12. New Reproductive Technologies: Sexist and Racist Implications*
Maria Mies
Introduction
Atomic technology having come under heavy attack, particularly after Chernobyl, its exalted place has been taken by biotechnology, mainly genetic engineering and reproduction technology, in company with computer technology. Together they are presented as the great hope in the so-called third technological revolution of ‘high tech’. This chapter concentrates on the implications of the development of new reproductive technologies. But it should be borne in mind that in practice these technologies do not simply exist side by side; they are combined in a number of ways. Particularly the combination of genetic engineering and reproductive technology. It is precisely this combination that brings to light their destructive potential.
The discourse on these technologies usually follows the age-old principle of divide and rule: fundamental or ‘pure’ research is divided from applied research; genetic engineering is divided from reproductive technology; reproductive technology is divided into two — one intended for industrial societies and the other for underdeveloped societies. This separation of spheres and contexts, which essentially are linked, makes a critical assessment of this technological development very difficult.
In the following pages I therefore use the methodological principle of showing the connections and linkages between these technologies, spheres and contexts. Only by such a comprehensive and panoramic view is it possible to surmise whether or not these developments contribute to greater happiness for all peoples. First, a few basic theses:
(1) These technologies have been developed and produced on a mass scale, not to promote human happiness, but to overcome the difficulties faced by the present world system in continuing its model of sustained growth, of a lifestyle based on material goods and the accumulation of capital. Since the markets for durable consumer goods are no longer expanding, new needs must be created for the new commodities developed by scientists and industry. The female body’s generative capacity has now been discovered as a new ‘area of investment’ and profit-making for scientists, medical engineers and entrepreneurs in a situation where other areas of investment are no longer very promising.1 Reproductive technologies have been developed not because women need them, but because capital and science need women for the continuation of their model of growth and progress.
(2) These technologies are introduced in a situation of social relations between men and women which, throughout the world, are based on exploitation and subordination. It is an historical fact that technological innovations within exploitative and unequal relationships lead to an intensification, not attenuation, of inequality, and to further exploitation of the groups concerned.
(3) These technologies are legitimized on humanitarian grounds by those who try to sell them, for example, to help infertile couples have a child of their own; to help women avoid bearing handicapped children, to minimize the hazards of pregnancy and child-bearing, and so on. The methodological principle is to highlight the plight and unhappiness of a single individual and appeal to the solidarity of all to help that individual. In this all kinds of psychological blackmail are used. The individual cases are only to introduce these technologies and to create the necessary acceptance among all people; the aim is total control of all women’s reproductive capacity. In this the woman as a person with human dignity is ignored.
(4) It is often argued that these technologies as such are neither good nor bad, and that this can be determined only by their application. This argument is based on the widely-touted proposition that science and technology are value-free and have no bearing on social relations.
A closer analysis carried out by feminists in recent years has, however, revealed that the dominant social relations are also part and parcel of technology itself. We can no longer argue about whether reproductive technology or genetic technology as such are good or bad; the very basic principles of this technology have to be criticized no less than its methods.2 These are based on exploitation and subordination alike of nature, women and other peoples (colonies).3 In this context lies the inherent sexist racist and ultimately fascist bias of the new reproductive technologies, a thesis that will be elaborated in the following pages.
Selection and elimination
Reproductive technology and genetic engineering are based on the same principles as physics and other sciences. Like other sciences, they involve the dissection of living organisms into ever smaller particles: molecules, cells, nuclei, genes, DNA and their various recombinations according to the plan of the (male) engineer. In this process to select desirable elements and eliminate undesirable ones is crucial. In fact, without the principle of selection and elimination, the whole technology of reproduction and genetics would make no sense. What purpose would a study of genetics serve if not to promote the propagation of what are considered to be desirable attributes and the elimination of those seen as undesirable? This applies as much to human genetics as to plant and animal genetics; and applies equally to reproductive technology, which is based on the selection of fertile elements (sperm, ova) and their combination outside the female body. This selection and elimination would not be possible if those living organisms were left intact and free to regulate their reproduction in accordance with their own desires, love and lust.
Carolyn Merchant finds a parallel to the dissection and invasion of nature in the torture of women in the witch pogroms, and shows that both types of violence are intrinsic to the method of modern science and technology.4 Francis Bacon, founding father of the modern scientific method, perceived nature as a witch whose secrets had to be extracted by force. He wrote:
For like as a man’s disposition is never well known or proved till he be crossed, nor Proteus never changed shapes till he was straitened and held fast, so nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art (mechanical devices) than when left to herself. [Emphases in original.]5
Force and violence constitute the invisible foundation upon which modern science was built. Hence, violence against women in the witch pogroms, and violence against nature which was perceived as a woman.
