Feminist Responses to the Disembodiment of New Reproductive Technology and the Future of Feminism

Women’s shared and diverse reproductive experiences are key to their responses to new reproductive technologies (NRTs), which I explore in this paper. In an article about “Feminism and Motherhood: O’Brien vs. Beauvoir,” reyes lazaro pins down the crux of the issue regarding women and NRTs: “Feminist theory faces the task of dismantling the works of patriarchy within reproductive consciousness while, at the same time, pointing out the feminist potential within it – for example, the potential for a nonpatriarchal kind of thought.” Importantly, she also warns us that: “[f]emale reproductive consciousness ... is not feminist per se” (1986,101), but I would argue, it is built on an experience common to women, to the exclusion of men. It is for this reason that women have been subjugated on the basis of their sex/gender, and also why it has been a rallying point for feminist politics and the women’s movement. It furthermore explains, following Mary O’Brien’s framework, why new reproductive technologies represent a “moment” of world historic significance. Part of the appeal of O’Brien’s theory of male and female reproductive consciousnesses based on the potential ability to bear children or not, is its antidote to the current fragmentation of women’s identities, qua women, in this time and place. Unlike O’Brien, however, we must incorporate the understanding that part of this fragmentation is women’s diverse experiences of their reproductive capacity. O’Brien’s perspective over-privileged the shared dimensions of women’s corporeality and consciousness, and the tendency of much current feminist theorizing of the body is to endlessly fragment women’s experiences, but we must see both shared and diverse experiences to reassert a viable feminist movement. At this time in history, therefore, “reproductive consciousness” is significantly more complicated than O’Brien’s singular phrasing would suggest. “Feminine reproductive consciousness” does not simply involve the corporeal capacity to be pregnant and give birth (though it does include it), nor just the considerably fraught “choice” to not birth that contraceptive technology offered. Greater technological and social intervention provides the potential platform for the “choice” to specify what kind of children to have and how. Our capacity to impose social and cultural norms on biological continuity and process has never been greater. For example, the application of NRTs to allow lesbians, gay men and women with disabilities among others previously unable to reproduce biologically, represents a significant socio-cultural and political shift as well as a bio-medical one. Although the process of human reproduction is not altogether disembodied, in the sense of taking place fully outside the female body as some feminist theory (Firestone 1970) and literature (e.g. Piercy 1976) envisioned, it is more so than it has ever been before. Although women’s wombs are still necessary to gestate a fetus capable of surviving, both conception and early birth are processes that are accommodated and managed technologically and extra-corporeally. In