IVF: Modern miracle or risky procedure?

Transformations: gender, reproduction and contemporary society (Week 10)

Karen ThrosbyK.Throsby@warwick.ac.uk

Outline

• What is IVF?

• Feminist and non-feminist responses to IVF

• Treatment failure (distribution of responsibility)

What is IVF?

What is IVF?

• A laboratory procedure

• A process of assisted conception

Facts and figures (April 2003-March 2004)

• 29688 patients

• 38264 cycles of treatment

• 8251 successful births (10242 children)

• Success rates (with “fresh” eggs):– Women under 35: 28.2%– Women 35-37: 23.6%– Women 38-39: 18.3%– Women 40-42: 10.6%

The risks of treatment

• Multiple pregnancy

• Ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS)

• Unknown long term effects of drugs

• Treatment failure

• Stress

• Financial hardship

Resisting IVF

• Many people (feminist and non-feminist) have opposed IVF – why?

Non-feminist responses

• “Pro-life”: embryos are “alive”– Cases of embryo

“adoption”– US – “snowflake

babies”

Disruption of normative reproductive categories

• Intergenerational donation

• Fragmentation of parenthood (social, genetic and gestational)

• Temporal disruptions (e.g. twins born years, even decades, apart).

Feminist responses: FINRRAGE

• Feminist International Network for Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering

• Reproductive technology as experimental and abusive of women

• Taking women’s health care out of women’s hands and into men’s

Critiques of FINRRAGE

• Too generalising about “women” and “men”

• Assumption of natural womanhood outside of culture

• Cannot account for women’s involvement (outside of complicity / false consciousness)

But….

• Centralise women’s bodies in the debate

• International perspective

• Race / class discrimination

• Showed links between industries (e.g. farming / fertility medicine)

Women as users, not recipients / victims

• Rayna Rapp: women as “moral pioneers”• Jana Sawicki (1991) Disciplining Foucault: Feminism,

Power and the Body - reproductive technologies as biopower: – “..creating desires, attaching individuals to specific

identities, and establishing norms against which individuals and their behaviours and bodies are judged and against which they police themselves” (Sawicki 1991: 68)

• Women actively use IVF, rather than simply being passive recipients / victims of it.

• Policing of own bodies is experienced as empowering / resistant – “doing something about it”.

IVF failure – blaming women?• Women do most of the “work” of IVF:

– Information gathering– Organising appointments / tests (for both

partners)

• IVF focuses on women’s bodies

• Different standards of “fertility” for men and women

• Technology succeeds, but women fail

“Poor perfomer”

• Liz: I thought, well… I was just sitting there thinking… gosh, they can’t… I feel labelled! You sort of… like a school report – could do better.

• “crap eggs” (Stephanie)• “[I’m] rubbish at producing eggs” (Jenny)• “[I never] did that well with the eggs”

(Jane)

Masculinity / virility / fertility

• Beth: I sent [partner] a card on Valentine’s Day last year, saying “To the world’s greatest lover” and there’s a friend of mine in here, who actually has 4 children […] and her boyfriend said, “Oh, how come I didn’t get a card saying, “Greatest lover?” and she said, “You’ve got children to prove you are.”

• John: […] Now, it’s like “Do you have any children?” I say, “Well, no, unfortunately, my wife couldn’t have any. We’ve tried. We couldn’t.

Conclusion

• IVF is a new reproductive technology that is highly in demand from patients

• It both affirms, and disrupts, normative reproductive categories

• It has been the focus of considerable opposition from both feminists and non-feminists, but on very different grounds.