Womb Wars:
The debate on reproductive technologies and
the contribution of speculative literature
(11742119)
MA Comparative Literature
June 2018
Contents
Introduction
3
Who, and what, do reproductive technologies serve? 12
The Artificial Womb
32
Conclusion
49
Introduction
In the 20th century reproduction was taken up by the medical-industrial field in a way that proceeded to change the way women interacted with their bodies forever more. Women’s reproductive bodies became hyper medicalised and new technologies were imposed upon them, from hormonal treatments to reproductive equipment and devices, raising the question of whether these technologies were tools for liberation or a new way for patriarchal society to manipulate women’s procreative power. In this thesis, I will analyse the way this question has been debated by feminist critics and how feminist authors of speculative fiction have
contributed to the debate. In my analysis, I will consider the history of female oppression and institutionalised sexism associated with the development of reproductive technologies, while also acknowledging that these technologies hold the potential to empower women if women’s safety and wellbeing were to be placed at the forefront of their implementation.
This thesis will operate within the field of Medical Humanities, employing an
interdisciplinary approach that draws from literary, sociological and historical forms of analysis. It is composed of two distinct but interlinked chapters: the first taking a historical and sociological approach to consider the real-world entanglements of technology,
reproduction and gender; and the second taking a literary studies approach to analyse how the implications of (future) reproductive technologies, specifically the artificial womb, are portrayed and problematized, in terms of their ethical and political implications, in 20th century and contemporary examples of speculative literature.
The first chapter delves into the history of reproductive technologies aimed at women,
racism and eugenic thinking, while also considering the different ways that feminist have intervened in techno science. Within this chapter I elucidate the contradictions and tensions within the feminist debate as it has unfolded during the implementation of reproductive technologies such as the pill, IVF and ultrasounds. These tensions hinge on two contrasting viewpoints: one which sees reproductive technologies as tools of continued patriarchal oppression and another which sees them as instigators of women’s liberation. While outlining these opposing views in relation to different reproductive technologies, I also begin to
introduce how, whereas real-life feminist debates about reproductive technologies have often occurred after the fact – when the technologies had already been accepted as part of everyday life – speculative literature, by representing such technologies before they became reality and thinking through their consequences, has the capacity to pre-empt sociological or historical debates, and to play an important role in aiding feminists and bioethicists to imagine and theorise the long-term effects of these technologies.
The second chapter builds on this discussion by analysing two speculative texts – Woman on
the Edge of Time (Marge Piercy, 1976) and The Growing Season (Helen Sedgwick, 2017) –
that ignited my thinking with regard to ex utero reproduction and the artificial womb. This comparative analysis exemplifies how science fiction and speculative narratives allow us to envision a future reality where technology has remodelled (wo)mankind as we know it. The novels, I argue, illustrate the distinctive effects reproductive technology can have on different groups of women and how this effect depends on the extent to which the surrounding society remains patriarchal.
In the second chapter I will move away from discussing reproductive technologies which have already been implemented and instead take the artificial womb as my focus as a means
of examining where these technologies are heading. When imagining an artificial womb, it can take on a number of varying forms or concepts: from hospital incubators, which mirror the environment of the womb for premature babies, and the baby bottles seen in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) to the fluid-filled sacs seen in the news recently, which have taken a sheep foetus from conception to full term (Devlin, The Guardian). The notion of ectogenesis can thus gesture to an array of mimicked uteruses. Yet what all these (potential) realities and imaginings encompass is the ability for reproduction to take place ex-utero, removed from female materiality. Writing for The Guardian in September 2017, Helen Sedgwick proclaimed that science is a fast approaching a ‘biotechnological breakthrough’ in the creation of a ‘complete external womb’ (Sedgwick). In fact, she notes that ‘in April this year, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced their development of an artificial womb’. Here, the creation of so-called “biobag” is intended to build upon the technology of conventional incubators in an attempt to bolster survival rates in premature babies. Though this pursuit is indisputably noble, the growing desire, buttressed by rapid technological development, to create a sustainable environment for a foetus to develop outside of the womb has the potential to reshape reproduction completely and to radically change the role of women in it and, by extension, in society.
The artificial womb, or ectogenesis, is a recurring trope within speculative fiction and both
Woman on the Edge of Time and The Growing Season explore it through their
conceptualisation of, respectively, the ‘brooder’ and the ‘pouch’. In Woman on the Edge of
Time, the artificial womb or ‘brooder’ is more developed and sophisticated than Huxley’s
baby bottle: a large tank, hooked up to monitors, is filled with floating unborn children bobbing around like fish. The role the ‘brooder’ plays within the narrative offers the reader the opportunity to appraise the ethical complexities of reproductive technology, concretised
in the text by the strong reactionary response of the protagonist Connie who time travels from 1970s New York to the (future) Mattapoisett, where ‘brooders’ are used. As a work of speculative science fiction, the novel presents us with a “utopian” future where women are freed from the constraints of maternity by artificial wombs - opening up new gender and parenting roles. Yet this utopia becomes distinctly unsettling when paralleled with the reality from which Connie time-travels, suggesting that overcoming the need for female materiality may hold the possibility to unlock gender equality, but only in a post-patriarchal world. The
Growing Season, published in 2017, offers a world eerily similar to our own, with the main
discrepancy being the prevalence of ‘pouches’, artificial wombs which can be strapped to the female or male body to mimic a maternity bump. Sedgwick’s novel, clear in its feminist intent, criticises the speed with which biotechnology is accepted and taken up without much consideration for their gendered implications. Together, the two texts exemplify how
speculative literature can push the reader to consider the ethical tensions produced by reproductive technologies, which can function (for different groups or in different contexts) as tools of both gender oppression and gender equality.
Reproduction, and by implication the technologies that facilitate or impede it, is an
intrinsically feminist concern and much of its consideration in this thesis is inspired by the works of feminist thinkers such as Shulamith Firestone, Gena Corea, Michelle Murphy and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Through these works, I elaborate on the debate within feminist criticism about whether reproductive technologies oppress or empower women, while making my own contribution by asserting the usefulness of speculative literature in prompting ethical debate in a timely manner, before reproductive technologies become naturalised and are, in a way, placed beyond questioning.
A central figure in second-wave feminism, Firestone published The Dialectics of Sex: The
Case of Feminist Revolution in 1977, igniting the feminist debate about the position of
reproduction within the gender equality battle. Firestone argued that gender inequalities are a consequence of the gendered divisions of labour that historically stem from the divergent biological materiality afforded to the sexes. The Dialectics of Sex proposes that for women to overthrow the patriarchy and achieve equality, these material differences (including those which liberate men from childbearing) must also be overcome. One way of doing this is to employ reproductive technology. By employing both critical theory and close readings of my primary texts, I will argue that in-utero reproduction and the knowledge which emerges from maternal materiality, instead of inhibiting women, as Firestone argues, can serve as a site of their empowerment within our contemporary capitalist society.