This whole process of development of ‘mechanical devices’ and of modern science, however, would not have been possible without applying the same principles of violent subordination and exploitation against the colonies and their people. The people in America, Asia and Africa were treated, like women and nature in Europe, as ‘savages’. Without the wealth robbed from the colonies, neither capitalism nor modern European science would have got off the ground between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
It is well-known that at the beginning of the fifteenth century Europe was less developed than China or India. Modern European science owes much to China, India and Arabia, in the fields of medicine, mathematics, chemistry and biology. In India plastic surgery was used long before it was ‘discovered’ in Europe, and inoculation against smallpox was known and used long before it was ‘introduced’ by modern medicine men.6 Similarly, the technologies in agriculture, iron smelting, smithing and in textile production were far in advance of those used in Europe around the fifteenth century.7
Not only technological practice but also theories about nature were more sophisticated in China and India than in Europe. Josef Needham has amply proved the excellence of ancient Chinese scientific thought. And about India he writes:
Indian culture in all probability excelled in systematic thought about nature … When the balance comes to be made up, it will be found, I believe, that the Indian scientific history holds as many brilliant surprises as those which have emerged from the recent study of China — whether in mathematics, chemistry or biology and especially the theories which were framed about them.8
This shows that it was not, as is often claimed, European ‘brain power’ that was more advanced than Asian. There must, therefore, have been something else which, at the beginning of the development of modern European science, gave it an advantage over other civilizations. This something was the use of human (male) brain-power for the arts of destruction and warfare. Modern mechanics and physics would probably have taken a different course had they not, from their beginning, been closely associated with militarism and the development of arms. This is the secret of the European Homo faber, the European model of civilization and progress. European scientists were, from the fifteenth century onwards, ‘Fathers of destruction’.9 To legitimize the development of these arts of destruction, women, nature and the colonies had to be robbed of their ‘human’ quality, their soul. They became spiritless matter, raw material. The goal of these processes of subordinating nature, women and the colonies and treating them as spiritless and passive matter to be dissected and recombined as the male engineer wishes, was and is the optimization of human labour for the production of material wealth. This goal defines what is valuable and what is not, what should be selected and what eliminated. Thus, white people are considered more valuable than brown and yellow and black peoples; men are considered more valuable than women; owners of means of production are considered more valuable than those who work these means. Everything considered as less valuable was defined as ‘nature’; everything that was valued higher was defined as ‘human’. And the human being par excellence is the white man; he has the right to rule over all ‘nature’ and to promote his own creation — ‘culture’.
Racism, sexism and the Enlightenment
Racism, sexism and fascism are neither ahistorical universal phenomena nor unique, recent developments, but are bound up with the colonial expansion of Europe and the rise of modern science. The distinction between white people as ‘human’ and blacks and browns as nearer to ‘nature’, along with the parallel distinction between men and women, found its clearest expression in the age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not in the ‘dark’ Middle Ages. Many philosophers, scientists and politicians have contributed to the ideology of racism and sexism. The celebrated German philosopher Hegel wrote, around 1830, about the blacks:
As we have said before, the Negro represents natural man in all his savagery and unruliness; if one wants to understand him correctly, one has to abstract from him all human respect and morality. In this character there is nothing that reminds one of the human. This is perfectly corroborated by the extensive reports of the missionaries. Therefore the Negroes get the total contempt of human beings… [emphasis added].
Hegel then argues that owing to this absence of human values the negro is destined to end up in slavery. Because, according to Hegel, ‘it is the basis of slavery that man has not yet acquired an awareness of his freedom and hence is degraded to an object, a valueless thing’. For Hegel, the negro lives outside history and is incapable of development. He writes:
From all these different features we can conclude that the main characteristics of the Negro are his savagery and unbridledness. This character is not capable of development and education. As we see them today so they have always been. The only connection the Negroes have ever had with Europeans and which they still have today is that of slavery.10
The distinction between civilized ‘culture-peoples’ (Kultur-Volker) and ‘natives’, or natural societies, ran like a dark thread through nineteenth-century discourse on colonies. But the Arabian traveller, Ibn Battuta, who, in 1352-53 travelled through Africa, described the natives in the following words:
The Negroes have some admirable qualities. They are hardly found to be unjust, because they abhor injustice more than any other people. Whosoever is found guilty of any small injustice finds no pardon with their Sultan. In their land there is perfect security. Neither travellers nor inhabitants have to be afraid of thieves or of violent men.11
As far back as 1352, Ibn Battuta counted the blacks among fellow human beings, whose high moral qualities he admired and respected. Five centuries later, the great modern German philosopher Hegel, regarded them as part and parcel of degraded, savage ‘nature’. This is the core of modern racism, which developed with the rise of capitalism and science. The ‘humanization’ of some categories of people (the European males), their entry into the realm of reason, history and freedom is dialectically based on the ‘naturalization’ of other categories of people (brown and black races and women), who are now defined as ‘savage’, that is, purely biological, devoid of reason, ethics and history, and whose existence is bound by endless cycles of biological reproduction.
Not surprisingly, according to Hegel, women also belong to this ‘prehistoric’ realm, like the ‘savage’ people. They are bound up with the institution of family, which, for Hegel, constitutes the ‘realm of death’, that is, the realm of unconscious generative processes. But whereas the black has no ethos whatsoever, the white European woman can enter the realm of morality by being a mother who cares for her children. In her critique of Hegel’s understanding of the dialectics of reproduction, Mary O’Brien writes: ‘Female morality, like women themselves, remains particular and relates only to the individuals in the family, concentrating on biological life.’12
According to the dualistic and patriarchal logic, man, in the process of ‘humanization’ and ‘civilization’, emancipated himself from the realm of nature (the ‘realm of necessity’), from woman and from savagery. This view was shared by many thinkers, including many socialists, in the nineteenth century. The emancipation and ‘humanization’ of the working class was also anticipated from the unlimited development of productive forces, which implies man’s dominance over nature. Due to this theory also the European working-class movement accepted the division of the world’s workers into those belonging to ‘civilized nations’ and those belonging to ‘savage’ or ‘native’ peoples. That was why the Social Democrats in imperial Germany were as little opposed to colonialism as were their British counterparts. For example, Bernstein, an SPD leader, wrote in 1896: ‘We shall condemn certain methods of subjection of the savages, but not the fact that savages are to be subjected and that the claims of the higher civilizations are upheld against them.’13 Even after World War I the German Social Democrats insisted on the right of Germany as a ‘civilized nation’ (Kulturnation) to own and exploit the territories of ‘barbarian peoples’ as colonies.14
The core of these arguments is the correct insight that the proletarian masses in the industrialized nations would not be able to rise to a higher standard of living or to a higher cultural level unless these nations could freely exploit the ‘native people’s’ territories in search of raw material, cheap labour and promising markets.
