Reproducing The Womb

Alice E. Adams crafts a subtle new response to the controversies surrounding reproductive freedom and the implications of medical technology. She explores a spectrum of competing visions of childbearing, from misogynistic nightmares of matriarchal control to feminist utopias. Firmly rooted in political reality, Adams offers innovative answers to the questions posed by the intimate interconnections, and the perceived conflicts, between fetus and mother, individual and collective.

Gender and body-based distinctions continue to be a defining component of women's identities, both in psychoanalytic treatment and in life. In this book, a distinguished group of contributors explore the ways in which women's sexual and reproductive capabilities, and their bodies, are regarded as societal and patriarchal property, and how as the "other", they can be the focus of mistreatment such as rape, sexual slavery, restriction of reproduction rights, and ongoing societal repression. They also explore the cultural definitions of motherhood, and how these set narrow definitions for the acceptable face of motherhood and for being a woman generally

This book offers a vision of politics that govern the womb; from antiquity ('be fertile and replenish the earth'), through the ages (hysterectomy, to extirpate women's 'hysteria'), up to the present time (abortion wars; assisted reproduction), and into the future (reprogenetics; the artificial womb). It explores how the womb has served humanity, either tacitly or explicitly, through the ages and examines how women have accepted and still perceive the rules created by men as natural - including the new anti-abortion laws in the USA - because 'that is the way things are.' The book also explores how the merging of assisted reproduction technologies and novel genetic tools (reprogenetics) will pose additional challenges to womb bearers, as all women will be made to reproduce with IVF. What is more, the advent of the artificial womb is in sight; the gender and social implications of this development would be enormous. Certainly not just another organ, the womb has been and remains a powerful tool that cannot be left to the decisions of half of the population. This book engages a wide audience, including women and men, professionals and laypersons who are interested in gender, politics, legislation, women's health, and ethics.

Discusses the female reproductive system, pregnancy, and birth control.

Among life's choices is to have children or remain childfree. Yet those who want a child and find themselves unable, live through the trauma of 'infertility'-cruelly attributed as 'their fault'-to undergo the tribulations of assisted reproductive technology. But how safe is aggressive Ivf, invasive Icsi, exploitative ovarian hyper-stimulation and commercial surrogacy? Politics of the Womb proves that there can be broken babies and breaking mothers; it rips away the romanticism around uterus transplants, warns of genetic theft and 'designer babies', and points to the human element being sacrificed, as artificial reproduction uses, reuses and recycles the woman. Pinki Virani combines investigation with analysis to question those who lead the worldwide onslaught on the woman's womb in the name of babies, and squarely confronts what has become the business of baby-making by a chain of suppliers that manufactures on demand. Written in a manner accessible to all, here finally is a path-breaking book which speaks up, in no uncertain terms, for the right to informed choice on responsible reproduction.

This innovative book uses the lens of cultural history to examine the development of medicine in Qing dynasty China. Focusing on the specialty of "medicine for women"(fuke), Yi-Li Wu explores the material and ideological issues associated with childbearing in the late imperial period. She draws on a rich array of medical writings that circulated in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century China to analyze the points of convergence and contention that shaped people's views of women's reproductive diseases. These points of contention touched on fundamental issues: How different were women's bodies from men's? What drugs were best for promoting conception and preventing miscarriage? Was childbirth inherently dangerous? And who was best qualified to judge? Wu shows that late imperial medicine approached these questions with a new, positive perspective.

Science.

With technological advances in reproduction no longer confined to the laboratory or involving only the isolated individual, women and men are increasingly resorting to a variety of technologies unheard of a few decades ago to assist them in becoming parents. The public at large, and feminists as a group, are confused and divided over how to view these technologies and over what positions to take on the moral and legal dilemmas they give rise to. Farquhar argues that two perspectives have tended to dominate feminist discussions of these issues. She labels these: "fundamental feminism" and "market liberalism." By linking a theoterical approach with a practical set of issues, Farquhar's The Other Machine provides a rigorous analysis of contemporary feminist debates.