue to structure the arguments for and against; the impact of the medicalisation of childbirth; the way debates are embedded in changing conceptions of parental rights, maternal rights and the social definition of motherhood itself; the problems of providing adequate health care for women; and, above all, the urgency with which these issues raise problems about the accountability of science.

She explained the four groups in which technology has intervened in human reproduction.

The first and most familiar group includes those concerned with fertility control which involves abortion, sterilisation, and contraceptives, especially hormone-suppressing contraceptive drugs.
The second group of reproductive technologies is concerned with the management of labour and childbirth. Childbirth and the care of child and mother changed from home-based activity to an activity defined by the province of medical professionals.
The third one of the growth areas in reproductive technology is concerned with improving the health and genetic characteristics of foetuses and of newborns.
Fourth is directed towards the promotion of pregnancy through techniques for overcoming or bypassing infertility through artificial insemination, fertility drugs, test-tube baby, and surrogacy.

Women themselves as consumers of services concerned with reproductive care, have to be sure of demanded techniques that would help them to control their fertility, their pregnancies, their experience of birth, and the health of their children. Yet it is clear that there is no simple cause-and-effect relationship between demands made by women and the supply of reproductive technologies. It is clear that the demand of those who can afford to pay is likely to be catered to far more assiduously than the demands of those with small resources.

Why the demands of women for technologies to aid in reproductive care are insufficient to explain the technologies currently on offer?

What women ‘demand’ as consumers depend on the options available to them. Undoubtedly, the demand amongst heterosexual women who wished to avoid pregnancy for a 100 per cent reliable contraceptive technique that carried no risks to health or quality of life would be overwhelming; but in real life, women have to divide their ‘demands’ more or less grudgingly between a range of less-than-satisfactory options.

Even our notions of what ‘satisfactory’ would be are shaped partly by our knowledge of existing or potential alternatives. She is trying to point out how even demand and what we are allowed to be satisfied with is shaped and constructed according to the options provided by these technologies, which command over every decision.

The Role Of An Obstetrician & Gynaecologist

It is obstetricians and Gynaecologists who decide which reproductive technology might be beneficial for women and infants, establishing that they ‘know more’ about pregnancy and about women’s bodies than women do themselves.

When the majority of the profession is male, it is perhaps not surprising that medical practitioners have been attracted to techniques that enable them to brush aside a woman's own felt experience of menstruation, pregnancy and birth.

The question needed to be asked is- Have reproductive technologies given women more control over motherhood?

The view that reproductive technologies have given women control over motherhood is problematic and questionable at various levels and here’s how.

This view doesn’t take into account the impact of changing social definitions of motherhood. Mothering no only involves the physical and emotional care for children but also psychological and intellectual development. So, reproductive technologies have reduced motherhood to just breastfeeding and care of children.
Reproductive decisions continue to be constrained by the shortcomings of existing means of fertility control having a range of distressing side-effects. And these contraceptives were used as instruments of women’s liberation. Michelle claims that failure to develop safer and more acceptable means of birth control is not just a technical problem but reflects the low priority given to women’s health and the tendency to disregard issues that women think are important.
The way that access to means of fertility control is managed indicates how women’s options regarding childbearing are linked to their location in social structure. It depends on their ability to pay, the infections during pregnancy were mainly seen as a problem for black women and women on low incomes.
The technical possibility of fertility control coexists with a powerful ideology of motherhood - the belief that motherhood is the natural, desired and ultimate goal of all 'normal' women, and that women who deny their 'maternal instincts' are selfish, peculiar or disturbed. Patrick Steptoe, the obstetrician who is credited with 'creating' the first test-tube baby, declared: 'It is a fact that there is a biological drive to reproduce. Women who deny this drive, show disturbances in other ways.’
Technologies for 'managing' pregnancy and childbirth are often embedded in a medical frame of reference that defines pregnant women as 'patients', pregnancy as an illness and successful childbearing in terms that de-emphasise the social and emotional dimensions. The process of pregnancy and childbirth has come under the control of medical professionals, the majority of whom are men, and many women are left with a sense of being mere onlookers in the important process of giving birth.

The idea of maternal instinct is sometimes used to override women’s expressed wishes with regard to childbearing, discouraging young married women from sterilisation or abortion, for example, while denying single women the chance to have a child. In other words, a belief in maternal instinct coexists with obstacles to autonomous motherhood – obstacles, that is, to motherhood for women who are not in a stable relationship with a man. According to ideologies of motherhood, all women want children; but single women, lesbian women (and disabled women) are often expected to forgo mothering ‘in the interest of the child’.

Author addresses the question of whether reproductive technology liberates women in a way making it possible to make one’s known and informed choice?