Claudia Dreifus was a feminist writer contributing to the debates in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, and in clear dialogue with Firestone. Her introduction to the 1978 essay collection
Seizing Our Bodies (a clear influence on Murphy’s 2012 study Seizing the Means of Reproduction, which I will turn to shortly) highlights, with far ranging examples, how the
medical-industrial complex, instead of working towards the realisation of Firestone’s feminist demands, is seething with institutionalised sexism. Dreifus lays out her argument in very clear terms: ‘What we have is patriarchal rear-hegemony of technology, information, medicine and facilities affecting female reproduction. And who exactly are these men who dominate female reproductive lives? They are males raised, as we all have been, in a society steeped deep in women-hatred’ (xix). The essays that follow, including ‘The Dangers of Oral Conception’ by Babara Seaman and ‘Vaginal Politics’ by Ellen Frankfort, showcase how women’s bodies have been historically politicised and manipulated through medical technologies to further the patriarchal cause. Many of Dreifus’s claims are echoed in The
Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (1985), in which Corea asserts that the hyper-medicalisation of reproduction and the
female body is a way of instilling patriarchal structures of power, which extend to and are enforced by medical systems:
Advocates often argue that these technologies do, in fact, bring women new options and choices. But feminists, looking to the Background, have pointed out that any discussions of ‘rights’ and ‘choices’ assumes a society in which there are no serious differences of power and authority between individuals. Where power prevails, coercion (subtle or otherwise) is also apt to prevail. These and other forces acting on women’s lives within a system of male supremacy have been powerfully documented. We are familiar with the repeated exposes of male treatment of women in the medical system. (3)
These feminist interventions suggest that although the patriarchal incentives for
technologically meddling with reproduction may not appear obvious in a society submerged in technological infatuation, you only have to scratch the surface of the medical-industrial complex to reveal a history of systemic oppression of the female body.
Throughout this thesis I argue that it is not the availability of reproductive technologies in itself which leads to the oppression of women but the frameworks through which these technologies are developed, implemented and then insisted upon. Beck-Gernsheim points out that, as seen with the contraceptive pill, ‘reproductive technology becomes reproductive ideology’; in other words, as society becomes convinced of the necessity for such
technologies, they turn from promise to burden (38). She summarises this process, which I will trace for the contraceptive pill in Chapter 1, as follows:
Social processes of technological change, in the reproductive field as in other areas, move inexorably from secret development to uncontrolled implementation to universal use and finally coerced deployment. Humanity, once it develops a new technology, mounts an escalator that brings it into new worlds in a manner beyond control. (30-31)
Thus, both Corea and Beck-Gernsheim cast suspicion on the speed at which reproductive technologies are developed and implemented, which tends to preclude critical debate.
Murphy, in turn, has argued that feminists should act to counter the fast moving technological takeover of female bodies. Her proposed intervention is one that sees women reclaiming and seizing their bodies in a way that places faith and confidence in the female mind-body as a location of knowledge and strength - and as a source for a form of resistance to a
technological empire which insists it always knows better.
On the other side of the debate are reproductive technology advocates, who underline the progress technology has allowed for in the feminist fight for equality. For example, Marks and many other critics acknowledge the pill’s problematic history, while still championing it for the opportunities it has granted women (Marks, 2010; Eigs, 2016; May 2010).
Environmental feminists, too, see contraceptives as a force for good in the fight to curb the overpopulation which is putting a strain on our natural planet, arguing that climate change will only further the oppression of women as the poverty gap widens as communities are destroyed and infrastructures can no longer be supported (Fine, 2011). In regards to the future
of reproductive technologies and the possibility of an artificial womb, some feminists still maintain Firestone’s claim that ex utero reproduction is the key to female liberation under patriarchy, while also arguing that it will grant equality to other marginalised bodies who seek to reproduce, such as a trans women or gay men, as well as providing an alternative to surrogacy which some argue is often exploitative of vulnerable women (Prashad, The
Guardian).
Speculative fiction has much to add to this debate. As Miller and McFarlane argue in a special edition of the Medical Humanities journal celebrating Science Fiction’s contribution to the field: ‘Science fiction proposes concrete alternatives and fosters critical self-awareness of the contingent activity which gives “the future” substance in the here-and-now’ (215). In this thesis, I will claim that one way for feminists to counteract the medical-industrial
complex’s will to technologize reproduction at increasingly rapid speeds is by imagining and thinking through the consequences of particular reproductive technologies before they arrive (and follow the trajectory Beck-Gernsheim lays out) through the medium of speculative literature. As Haraway argues: ‘Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others' practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions’ (Haraway, 172). According to Susan Merrill Squier, one way of claiming our stake in this ‘successor science project’ is through creating and reading speculative literature, which ‘gives us access to the biomedical imaginary: the zone in which experiments are carried out in narrative, and the psychic investments of biomedicine are articulated’ (17). By accessing the biomedical imaginary, Ari Schick similarly suggests, writers contribute to a dialogue of ‘anticipatory bioethics’ which can allow for ‘critical moral reflection on technological visions themselves,
proceeding from a recognition that these visions both reveal and shape the present, moulding our understanding of what is possible, what is likely and what is desirable’ (229, 230).
In addition, speculative literature is a way of taking debates on medicine and technology to a wider audience in the hope that by engaging readers these texts can affect their thinking and prompt debate. This sentiment is mirrored in an online article, Reproducing the Speculative:
Reproductive Technology, Education, and Science Fiction (2017), where Sherman argues:
Science and speculative fiction reach millions, and anthropologists who are interested in engaging with public conversations around science and medicine—and around expanding reproductive technologies in particular—must recognize the role these genres play in popular understandings of the social implications of new technologies.
What Haraway, Squier and Sherman share is a belief in the power of speculative literature to affect and intervene in the debate about reproductive technologies as both a prompt for debate and a form of resistance. Making this concrete, Bigman points out how speculative thinking and science fiction during the interwar period were used by feminist writers to ‘challenge male technocratic narratives premised on scientific progress’ (McFarlane and Miller, 217). My thesis shows that Piercy’s and Sedgwick’s novels are part of and continue this tradition of challenging reader to problematize medical narratives about reproduction, and in doing so make an important contribution to both the feminist debate and bioethical considerations surrounding emerging reproductive technologies.
Chapter 1
Who, and what, do reproductive technologies serve?