Eugenics
Whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century sexist and racist ideology was encapsulated in the idealistic philosophical discourse on the dualism of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, in the second half of the century it acquired a materialistic ‘scientific’ foundation. In this process Darwin’s theory of evolution played a decisive role, particularly in the form of Social Darwinism developed by Spencer, which posited that ‘survival of the fittest’ was the selective mechanism by which ‘superior’ societies evolved from lower ones. The backwardness of the peoples in the colonies was now attributed to their being on a lower stage in the evolutionary process. At the pinnacle were the Anglo-Saxons or the Nordic race.
Such ideas gave rise to the eugenic movement started by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, who coined the term ‘eugenics’ in 1883. Galton combined the ideas of Darwin with those of Malthus and advocated ‘selective breeding’ in order to prevent the deterioration of the race. The ‘fit’ were to be encouraged to breed more and the ‘unfit’ to breed less. Fitness and unfitness, however, were defined by the values of the English middle class. Galton was interested not only in the genetic quality of people, he was also a promoter of statistics in social research and introduced the grading system to measure people’s genetic quality. By applying statistical methods to eugenics he gave ‘scientific’ legitimacy to his theories, because mathematical procedures and statistics were considered proof of scientific objectivity. Galton graded blacks two grades below whites in intelligence.
The eugenic movement had a great influence on social science, on psychology with its intelligence tests, on behaviourism and on politics. The movement gained momentum at the beginning of the twentieth century in Britain and the USA, particularly after the biological laws of heredity, first discovered by Gregor Mendel in 1865, were posthumously published in 1901. Charles B. Davenport, the main promoter of the eugenics movement in the USA, persuaded the powerful Carnegie Foundation and other wealthy families in the USA to support the eugenics movement. In 1904, the Laboratory for Experimental Evolution was founded at Cold Spring Harbor; in 1907, came the Eugenics Records Office. The aim of these institutions and the eugenicists who worked there was to make inventories of the racial qualities of peoples and to increase the reproduction of superior races as well as to reduce the breeding of inferior ones. In the climate prevailing in the USA before and after World War I positive eugenics meant faster reproduction of the white Anglo-Saxons or, at least, the Nordic race; negative eugenics meant a reduction in reproduction of the ‘inferior’ races, mainly of blacks and immigrants. These blatantly racist theories were supported by a host of scientists who demanded political action.
Eugenicists considered a whole range of human traits as hereditary, for example, intelligence, cleanliness, alcoholism, social behaviour, poverty. They demanded that the state should take action, like a good cattle breeder who selects those fit for reproduction and eliminates those he considers unfit. ‘There are fig and thistles, grapes and thorns, wheat and tares in human society, and the state must practice family culture’, wrote Whitney in 1934.15
The followers of the eugenics movement were to be found among ultra rightists as well as among socialists such as the Fabians. Even feminists, for example, Margaret Sanger, Stella Browne and Eleanor Rathbone, supported the eugenics movement. Margaret Sanger advocated the combination of birth control with eugenic considerations. She wrote: ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit is the chief issue of birth control.’16
It was not surprising that eugenicists applauded Hitler when he passed a compulsory sterilization law in 1933, known as the Law on the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Future Generations. The British Eugenics Review hailed Hitler’s Germany as a vast laboratory which was the scene of a ‘gigantic eugenic experiment’. It observed that: ‘It would be quite wrong and quite unscientific to decry everything that is going on in that country… In Germany the most advanced eugenics legislation is carried through without difficulty.’17 Whitney praised Hitler’s eugenic policy:
Though not all of us, probably, will approve of the compulsory character of this law — as it applies, for instance to the sterilization of drunkards — we cannot but admire the foresight revealed by the plan in general, and realize that by this action Germany is going to make herself a stronger nation.18
The atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis on people who were considered ‘unfit’, particularly the Jews, but also the gypsies and the handicapped, brought the eugenics movement into disrepute after the collapse of the Third Reich. But many lieutenants of this movement entered the new field of population control and family planning after World War II. They now apply the eugenic principle of selection and elimination to the world population as a whole. The whites in Europe and the USA are encouraged to breed more, and the blacks and browns in the underdeveloped world are put under heavy pressure to diminish their population — if necessary, by compulsory sterilization campaigns. Professor Hans Harmsen, whose name has been associated with the compulsory sterilization of handicapped people in Nazi Germany, joined the population control establishment after the war and founded the German branch of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), naming it ‘Pro Familia’. He was president of this institution for a long time, and played an important role in shaping population control policies for the Third World.19
It was easy to denounce the genocide in Hitler’s Germany as ‘fascist’, but few people can discern the genocide that stalks under the banner of eugenics; and fewer are prepared to decry it as fascist. There is, however, an historical continuity from the eugenics movement, via Nazi Germany, to the new reproductive technologies: prenatal diagnosis, genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization and suchlike. The promoters and practitioners of these technologies turn a blind eye to this historical heritage.
Sociobiology
The link between the old eugenics movement and the new genetic and reproduction technologies is provided by sociobiology. Its main spokesman, Edward Wilson, Harvard biologist, tries to combine biology with anthropology and behaviourism in order to prove that such human characteristics as, for instance, the sexual division of labour, the nuclear family, aggression and social inequality are hereditary because they have sprung from the genetic infrastructure of our primate ancestors.
