Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women

by Gena Corea (Editor)

Book by

Genres: Feminism

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Genoveffa "Gena" Corea is the author of several feminist nonfiction works analyzing the treatment of women within the medical industry. Her writing has dealt with reproductive technologies, disease and malpractice. She has also published articles in dozens of anthologies including Contemporary Issues in Bioethics (1994), Radical Voices (1989), Embryos, Ethics and Women's Rights (1988), and Test-Tube Women (1984). Corea has published in both English and German, and she has been featured in a number of documentaries on reproductive technology.

Reviews

[Rosie · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars, maybe...

I have mixed thoughts about this book. I think it contains a lot of valuable, critical commentary on reproductive technologies from a feminist perspective, but, honestly speaking, I think its short length and (relative) minimal number of contributors made it less thorough than it should have been. Also, some of its articles were…dull. And I have considerable experience reading feminist nonfiction books (over 100 now), most of which I enjoyed a lot, so the topic and its academic tone aren’t what made it boring. I think the composition of the articles, the language used, could have been more interesting and vivid. In terms of its length, I should note that there was a good reason cited for that: It was originally a series of speeches at a conference, which makes a lot of sense. I did think the points made by these women deserved attention and thought. You don’t see a lot of this in contemporary, mainstream debate; there tends to be a false dichotomy made, I think, where you either are a politically-correct liberal who enthusiastically, blindly supports all reproductive technologies (surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, etc.), or you are a right-wing, God-fearing conservative who thinks they are all sinful (alongside abortion). There is a substantial third position, the feminist one, which looks at reproductive technologies critically, searching for the benefits they can bring women, alongside the serious harms they can inflict, while still fully advocating women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. In terms of the feelings I noticed while reading: Frankly, I didn’t experience many intense emotions. I’ve already read on this topic before, so there wasn’t anything really new to me in this book, and it didn’t describe very many atrocities, not ones I haven’t heard of before. Likely it would have been improved had there been more concrete, tangible, first-hand accounts of the ways these technologies can and have harmed women, rather than predominantly sticking to distant, academic discussion about the topic. I think there are definitely better books to read if you are interested in learning more about the feminist critique of new (not so new now, I suppose) reproductive technologies. I did feel quite appreciative at certain points in the book, when very insightful, incisive, and intelligent things were said, such as for many of the quotes I selected above. I also appreciated the nuanced way these things were discussed. The women did not automatically, vituperatively condemn these technologies; instead they discussed them from various angles before providing thoughtful statements about their reasons for viewing them with wariness. Overall, it’s still a good book, but not a great one. Not for political, opinion-related reasons, but for the reasons above, regarding short length and some dullness. I was left feeling a little unfulfilled after finishing it, even if it was nice that it was short enough I could finish it very quickly.

Quotes:
“Guttentag and Secord (1983) have studied several actual modern and historical populations with sex ratio imbalances. They observed that most societies with a preponderance of males have the following characteristics:

bride-price and bride-service, great importance attached to virginity, emphasis on the sanctity of the family … proscriptions against adultery … marriage at an early age, and … women … regarded as inferior to men … [in] reasoned judgement, scholarship and political affairs. (Guttenbag and Secord 1983: p. 79)

In some societies women are treated as possessions to be bought and sold. Paradoxically, certain countries where women are the minority so devalue the gender that they contribute further to the scarcity of females by female infanticide, girl child neglect, and bride murders.” (23)

“And what about the severe population problem in the world? Some say that a bit of sexist prejudice is a less grave evil than the death by starvation of large numbers of people. However, to propose sex selection for population control is to be racist and classist as well as sexist. Advocates express no interest in having the rich white minority sacrifice any of its affluence for the benefit of the poor majority. Always it is the Third World or the poor who should have fewer, or only male, children. No one acknowledges that a rich child will consume a disproportionately large share of the world’s resources, by using fossil fuels from underdeveloped nations and by eating luxury foods grown by starving people. Indeed male-choice-population-control might well stabilize the present rich-white/poor-non-white gap.” (24)

“I would like to begin by reporting on two instances of deaths of women in Delhi in December 1983. In one case, a young woman who had been married for about fifteen months, took her own life soon after the birth of her first child – a daughter. Even before the child was born, the young woman’s husband and in-laws had told her that she would not be allowed to return to her marital home if she gave birth to a daughter. Therefore, from the hospital, the woman was forced to go to her parents’ house. This is considered a big social disgrace for a woman. She was so demoralized at being abandoned in this way that, fifteen days after her daughter’s birth, she killed herself by dousing herself with kerosene and setting herself on fire in her parents’ home.

“In the same month, another case was reported in Delhi newspapers. A young woman in her early twenties gave birth in a private nursing home to her second child, another girl. On the day the baby was born, she strangled it to death, and was arrested for murder. It was suspected that she murdered her baby daughter because she feared she would be abandoned by her husband’s family for failing to produce a son. These are two extreme examples of the potential consequences for women of giving birth to daughters instead of sons. Though this is not an everyday response to the birth of daughters, most families do feel bad when a girl is born. The acute preference for sons and viewing the birth of daughters as a curse has a long history in India.” (30-1)

“Whatever other potential advantages sex determination tests may have, they are likely to be used in India as an incentive to destroy female foetuses. This is borne out by the few instances of data gathering in this country. For instance, when the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, at New Delhi, introduced these tests about six years ago, ostensibly to discern genetic disorders, they found that seven out of eight parents who came for the test did so with the specific purpose of aborting in case the foetus was found to be female. The Institute was flooded with requests for abortions in cases where the woman was found to be carrying a female foetus. Some of the clinics that have mushroomed over the last two or three years perform the tests relatively inexpensively, almost on a mass production basis. They proclaim very loudly that the birth of sons is the primary purpose of these tests. They do not make any bones about it. They advertise through leaflets, newspapers and magazines: ‘Come for this test so that you don’t have an unwanted daughter born to you.’” (34)

