Biopolitics and Human Reproduction

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2017

This Bioethics and Biopolitics: Presents and Futures of Reproduction symposium draws together a series of articles that were each submitted independently by their authors to the JBI and which explore the biopower axis in the externalization of reproduction in four contexts: artificial gestation (ectogenesis), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for sex selection, women's (reproductive) rights, and testicular cryopreservation (TCCP). While one contribution explores a Bfuture^of reproduction, the other three explore a Bpresent,^or better, explore different Bpresents.^This article pulls together some reflections on the four papers and explores how what may count as Bpresent,^and what as Bfuture,ĉ hanges dramatically, depending on the geographic declination of the tense.

Australian Feminist Studies, 2008

Annual Review of Anthropology, 1991

This book analyzes the dialectical, historical, and material aspects of the reproductive process. It offers the thesis that the reproductive process is not only the material base of the historical forms of the social relations of reproduction, but that it is also a dialectical process which changes historically. Chapter 1 analyzes the reproductive process and expounds on the human significance of the dialectics of that biological process. A selection of the conceptual concerns of feminist theory is discussed, and the works of Hegel, Marx, and Freud are incorporated where relevant. Chapter 2 is a critical examination of the theoretical framework of feminist studies and includes the works of De Beauvoir, Millet, Firestone, and Reed. The reliance of these women on existing theories, however selective the approach, is viewed as a weakness which perpetuates the elements of male-stream thought and which works against women, particularly in the denial of the creativity, historicity, and intellectual significance to human reproduction. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the relation of creation to procreation as a determinant of the social forms of the separation of the public realm and politics from the private realm and family. This division is argued to be responsible for man's historically demonstrable need for a second nature, as seen from the works of Arendt, Machiavelli, and Plato. Chapter 5 examines Marxist interpretation of the polis life, whose real and imagined virtues frame the idealist political vision. George Thomson demonstrates the limitations of economism in either describing or understanding the historical move from family to polity. Marx preempts reproductive dynamic and awards it arbitrarily to the reproductive process. This is the materialist ideology of male supremacy. Some of the dimensions of the theoretical task which history now presents to women are discussed in the conclusion, as are some of the problems of unifying feminist theory with feminist practice.

This paper explores two different but interlinked and contemporaneous debates over reproductive politics in which we can observe at least three distinct combinations of time. In the first part, I describe the shift in the 1980s to a 'biologized' time by British Christian Right-to-Life groups, who began to use a secularized ontogeny to promote and defend a religious definition of 'the way, the truth, and the life' -an altered 'theo-ontology' based on the equivalence of the absolute value of human life, the truth (of biological life), and faith in Christ (as everlasting life). In the second part, I describe a differently 'remixed', and opposing, ontology (secular and semi-secular, using a hybrid bio-legal chronometry but orientated toward the timeless horizon of progress) that characterized the debate over the future of in vitro fertilization in the same period, leading up to the adoption of the first Human Fertilization and Embryology (HFE) Act in the UK in 1990. In the third part, I examine the legacy of these debates insofar as they are evident in the more recent political conflicts accompanying passage of an amended HFE Act in 2008 and the debate over so-called 'cybrid embryos'. These episodes reveal how social movements 'are profoundly shaped by mediations and conflicts between diverse representations, technologies, social disciplines and rhythms of time'. I argue that the varied constructions of temporality in reproductive politics evident in these three distinct episodes are crucial to anthropological understandings of the meaning of 'biological control' in the context of stem cell research, cloning, tissue engineering, and reproductive biomedicine.

Issues in reproductive ethics, such as the capacity of parents to ‘choose children’, present challenges to philosophical ideas of freedom, responsibility and harm. This book responds to these challenges by proposing a new framework for thinking about the ethics of reproduction that emphasizes the ways that social norms affect decisions about who is born. The book provides clear and thorough discussions of some of the dominant problems in reproductive ethics - human enhancement and the notion of the normal, reproductive liberty and procreative beneficence, the principle of harm and discrimination against disability - while also proposing new ways of addressing these. The author draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, especially his discussions of biopolitics and norms, and later work on ethics, alongside feminist theorists of embodiment to argue for a new bioethics that is responsive to social norms, human vulnerability and the relational context of freedom and responsibility. This is done through compelling discussions of new technologies and practices, including the debate on liberal eugenics and human enhancement, the deliberate selection of disabilities, PGD and obstetric ultrasound.

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1984

The United States Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart upheld the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban of 2003, despite the law's failure to include an exception for the health of the mother. This paper argues that the Court's decision in Carhart opens new doors for future politicized governmental interference in the lives of patients and their doctors. Those concerned with biopolitics, the use of governmental power to regulate and control the personal and private space of one's health care decisions, have new reasons to be worried about the future of reproductive freedoms and the exercise of clinical medical judgment.

1999

The original article was published in Hebrew. This translation is of one section (ch. 5), which holds the core of the argument. Abstract: The technological revolution of the past decades in the field of assisted reproduction has engendered the ability to plan and control many aspects of childbirth, among which are the genetic attributes of the newborn. As a result, nowadays procreation is no longer perceived as an utterly natural phenomenon, but rather as a designed human formation. Among the new possibilities is the fulfillment of an age-old wish – to know the sex of the fetus in advance, and furthermore, to determine it. Two novel technologies developed in the 1990s enable determination of the child's sex during the initial stages of reproduction, i.e., even before conception. These methods are ordinarily used in order to prevent sex-related hereditary diseases. However, they can also be applied for the purpose of sex selection on non-medical grounds. It seems that there is wide public opposition to such an elective sex selection, reflected also in the various legal arrangements embraced by many countries, which limit the possibilities of selection. Nevertheless, eminent critics, academics and medical practitioners alike, frown on these legal restraints (although they do not necessarily advocate the implementation of sex selection). They predicate their opposition on the liberal precept that restriction of liberty and rights is justified only in order to prevent significant harm. Proponents of the restrictive policy towards sex selection present plenty of examples of harm to society or its members, such as an imbalanced sex ratio; worsening of the status of women; physical or psychological damage to the child whose sex has been selected; and of course, the dreaded "slippery slope" decline of mankind towards a genetically-engineered humanity. Others base their rejection of sex selection not on liberal principles, but on alternative ethical views, such as religious perspectives towards procreation, moral values ascribed to nature, or parental care seen as an ethical virtue. The present article questions the accepted framework of discussion – posing the right to choose versus potential harmful consequences – while still adhering to foundations of liberal political thought. The main argument is twofold: first, it refutes the claim that sex selection is a right, by debating the much-discussed rights that allegedly uphold sex selection. These are either directly related rights (such as reproductive liberty and the right to parenthood), or "classical" rights that purportedly buttress the claim for sex selection (such as the right to privacy and personal autonomy). Secondly, it aims to disencumber the debate on childbirth of the binding dichotomy between natural phenomena and human creation, employing Hannah Arendt's triple division of human activities. Based on Arendt's writings and on critical political thought, it is argued that the planned parturition is a political action, which lays upon the parents a quasi sovereign status, and that the newborn is a political subject even before its reproduction. Therefore, goes the argument, from a liberal perspective as well, the political character of childbirth, the sovereign role of the parents, and the political subjectivity of the future child, combined with the refutation of the discourse of rights – all justify (though they don't necessitate) restraining sex selection by the political community, taking into consideration its shared values. Closing the article is an analysis of the Israeli legal arrangement regarding sex selection, in light of the thesis outlined above.