Women, and particularly feminists, have a long and complicated history with reproductive technologies, which intensified in the West in 20th century with the Cold War policy on overpopulation and the introduction of the contraceptive pill. Arguably, reproductive technologies, both in terms of their development and their continued implementation, continue to cause one of the greatest divides among feminists. For some, reproductive
technologies offer personal freedoms to women which override their more questionable uses, while for others these technologies are representative of an extension of patriarchal control over women. In this chapter I will explore further the tensions that exist within feminist debates about reproductive technologies. By exampling how reproductive technologies have been employed by patriarchal powers to disempower women despite being outwardly framed as tools for gender liberation, I argue that reproductive technologies created within a
patriarchal society will, even when developed with the best intentions, be taken up and manipulated to oppress and devalue the female body. At the same time, I will point to various ways in which women are railing against this technologicalization and medicalisation of female reproductive health, striving to move away from or at least seize control of
reproductive technologies and mould them into something fairer and more enabling for all women.
To understand how women’s reproductive bodies became a technological entity and political tool troubled by medical and technological intervention it is useful to consider how
reproductive technologies arrived, why they were so readily taken up by governments and institutions, and how they gained such wide social acceptance. By outlining a brief history of
reproductive technologies, I aim to provide a background to the feminist debates that continue today and to elucidate the discourses that prompt the thinking on both sides of the reproductive fence. I will take as my first focus hormonal contraception, a medical
intervention in reproduction which changed the way women all over the world interact with their bodies, sexuality and reproductive capacities, before discussing other reproductive technologies such as ultrasounds, IVF and the speculum.
The problem with the pill
The contraceptive pill was brought to market in 1960; taken up by medical institutions, it mobilized a whole catalogue of social changes, as well as much controversy and resistance. Broadly, resistance came from conservative and religious populations whose attitudes to sex encouraged a belief that the pill would sow the seeds of immorality and liberal sexual behaviour. Yet, upon a closer inspection of the pill’s emergence, the greatest controversy arguably concerned its entanglements with the Cold War desire to control the world population, a desire riddled with notions derived from eugenic philosophy1. As Murphy notes: ‘Cold War United States sponsored economic development brought the surveillance and reduction of regional birth rates into the heart of its project, positing fertility reduction as a necessary condition for the successful staging of industrialisation, green revolutions, free market governance, and other assorted projects of modernization’ (3). In this way, the (poor, non-white or impaired) female body was put on the political agenda as a tool whose
reproductive capacities could be manipulated for national gains. Murphy notes how many women’s experiences included their body being sized up in terms of ‘racial fitness or
1 The eugenics movement gained momentum in the beginning of the 20th century and centred round
the belief that the human race can be improved, for example, through selective breeding. Eugenics works to determine human worth against a set of ideals and practices have historically been used to
economic vitality’, leading to their being 'cajoled, targeted, or even coerced’ to use contraception or forcibly ‘sterilized’ (4).
Before, and even after, the pill’s implementation involuntary sterilization was rife (Wills,
JSTOR News). Its history exemplifies how governments and institutions believed they had the
right, and the power, to intervene in the reproductive lives of the population at will, often under the guise of national or local interest 2. Policies of forced sterilisation redefined reproductive functions as a privilege rather than a right, which could be forcibly taken from you based on your standing within a hierarchy of value enforced by a patriarchal and racist system that privileged white, wealthy, able bodies. It was only in the 1970s that involuntary sterilization laws began to be appealed. Significantly, this occurred at the same time that the pill was brought to market, begging the question whether the contraceptive pill to some extent replaced sterilisation in the eyes of governments who up until WWII had openly embraced eugenics. Was the pill so readily taken up by medical institutions because it was an easier, cheaper and more socially justifiable way of controlling a woman’s right to procreate?
This idea is supported by the fact that the first large scale human trials of the contraceptive pill in the 1950s were carried out on unwitting ‘descendants of Puerto Rico's jibaro
agricultural underclass’ living in the American territory of Puerto Rico (Quintanilla). At this point the side effects of the pill were not known, yet the Puerto Rican women were persuaded to take it for three years in an experiment on a population classed as ‘Other’ to white
2 Unlike involuntary sterilisation, voluntary sterilisation can be liberating for women and men who no longer want to have children, or for women who have already had children and have been advised that their health would be in danger if they were to get pregnant again. Men often choose to be sterilised so as to remove the need for their partners to use birth control measures with negative side effects.
America, which Briggs directly ties to colonial racism (Briggs, 139). Many side effects revealed themselves and the subsequent suffering of the test subjects has been repeatedly detailed by feminists who believe the Puerto Rican trials stand as a representative example of marginalised women’s bodies being exploited by a medical-industrial complex for capitalist, nationalist, and by extension patriarchal, gains.
At the same time, Lara Marks rationalizes the choice of the researchers in selecting the Puerto Rican women to test the pill on. She counters the idea that the women were used as ‘human guinea pigs’ by arguing that:
Puerto Rico was favoured because many of its medical practitioners were American trained… In addition, the island was near enough to the United States to allow close supervision… It was also regarded as an ideal setting because it had no laws
prohibiting contraception. Moreover, it had an active family planning movement and a well-established network of birth control clinics. The island was also important because of its growing population and poverty. Many women were keen for contraception. (101)
Here, Marks lists the practical reasons for which Puerto Rican women were selected,
including the fact that many of them desired birth control, as not having more children would help to mitigate their poverty.
The opposing perspectives of Briggs and Marks underscore the tensions within feminist debate about reproductive technologies: Briggs argues that the pill trials were
system reinforcing the notion that women of colour were less valuable, while Marks asserts that researchers chose the Puerto Rican women partly because they believed they were liberating a community of lower-class women who struggled with ‘large families’ (Briggs, 140; Marks, 101). Significantly, Briggs and Marks both wrote about the trials on the cusp of the twenty-first century, long after they happened, at a time when the pill had been widely taken up around the world. This ties into a larger issue with reproductive technologies, where their development is often a matter of the medical-pharmaceutical community and ‘invisible’ to society at large, followed by an implementation phase that depends on framing these technologies as tools for ending the oppression of women (Beck-Gernsheim, 26-27). This trajectory subsequently works to undermine those feminists who seek to problematise the effects of these technologies; it also means that critical debate about these technologies often only takes place and finds an interested audience when the technologies are already firmly instilled within medical and popular culture.
Interestingly, Marge Piercy’s 1976 science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, which I will discuss in detail in the second chapter of this study, was already confronting the issues raised by Marks and Briggs in the 1970s, and predates even early feminist criticism of reproductive technologies, such as Corea’s The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies
from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs, first published in 1986. The female
protagonist of Piercy’s text, Connie, is a poor Latino woman, much like the Puerto Rican patients in the pill trial, who experiences being a reproductive test subject for the benefit of the medical establishment: ‘Unnecessarily they had done a complete hysterectomy because the residents wanted practice’ (44). Women on the Edge of Time introduces not only the idea that the racialized female body was extra vulnerable to the medical complex, which saw it as less socially valuable and therefore an acceptable vessel for medical experimentation, but
also draws the reader’s attention to the real-life coercion and forced sterilisation of many women at the time the book was being written. Drawing attention to the time gap between Piercy’s narrative, which already points to the sexism and oppression within reproductive medical research, and the dialogue between Briggs and Marks is not to say that the latter is no longer necessary once a technology is firmly in place. Rather, it points to how speculative literature, and the imaginings it catalyses, can represent emerging reproductive technologies or technologies that do not yet exist, think through their possible social effects and debate their merits in a way that is unavailable to historians and sociologists, who have to wait for materials they can base their analysis on (documents, statistics, outcomes of studies of long-term effects) to become available; especially when it concerns patented medical technologies, this is often difficult and takes time.
