Women and Reproductive Technologies

As applications of basic scientific knowledge, it is important to remember that technologies are always developed for particular purposes. That is, they are developed to certain problems. In this sense, a is a social and/or physical phenomenon defined with reference to a particular set of values, assumptions, meanings. A phenomenon is not problematic-in need of solution-until human beings say that it is. Whether some particular phenomenon is a problem and what kind of a problem it is depends on who defines it. Sometimes the definition is widely shared within a particular society; sometimes it is more partial, more related to the experiences and interests of a particular group. (Trial lawyers and politicians have always known this very well: where you stand on a particular social issue depends very much on where you sit in the social structure. The phenomenon of drug use by teenagers became a problem, a social issue to be discussed in the media and to be solved by government-funded programs, only when it spread beyond the inner cities to the suburbs.) Given recent developments in the area of reproductive technology, we are now at a point, for example, where procedures for prenatal identification of certain genetic conditions can, when coupled with elective abortion, provide a solution to the of unwanted infants with severe mental and physical disabilities. The testimony of disabled persons now alive and productive-and politically active-speaks eloquently, however, to the fact that there is another view of this problem. The problem from their point of view is not primarily that they are disabled, but that the potential existence of others like them, and implicitly the value of their own lives, now is threatened by the availability of technologies to solve what others have deemed a problem. The point of this example of course is that the technological procedures do not, and by their very nature cannot, provide an analysis of why disabled infants are a problem, why they are unwanted. Rather, use of the technology for this purpose implicitly supports and reinforces the assumption that they are. From the perspective of different assumptions, however, namely those held by many disabled persons and their advocates, important questions need to be raised regarding the aims and values implicit in this use of the technologies. For example, would the birth of a disabled infant be such a under different social arrangements, where financial responsibility for expensive medical care did not fall on individual parents alone, or in a different climate of values, where individual life is truly sacred, before and after birth? Is it likely under different social and cultural conditions that large numbers of normal, healthy women would undergo the sometimes painful prenatal diagnostic procedures and the psychological debilitation of what Barbara Katz Rothman has called a tentative pregnancyI (what you have until the decision to keep it has been made, often long after fetal movements have begun)? And, as Rothman has pointed out, how much choice do pregnant women, particularly those over thirty-five, really have

Biology · Pregnancy · Reproductive technology · Reproductive Health and Technologies · Genetics