No
cut and dried answers
This glossy image offered
up by the “celebrity mom” feeds into American society’s
current baby making obsession. A recent issue of Good Housekeeping flouted actress Courtney Cox on its cover with a story inside about
celebrities who overcame infertility. Many of those actresses kept
their struggles private until they triumphed with a “precious
miracle.” Never mentioned were actresses who continue to confront
infertility. Michaels believes that Lunden represents the most egregious
end of this spectrum. “‘Why should I be denied?’
people are asking, as if having a biological baby is a basic, inchoate
right. Globally, to put so many resources and so much effort into
a single child makes no sense.”
“While there was a knee-jerk response among feminists that
reproductive technologies were bad for women,” Michaels recalls,
“that was too simplistic.” Reproductive technologies
run a wide gambit. Activists have long worried that singling out
later abortions would compromise the right for all abortions. Similarly,
feminists feared that to question surrogacy might compromise other,
more simple interventions. Some feminists are among those reaching
for help from technology in their personal struggles with infertility,
making it even harder to raise pointed questions about its ramifications.
Michaels says, “There’s this faux feminist argument
about choice that you are expanding women’s choices, but this
notion doesn’t take into account the perversion of some of
these choices. If left untended, these so-called choices make pregnancy
and family into commodities.” Marlene Fried, activist, professor
and co-author (with Loretta Ross, Jael Silliman and Elena R. Gutierrez)
of the book Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for
Reproductive Justice also warns against overly simplistic responses
to these complex questions. “Who would you find to regulate
these technologies?”
The increasing precariousness of abortion access over the past
quarter century has squelched feminists’ abilities to examine
other reproductive health matters freely. Fried says, “Given
abortion rights’ minimal security, it’s hard to look
at reproductive technology without potentially jeopardizing those
tenuous rights.” Yet, to keep abortion entirely out of the
infertility equation is impossible. Infertility drugs and IVF elevate
the risk of multiple pregnancy. Medical reduction, a euphemistic
term for abortion, is a doctor-sanctioned procedure involving dissolution
of one or more fetuses from a multiple pregnancy. These reductions
occur for a range of reasons, from birth defects in one fetus to
the fact that carrying three or more fetuses greatly increases the
risk of premature delivery and sometimes compromises the health
of the pregnant woman.
It cannot be disputed that extreme reproductive technologies raise
the risk of devastating losses surrounding pregnancy and that the
costs-in terms of dollars, emotional and physical health-are potentially
enormous. A very short list includes a sharp rise in complications
for premature babies, a direct result of the exponential rise in
multiple pregnancies and the enormous toll infertility treatments
takes upon women and their partners, sometimes regardless of whether
they end up with a child or children or not. The myriad ways that
others can now be involved in the creation of children opens the
door for potentially complicated connections between strangers never
before imagined. There are countless happy stories of the ways reproductive
technologies have created families or assisted people in having
healthier children. No cut and dried answer exists now that what’s
possible and what might be possible in the future has rendered simple
answers obsolete. Technology, moving at warp speeds, cannot be slowed,
so we need to slow ourselves down in order to disentangle our questions
and concerns from the enticing momentum of “progress.”
What seems clear
in the meantime: a woman’s right not to have a baby is intricately
linked to her right to try to have a baby or to help someone else
to have a baby. To lose the right of one side of this equation is
to threaten the loss of the other side. Sometimes, this might create
uneasy alliances. At this juncture uneasiness may be called for—
even welcome.
mmo : february 2005
|
