Overcoming Motherhood

[Guest guest]

Overcoming Motherhood

"One would hope that, having had glimpses of the logical conclusion

of their principles, feminists would make a well-timed retreat from

their glorification of choice in reproductive matters. Such a retreat

is unlikely, however, for making it would require feminists finally

to concede that there is no such thing as "women's values" or the

sisterhood for which they have served as self-appointed spokeswomen.

Such a retreat would force feminists to confront the fact that some

women make ethically unsound choices not because they are victims of

male domination, but because they lack ethical moorings, and it would

require them to recognize that in a world of unfettered

individualism, women's choices will not lead to a feminist vision of

women's liberation."

 

By Christine Stolba

 

o invoke prometheus, the figure of Greek myth who was punished by

Zeus for stealing fire from Hephaestus and giving it to humans, has

become a popular warning against scientific hubris in our new age of

biotechnology and genetic engineering. But the second half of the

Promethean myth offers a further warning: Prometheus's defiant act

led Zeus to dispatch a woman, Pandora, to unleash her box of evils on

the human race — and thus eliminate the power differential that

access to fire briefly had given mankind.

 

Pandora's box of dark arts is an apt metaphor for human reproductive

technologies. Despite being hailed as important scientific advances

and having succeeded in allowing many infertile couples to have

children, the next generation of these technologies offers us a power

that could prove harmful to our understanding of what motherhood is.

This new generation of reproductive technologies allows us to control

not merely the timing and quantity of the children we bear, but their

quality as well. Techniques of human genetic engineering tempt us to

alter our genes not merely for therapy, but for enhancement. In this,

these technologies pose moral challenges that are fundamentally

different from any we have faced before.

 

Contemporary human reproductive technologies range from the now

widely accepted practice of in-vitro fertilization (ivf), where

physicians unite egg and sperm outside the woman's body and then

implant the fertilized egg into the womb, to sophisticated sex

selection techniques and preimplantation genetic diagnosis of disease

and disability in embryos. Today, for-profit clinics, such as

Conceptual Options in California, offer a cafeteria-like approach to

human reproduction with services such as ivf, sex selection

screening, and even "social surrogacy" arrangements where women who

prefer not to endure the physical challenges of pregnancy rent other

women's wombs. New techniques such as cytoplasmic cell transfer

threaten to upend our conceptions of genetic parenthood; the

procedure, which involves the introduction of cytoplasm from a donor

egg into another woman's egg to encourage fertilization, could result

in a child born of three genetic parents — the father, the mother,

and the cytoplasm donor — since trace amounts of genetic material

reside in the donor cytoplasm. Doctors in China recently performed

the first successful ovary and fallopian tube transplant, from one

sister to another, which will allow the transplant recipient to

conceive children — but from eggs that are genetically her sister's,

not her own.

 

The near future will bring uterus transplants and artificial wombs.

Scientists at Cornell University are perfecting the former, while

researchers at Juntendou University in Tokyo, who have already had

success keeping goat fetuses alive in artificial wombs for short

spans of time, predict the creation of a fully functional artificial

womb for human beings in just six years. Cloning technologies

eventually could fulfill even the most utopian of feminist yearnings:

procreation without men via parthenogenesis, something that excited

the passions of Simone de Beauvoir in 1953. "Perhaps in time," she

mused in The Second Sex, "the cooperation of the male will become

unnecessary in procreation — the answer, it would seem, to many a

woman's prayer."

 

De Beauvoir was correct to identify women's hopes as a powerful force

in modern challenges to old-fashioned procreation, but these hopes

also pose serious ethical challenges. Contemporary feminism's

valorization of "choice" in reproductive matters and its exaltation

of individualism — powerful arguments for access to contraceptives

and first-generation reproductive techniques — offer few ethical

moorings as we confront these fundamentally new technologies. In

fact, the extreme individualism of the feminist position is

encouraging women to take these technologies to their logical, if

morally dubious conclusion: a consumer-driven form of eugenics.