Woman on the Edge of Time was published when the pill was first being implemented and
though the text does not directly discuss the pill, the artificial womb or ‘brooder’ which appears in the narrative can be seen as an extended analogy for contraception: reproductive technology has already made it possible to have sex without producing children and, following this trajectory, it will one day make having children without sex possible as well. The novel, crucially, points to the positive role reproductive technologies could play in achieving gender equality, while at the same time problematizing the artificial womb (and, by extension, the pill and other reproductive technologies already in existence when the novel appeared) through the lens of Connie’s experiences. How the novel does this will be
discussed at length in the next chapter. Here, it is important to draw attention to how fiction often anticipates critical debates in society and that by engaging with fictional texts
considering and debating the (de)merits of reproductive technologies and their potential effects on women.
Though there was social debate about reproductive technologies throughout the 20th century, feminist critiques were largely dismissed by the medical establishment and society as a whole due to the persistence of patriarchal power. In an online article, Vagas quotes a statement made by the Washington-based Women’s Liberation group during the 1970 congressional hearings about the pill’s side effects:
In spite of the fact that it is women who are taking the pill and taking the risks, it was legislators, the doctors, and the drug company’s representatives, all men of course, who were testifying and dissecting women as if they were no more important that the laboratory animals they work with every day.
This quote draws attention not only to the patriarchal structure of the medical profession which governed reproductive technologies but also to the fact that the pill made contraception a women’s only issue, in many ways freeing men from the responsibility they held when barrier methods were the only means of contraception and placing pressure on women to take on the responsibility and ‘risks’ associated with the pill. The fictional texts discussed in the next chapter, Woman on the Edge of Time and The Growing Season, both contain narratives which work to problematise medicine as an extension of the patriarchal abuse, manipulation and control the women protagonists experience in their daily lives: ‘She too, she was spayed. They had taken her womb at Metropolitan when she had come in bleeding after that abortion and the beating from Eddie’ (Piercy, 44). In this quote, Woman on the Edge of Time
practices of forced sterilisation, as well as the Puerto Rico pill trials. In doing so, it again suggests the important role literature can play for women, feminist scholars and bioethicists seeking to debate reproductive technologies.
As illustrated by Marks’ assertion that the pill trials sought to enable rather than manipulate the poverty-stricken Puerto Rican women, many historians and social commentators continue to celebrate the positive side of reproductive technologies. Several popular historians, such as John Eigs and Elaine Tyler May, champion the pill as liberating women’s sexualities. Eigs wrote The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (2016), which lionizes the pill’s creators, and May wrote America and the Pill: A History of
Promise, Peril and Liberation (2010), a text that focuses on the role of May’s father in the
research on the pill that was crucial to securing the FDA’s approval of the drug (xiv). Both works present partial accounts which work to romanticise the motivations of those working in the medical-industrial complex. Moreover, the argument that there was a causal relationship between the implementation of the pill and more liberal attitudes to sex has been disproved by several scholars (Watkins, 2).
Environmental feminists have argued that reproductive technologies aid the battle against overpopulation which puts a strain on our environments and ecosystems. As Fine asserts, not only do contraceptives protect women from the dangers associated with abortion and
childbirth but ‘unintended pregnancy is a key contributor to the rapid population growth that in turn impairs social welfare, hinders economic progress, and exacerbates environmental degradation’ (Fine, 1). Our contemporary environmental crisis is indeed likely to increase the poverty gap and, in doing so, to deepen the oppression of poor women, so the capacity of contraceptives and other reproductive technologies to curb or lessen the effects of
overpopulation is worth considering. However, historical examples, such as the development and implementation of the pill, show how positive social and environmental movements can quickly turn sour in the wrong political hands which do not value all bodies equally.
Consequently, some caution is in order and feminists should not uncritically accept technological advancements which claim to be in the service of a good cause; here,
environmental justice could easily lead to social injustice, as determinations are made about which women are not allowed or encouraged to procreate in order to save the planet.
Today, the pill and its hormonal contraceptive sisters such as the implant, ring and IUD, are further problematized as more and more studies point to users of hormonal contraceptives experiencing a lower quality of life, and statistics about the risk of physical and mental health problems, particularly in young women using these contraceptives, make for grim reading. Various longitudinal studies into hormonal contraceptives and health risks carried out in Denmark offer persuasive evidence of increased risk of deep vein thrombosis and depression in young women (Lidegaard, 1154). A growing public awareness of the mental health risks of hormonal contraception, stirred by popular women’s media taking up the debate, has already led to more women than ever taking up non-hormonal methods of contraception such as the copper coil or app based fertility trackers such as Natural Cycles, with Time reporting that Planned Parenthood ‘has experienced a 75% increase in IUD use among its patients since 2008’ (Sifferlin, 2015).
Yet, the IUD is not a problem-free alternative to the pill, and the larger issue of why women are still shouldering a large part of the contraceptive responsibility remains3. The male pill,
3 A Google search delivers a catalogue of personal testimonies and articles describing a plethora of wide ranging side effects, many of which are understood and detailed by medical professionals yet not officially connected to IUD-use through research. Even non-hormonal methods such as the copper coil have side effects,
for example, has been announced many times and researchers admit the technology is there but uptake, even in trials, is slow and dropout rates for the trials that have gone ahead high (Extance, 2016). Likewise, a reversible male sterilisation procedure (reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance, or Risug), which has so far shown no side effects, has been
successfully researched and trialled in India, but big pharmaceutical companies which profit from the female pill and condom sales have worked to block its introduction in the West, which would also entail paying astronomical FDA fees (Altstedter). Arguably, procedures such as Risug, if made widely available, could help to create more gender equality and encourage shared responsibility when it comes to contraception. As ever, it seems that capitalism is to blame as pharmaceutical giants which determine which reproductive technologies come to market are primarily motivated by the maximisation of their profits. Still, while it would be easy to see new male contraceptives as the ultimate equaliser, Corea notes:
But all this [the problematic male supremacy in the development and implementation of reproductive technology] seems to be forgotten when commentators discuss new reproductive technologies. It is as if the “old” reproductive technologies (such as the IUD) and the “new” ones arose out of two separate medical systems, one of which has a clear record of having hurt women, another of which will help women. But in fact there is one system and one low valuation of women in it. (3)
such as heavier menstrual bleeding, which leads to only ‘30 percent of women who haven’t given birth opt[ing] to keep in a standard 32-millimeter width copper IUD’ (Beaton; The Atlantic). Ari Altstedter reports that ‘almost 60 percent of women in spousal relationships used the contraceptive pill or some other form of modern contraception worldwide in 2015, according to a United Nations report. In contrast, 8 per cent relied on their
Though Corea is talking about new technologies focused on the female body, her comments highlight that whether these new reproductive technologies are designed for men or women, they will have been designed within a medical system informed by patriarchal values,
motivated by capitalist gains and with a long history of oppressing women. With this in mind, feminists and bioethicists arguably need to keep debating and imagining the ways in which new reproductive technologies (whether aimed at women or men) might be taken up and manipulated in ways that serve the patriarchy and extend the oppression of women. In the next chapter, I will discuss how speculative literature can guide this debate by creating imagined futures in which these technologies exist and their consequences are thought through, thus prompting a start to the ethical discussion before these technologies become accepted as part of everyday reality.