Whereas the eugenics movement was aimed at the newly awakened workers and colonized peoples in the early twentieth century, sociobiology legitimizes modern wars as rooted in the ‘genetically more aggressive male’. It is also directed against the new women’s movement which wants to end male supremacy. Wilson projects the American nuclear family into the Stone Age cave, where, as Barbara Chasin observes, ‘the man was the active, aggressive, subsistence-providing person, while the little woman cleaned the cave, cooked the mastodon and reared the kiddies’.20
Sociobiology arose in the USA when the government and the ruling classes were no longer willing to support welfare programmes and other ameliorative measures to help the disadvantaged. Social inequality was therefore explained as biologically determined, a matter of genes. Wilson and other sociobiologists have gone so far as to explain even socially and historically created institutions and customs (ethical rules, world-views, division of labour, form of government, marriage rules, religious convictions, and so on) in terms of inherited traits.21 Sexual inequality was, of course, explained by biology.22
The amorality of biotechnology
Modern biological research, particularly genetic engineering and reproduction technology, has given rise to a new questioning of the ethical foundations of these technologies. These ethical questions, however, cannot be separated from the historical background noted above, from a concept of man and nature which implies that man’s morality, his freedom and his subjectivity are based on his emancipation from nature. The human being is conceived of, not as part of nature, but as nature’s master and lord. This lordship is justified by his rationality and his brain-power. Therefore the ‘head’ is considered superior to the ‘lower’ parts of the body, the man superior to the woman, culture superior to nature.
Rather than break with this model, biotechnology develops it further. Whereas formerly the ‘head’s’ control over the body implied the control of a whole person, biotechnology now eliminates the human person as such. For biotechnologists, human beings are just heaps of organic matter, DNA, raw material, which can be dissected and reassembled into new bio-machines. Morality has no place in their laboratories. But, this absence of morality constitutes the innermost essence of modern science. Science is supposed to be value-free, motivated only by the ‘pure’ quest for knowledge, not by interest or ambition. Due to this concept of science, the question of ethics arises only outside the laboratory, when it comes to the question of whether or not the fabrications of the biotechnologists should be applied on a large scale. Ethics committees are set up only after the scientists have had ample time and money to experiment and publicize their results. Such reactive ethics, however, which can only try to prevent the most dangerous abuses of these inventions, is not only impotent, but is no ethics at all, since the main task of these committees is to promote the acceptability of these technologies.
As these ‘ethical experts’ usually accept the dominant scientific paradigm and its claim to value-freedom, they have no criteria for judging what is beneficial for humanity and what is not. As they have never dared to consider ethical aspects before and within the research process itself, they can no longer look at the scientific process as part of a comprehensive, all-embracing life process. Science is no longer seen as part of the human and natural universe, but as above it. Therefore, biotechnology as part of modern science and technology is amoral in its essence. This lack of ethics is most clearly manifested when we look more closely at the development of reproductive technology, because here women are the main source of ‘organic matter’, as well as the targets of man’s control over nature.
Sexist and racist implications
Gena Corea gives abundant evidence of the absence of ethical considerations in, and the continuity between, the eugenics movement and today’s genetic and reproductive technology. She quotes the Marxist geneticist Muller, who won a Nobel prize for his work on the effect of nuclear radiation on genes. Muller said that infertility, which seemed to be on the increase, provided an:
excellent opportunity for the entering wedge of positive selection, since couples concerned are nearly always, under such circumstances, open to suggestion that they turn their exigency to their credit by having as well-endowed children as possible.23 But the difference between Muller (who dreamt of breeding more men like Lenin, Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat-Sen and Marx) and the old eugenicists is that for the former it is no longer necessary to have control over whole men and whole women and make them copulate in order to give birth to these supermen. Genetic research has advanced so far that it is possible now to use the donor sperm of geniuses to fertilize women, if the women also possess superior quality eggs.
A further step in the application of the principle of selection and elimination came with the perfection of the various methods of prenatal diagnosis and quality control and with the technology of in vitro fertilization (IVF). It is possible today not only to isolate and select ova and sperm according to certain quality standards, but also to isolate the genes, to cut up the DNA, to examine which of the chromosomes are defective, to recombine and manipulate pieces of the DNA, and thus to directly influence the genetic substance. Geneticists are busy everywhere mapping the genetic pool of humans, animals and plants in order to discover so-far-unknown genetic ‘defects’. I should not be surprised if, in the near future, a whole new range of diseases were to be declared. The ideology of both eugenics and sociobiology will provide the criteria for what will be understood as ‘healthy’ and what as ‘defective’. These new hereditary diseases will provide a large market for gene therapy and prenatal diagnosis. The aim of this whole enterprise is to adapt the human being to survive the destructions which Homo faber and technological progress have wrought on the environment.
Sexist biases permeate the new reproductive technologies and genetic engineering at all levels. In general they imply that motherhood, the capacity of women to bring forth children, is transformed from a creative process, in which woman co-operated with her body as an active human being, to an industrial production process. In this process, not only is the symbiosis of mother and child disrupted, but the whole process is rationalized, objectified, planned and controlled by medical experts. More than ever before the woman is objectified and made passive. Under patriarchy she has always been an object for male subjects, but in the new reproductive technologies she is no longer one whole object but a series of objects which can be isolated, examined, recombined, sold, hired, or simply thrown away, like ova which are not used for experimentation or fertilization. This means that the integrity of the woman as a human person, an individual, as an integral indivisible being, is destroyed. It is the ideology of man’s dominance over nature and woman, combined with the scientific method of analysis and synthesis that has led to the destruction of the woman as a human person and to her vivisection into a mass of reproductive matter. (See chapter 13).