 

The primacy of choice

 

ur biotech era has exposed a serious contradiction in feminist

thinking: Feminists want women to maintain absolute control over

reproductive decisions, but thus far their arguments have rested on a

feeble hope that women will not choose to do detrimental things. They

have failed to construct a plausible and stable ethical basis upon

which to make morally sound decisions about human reproductive

technologies. The feminists' approach to gene therapy for the

purposes of enhancement, for example, is little different from their

stance on plastic surgery — we are told that it does not serve

women's best interests but are given no ethical guidance on the

elimination of these incorrect desires. What happens when women, as

avid consumers, exercise that control and use sperm sorting to give

birth only to sons, or as their justification for genetically

manipulating their children?

 

The triumph of individual choice as an unassailable right also

prevents us from engaging in important debates about the broader

social implications of reproduction and the technologies that promise

to change its meaning. Drawing the delicate line between genetic

therapy and enhancement is a difficult task, and quality of life a

malleable concept. Recently, a woman with a history of early-onset

Alzheimer's disease paid a fertility clinic to screen her ivf-created

embryos for the defective gene, discard the embryos that were found

to have it, and implant a "clean" embryo that did not carry the

genetic marker. Is this eugenics, preventive therapy, or simply the

neutral exercise of individual choice?

 

The desire to control reproduction and conquer biology was a central

part of the feminist-driven political and sexual revolutions of the

late twentieth century. In her 1970 manifesto, "The Dialectic of

Sex," radical feminist Shulamith Firestone wrote that the "first

demand" of a feminist social order would be "the freeing of women

from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means

available." In their push to populate classroom, courtroom, and

boardroom, feminists implicitly endorsed Firestone's goal, securing

the contraceptive and abortion rights they saw as crucial for women's

advancement in the public realm. Feminism insisted that women try to

overcome, or at least willfully ignore, biological realities.

 

By the late twentieth century, the feminist movement's effort to

liberate women from reproduction had produced unexpected results. A

majority of women routinely used birth control, accepted abortion as

a right, and viewed ivf and other first-generation reproductive

technologies as useful tools of last resort for the infertile. But

the women who embraced the feminist message about reproduction — the

daughters of the sexual revolution — eventually felt that message's

sting personally. They found themselves entering middle age with ripe

careers but declining fertility. Today they form a large portion of

the fertility industry's customers, spending tens of thousands of

dollars for a single chance to cheat time. The facts are stark:

According to a January 2002 report on aging and infertility in women,

published by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a

woman's fertility begins to decline in her late twenties and drops

precipitously around the age of 35. Although fertility experts

quibble over precise odds, there is a consensus that by the time a

woman is in her forties, her odds of having a child, even with some

form of intervention, are less than 10 percent. For these women,

reproduction is not the tyranny imagined by Firestone, but an

unfulfilled hope. A recent educational campaign launched by the

American Infertility Association and the American Society for

Reproductive Medicine is directed at the daughters of this feminist

generation; fertility specialists hope to combat the undue optimism

of women in their twenties and thirties about their ability to have

children as they get older.

 

As the controversy — and, in some quarters, consternation — that

greeted Sylvia Ann Hewlett's recent book, Creating a Life:

Professional Women and the Quest for Children, revealed, we are still

uncomfortable, as a society, with airing too many of these facts

about fertility. Hewlett, who gently rebukes women for assuming that

the fertility industry could extend their reproductive lives long

enough for them to make partner (and chastises the fertility industry

for insinuating that it could), nevertheless is herself wary of

trampling the principle of choice. Instead, in interviews with

childless women that speak poignantly to the intractability of

biology, Hewlett uncovers something called "creeping non-choice," a

condition treatable, in her view, with a strong dose of government

social policy and more "intentional" plotting by women of their

reproductive futures.

 

What Hewlett and others overlook is a different and more disturbing

facet of "choice," the one that inexorably pulls us toward

making "intentional" decisions about the kind of children we have.

The sentiment is already gaining the sanction of clinical

practitioners. A recent study conducted by University of

Massachusetts public health professor Dorothy Wertz and University of

Virginia bioethicist John Fletcher revealed that 62 percent of

American geneticists would agree to perform sex-selection tests on

fetuses (or refer them to specialists who would) for parents who

stated ahead of time their desire to have an abortion if the fetus

was the "wrong" sex. In the early 1970s, a similar study found that

only 1 percent of physicians and ethicists would do the same.

 

Feminist bioethics

 

f clinicians are less inclined to question the limits of individual

choice in these matters, our self-appointed ethical guides in the

field of bioethics should. In fact, the burgeoning field of bioethics

now supports a subdiscipline in feminist bioethics, with its own

organizations and methodological assumptions and with a keen interest

in reproductive technologies. Unfortunately, feminist bioethicists

remain wedded to a misguided view of science and medicine as

inherently biased against women, and they pursue a feminist worldview

that applauds "difference" but offers few limits on the excessive

individualism that is the logical conclusion of their emphasis on

choice in reproductive matters.

 

Although resting along various points of the ideological spectrum,

feminist bioethicists share certain core principles — most important,

a concern that human reproductive technologies are being developed in

the context of a society that has not yet granted women full

equality. The International Network on Feminist Approaches to

Bioethics, a consortium launched in 1992, is "committed to a non-

hierarchical model of organization" and takes as its goal the

development of "a more inclusive theory of bioethics encompassing the

standpoints and experiences of women and other marginalized social

groups." The group's mission statement also includes a vow to

deconstruct "presuppositions embedded in the dominant bioethical

discourse that privilege those already empowered."

 

In this, feminist bioethics has its roots in broader feminist

critiques of both science and ethics, two enterprises they view as

inherently masculine and biased. Critics such as Lynda Birke of the

University of Warwick and Sandra Harding of the University of

California, Los Angeles, have argued for a "feminist science" that

rejects objectivity in favor of intuition and seeks to supplant

Francis Bacon's metaphor of Mother Nature as a "common harlot" meant

to be tamed and molded by men with more inclusive practices. Their

critique of science has trickled down into popular culture through

narratives, such as Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, that attack the male

medical establishment for its treatment of pregnant women, and

through manuals such as the popular alternative feminist health book,

Our Bodies, Ourselves, which has been in print continuously since

1970.

 

The feminist critique of ethics is also intent on illuminating

women's subordination. As feminist bioethicist Rosemarie Tong of the

University of North Carolina notes, feminist ethicists "ask questions

about male domination and female subordination before they ask

questions about good and evil, care and justice, mothers and

children." Moreover, women's subordination "leads to women's

disempowerment morally and personally as well as politically,

economically, and socially." This twin focus on women's

disempowerment and the masculine bias of science serves an important

exculpatory purpose — as ethical escape hatches — in the field of

feminist bioethics.

 

The current reigning principle in bioethics is autonomy, which grants

to individuals the freedom to choose for themselves what they want to

do until they begin to infringe on the liberty of others or cause

serious harm. Feminist bioethicists promote something different; they

endorse the principle of "autokoenomy," from the Greek for self

(auto) and community (koinonia). As Tong notes, "unlike the

autonomous man who thinks that his self is entirely separable from

others . . . the autokoenomous woman realizes that she is

inextricably related to other selves." The implication is that

autokoenomy fosters a humility that is otherwise lacking in strict

autonomy, since it emphasizes a person's place in a particular

community, or an "epistemology of perspective."

