ABSTRACT
Technology increases the control which experts and the medical professions exercise over conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. However, it is women and women alone who should make the ultimate decisions regarding their own childbearing. Whatever the moral and metaphysical complexities of reproductive decisions, the answer to "Who should decide?" is clear. Women, and only women, should make decisions about their own childbearing. This does not exclude the concerns of men they care for, or the advice of men they trust. Each of these measures runs counter to paternalistic tradition, and patriarchal ideology of which paternalism is part. Patriarchy presupposes a father's control over children, as well as over the reproductive decisions by which they are generated. Such control was rationalized by familiar assumptions about women's needs, desires, capacities, physiology, as well as dicta about the importance and composition of families. Not all objections to women as sole deciders are either professional or patriarchal.
