Women’s & Repro Rights Advocates

Women have struggled for a century to secure their right to use medical technology to control their own bodies, from contraception and abortion to birthing contracts and home pregnancy diagnosis kits. Feminists have had good reasons to be suspicious of the patriarchal practices of obstetrics, and the assumptions behind reproductive medicine. The feminist critique has helped women to take more control over their reproductive decisions and be more assertive with the health care system.

Today technologies also allow women to ensure the health and characteristics of her future children. But some feminists are balking at these new technologies of self-determination, and are fighting the inclusion of genetic and reproductive technology as a part of “reproductive rights.” As Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society says “It will take focused effort to make it clear that altering the genes of one’s children is not among the reproductive rights for which so many women and women’s organizations have struggled.” Some feminists, such as women’s health activist Judy Norsigian, have joined forces with religious anti-abortion groups to oppose reproductive technology and germinal choice.

These bioconservative feminists refuse to acknowledge any connection between a reproductive right to abortion, which they defend, and a right to use reproductive technologies such as germinal choice, which they want to deny.  In their fear of technology these bioconservative feminists have forgotten the danger of allowing the state to dictate to parents which children they are and aren’t allowed to have, the danger of coercive eugenics and anti-choice forces.

According to Luisa Cabal, deputy director of the international legal program of the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights and an expert on reproductive rights in Latin America, “What we’re seeing is conservative groups using the law in any way they can to place obstacles to women’s choices. This is not an isolated case. It is part of an articulated legal strategy, attacking the same legal foundation that upholds other women’s rights and trying to mislead the courts into saying that the international law protects the right to life of the fetus.” According to Cabal, an international effort needs to be launched to defend access to assisted reproductive technologies on the grounds of the right to form a family, the right to privacy, the right to reproductive self-determination and the right to benefit from scientific progress.

Transhumanists stand shoulder to shoulder with those who want to ensure the full protection of women’s and reproductive rights, including the right of women to use conceptive, contraceptive, reproductive and germinal choice technologies. 

Transhumanism and Reproductive Rights

• World Transhumanist Association’s Position on Human Germline Genetic Modification
• It’s about Reproductive Rights, Stupid: Just who, exactly, are the eugenicists? Bioconservatives say that transhumanists have no business co-opting the reproductive rights movement while they explicitly advocate state control over procreation By George Dvorsky, Betterhumans - 7/14/2003

Campaign to Defend Assisted Reproduction in Costa Rica

• “Costa Rican IVF Ban Faces Human-Rights Test”
• Center for Reproductive Rights-- Center Joins Couples’ Legal Battle Against Costa Rica’s IVF Ban
• Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Petition in Defense of Costa Rican Access to ART - 12.361 ADMISSIBILITY ANA VICTORIA SANCHEZ VILLALOBOS AND OTHERS COSTA RICA

Reproductive Rights Links

• The Other Machine by Dion Farquhar, is a feminist defense of reproductive technology, and a critique of “fundamentalist feminism.”
• International Planned Parenthood Federation
• Center for Reproductive Law and Policy
• Review of International Laws Restricting Cloning and Germline Genetic Engineering Center for Genetics and Society
• “Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights” Adopted by UNESCO’s General Conference in 1997
• Videos from the Issues For the Millennium: Cloning and Genetic Technologies” Conference” Mostly bioLuddite, but includes comments from Lee Silver