ABSTRACT
My scholarship on reproduction has made me acutely aware of the stratification of childbearing in the United States. In particular, the social value placed on a woman’s reproduction depends on her standing within the hierarchies of race, class, and other inequitable divisions. My research highlights the harsh dichotomy where policies punish poor black women for bearing children but advanced technologies assist mainly affluent white women not only to have genetically related children, but to have children with preferred genetic qualities. In this regard, I have worked with organizations opposing a program offering substance-abusing women in minority neighborhoods money to be sterilized and have attended many conferences where academics debate precisely which traits are acceptable to select for when testing an array of embryos for implantation. While welfare reform laws aim to deter women receiving public assistance from having even one additional healthy baby (Mink 2001), largely unregulated fertility clinics regularly implant privileged women with multiple embryos, knowing the high risk that multiple births pose for premature delivery and low birth weight (Helmerhorst 2004). The public begrudges poor mothers a meager increase in benefits for one more child but celebrates the birth of hightech septuplets that require a fortune in publicly supported hospital care (Andrews 1999). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the race and class dimensions of
reproduction, a chief way of creating families, are clear. My prior writing on the stratification of reproduction contrasted policies that penalize the childbearing of poor nonwhite women with policies that promote childbearing by wealthier white women (Roberts 1997). I take a different tack in this chapter. Rather than place these two categories of women in opposition, I explore how the privatization and punishment of reproduction links them together to avoid public responsibility for social inequities. Both population control programs and genetic selection technologies reinforce biological explanations for social problems and place reproductive duties on women, shifting responsibility for improving social conditions away from the state. Reproductive health policies involving both
categories of women play an important role in the neoliberal state’s transfer of services from the welfare state to the private realm of family and market. This chapter was completed during the last days of the Bush administration. The Obama administration promises to take the country in a very different direction, and I hope that its policies will improve the matters discussed in this chapter. However, because the policies of prior administrations, along with race and gender ideologies, have lasting legacies, the discussion that follows remains relevant today. Viewing new reproductive technologies as a form of private regulation of
women’s childbearing decisions complicates the choice-versus-regulation dichotomy that typically frames discussions of these technologies’ costs and benefits. Technologies that enable women to have children and to select those children’s genetic traits are often viewed as entirely freedom-enhancing tools that should therefore be free from state regulation. I argue, however, that like the reproductive regulations imposed on less privileged women, use of these technologies has the potential to restrict women’s control over reproduction while reinforcing social hierarchies that disadvantage women. Thus, it is possible that some state regulation will promote rather than hamper women’s reproductive freedom. More importantly, recognizing the restrictive potential of reprogenetics supports greater state investment in eliminating the systemic inequities that make these technologies seem so attractive for addressing disability and illness. Rather than expand public surveillance and regulation of women’s reproductive decisions, we should tackle the social conditions that limit women’s options for bearing and raising healthy children who can flourish in this society.