“It seems that this culture of devaluation of female lives is rooted in a situation of the near total economic and political disinheritance of women. This has been accentuated further by various economic and political developments in the last few decades, such as changes in land tenure systems and changes in technology. For instance, in some of the green revolution areas such as Punjab, where there have been tremendous advances in agriculture, employment opportunities for women are among the lowest in India. Studies have found that in most areas, women from landless poor families do not find more than forty-five to sixty days of paid employment per year in the fields. The introduction of new technology has displaced women by the millions. For instance, hand threshing of rice and grinding of corn were traditionally women’s jobs. But as soon as threshing or grinding machines come to be used, millions of women are pushed out and men take over the jobs. In other words, as soon as the job becomes less drudgery oriented, requires less physical labour and provides a better income, men come and take these jobs away from women. Women are rendered more and more peripheral to the economy. They have to eke out a living by more and more miserable means and get less and less in return for their labour.

“Similarly the last several decades have seen a further consolidation of land ownership in the hands of men at the cost of women’s rights. Thus while women’s labour plays a crucial role on the family farm, their status is like that of bonded labour who have no control over the products of their labour or over the land in which they work. Thus they are denied basic control over their own lives, and are made to feel dependent on men for their very survival. Added to the patriarchal ownership of property is the structure of the patrilocal family which ensures the political powerlessness of women in the family, the community and the village.” (35)

“The breeder into whom an embryo is placed need not be alive. This possibility is suggested by several recent cases in which the bodies of brain dead pregnant women were kept functioning until the foetus had developed enough to be delivered. In one case, a 27-year-old woman suffered a fatal seizure when she was twenty-two-weeks pregnant. Her husband and other family members wanted the woman’s body kept in operation until the foetus became viable. Physicians put her on a life-support system. Their most difficult medical challenges during the nine weeks they maintained the dead woman, they report, were keeping control of the woman’s many failing body functions and combating infection. The woman developed diabetes insipidus and Addison’s disease and, periodically, a blood infection throughout the body. Doctors did blood studies on the dead woman every two hours. They performed a Caesarean section on her more than two months after she had been declared dead, extracted a healthy baby and then removed the life-support apparatus. She stopped breathing. Relatives reportedly expressed ‘a great deal of pleasure’ at the birth (Star-Ledger 1983).” (49)

“Removing childbearing functions from women might lead the patriarchy into new heydays of power over women. I think the prospects for our future are gloomy. The question of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ reproductive technologies is not an individual issue. I believe that it is at the core of women’s lack of freedom – young and old, interested and uninterested in having children. It is violence against women in a new and frightening sense. As women are dismembered for science’s sake in labs, and embryos are transferred, replaced, divided, frozen, flushed out from a temporary surrogate mother’s womb and operated upon, in ‘real’ life violence against women increases daily. Worldwide, pornography flourishes. Profoundly disturbing horror scenes of rape, mutilation, murder and degradation of women appear in sex movies and on the video screens of millions of ‘ordinary’ people at home. Hitler and his national-socialist breeding programmes are of our very recent past. The ‘opportunities’ to use the reproductive technologies in an attempt to ‘purify’ a race are limitless. ‘Brave new world’ is here and it’s neither ‘brave’ nor really new. It’s more of the same for women – but it’s much more sophisticated and insidious. And it’s far more dangerous: the new reproductive technologies could become ‘the final solution in the woman question’ (to use Robyn Rowland’s term, 1984) in a not-so-science-fiction world. When the ‘glass womb’ is perfected, women as a group might be obsolete as childbearers.

“However, having babies and raising children is not the only work women do. In fact, women perform two-thirds of the world’s dirtiest labour for minimal pay. As women’s work has historically been the work that men don’t want to do, it is unlikely that the unemployed men of the future will compete with women for the really demanding jobs.” (70)

“The pill was hailed once as the true liberator of women, yet its resulting ‘freedom’ is now viewed with suspicion and skepticism by feminists. It ensured that most women users had control over their fertility; but also that they were then ‘at fault’ if they became pregnant. It allowed men to become less responsible and women to become targets for sexual use more readily. In addition, it led to higher rates of cancer and thrombosis, and continues to be a drug which is taken on the basis of little and poor research into its side-effects. Depo Provera, the most ‘efficient’ contraception, has placed many women at risk. The Dalkon Shield, a contraceptive inter-uterine device (IUD), has in fact caused deaths of women through infection and septic abortion, and represents again the use of women’s bodies by a medicine little concerned for the well-being of its victims. Can we assume that sex preselection will be an equivalent ‘advance’ in women’s reproductive freedom?” (80-1)

“We live in a social climate and in an intellectual tradition in which violence and sexuality are conflated; man the aggressor pursues woman the masochistic victim. Women’s bodies become the nature to be controlled (Easlea 1983). In cultures that prize individual competition and money-making there are personal advancements and financial spin-offs. For example, there are patents on certain in vitro fertilization procedures developed at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and sex predetermination techniques are marketed in the USA.

“To define these issues as being about women’s ‘choice’ and ‘rights’ is totally inadequate, as these concepts are based on liberal philosophy in which there are no serious differences in interests or power between social groups that make up society. While this response is also inadequate for earlier interventions in biological reproduction (Pollock 1984), the new technologies expose the politics of male supremacy far more clearly. We need to rediscuss motherhood, biological reproduction, childcare and the relation of these to sexuality and the personhood of women, bearing in mind that we live in a gendered society in which women are subordinate. The discussion thus far has been too superficial. The totality of the control of women’s bodies which is now becoming feasible alters the terms in which the new reproductive technologies must be considered.” (104-5)