 

In practice, autokoenomy appears to foster confusion, not ethical

guidance. As an ethical principle, it appears to allow nearly any

ethical choice, including eugenic choices, as long as the choice is

made in the service of gender equity. "It is to be hoped," Tong

writes, "that women will choose the characteristics of their fetuses

in ways that will break down gender inequity and the host of other

human oppressions to which it is related. In choosing for their

fetuses, women will be choosing for themselves." Laura Purdy, of the

University of Toronto, is another feminist bioethicist who approves

of genetic screening for the purpose of weeding out the unfit; she

declares "unjustifiable" the "rejection of so-called quality control

that uses genetic services to prevent the birth of babies at risk for

serious physical or mental illness or disability." Since women are

primary caregivers to children, Purdy reasons, their autonomous

interests are infringed upon when those children are burdened by

genetic conditions that require more devoted parental care. Purdy

concludes that failing to prevent the birth of a child with serious

defects is "immoral."

 

Autokoenomy can also begin to resemble a chilling

utilitarian "community" of one. University of Chicago feminist

bioethicist Mary Mahowald draws on the "ethics of care" and "maternal

thinking" models of Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick to promote

a "feminist standpoint theory" that parallels Rosemarie Tong's

autokoenomy. Mahowald's feminist standpoint theory endorses women

having babies for the explicit purpose of harvesting spare parts for

themselves or loved ones. The ethic on which she relies

would "support a decision to become pregnant in order to provide the

[fetal] tissue to someone with whom one has a special relationship."

Moreover, Mahowald says, "a pregnant woman might herself be the

recipient and could deliberately become pregnant in order to provide

the fetal tissue that might lead to her own cure." As Tong and

Mahowald's reasoning reveals, autokoenomy has little to say about the

excesses of individual choice.

 

The technology of patriarchy?

 

t the other end of the spectrum are feminist bioethicists who do not

so eagerly embrace reproductive and genetic technologies, although

they do share with their autokoenomous sisters a devotion to feminist

politics. As Tong says, "all feminist approaches to bioethics share a

common methodology — namely, the methodology of feminist thought."

But feminist principles make for an awkward fit in the field of

bioethics, for in focusing so keenly on science's patriarchal bias,

feminist critics of reproductive technologies miss the most serious

challenges these new tools pose.

 

Australian feminist Robyn Rowland has been issuing warnings since the

early 1980s about the dangers of male control of reproductive

technologies. Men have "coveted" the power women have over

reproduction, Rowland argues. "Now, with the possibilities offered by

technology they are storming the last bastion and taking control of

conception, fetal development, and birth." But this is only part of a

larger control men exercise over women, according to Rowland's

critique. "Being the dominant social group, men expect to control all

social resources, including reproduction," Rowland argues. They "use

the vehicles of science, medicine and commerce to establish control

over procreation." Men, Rowland concludes, are making women

into "patriarchy's living laboratories."

 

Another feminist critic of reproductive technologies, former New York

Times reporter Gena Corea, assails as "propaganda" the notion that

women should procreate. It is patriarchal society that pushes this

pronatalism, Corea argues, and it "has a coercive power.It

conditions a woman's choices as well as her motivations to choose,"

she says, leaving her incapable of rendering an authentic ethical

choice about her reproductive options. Janice Raymond, a feminist

theorist who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, has argued

that new reproductive technologies might be used by the patriarchal

medical establishment as a tool for the "previctimization" of women,

eliminating or fundamentally altering females before they are even

born. "Technological reproduction is brutality with a therapeutic

face," Raymond avers. In 1984, some of the more earnest skeptics of

reproductive technologies organized finrrage — Feminist International

Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering — a

small group that hosts conferences to raise awareness of the dangers

of these new interventions.

 

Genetic technologies are also viewed with suspicion by feminists who

fear they will undermine feminism's valorization of "difference."

Maura Ryan, a professor of Christian Ethics at Notre Dame University,

has argued that genetic technologies are "at odds with a feminist

view of community where all are welcome and persons are challenged to

deal creatively with difference." Yet arguments for difference can

take unexpected twists, as they did recently when they were invoked

by a deaf lesbian couple in Bethesda, Maryland, who used sperm

donated by a fifth-generation deaf man to ensure that their son and

daughter would be born profoundly deaf. Since the women view deafness

not as a disability, but as a sign of membership in a specific

cultural community, they wanted to guarantee that their children

would be part of that community as well.