After conception - technology and the foetus
The industrialisation of reproduction in the 20th century was a catalyst for an exponential upsurge in the development of reproductive technologies (Tyler-May, 5). As the medical-industrial complex pushed these technologies, it created new ‘standards’, convincing women that these technologies, such as ultrasounds and monitoring of the foetus, were an intrinsic and ‘routine’ part of maternity (Beck-Gernsheim, 28). This, along with the widespread uptake of contraception, worked to create an understanding among women that medical surveillance of their reproductive bodies was a normal and necessary part of life 4. Arguably, this then enabled new reproductive technologies to be readily taken up without the wider public being prompted to question or problematize the increasing role of technological interventions in human propagation. As noted in regards to the pill, the implementation of these technologies
4 This had already begun in some ways in the nineteenth century, with discourses around menopause and the invention of the speculum (Strange, 2000),
often precedes ethical debates about them, making such debates largely ineffective in challenging the technologies.
Scepticism about reproductive technologies was most prevalent in feminist criticism in the 1980s and early 1990s (Beck-Gernsheim, 25). By the 1980s, human inference with
reproduction, in the form of medical and technological intervention, had reached new heights, prompting Corea to assert: ‘We are in the midst of a dramatic biological revolution’ (1). Here, Corea refers to the manner in which reproductive technologies had pervaded everyday life and restructured each stage of reproduction, from contraceptives to artificial insemination and IVF to ultrasounds and medicalised births and breastfeeding. In The Mother Machine:
Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (1986), Corea
frames reproductive technologies as a political issue and insists that these technologies ‘will not affect all women equally’ (2). In this way, she ignited what became a long-standing discussion within feminism about the origins and effects of reproductive technology: how and why did these technologies come to fruition? Who will they ultimately benefit and how can we ensure that inequality is countered rather than promoted through these reproductive tools? In addressing these questions, Corea firmly rebuts the idea that reproductive technologies allow for the liberation of women. Instead, she asserts that these technologies further patriarchal oppression:
Advocates (of reproductive technologies) often argue that these technologies do, in fact bring women new options and choices. But feminists, looking to the Background, have pointed out that any discussion of “rights” and “choices” assumes a society in which there are no serious differences of power and authority between individuals. Where power does prevail, coercion (subtle, or otherwise) is also apt to prevail. (3)
Over the last ten years, however, feminist critics have waded back into the conversation, critiquing in particular the use of ultrasound technology and its adoption by the pro-life movement in the United States. In 2009, Georgina Firth revisited Barbara Duden's 1993 book
The Public Foetus, noting how its overarching premise - that pregnancy is embedded within
the woman and that technologies such as ultrasounds work to undermine this by
disembodying the foetus - is still relevant today as women work to renegotiate the terms by which their reproductive bodies are penetrated and surveilled by technology (55). As Janelle Taylor notes, referring to ultrasounds: ‘In the past twenty-odd years, in the United States, a number of different prenatal diagnostic technologies have, with startling rapidity, gone from highly experimental to virtually routine medical procedure’ (391).
Similarly, we can see Corea’s assertions at work in our contemporary moment where, in America, women are forced to have an ultrasound as a prerequisite for having an abortion (Upadhyay et al., 2). In alienating the foetus from the women’s body, the ultrasound grants the unborn foetus autonomy and therefore individual rights. This positions the maternal body as a mere host and is used to argue for the foetus’ right to life, even when the mother’s life is in danger. This is exampled in the case of Savita Halappanavar who died in 2012 in Ireland of a septic miscarriage as a result of the 8th Amendment, which declares a pregnancy cannot be terminated while a foetal heartbeat can be detected. Despite Halappanavar’s distress and the fact that she was clearly miscarrying, the consultant whose care she was under, although aware of the risk of sepsis, stressed ‘the need to continuously check for a fetal heartbeat’ and as a result Savita died (O'Carroll, 2018).
Taylor’s essay “Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy, and Consumption” (2000) echoes Corea’s concerns as she argues that technologies such as the sonogram have worked to commodify the foetus and ‘that women are, in the process, being reduced to the status of unskilled reproductive workers, who produce these valued
commodities through their alienated labour’ (391). Taylor’s argument is reinforced by Ann Oakly, who argues in The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant
Women that reproductive technologies extract power from the mother’s body and place it in
the hands of historically oppressive institutions by enabling the doctor to bypass the mother to gain knowledge about the pregnancy. However, as Taylor highlights, with the ultrasound having already firmly asserted itself as a necessary and routine practice which many women enjoy as an important landmark of their impending motherhood, it is hard to problematize and it is in many cases essential to promoting and safeguarding the health of both mother and foetus.
This brings us back to the ambiguity of these techniques, which can at once be liberating and oppressive, sometimes even in the same instance. For example, a woman may find it
reassuring to check on the foetus with an ultrasound, particularly if she has had health issues or miscarriages in the past, but these same scans could produce anxiety that something is wrong and push women to place technological knowledge above a knowledge and
understanding of their own body. The discussion about these technologies needs to take all these factors into consideration, not simplifying or generalising them as either wholly oppressive or solely liberating, if it is going to allow for productive understanding and alternatives to evolve. The novels I analyse in the next chapter underline these nuances by highlighting how different characters experience and respond to reproductive technologies,
and how the context in which these technologies exist dictates whether they aid or harm women.
