ABSTRACT
Women are the primary interest holders in reproduction. While traditional gender roles have altered and technology has advanced, pregnancy and childbirth remain a woman’s burden and are entirely gender-specific.1 As the decision to become a mother ‘is crucial to [a woman’s] personal well-being, definitive of her social persona, and predictive of her economic horizons’,2 the centrality of motherhood to women’s lives means that reproduction has been an important focus of feminist literature. Situating motherhood within feminism has, however, been hugely problematic: feminist analysis has encountered a ‘profound ambivalence’ as to whether motherhood is empowering, oppressive or both.3 As the decision to mother or not is so essential to a woman’s sense of self and her life plan and, if it is correct that ‘the interconnection between all aspects of women’s unequal status – particularly race, class, and age – are nowhere clearer than in the potential consequences of maternity and motherhood’,4 then it is important that ‘natural’ mothering or assisted mothering decisions are characterised by real choice and autonomy rather than being conditioned by socially constructed notions of idealised motherhood. In the UK, assisted conception is regulated by the Human Fertilisation and
Embryology Act 1990, recently updated by the amending statute of the same name in 2008 (hereafter HFE Act). The UK has a relatively permissive and liberal regime and, as such, occupies a middle ground between some countries whose regulation is prohibitive and other countries, such as the USA, which have no formal regulation and where treatment provision is purely market-based. The HFE Act regulates women’s reproductive autonomy in so far as assisted mothering choices are concerned. However, it is recognised that assisted reproductive technology (ART) choices are not made in the abstract. Rather, it is suggested that the ART decision is in a sense a ‘micro’ decision, which can only be entered into once the ‘macro’ decision to become a mother has been made. This chapter will explore women’s choices to become mothers and, subsequently, to use ARTs, before examining the extent to which women are granted self-determination under (some parts of) the UK’s regulation.5