 

What these feminist skeptics of reproductive technologies share is an

assumption, guided by feminist politics and feminist critiques of

science, that women lack control over even the most rudimentary

reproductive decisions. This leaves them unwilling to tackle thorny

ethical practices, such as sex selection, that rest on women's own

choices. Evidence from China and India indicates that women in those

countries avidly rid themselves of female fetuses, usually by making

use of ultrasound machines and abortion, creating a serious imbalance

in male-to-female sex ratios in the process. In the United States,

sex selection is gaining in popularity, with new techniques such as

sperm sorting offered by many fertility clinics.

 

Feminists have a stock answer when questioned about the use of sex

selection in countries such as India and China: Blame the sin, not

the sinner. Because these women are living in undemocratic,

patriarchal societies, they are eligible for feminist bioethicists'

ethical escape hatch. "The solution is not to take away abortion

rights," a spokesperson for the group Population Action International

stated, "but rather to elevate the status of women so that the

economic and cultural incentives for sex-selection abortion are no

longer there." This rationale is less compelling when applied closer

to home, where feminist claims of patriarchal control do not ring

true. Bioethicist Mary Mahowald suggests that "selection of either

males or females is justifiable on medical grounds and morally

defensible in other situations so long as the intention and the

consequences are not sexist." But how does one judge whether

consequences are sexist? In the United States, many women use sex

selection to have girls. "Women are the driving force, and women want

daughters," one fertility doctor told the New York Times in 1999.

 

Even mainstream feminist groups, such as the National Organization

for Women, conveniently ignore incorrect expressions of choice. now

has no official position on the use of sex-selective ultrasound and

abortion or other sex-selection techniques, yet the group did endorse

a resolution at its national conference last year calling for the

protection of the rights of "intersex girls" (girls born with

atypical sexual anatomy). The resolution, which called on parents to

resist imposing hormone treatments and surgery on their daughters

until the daughters themselves could choose whether or not they

wanted to become fully female, was deemed part of the

organization's "movement for reproductive freedom and bodily

integrity."

 

Although feminist bioethicists have failed to come to terms with the

impulse to control the quality of one's offspring, especially among

women, it is not a new one. In Spartan society, women were

responsible for bearing sons who would be formidable warriors and for

rigorously weeding out those who would not, leaving them to die of

exposure in the chasm called the Apothetae. In the mid-nineteenth-

century utopian community of Oneida in upstate New York, it was women

more than men who eagerly volunteered for leader John Humphrey

Noyes's proto-eugenic experiments in breeding better children — an

undertaking he likened to plant breeding and called "human

stirpiculture." During the heyday of the American eugenics movement,

as historian Wendy Kline has found, women's reform organizations were

some of the most enthusiastic lobbyists for compulsory state

sterilization laws meant to combat the menace of the so-called

feebleminded. Women embraced an ideal of "scientific"

and "responsible" motherhood that emphasized the quality of the

children being born, and found in the eugenic impulse to "improve the

human race through better breeding" a compelling justification for

their efforts.

 

The birth control movement of the early twentieth century offers

perhaps the most extended case study of this impulse. In her 1920

polemic, "Woman and the New Race," birth control activist Margaret

Sanger described how "millions of women are asserting their right to

voluntary motherhood. They are determined to decide for themselves

whether they shall become mothers, under what conditions, and when."

But the logic of that assertion encompassed more than control of

quantity. Like many of her peers, Sanger shared her culture's desire

for eugenic "race improvement." Fearful that the vaunted American

melting pot was no longer assimilating new waves of immigrants from

southern and eastern Europe, Sanger argued that contraception could

alleviate the burden of bad stock. "Birth control, often denounced as

a violation of natural law," she wrote, "is nothing more or less than

the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of

preventing the birth of defectives, or of those who will become

defectives." The "voluntary motherhood" Sanger pursued had as its

goal the "creation of a new race" and drew upon the language of

choice and the individual rights of women to achieve it.