Medical and scientific advances in the sphere of reproduction so often hailed as the liberators of twentieth-century women have, in fact, been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they have offered women a greater technical possibility to decide if, when and under what conditions to have children; on the other, the domination of so much reproductive technology by the medical profession and by the state has enabled others to have an even greater capacity to exert control over women’s lives. Moreover, the ‘technical possibility’ of choosing an oral contraceptive or in vitro fertilisation is only a small aspect of reproductive freedom. For some women, motherhood remains their only chance of creativity, while economic and social circumstances compel others to relinquish motherhood altogether.

Finally, Author also gives a powerful theoretical approach which sees techniques as means for men to wrest not only control over women but on the process of reproduction itself. Men’s alienation from reproduction that is men’s sense of disconnection from their seed during the process of conception, pregnancy and birth, has underpinned through the ages a relentless male desire to master nature, and to construct social institutions and cultural patterns that will not only subdue the waywardness of women but also give men an illusion of procreative continuity and power.

There are two broad categories in which we wish to present our own interjections towards this chapter.

On Reproductive Control - The author highlights, at multiple stages, that many of the groups more directly responsible for promoting reproductive technologies have an agenda in which women’s demands only play a small role. In this, they refer to the medical professionals who are biassed towards funding, the entrepreneurs responsible for ‘high-tech’ medicine who are biassed towards innovation over what is comfortable for women and especially, above all, family structures whose very continued existence is crucial for the continuance of the patriarchal setup to which they belong.

Our first contestation to this idea comes from the fact that we think a broader distinction needs to be drawn between the forces behind reproductive control, and the ones behind these technologies. Without taking away from the author’s investigative endeavour into the latter, consider how these same technologies have come to make a woman’s life more than just reproduction. Women of the working classes, owing to financial restraint, have been going back to work after giving birth for centuries, especially in India where it’s not uncommon to see women continuing to take up household chores well into their second and third trimesters. These technologies just make it so that they can actually survive that labour, or not have to go through that process themselves.

The author might respond at this point by mentioning the normative associations that label pregnancy as a diagnosis, and the cold lens through which medicine leaves women as mere onlookers in the process of giving birth. Our interjection to that firstly comes from women’s own experiences of giving birth – if we pay attention to their descriptions – and secondly, on the idea of this apparent manipulation of the medical practitioners to gain unprecedented control over motherhood itself.

In a series of interviews taken in Gonabad City, there was a very common sentiment expressed about women who felt significantly more empowered from that experience. We would be a little more careful in arguing that medical technology has the capacity to completely take over motherhood especially given the amount of labour that as of yet we cannot replace completely by this technology. At the same time, we recognise that the same study also mentions of “Fear of pelvic examinations and discomfort resulting from it as one of the most bitter and hard experiences in giving birth.”

Many concerns remain about equality of access, the health risks and unpleasant side effects of some forms of contraception, and the use of sterilisation and contraception by injection on women in underdeveloped countries. One international feminist group who strongly oppose technologies like IVF are the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (or FINRRAGE). For this group of writers and campaigners, the science at the basis of technologies of conception could ultimately lead to men removing the ‘last woman-centred process’ from women’s control.

To respond to that, consider the next interjection.

In 2011, Sandra Tsing Loh wrote “The Bitch Is Back” a scathingly smart and funny piece for the Atlantic in which, among other things, she distilled the information from “The Wisdom of Menopause” into the observation that the real “change” was a woman’s period of fertility. The “craziness” long associated with menopause was in fact a return to sanity. Could we extend a similar treatment to a world where women are completely removed from the reproductive process?

The absence of the reproductive process as a biological determinant that’s keeping women down, that’s upholding the wage gap is the absolute feminist utopia that a radical from the ranks of Shulamith Firestone, Ruth Bleier (1984) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (1985/1992) would have imagined.

However, interestingly, we as aspiring feminists and women living in times of their very advent have a much more critical onlook towards them. And, while we are celebrating this advent, it’s worthy investigating this change further.

Following this attempt to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, We wish to throw some light on the point at which we’re living in the context of Roe V. Wade, and the worsening condition of access to family planning centres in the West. Subsequently, we need to be careful about asking for regulation-free access to reproductive control in South Asia. The debate around abortion takes a nuance in brown households owing to a history of its misuse – with the rise of female foeticide post-gender assignment in the late 21st century. Perhaps it is in this conversation that one can better implement the authors’ criticism of free-for-all medical technology.

Did the pictures sprinkled around this article of women in STEM as magazine covers, art inspiration being celebrated as heroines, and taking strides for all woman-kind make you a bit uncomfortable? Do these caricatures serve the purpose of inspiring young girls, or instead separate them into an impossible category of genius, not meant to be achieved by the average young person?