For women these developments mean, above all, that their reproductive capacity will be placed under a rigid and constant quality control. Today the social pressure on pregnant women to produce perfect children is already enormous and will grow. In the industrialized countries women are already subjected to a whole series of pregnancy tests. If they are over 30 or 35 they are seen as ‘risk-pregnancies’, and pressured to undergo amniocentesis in order to avoid bearing a handicapped child.
In countries like India and China, amniocentesis, used as a sex-determination test, has led to large-scale abortions of female foetuses. Vimal Balasubrahmaniam has observed that this femicidal tendency, made possible by modern technology, was first propagated by some Western promoters of population control. ‘Breeding male’ was seen as the best remedy against the ‘population explosion’.24
Apart from total quality control, the new reproductive technologies will mean for most women a loss of confidence in their own bodies and in their child-bearing competence. Already most young women are afraid to have babies without constant monitoring by a doctor. Most children are born in clinics. The new reproductive technologies, advertised as a means to widen women’s choice, will greatly enhance women’s fears. Women will eventually become totally passive, abandoning themselves to medical experts who know everything about them and the child inside them.
Reproduction engineers’ propaganda clearly aims to devalue children born of women as ‘inferior products’. Some French technodocs boasted of their IVF-babies being superior to ‘les enfants banales’, conceived and born ‘wildly’, that is, not produced scientifically under constant medical control. The difference between ‘les enfants banales’ and the IVF-babies is seen as the difference between a creation of nature and an industrial product. It is not surprising that the new reproductive technologies are propagated in some countries, for example, in France, as a method of rationalizing reproduction, following rationalization of production through technological progress. The reproductive processes in women have therefore to be brought under the control of scientists and, eventually, of the state.25
The anti-women tendencies of the new reproductive technology are to be seen, not only in their potential for total social control of women, but also in their aggressive, invasive nature. The IVF programme starts with long-term fertility monitoring and hormonal treatment, the long-term effects of which are not known. Once the eggs are ripe, incisions are made into the woman’s abdomen to remove them with the help of a laparoscope. This operation takes place under general anaesthesia while the woman’s belly is blown-up by carbon dioxide. The transfer back of the fertilized egg into the woman’s uterus is also invasive. She must again undergo hormonal treatment to prepare the uterus for the implantation and the growing of the embryo; subsequently she must undergo frequent ultrasound monitoring and amniocentesis.26
These physical invasions generate anxieties and traumas. Gena Corea describes the ups and downs of hope and despair of women at each stage of the IVF treatment.27 The woman in these programmes is made a totally passive object, therefore the IVF procedures are not only painful and traumatic but also humiliating and degrading. In a study conducted among IVF patients in Australia, Barbara Burton found that many women complained that the whole process was very alienating. Doctors had no time to explain anything, particularly when there were failures. One woman said; ‘The treatment is degrading. You have to give up your pride when you enter the hospital… You feel like a piece of flesh in a flesh factory. But when you want a child by all means you do it.’28
There is a rapid spread of ĪVF clinics in many countries. Research in this field is advancing by leaps and bounds; natural processes of giving birth are increasingly manipulated. It is reported that 60 per cent of deliveries in the clinics of Sao Paulo were by caesarean section; the doctors had persuaded the women that it was better for them because this would leave their vaginas ‘attractive’ for their men. If these women are later unable to have children the natural way, an IVF clinic is ready at hand. One of the IVF celebrities, Dr Nakamura of Sao Paulo, runs not only an IVF clinic, but also a family planning clinic. He has even conducted an IVF operation live on television. The patient unfortunately died, but Dr Nakamura did her the honour of naming his clinic after her.29
From fertility as a ‘disease’ to sterility as a ‘disease’
To discover how medical experts obtained such sweeping control over women’s reproductive capacities, we must recall the contraceptive movement of the past few decades. Long before sterility was so defined by the WHO, fertility had been treated as a disease, not only by the pharmaceutical firms which wanted to sell their contraceptives and by the medical establishment which had an obvious interest in defining women’s fertility as a disease, but also by women themselves who had become ‘sick of their fertility’, as one woman put it at the 1985 Emergency Conference on Reproductive Technology in Sweden. Women’s emancipation had for a long time been identified by many with women’s control over their fertility. The invention of various contraceptives, particularly the pill, was hailed by many as the decisive technological innovation that would eventually liberate women from their unruly fertility. Yet, by looking at fertility as a disease, as a purely biological affair, women handed the responsibility for their generative powers to medical experts and scientists. Instead of changing the unequal sexual relationship between men and women, hopes of women’s emancipation were pinned on technological innovation and medical treatment. This is also, basically, the approach of Shulamith Firestone, who considers woman’s biology her greatest obstacle. She expects women’s liberation to emerge from the artificial womb, the final rationalization of reproductive behaviour.
In the course of time many women actually became sick, but not of their fertility; they fell sick by fighting fertility with contraceptives. It is well known that the sterility about which many women complain today is partly a result of invasive methods of contraception, for example, the Daikon Shield and various other IUDs, and callous treatment by doctors.30
By perceiving fertility and sterility as ‘diseases’ it becomes impossible to see them as socially and historically influenced phenomena. They are defined as purely biological categories within the exclusive purview of medical experts. This precludes the possibility of women and men beginning to understand that they themselves have a responsibility for being fertile or sterile and that their generative power has something to do with the overall social and ecological climate in which they live. Any movement against the sexism inherent in the new reproductive technologies must start with the recognition that fertility or sterility are not just biological conditions and ‘diseases’ but socially determined. The definition of sterility and fertility as diseases is backed by the WHO. The WHO is thus persuading women worldwide to deliver themselves into the hands of powerful interests — the medical technologists and the pharmaceutical multinationals.