Untangling the patriarchy from reproduction and its technologies
Besides making the discussion of reproductive technologies as nuanced and considered as possible, it is also crucial to consider alternatives, and to restructure their use when harmful aspects are exposed. From the 1970s, when reproductive technologies had firmly rooted themselves in everyday life, groups of feminist have resisted the forces which sought to use these technologies in ways which would repress or limit women (Murphy, 20). As it is unlikely alternatives are going to emerge from a patriarchal medical-industrial complex, it is important to consider the ways women can resist on both micro and macro levels within their own communities. For this reason the final part of this chapter will example how women are seeking to access reproductive technologies on their own terms, becoming their own
educators and railing against the systems which dictate their experiences within reproductive health and medicine.
The speculum is one of the most low-tech examples of a reproductive technology and therefore provides a logical entry point for feminists who want to remodel reproductive technologies to fit their needs. The speculum, like the pill, has a troublesome history tainted with racism and patriarchal abuses 5. Designed by slave owner and medic James Marion Sims in 1845, the metal speculum, whose design has largely remained unchanged since its
5 J. Marion Sims developed the frst pelvic speculum through ‘acts of brutal unanaesthetised surgery upon enslaved African-American women’ (Pasco, et al., 246). Lerner reports that Sims would borrow slave women from the community to conduct ‘experiments’, with records showing he operated thirty times on one woman, despite being urged to stop by other medical professionals (The New York Times, 2003).
implementation, often causes pain and anxiety for women, both during and after use; research has shown that its use during cervical screening is one of the key reasons women avoid such appointments (Seehusen et al.). However, a group of women in San Francisco are seizing the speculum and untangling the web of patriarchy so tightly tied to its design. By changing the design of the speculum, they hope to create a better experience so women no longer avoid gynecological appointments and more abnormalities can be spotted and treated
(https://yonacare.com/Process). It is interesting to note, however, that when companies bought products to market in the past which provided ways of examining the cervix in a more patient-friendly way, these products have failed as medical staff did not take them up or take the time to be properly trained (Eveleth). Taking this into account, it becomes clear that women not only need to seize reproductive technologies and remodel them, but force women’s reproductive health onto the political agenda to demand that issues surrounding reproductive technologies are taking seriously within the medical field.
The demedicalisation of breastfeeding and birth is another way that some feminists are pulling back from the technological entanglements of reproduction, which frames female materiality as dangerous. Breast-milk has become highly medicalised, particularly by highly regulated milk banks in Neonatal intensive care units which pose a mother’s raw breast milk as a potential hazard (Palmquist, 28). Aunchlee Palmquist argues that the practice of milk sharing communities in the US is one way in which women are demedicalising breastfeeding and empowering other women to care for their children (23). Recent medical campaigns have worked to push the narrative that breastfeeding is superior to bottled milk, both in terms of the baby’s health and the mother-child bond. Such campaigns, however, have also pressured and produced feelings of guilt in many women who struggle with breastfeeding (Leppard, 2017) 6.The communities of non-commercial milk sharers that Palmquist researched use these
practices as a way to push back against both the medicalisation and capitalization of feeding and caring for their children, while also challenging the narrative that a woman can only be perceived as a “good mother” if she actively breastfeeds her own child. Interestingly, these milk sharers still employ technology, in the form of Facebook groups and non-commercial milk sharing websites, yet this technology exists outside of the medical-industrial system. As Palmquist asserts: ‘Milk sharing is part of our ancient history, and with the aid of the internet it has been reimagined and reinvigorated in the twenty first century’ (25). In this way women are, as Murphy terms, ‘reseizing the means of reproduction’ by building their own
communities of support outside of medical frameworks and reimagining ways of using technology to empower other women. Milk sharing also works to establish equality as it gives all mothers or mother figures the opportunity to provide breast milk to their children, including trans women, gay couples and men. The reliance on generosity through a non-commercialised sharing model, furthermore, also lifts barriers to access for mothers of all socio-economic backgrounds.
Both milk sharing and the redesigning of the speculum show how feminist movements, shaped by women and with women’s interests at their centre, are reimagining how
reproductive technologies can be remodelled outside of a medical-industrial complex tainted with patriarchal entanglements that often works to encourage women and mothers that the capacity of their bodies, and the knowledge these bodies bestow, come second to medical and technological commands.
It is clear from the debates that exist within feminism that reproductive technologies hold two contradictory truths: they can liberate women both as labourers and sexual beings, and theoretically help to curb the strain put on the planet by overpopulation, but their history has also shown that, in patriarchal systems, they are often developed and used in ways that harm and oppress women. The history of reproductive technology is tainted with racism, with bodies of colour disproportionately falling prey to medical experiments and abuse, as exemplified by forced, involuntary sterilisation and the Puerto Rico pill trials. Reproductive technologies, as they have been used, also make women bear the brunt of contraceptive responsibility and place them at risk of severe physical and mental side effects. Technologies such as the ultrasound, moreover, undermine the capacities and knowledge produced by the female body-mind, and sever the foetus from female materiality in a way that encourages people to dismiss the need for female agency when it comes to matters of one's own body. As Beck Gernsheim concludes:
We can assume that the development and application of reproductive technologies will follow the established historical pattern. At the beginning the positive side, the promise of liberation, stand in the foreground, just as it did with the automobile and nuclear energy as well as IVF. Only later does it become apparent that liberation also has a price, and that with each of these achievements, we also take on a burden of new risks and dangers. (25)
For these same technologies to succeed as tools of social justice it is clear that they need to be repurposed within a new medical framework that values all bodies equally. As Murphy argues, there is a ‘possibility for feminism as a kind of technoscientific counter-conduct’ (3), and, as exampled by the redesigning of the speculum, groups of women are working to seize
control of reproductive technologies in a way that could potentially restructure the medical-industrial complex. However, tensions and contradictions remain, meaning that even
feminists do not always agree on the best way to repurpose these technologies, which, on the one hand, have the capacity to improve the well-being of women, providing them with opportunities and freedoms, but at the same time can be employed in controlling manners, even outside a patriarchal context. For example making IVF available in an unlimited way to women would at first appear as something that feminists should advocate and promote but at the same time risks creating a pressure for women to keep trying while also perpetuating the idea that to truly be woman you must become a mother.
By highlighting some episodes from the problematic history of reproductive technologies, this chapter has sought to a build a foundation from which to consider the future of these technologies within the frameworks of patriarchal rule which continue to dominate our contemporary reality. I have highlighted the complexity of the feminist debate about
reproductive technologies, while also beginning to assert the power of speculative literature to intervene in this debate and provide further nuance. Furthering my discussion of Women
on the Edge of Time in this chapter and adding to it through a comparison with The Growing Season, Chapter 2 will seek to show how the speculative novel has prefigured debates about
reproductive technologies through imaginative thinking and, in this way, can both empower and educate feminists. I will take the artificial womb as my case study, since it is a
reproductive technology that does not yet exist, but of which the implications have repeatedly been explored, in all their dimensions, and in patriarchal and non-patriarchal contexts, in speculative literature. The artificial womb is hailed by some feminists as the ultimate way to even the reproductive playing field for all genders. In many ways the artificial womb is the ultimate realization of Margaret Sanger’s attempt to end women being what she termed in her
1933 speech ‘breeding machines for men’ (Corea, 14) 7. But, like the pill, it springs from a problematic medical-industrial complex and thus also has the potential to become wrapped up in something much darker than women’s liberation.
