Women call for fight against birth engineering

Press, 15 July 1985, Page 5

Women call for fight against birth engineering

NZPA Nairobi In-vitro fertilisation, embryo transfer, and other new birth technologies came under attack at a women’s workshop in Nairobi yesterday. Representatives from a 16-country women’s conference held in Vallinge, Sweden, earlier this month presented a statement declaring that the female body was being “expropriated and dissected as raw material for the technological reproduction of human beings.” “We call on women to

resist the take-over of our bodies for male use, for profit-making, population control, medical and scientific experimentation,” the statement said. Assertions that medical science was spending vast amounts of money developing new birth technologies while doing little to research the causes of infertility were supported by many at the workshop. Figures were produced showing that in some parts of Africa as many as 40 per cent of women of childbearing age were infertile. “What is being done about this? Nothing,” an African delegate said. “Our countries are still being used as a dumping ground for birth control methods which have been abandoned in the West because they have been shown to cause infertility.” Others said the new birth technologies were being widely abused. While in theory they offered new hope to infertile women, in practice they were usually available only to well-off Western women.

“The only time poor, disabled, black, or Third World women have access to new birth technologies is when their bodies are being used for scientific experimentation,” one delegate said.

Many women expressed concern that technology was changing birth into a purely mechanistic process. They cited statements from directors of three American clinics that in future embryos would be screened so that those of an unwanted sex or with birth defects could be eliminated at the whim or fancy of doctors. Such methods were now the exception but they were rapidly becoming the norm, they said. “Scientists in the United States are already predicting that within 20 years they will be able to produce an artificial womb. “Most of the research is dominated by men. Women, are fast becoming irrelevant to the reproductive process.” The workshop organisers, part of an international feminist network formed to resist reproductive and genetic engineering, are producing information kits to send to women’s health groups throughout the world, including New Zealand. “The struggle over economic resources was lost years ago by women,” they said.

“At least on this issue, by alerting women now to what is happening, we may have a chance of winning.”