Racism: population control and reproductive technology in the Third World
The eugenic principle of selection and elimination manifests itself most clearly on a world scale, if we look not only at technologies aimed at sterility ‘as a disease’, but also at those which are meant to fight fertility ‘on a war footing’. The target population for the latter are mainly the rural and urban poor in the underdeveloped countries. Whereas some women should produce children at any cost, others are prevented from so doing by all possible means. The myth of overpopulation in the poor countries serves as justification for the development of ever more anti-fertility technology.
The old Malthusian logic that development efforts are of no avail because the poor breed too many poor, today underpins the most widespread myth in the world. It had meanwhile been accepted as a fact not only by Western governments but also by Third World governments. Private corporate interests in the USA first convinced the US government, then the UN and the World Bank, and finally the dependent governments in the Third World countries to accept this myth,31 and to legitimize intervention in the reproductive behaviour in virtually all countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.32 Fear of the ‘population explosion’ of black and brown people is so widespread today in the white world that population planners can disregard any ethical considerations when designing measures against the ‘wild fertility’ of the browns and blacks. The double-faced policy of selection and elimination is obvious if one looks into the fate of the ‘basic right’ to have a child of one’s own (a ‘right’ so often highlighted to legitimize the use of new reproductive technology in the North) at the hands of population planners in such countries as Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Egypt, for example.
Farida Akhter has rightly pointed out that notions such as ‘reproductive rights’ for women, propagated by feminist groups in the West, have no meaning for the majority of women in Bangladesh who are covered by population control measures. Under relentless pressure of sheer survival needs, women in these countries may trade their fertility for some money and a sari, by joining a sterilization camp to undergo tubectomy. The contraceptive technology developed for these women increasingly reduces all elements of individual choice, and places more and more control over them in the hands of medical experts and health personnel; and the women are increasingly subjugated through political, economic and cultural coercion. ‘Nowhere do the rights of women become any [one’s] concern’, says Farida Akhter.33
The blatant disregard for human rights and dignity inherent in population control technology can be demonstrated in a number of instances. Some of the more prominent ones are discussed below.
While in the 1960s and early 1970s the international population establishment still believed in educating and motivating people to accept contraceptives, from 1975 onwards coercive methods and a tendency towards such ‘final solutions’ as sterilization were increasingly accepted. India carried out a massive sterilization campaign during the Emergency from 1975-77, in the course of which millions of people were forcibly sterilized. This compulsory sterilization campaign aroused no resentment or protest in the West; nor does the Chinese population policy with its coercive methods, leading to female infanticide and foeticide, cause a stir. The attitude of many in the West today is the same as that of the US and British eugenicists towards Hitler’s eugenic laws: they abhor compulsion, but see no alternative to arresting the ‘reckless breeding’ of ‘those’ people.
This double-faced stand with regard to human rights and dignity seeks justification on the grounds that the ‘population explosion’ has created a crisis situation and must be dealt with on a ‘war footing’ with crash programmes and methods of crisis management. This method is propagated today by USAID which thinks the multi-sectoral strategy of integrating family planning into development policies and health sectors is too time-consuming and does not yield direct results. In this strategy the fertility of — particularly poor — Asian, African and Latin American women is no longer seen as a ‘disease’, ‘curable’ by pills and IUDs, but as an epidemic, like cholera, malaria or smallpox.
The conceptualization of Third World women’s fertility as an epidemic means that the state must intervene in people’s reproductive behaviour. In most Third World countries population control — formerly called family planning — has become the state’s concern. This state intervention began under the pressure of the ‘international state’ — the aid-giving agencies and credit-giving organizations such as the World Bank, which linked their economic measures and credits to population control. The state increasingly opted for final solutions; and increasingly women became the main targets of these solutions. While in India, in the years 1975-76, 75 per cent of the sterilizations were performed on men, in 1983-84, 85 per cent were performed on women.34 In Bangladesh, among all contraceptive measures, the proportion of sterilizations went up from 19 per cent in 1979-80 to 39 per cent in 1983-84, and to 43 per cent in 1984-85.35
The trend towards enforcing final solutions is aimed particularly at women. This is borne out by the fact that, in Bangladesh, food-aid earmarked for distribution among the most distressed women is used to blackmail them into accepting sterilization in exchange for a few kilograms of wheat. Thus, the Vulnerable Group Feeding Programme (VGF) has been used to force the poorest women to be sterilized. The family planning authorities issue certificates to women who undergo sterilization, on which it is written: ‘She can be given food under government relief.’ Without such a certificate a woman gets none. Old women, women already sterilized, and widows are not entitled to food relief.36
Third World women as guinea-pigs
The strategy of fighting against poor Third World women’s fertility ‘on a war footing’ ignores the long-term side-effects of contraceptive technology on women’s health. Poor Third World women are treated not as persons but as numerical entities in demographic statistics. All that counts is a fall in the fertility rate, irrespective of the effects on women. Many Third World governments are put under pressure by credit-giving agencies to perform in the field of population control. The governments use the same pressure tactics to get their functionaries to fulfil their ‘targets’ of IUD-insertions, sterilizations, and so on. And for their part, the functionaries often use direct coercion to bring people into the family planning camps. Demographers like S. P. Jain admit that the IUD programme in India was formulated under foreign pressure, that there was no consideration of the effects on women, and that use of the loop was stopped only when it was found that a large percentage of women suffered side-effects.37
Thus in this case, as in many others, Third World women were used as guinea-pigs by multinational drug industries. It is cheaper, faster and politically more convenient to use a crash programme against fertility to discover long-term effects of a contraceptive than it is to run clinical tests on samples of women in the West. In this sense, a number of Third World countries have been turned into human laboratories for transnational drug industries.