Chapter 2 The Artificial Womb
As works of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2016) offer the reader seemly utopian futures where women are freed from the constraints of maternity by artificial wombs, thus opening up new gender equalities and parenting roles. The artificial womb was famously narrativized in Aldous Huxley’s dystopia in A Brave New World (1932): however, in Piercy’s and
Sedgwick’s novels, the artificial wombs are not the grotesque baby bottles of Huxley’s text but posited as a mark of progressive society which has dismantled gendered power structures. In the social realm, the artificial womb is fast becoming a post-human possibility, as Eve Sedgwick, writing for The Guardian, notes: ‘our ethics rather than our technology are now the limiting factor’. As displayed in Chapter 1, the role of technological and artificial intervention in maternity is an issue which divides many feminist critics, and even non-human ectogenesis technology is riddled with ‘ethical tangles’ (Prasad). The ‘brooder’ and the ‘pouch’ in Woman on the Edge of Time and The Growing Season arguably add to this debate by prompting the question on which this chapter will focus: is the artificial womb the key to a gender equality which allows for new visions of the ‘family’ collective or a new-fangled mechanism through which patriarchal forces can draw power and control from the female body? I will employ my comparison of Woman on The Edge of Time and The
Growing Season as a springboard to discuss the real-world potentialities and implications of
the artificial womb in our contemporary society.
The artificial womb in Woman on The Edge of Time acts as trope through which to explore the entanglements of gender, reproduction and technology. Commenting on the considerable
influence of Firestone’s The Dialectics of Sex, Murphy asserts in Seizing the Means of
Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience that ‘Firestone argued
that women needed to seize the means of reproduction in order to sever the chains of a patriarchy that fundamentally depended on the uneven material distribution of mammalian biological reproductive labour into male and female bodies’ (5). Piercy took inspiration from the theory put forward in Firestone’s canonical text in her portrayal of the ‘brooder’, an artificial womb in which genetic material is stored and ‘embryos grow’ (Piercy, 106). The ‘brooder’ exists in Mattapoisett, a futuristic utopia where the novel’s protagonist, Connie, time travels with the help of Luciente, a time traveller and resident of Mattapoisett, and is presented as offering a liberation from gender roles for both sexes. The temporality of the narrative oscillates between Connie’s present reality, where she finds herself in a slum-like 1970s Spanish Harlem and then a mental hospital, and her past, giving the readers an understanding of her experiences as a poor Latino woman in America. These narrative flashbacks provide a context to Connie’s reaction to the ‘brooder’, discussed at length. Connie’s child was taken away by social services due to class inequality and many of her friends have had their female materiality used against them by institutionalised powers: ‘That she had borne herself all over again, and it was a crime to be born poor as it was a crime… She had caused a new woman to grow where she had grown, and that was a crime’ (62). Offsetting this narrative are Connie’s travels to two futures: a dystopian society visited briefly only once and the utopian Mattapoisett, where much of the novel is set. In Mattapoisett, Connie is introduced to Luciente’s communist peasant community and the different family units which exist. These families are no longer formed through male and female couplings but formed in groups of three; children are created in the ‘brooder’, are not genetically related to their parents and are cared for in communal arrangements, as Luciente explains while showing Connie the brooder: ‘Our mems, our children, our friends include
people of different gene mixes. Our mothers also… There’s no genetic bond - or if there is, we don’t keep track of it’ (109).
As Grosz notes, many feminist critics, including Firestone, ‘relish the development of new technological means of regulating reproduction and eliminating the effects of women's specific biologies on women's roles as social, economic, cultural, and sexual beings’ (15). Yet Grosz presents these scientific inhibitions of maternity as paradoxical in their framing of reproduction as ‘a major or defining feature of femininity as we know it, while at the same time, regarding female bodies as inadequate, in need of (this time surgical) supplementation or supersession’ (15-16). This paradox is explicitly played out in Woman on the Edge of Time in the conflicting approaches of Luciente and Connie to the ‘brooder’. For Luciente, the artificial womb in Mattapoisett is ‘part of women’s long revolution’ (110), whereas Connie detests and reputes the children of the brooder: ‘She hated them, the bland bottleborn monsters of the future’ (111). Here, the ‘revolution’ Luciente references is a war that took place in Mattapoisett that succeeded in dismantling both patriarchal and capitalist structures and gave way for the communist peasant community with gender equality that now exists to be established. The war is offered to the readers as a way of understanding how Connie’s reality could ever lead to a genderless society: ‘We were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we [women] ever had’ (110). To take away men’s power in the war of the future, women had to lose ‘the only power we ever had’, as Luciente asserts: ‘Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal' (110). Here, Luciente’s use of ‘enchained’ links reproduction to a female disempowerment. Paradoxically, however, the notion that female bodily reproduction had to be surrendered to win the war for gender equality undermines Luciente’s perception of the ‘brooder’ because the men of Mattapoisett clearly feared that their lack of reproductive
capacity made them inferior. This gestures to the reasoning behind patriarchy’s need to inhibit maternity through technology and their will to oppress, and reduce, the female body, which is further stressed by Luciente’s reference to maternity as the ‘the original production’, linking reproduction to capitalist frameworks of power and assembly (110). Significantly, as Murphy notes, ‘reproduction’ as a term related to maternity only dates back to the eighteenth century, arriving into usage alongside the political economy concept of ‘production’. The historicity of term emphasises how genealogies attach ‘questions of sex and living-kinds to the organization of economics’ (Murphy, 9). If this reasoning is followed, women’s bodies are sustained, within a contemporary society that values production, due to their ability to replicate the machinery and systems of production intrinsic to capitalist frameworks.
Women’s only power within institutional patriarchy then comes from their maternal abilities, which sustain capitalism through producing beings (workers and consumers) that will
continue the chains of production and consumption.
To Connie, the womb is central to the conception of her sexuality, womanhood and human status: ‘They took her womb in the hospital. Afterward that was a curse Jesus threw in her face: no longer a woman’ (44). This dispossession is emphasised by the dehumanising terms and animalistic language the third-person narrator utilises to refer to hysterectomies, ‘She too, was spayed’, which positions the womb-less woman as comparative to animal status (42). Connie’s conceptualisation of the womb as essential to female corporeality underpins her reaction to the ‘brooder’: ‘Connie gaped, her stomach also turning slowly upside down. All in a sluggish row, babies bobbed. Mother the machine’ (107). Again, reproduction is linked to capitalism through the analogy of the machine. The machine enables capitalism through its ability to mass produce, but here it occupies what was previously a female site of power.
