Mapping the Public Debate on New Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

The drive to invent technology which can be used to control human fertility is not particularly typical of this time and age. Pre-industrial societies have sought means to regulate reproductive practices, using everything from infanticide to contraceptives, and from abortion to ovulation rituals. But the development of what is called the new reproductive technologies has expanded at an accelerated speed the options of humans to manipulate the process of reproduction. In the past decade, techniques such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), and spinoffs such as Gamete Intra Fallopian Transfer (GIFT), Zygote Intra Fallopian Transfer (ZIFT), and Embryo Transfer (ET), have become regular procedures in reproductive medicine and medical practice.¹ Increasingly, women rely on doctors and medical technology to ‘assist’ the reproductive process, part of which is occurring outside the woman’s body. New reproductive technologies have turned from innovative, experimental techniques into accepted and even routine procedures. Despite low success rates, IVF is presented as a mere ‘play-ground for beginners’ in view of feasible revolutionary developments that have yet to come.

What was once an act of private ‘love,’ of intimacy and secrecy, is now a public act, a commercial transaction and a professionally-managed procedure.

(Sarah Franklin, ‘Postmodern Procreation’)

The issue, then, is not whether these technologies are good or bad, but how we should think them and how they will think us…. Culture exists in the way analogies are drawn between things, in the way certain thoughts are used to think others. Culture exists in the images which make imagination possible, in the media with which we mediate experience.

(Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the Future)