Moreover, contraceptives which are not yet licensed for use in family planning programmes in the West, are being tested predominantly on Third World women; for example, the injectible contraceptives (ICs). After Depoprovera was banned in the USA because of its carcinogenic potential and other long-term effects, the new IC which is now propagated is NET-OEN (norethisterone-oenanthate), produced by German Remedies, a subsidiary of the Schering Company of West Berlin. NET-OEN, a synthetic hormone, is administered by intramuscular injection; its contraceptive effect lasts for two to three months.38
NET-OEN is at present being tried out in India. The tests were initiated in 1984 by family planning camps. Only after feminist groups in India began to protest did the public become aware of the methods used in these tests. These groups found that the principle of informed consent was not followed when NET-OEN was administered and the women were not informed that there might be dangerous side-effects. A petition has been filed by women’s organizations in the Supreme Court of India pleading that the tests of NET-OEN on several thousands of Indian women are unethical and unsafe and should be stopped immediately.
Sponsored by the WHO, the test programme is administered by the Indian Council of Medical Research, through the family planning and primary health centres. It was also found that the field tests of NET-OEN were part of the national programme for research in human reproduction which is under way in a number of research centres in India and which uses a standardized uniform methodology in a multicentre clinical approach.39 This gives the impression of a responsible and rigorously scientific approach. But it mystifies the health hazards for women and masks the racism inherent in these tests. The health hazards pointed out by the women’s groups are: breast cancer; two types of uterine cancer; serious menstrual disturbances; and masculinization of female foetuses.40
Long-acting hormonal injectible contraceptives have been especially invented for illiterate Third World women, who, according to the understanding of the population planners, are incapable of exercising any rational control over their reproductive functions. This is clearly spelt out by the propagators of these ICs. They say that Third World women want injections, because they are accustomed to having injections whenever they are sick. Here, the method of treating Third World people as dumb creatures who need not be informed about their diseases but who only receive quick injections shows its results. Women now want injections against fertility as well. Injections are also seen as the most convenient means for the family planning personnel: with these, there is no need to educate, to persuade the people! Other methods, such as IUDs and the pill are regarded as ‘more than underprivileged, undernourished, overworked women can handle.’41 So ICs, like Depoprovera, NET-OEN, or the contraceptive Norplant (which is implanted under the skin and diffuses a steroid, levonorgestrel, over a period of five years), are specifically invented for this category of women.
Breeding male, or patriarchy as business
Sexist and racist aspects are most closely interwoven in prenatal diagnostic technology. As already mentioned, amniocentesis, first developed to discover genetic abnormalities in the foetus, is now widely used in India as a sex determination test. As female children are unwanted in India, particularly because of the high marriage /dowry demands this modern technology is used to strengthen patriarchal attitudes and institutions. When the amniocentesis test shows that the foetus is female, most women have it aborted. In spite of feminist groups’ protest, this femicidal practice is spreading not only in absolute numbers but also geographically to the rural areas, and to the poorer classes; as the test costs only around Rs. 500, even working-class people can afford it.42 It is often practised because the women, who may already have given birth to one or several daughters, are afraid to face their husbands and family with yet another one. Achin Vanaik writes:
Almost 100% of the 51,914 abortions during 1984-85 carried out by a well-known abortion centre in Bombay were done after sex determination tests. There are now S.D. clinics in almost every medium-sized town in Maharashtra.43
The rapid spread of amniocentesis for sex determination and the abortion of female foetuses has given rise to a strong wave of protest by Indian feminists. Yet, while the feminist groups were still campaigning for a ban on sex determination tests, other more sophisticated methods to determine the sex of a child were already being practised in Bombay. Doctors in the private Citi Clinic in Bombay practice a pre-conception sex-selection technology, based on sperm, or rather chromosome separation by albumin filtration and artificial insemination. This technology, developed by the American, Dr Ericsson, in 1984 is used to select male-bearing sperm. By this filter method, the sperm containing Y-chromo-somes, which are the male sex determinants is separated from the X-chromosome sperm, and concentrated. Doctors are able to select sperm containing 80 per cent of Y-chromosomes which is then injected into the woman, who must be prepared for this procedure in a similar way to women who undeigo an IVF-programme. In an interview I was told that the success rate, that is, the birth of a boy, is about 80 per cent. The private clinic in Bombay is one of the 48 centres Dr Ericsson has meanwhile established all over the world as branches of the company GAMETRICS Ltd, which he founded and which sells the fluid albumin to these centres. Several of these centres are in Third World countries which have a strong preference for male offspring. The doctor who practises this technology in Bombay claims that it is more scientific and ethically more acceptable than amniocentesis and female foeticide. If one looks only at the technology as such, one can only agree with this doctor. All is very clean, very scientific, and it means business. But it will render women more than ever an ‘endangered species’, as Vibhuti Patel puts it, in countries with a strong patriarchal preference for boys. GAMETRICS can be sure of a bright future in such countries.
This example shows clearly that sexist and racist ideology is closely interwoven with capitalist profit motives, that the logic of selection and elimination has a definite economic base. Patriarchy and racism are not only ethically rejectable ideologies, they mean business indeed.
Conclusion
The development of reproductive technology, both for increasing and decreasing fertility, took place in an ideological climate which makes a sharp distinction between man and nature, culture and nature; and nature is something that must be conquered by White Man. The main method of conquest and control is predicated on the principle of selection and elimination, which principle permeates all reproductive technologies. Without selection and elimination, this technology would be quite different, hence, it cannot claim to be neutral; nor is it free from the sexist, racist and ultimately fascist biases in our societies. These biases are built into the technology itself, they are not merely a matter of its application. Apart from this, an historical continuity of these principles can be traced from the nineteenth century eugenics movement, to the fascist race politics of the Nazis, to the present day genetic, reproduction and population control technologies. It is a continuity which is not confined to ideas and research methods alone, but involves people also.