In Connie’s real-time world, we see how the state regulates and appropriates female reproductive power for patriarchal gains: ‘They had taken out her womb at Metropolitan when she had come in bleeding after that abortion and the beating from Eddie’ (44). As Ruddy argues, ‘technologies are often employed today to serve men and the demands of a capitalist market’ and ‘for many feminists, these interventions are thought to be invasive, misogynist, and unnecessary; because men control the technology, they argue, these interventions function as extensions of male power and control of women’ (23, 22). Along these lines we can read Connie’s reaction to the babies in the artificial wombs as a
manifestation of scepticism born from living in patriarchal society where technology and medicine are conducive of male control: ‘Who got that child out of a machine the way that couple, white and rich, got my flesh and blood. All made up already, a canned child, just add money. What do they know of motherhood?’ (111). This notion is further underlined by the women within the narrative having their wombs removed for medical ‘practice’ and without choice, and being repeatedly forced into abortions by men who use them for sex and income: ‘year of her first abortion’; ‘pregnant with a baby she must abort’ (62, 43, 45).
In her hostile response to the ‘brooder’, Connie refutes the idea that the womb is a ‘dark and dangerous’ place, seeking to establish it instead as a ‘natural’ place for the baby to develop: ‘How could anyone know what being a mother means who has never carried a child nine month heavy under her heart’ (111). In the chapter ‘The Artificial Womb: An Escape from the “Dark and Dangerous Place’ in The Mother Machine, Corea writes that the development of ‘male-oriented obstetrics’ has convinced women that their bodies, and more particularly their wombs, are dangerous places (205). She proceeds to detail and list the arguments and attempts made to the frame the womb as volatile environment for the embryo, emphasizing the ways in which medicine and society have manipulated science to reduce the capacity of
the female body to create and maintain life within it. Connie’s use of the word ‘under’ and the placement of the child beneath ‘her heart’ create an allusion of concealment and safety, and, in doing so, celebrates the female body for its protective capacity. Yet the use of ‘heavy’ adds another layer of meaning as maternity ultimately labours women. Despite her
protestations against the ‘brooder’, Connie acknowledges this when referring to her sister, Inez: ‘under his [Inez’s husband’s] thumb too and him filling her with babies one right after the other… She’s tired and worn out with making babies’ (299). Here, we encounter again the tension that fuels the divide between feminist considerations of reproductive technology, as discussed in the previous chapter: a shared belief that the female body holds value in its maternal capacity, which empowers many women, but also a fractionating awareness that this same capacity is reduced by a patriarchy which disregards maternal labour and uses it to societally impede women rather than to value them.
When considering the artificial womb as not an equalizing tool, but a method by which to disempower women, the practical workings of this can be imagined using the models of capitalism and patriarchy already at play in society. For example, the bioethicist Scott Gelfand hypothesizes: ‘Employers could also require female employees to use artificial wombs to avoid maternity leave... Insurers could require use of the device to avoid costly complicated pregnancies and deliveries’ (quoted in Stein). These assertions highlight the far-reaching capitalist and patriarchal gains which can be achieved through the removal of reproduction from the female body. In Woman on the Edge of Time, the narrative explicitly considers how some bodies and, by implication, the products of these bodies are
illegitimized: ‘That she had borne herself all over again, and it was a crime to be born poor as it was a crime to be born brown. She had caused a new woman to grow where she had grown, and that was a crime’ (62). In the narrative Connie’s child is taken from her and put up for
adoption after social services intervene due to a purported instance of child abuse; Connie, however, believes she was punished due to her poorness being negatively correlated with her aptitude as a mother.
Arguably, the artificial womb, celebrated by masculine forces for its ‘curing’ of the
interference of the female body, could assume superiority over ‘natural’ birthing and instigate another means by which babies and female bodies are illegitimized and appropriated. Such an appropriation would widen societal and class differences, ‘Who got that child out of a
machine the way that couple, white and rich, got my flesh and blood. All made up already, a canned child, just add money?’, and allow mothering to be further policed and determined by patriarchy-funded and -motivated technology. This is implied by Bee’s assertion that the ‘brooder’ is superior to ‘bearing alive’ in its ability to produce ‘stronger babies’ (111, 107). Given Grosz’s assertion that the body is historically and societally associated with
femininity, the artificial womb can be considered a way in which patriarchy can do away with the ‘inference’ of the maternal body in reproduction, thus rendering female corporeality redundant and alleviating masculine inferiority, crucially without making men bear children (5).
Much of Connie’s hatred of ‘the bland bottle born monsters of the future’ derives from the value she places on female bodily materiality as the site of maternity (11). Considering her own experiences of childbirth, she notes: ‘The nurse said I would have to show you, but you reached right for my breast’ (111). The retelling of her experiences works to illustrate an image of instinctive, natural mothering while situating the breast as specific, corporeal location of maternity. Significantly, the men of Mattapoisett have developed the ability to breastfeed through the use of hormones:
He had breasts. Not large ones. Small breasts, like a flat-chested woman temporarily swollen with milk. Then with his red beard, his face of a sunburnt forty-five-year-old man, stern-visaged, long nosed, thin lipped, he began to nurse. (142)
Connie installs a sense of uncanniness around this image by juxtaposing the list of
stereotypically male features with the phrase ‘he began to nurse’, stressing the unnaturalness of men espousing female corporeal functions. Watching Barbaroosa breastfeed stimulates a bodily memory for Connie as she recalls: ‘Her breasts ached with remembrance. She had loved breastfeeding – that deep-down milky connection that seemed to start in her womb and spread up through her trunk into her full dark-nipple’ (142). Here, the language used focuses on the materiality of the female body and the connectivity of maternal organs, illustrating that the body is an essential vehicle to the forming and experiencing of maternity 8. In this way, the mimesis of the womb by a ‘larger fluid receptacle’ and artificial ‘sacs’, and the adoption of maternal abilities by men are framed as not only abstracting female power from women but as also extorting their experiences of femininity (107).
The Growing Season is a useful point of comparison to Women on The Edge of Time, if only
to see how little has been resolved within the feminist debate about ex utero reproduction which both texts narrativise despite the forty years between their publication - in surprising contrast to the seemingly infinite progression of biotechnology and its reproductive uses. The feminist tensions displayed by Connie and Lucientie in Piercy’s novel are still very much
8 Yet, we also saw in Chapter 1 how the natural narrative surrounding breastfeeding (as expressed in the Breast is Best campaigns) can work to alienate or guilt women. Connie’s feelings, though valid given her experiences, express the belief that the ability to breastfeed should not be extended beyond women. This belief arguably
