Breeder reactionaries - reproductive technologies

Reason, Dec, 1994 by Wendy McElroy

The above arguments may sound absurd and contradictory--just how absurd and contradictory we will see shortly. But because radical feminists are almost the only women in the feminist movement discussing the implications of the new reproductive technologies, they enjoy tremendous influence over the terms of debate. At the university level, they often chair women's studies programs and occupy administrative positions. Radical feminists are also defining the terms of the reproductive debate outside the academy. The shelves of libraries and bookstores are stocked with radical feminist works from major publishers, all of which argue against new reproductive technologies. These include: Living Laboratories, by Robyn Rowland; The Mother Machine, by Gena Corea; The Politics of Reproduction, by Mary O'Brien; and such anthologies as Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress; Man-Made Women: How the New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women; and Test Tube Women.

Radical feminists are even shaping the political process that will monitor and regulate access to and information about the new reproductive technologies, as well. Janice Raymond, for instance, testified against surrogacy contracts before the House Judiciary Committee of Michigan in 1987. The Sixth International Women's Health Congress, held in 1990, drafted a resolution opposing, among other things, the development of anti-pregnancy vaccines. In Canada, groups such as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women have been preparing studies and statistics in hope of restricting fertility clinics.

The critics opposing the radical feminist position tend to be far removed from the word of "gender studies"; as a result, they are often dismissed as uninformed or irrelevant by radical feminists. For instance, John Robertson, professor of law at the University of Texas, has argued that, because the right to reproduce follows from the constitutional guarantees to privacy that underwrite Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut, access to the new reproductive technologies should be similarly protected. But since radical feminists dismiss the U.S. Constitution as a document written by and for white slave-owning males, they reject any appeal to privacy because it places reproductive rights beyond considerations of the "female" values of social justice and social ethics. "Privacy rights," say the radical feminists, are just another attempt to tie reproduction to the male-dominated tradition of property rights.

It is worthwhile, then, to examine and refute the radical feminist rejection of the new reproductive technologies on its own terms. By looking at the misinformation and the illogic of their attacks on science and individual--as opposed to group--rights, the implications of the radical feminist mindset become clear. It calls for nothing short of a "gender revolution" that will overturn individual rights, private property, and any other institution tainted by "patriarchy." "In order to stop... systematic abuses against [women]," writes Andrea Dworkin in her 1976 book Our Blood, "We must destroy the very structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws."