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From the December 2004 Anthropology News Technologies of Reproduction Linda E White Over the next several months in AN, writers will discuss how state, religious and medical institutions are shaping discourses and practices that mediate between women’s bodies and technologies of birth. From recent legal decisions that designate fetuses as citizens to developments in “touch” haptic software for obstetric fetal ultrasound, these anthropologists show how new technologies, often marketed by private corporations and championed by activists, can bring women, their bodies and populations increasingly under the control of systems of discursive and institutional power. At the same time, scholars point out how old reproductive technologies such as adoption can still have value even if at times ignored by national population experts, who might, such as has occurred in Peru, administer forced sterilizations instead. The issues raised by anthropologists studying reproduction are not unrelated to those addressed in the recent AN series on marriage, which focused on the role of the state and societal norms in shaping definitions of family and kinship. In the current series, writers consider the ways in which institutional and social pressures incite women to conceive or practice contraception, to test or to avoid testing, to give birth in a medical setting or under the care of a midwife, to abort or carry a fetus to term. Feminist
Anthropology and Reproduction The first full-length, ethnographic study to apply feminist theories to understandings of reproduction in the US is Emily Martin’s Woman in the Body. In this 1992 book Martin laid bare the politics of the medicalization of women’s bodies, or how reproductive functions—menstruation, childbirth and menopause—are understood as problems to be fixed. She shows how economic metaphors of production, efficiency, and capitalist fragmentation and alienation permeate our society’s understandings of reproduction and women’s bodies. Following the lead of Martin and Rapp, many scholars have investigated the invisible structures that shape discourses and practices related to reproduction, motherhood, infertility and related issues. The writers in this series have shown that the supposedly inevitable and “natural” components of reproduction are socially as well as biologically structured. The taken-for-grantedness of the drive for maternity—something overwhelmingly facilitated through new medical technologies that promise older and older women a “successful conception”—is just one of the many new logics of reproduction exposed in this research. Building on Foucault’s discussions of disciplined bodies and systems of knowledge and power, Martin, Rapp and others have shown that the science of reproduction has not been objective, neutral and beyond ideology, but is instead imbued with male anxieties about female difference. Discourses on new reproductive technologies have naturalized these technologies as inevitable outgrowths of “pure” scientific development. As one result, women are now encouraged to “fix” fetal defects diagnosed in utero through abortion or experimental fetal surgery. In an atmosphere of increasingly hegemonic standards of “normalcy” supported by burgeoning technologies of enforcement, serious consideration must be given to the concerns of disability rights communities about the march toward fetal perfection and related eugenics practices.
Reproductive
Technologies and Rights While technology has been the central issue surrounding reproduction in the developed world, the current political situation in the US and the resulting global health policies have had profound effects on access to fertility technologies and abortion in the developing world. The Bush Administration’s 2001 reinstatement of the global gag rule restricts foreign NGOs that accept USAID family planning funds from providing abortion services or medical information about birth control and abortion to patients. Despite the 1994 declaration by the International Conference on Population and Development that reproductive rights are essential human rights, the US administration has opposed efforts to fund programs supporting those rights, instead directing up to $100 million per year to abstinence-only programs. Disparities
in Access The growing influence of religion in the development and implementation of reproductive technologies is also highlighted in this series, as are the disparities in access often resulting from that influence. Several writers discuss the conflict between religious values and the desire of women to control their fertility, leading to adventurous strategies to access artificial insemination in Muslim countries to unexpected ones in the Midwest. Marital status, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity and religious background, among others, are factors in determining access. The essays in this series speak to these disparities and the ways they make themselves felt in the face of the powerful new technologies now available. As we turn our attention to topics such as the Human Genome Project, cloning, eugenic selection and prenatal gender selection, anthropologists have found themselves confronting a new set of theoretical and moral challenges. The role of the field in the politics of culture has not always been a noble one. If we hope to avoid the pitfalls of the sort that produced 19th-century studies in support of colonial projects and imperialist regimes, we must continue to do research that exposes the political and ideological pressures that shape the development and use of biomedical technologies, from embryonic stem cell research to surrogacy. The essays in this series make an important contribution to this effort by identifying the issues that have and will shape this debate while suggesting new ways to think about them. Linda White teaches women’s studies and anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is working on a manuscript on contemporary Japanese feminist activism and her new research examines feminist critiques of organ transplants and brain death in Japan. |
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