 

Many of Sanger's more astute contemporaries understood the radical

nature of the new ideal of motherhood she was promoting. In A Preface

to Morals, Walter Lippmann urged society to consider the "full logic

of birth control," which he saw as making parenthood a "separate

vocation," detached from the "hard realities" and ambiguities of life

and thus ultimately "efficient, responsible, and dull." Birth control

is like the automobile, Lippmann argued, capable of hurtling us along

at terrifying speeds to new and exciting destinations, but a device

whose "inherent possibilities do not fix the best uses to be made of

it."

 

Our reproductive future

 

oday our devices are more numerous and powerful, but contemporary

feminist bioethicists remain mired in the individualistic rhetoric of

the previous era's technologies and politics. The end pursued by

feminist bioethicists is an egalitarian feminist society, but they

assume that this society would consist of feminist mothers choosing

traits for their children that conform to "women's values." In this,

feminist ethicists betray the fact that they have not strayed far

from the utopian yearnings of their foremothers. Charlotte Perkins

Gilman's 1915 feminist utopian novel Herland found perfection in a

world where men did not exist and where parthenogenic births produced

only girl children; contemporary fiction writer Marge Piercy's 1976

novel, Woman on the Edge of Time, offered a similar social vision. In

Piercy's world, citizens of the utopian society of Mattapoisett

decide that to end sexism, classism, and racism, reproduction must be

removed from the control of one particular sex. "It was part of

women's long revolution," one of Piercy's characters explains. "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."

 

We are not all mothers yet, but if we continue along the path our

feminist ethical guides have laid down, we run the risk of ending up

in a consumer-driven eugenic society. With ever more sophisticated

ivf techniques, genetic screening, and artificial wombs, the

physiological process of pregnancy and childbirth could become just

another commodified "life experience." Like climbing Mt. Everest or

meditating on an ashram, seekers of the exotic could experience

the "adventure" of childbirth the old-fashioned way, while some women

would make use of artificial wombs to avoid the hassles of pregnancy.

 

Our new reproductive future also suggests a society where male

responsibility and fatherhood take on a different form. Shotgun

weddings and social stigmas that used to keep men close to their

offspring have disappeared, but in an age where embryos are stored in

fertility clinics like jewelry in safe deposit boxes, men have begun

to claim paternal rights using the language of property. Popular

culture has enlisted science to help them. Producers of daytime talk

shows are leavening the sensationalism of their broadcasts with

paternal "outings" using dna tests; men who suppose themselves the

father of a child are told, on-air in front of a studio audience and

their wayward partners, that dna tests have proven otherwise.

 

We are being eased into this bread-and-circuses world of reproduction

by the very rhetoric that once promised to free women from the

burdens of biology: the rhetoric of choice that feminists have long

championed. Choice will allow us to begin crossing the line between

genetic therapies and genetic enhancements — quietly at first, but

eventually with ease. Genetic engineering could become just another

reproductive right. But this normalization process comes with a cost

that first-generation technologies such as ivf never posed: altering

the human race and, in the process, fating for extinction biological

motherhood as we have known it. With feminist principles guiding us

and a public preternaturally optimistic about and desirous of new

reproductive technologies, Pandora has met Dr. Pangloss. But all is

not for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

 

One would hope that, having had glimpses of the logical conclusion of

their principles, feminists would make a well-timed retreat from

their glorification of choice in reproductive matters. Such a retreat

is unlikely, however, for making it would require feminists finally

to concede that there is no such thing as "women's values" or the

sisterhood for which they have served as self-appointed spokeswomen.

Such a retreat would force feminists to confront the fact that some

women make ethically unsound choices not because they are victims of

male domination, but because they lack ethical moorings, and it would

require them to recognize that in a world of unfettered

individualism, women's choices will not lead to a feminist vision of

women's liberation.

 

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