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IVF: Modern miracle or risky procedure?

IVF: Modern miracle or risky procedure?. Karen Throsby K.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.

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IVF: Modern miracle or risky procedure?

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  1. IVF: Modern miracle or risky procedure? Karen Throsby K.Throsby@warwick.ac.uk

  2. Outline • What is IVF? • Feminist and non-feminist responses to IVF • Treatment failure (distribution of responsibility)

  3. What is IVF?

  4. What is IVF? • A laboratory procedure • A process of assisted conception

  5. Facts and figures (Jan – Dec 2007) • 36,861 patients (5.8% increase) • 46,829 cycles of treatment • 11,091 successful births (13,672 babies) (8.3% increase) • Success rates (with “fresh” eggs): • Overall live birth rate 23.7% • Women under 35: 32.3% • Women 35-37: 27.7% • Women 38-39: 19.2% • Women 40-42: 11.9% • Women 42-44: 3.4%

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

  7. Non-feminist responses • “Pro-life”: embryos are “alive” • Cases of embryo “adoption” • US – “snowflake babies”

  8. Disruption of normative reproductive categories • Intergenerational donation • Fragmentation of parenthood (social, genetic and gestational) • Temporal disruptions (e.g. twins born years, even decades, apart).

  9. 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

  10. Critiques of FINRRAGE • Too generalising about “women” and “men” • Assumption of natural womanhood outside of culture • IVF is a context-specific technology (can’t generalise about it) • Cannot account for women’s involvement (outside of complicity / false consciousness)

  11. But…. • Centralise women’s bodies in the debate • International perspective • Race / class discrimination • Showed links between industries (e.g. farming / fertility medicine)

  12. 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”.

  13. 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

  14. “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)

  15. 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.

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