Notes
1. Mies, Maria ‘Why Do We Need All This? A Call Against Genetic Engineering and Reproductive Technology’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 8, No. 6,1985.
2. Ibid. See also Carolyn Merchant The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1983.
3. Mies, Maria Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London, Zed Books, 1986.
4. Merchant, op. cit.
5. Bacon, Works, Vol. 4, p. 263, quoted in Merchant op. cit., p. 169.
6. Alvares, Claude, Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1500-1972. New Delhi, Allied Publishers. 1979, Ch. 2. pp. 46-74.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., pp. 69-70.
9. Easlea, Brian Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race. London, Pluto Press, 1986.
10. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 122, trans. Maria Mies.
11. Quoted in: Bodo V. Borries, Kolonialgeschichte und Weltwirtschaftssystem. Dusseldorf, Schwaan Verlag, 1986, p. 83.
12. O’Brien, Mary The Politics of Reproduction. Boston, London, Henley-on-Thames, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 26.
13. Quoted in: Martha Mamozai, Herrenmenschen, Frauen im deutschen Kolonialismus. Rororo, Reinbek, 1982, p. 212, trans. Maria Mies.
14. Mandelbaum, Kurt ‘Sozialdemokratie und Imperialismus’, in: K. Mandelbaum (editor), Sozialdemokratie und Leninismus, Zwei Aufsätze. Berlin, Wagenbach, 1974.
15. Quoted in Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs. New York, Harper and Row, 1985, p. 18.
16. Sanger, Margaret, Birth Control Review, May 1919.
17. Quoted in: Bonnie Mass, Population Target: The Political Economy of Population Control in Latin America. Toronto, Women’s Press, 1976, p. 21.
18. Corea, Gena ‘Was der Konig nicht sieht…’, in: Dokumentation Frauenfragen 1985. Fachhochschule Köln, FB Sozialpädagogik, 1986.
19. Kaupen-Haas, Heidrun ‘Eine Deutsche Biographie — Der Bevölkerungspolitiker Hans Harmsen’, in: A. Ebbinghaus, H. Kaupen Haas, K. H. Roth (editors), Heilen und Vernichten im Mustergau Hamburg. Hamburg, Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1984.
20. Chasin, Barbara ‘Sociobiology, a Pseudo-Scientific Synthesis’, in: Arditti et al. (eds), Science and Liberation. Boston, South End Press, 1980, p. 35.
21. O. Wilson, Edward On Human Nature. Cambridge, London, Harvard University Press, 1978.
22. Chasin, op.cit., pp. 41-5.
23. Muller, H. J. ‘The Guidance of Human Evolution’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Vol. ΠΙ, No. 1,1959.
24. Balasubrahmaniam, Vimal ‘Medicine and the Male Utopia’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23 October, 1982.
25. Gavarini, Laurence ‘L’uterus sous influence ou la Mere Machine’, paper presented at the colloquium: Feminisme et Maternite, Paris, 7-8 January, 1984.
26. Duelli-Klein, Renate ‘Könige, Königsklone und Prinzessinnen: Neuigkeiten aus der Retortenwelt’, in: Dokumentation Frauenfragen 1985. Fachhochschule Köln, FB Sozialpädagogik, 1986.
27. Corea, op. cit.
28. Ibid, p. 26.
29. Regina, Ana Dos Gomes Reis, ‘IVF in Brasil: The Story Told by the Newspapers’, paper presented at FINRRAGE Emergency Conference on Reproductive Technology, Vallinge, Sweden, 3-5 July, 1985.
30. Klein, Renate, (ed.), Infertility, Women Speak Out About their Experiences of Reproductive Medicine. London, Pandora Press, 1989.
31. Mass, op. cit.
32. Akhter, Farida ‘Depopulating Bangladesh: A Brief History of the External Intervention into the Reproductive Behaviour of a Society’. UBINIG, Dacca, 1986.
33. Ibid.
34. Daswanit, Mona ‘Women and Reproductive Technology in India: The Injectable Menace’, paper presented at the Congress of Women against Reproductive and Genetic Technology, Bonn, 19-21 April, 1985.
35. Akhter, op. cit., p. 21.
36. Akhter, Farida ‘Wheat for Statistics: A Case Study of Use of VGF Wheat for Attaining Sterilization Target’, unpublished paper, Dhaka, 1985.
37. Daswani op. cit.
38. War on Want: Norethisterone Oenanthate, The OTHER Injectible Contraceptive, Briefing Paper. London, War on Want, 1984.
39. Eve’s Weekly, Bombay, 5 July 1986.
40. ‘Ban Injectable Contraceptives’, Leaflet, Bombay: Women’s Centre Bombay, 1985. The case on NET-OEN is even now (1992) pending in court. According to Indian health activists it will never be brought to India, but meanwhile Norplant, another long-acting hormonal contraceptive has been introduced.
41. Kapil, Iris ‘Case for Injectible Contraceptives’, Economic and Political Weekly, 11 May 1985, p. 855.
42. Patel, Vibhuti ‘Amniocentesis — An Abuse of Advanced Scientific Technique’, paper presented at XI World Congress of Sociology, 18-22 August, 1986, New Delhi.
43. Achin Vanaik, Times of India, 20 June 1986.
*This is a revised version of an article that first appeared in Alternatives, XII, 1987.