Posted on 10/27/2001 4:39:07 PM PDT by Pokey78
Feminist Naomi Wolf says children need fathers not test tubes
'We can create babies without the need for men," claim scientists. Be careful what you wish for, as the old Yiddish proverb puts it. You might get it.
It seems we have. For generations feminists have fantasised about the Ultimate Solution: technology producing a world in which women could escape their reliance on the patriarchal family, their dependency on sexual relations with men, and still have babies.
These fantasies have taken different forms. For two centuries, feminists bemoaned the "innate" oppressiveness of family life with men while glorifying the bond of motherhood. In our own time, feminists continued to demonise the family bond with men while claiming absolute rights to motherhood. As Phyllis Chesler put it in her study of custody battles, Mothers on Trial, women are the only ones who have a legitimate right to decide on reproduction: "She [the mother] is the one who bears the most personal responsibility for her child."
Feminists imagined how technology could soon free women from the age-old curse of their reproductive chains: if only, they wrote, women could be liberated from the need to carry a baby to term personally, with all the hardships that involves. If only technology could extend the limits on safe reproduction, then the "biological clock" could be smashed and women could revel in careers without sacrificing children. There were even fantasies in the 1970s of technology liberating us from our menstrual cycles - such advances would be our dea ex machina, delivering women from men.
It is a seductive science fiction. The trouble is that what was only two decades ago the radical, theoretical premise that mothers alone should control families, bypassing men to get babies, is now a mainstream choice. The genetic father may well become obsolete. Fertility specialists have discovered a method for women to have babies without the participation of men. Is this, and a host of other new technologies, best seen as feminism's ultimate liberation anthem or better understood as a feminist dirge?
I believe that these "breakthroughs" show only that when you put your faith in technology to create "freedoms", it is a devil's bargain. Technology without enlightenment, as Mary Shelley knew, makes monsters.
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While researchers say that the process should be made available to women whose husbands are infertile, ethicists are worried that this view is too sanguine and that the technology could lead to "a female-dominated society where men have little or no role".
In another development, doctors have created the first artificial womb lining. The specialists involved, from Cornell University's Weill medical college in New York, reveal that their final goal is to create an entire womb, letting infertile women carry babies themselves, or have surrogates carry their genetic offspring for them in artificial uteruses.
Finally, there is cloning: parliament will have to consider the ramifications of new technology that would allow women to clone their own babies. Fertility experts argue that if the wife of a sterile man wants to reproduce the genes of the man she loves, not some other man's from a sperm bank, why should it not be her right?
It is no surprise that these developments are put in the context of "women's rights". For feminism, understandably, given the historical need to argue that women could work like men in the marketplace, embraced a consumerist, individualist model of freedom.
But it is time to ask deeper questions about what freedom means. Surely our obligations to our families and communities are as important a part of our freedom as the ability to tailor our reproductive lives to our own feminine whims?
It is easy to imagine that many women, fed up with trying to find a father for their children who is willing to commit to them and be responsible for their offspring, would jump at the chance to go it truly alone - no irksome sperm donor with unknown genetic proclivities to worry about.
It is even easier to imagine that many hard-driving career women would be interested in subcontracting out the arduous, physically taxing work of pregnancy, as they now subcontract out the housework and the childcare to low-income women.
Beyond baby farms in artificial uteruses, there is now the possibility of creating embryo farms that would never produce babies at all. Scientists in the United States are trying to develop human embryos incapable of becoming children that could be harvested for their stem cells for medical treatments.
But does turning embryos into a commodity with no connection to family life really free women? For a generation, feminism has been preoccupied with protecting reproductive rights, specifically abortion, as a key component of personal freedom. I am passionately pro-choice but that does not mean I think it is right to treat the foetus as expendable "material".
Are women's lives improved and the status of women enhanced when the beginning of a baby, or a baby itself, becomes just another point-of-purchase item in a gene bank? Is motherhood strengthened when it becomes part of a market economy in which rich women utilise the bodies of the poor? Are women free by definition when they do not have to interact with men on the most intimate of levels in order to create a family?
No, to all of the above. Indeed, at a moment such as this, technology can prevent women's and human evolution. The contract between men and women around family life was weakened by the sexual revolution and by feminists who devalued fatherhood. We are not served by jettisoning male involvement as soon as technology permits. Rather, we must try to change so that we can all live productively together.
This new technologising of family life puts women at a turning point at which they could lose something precious. Women are tasked with motherhood; not the "motherhood" of a lab-tested genetic connection, but the motherhood of day-to-day difficult care; attachment against all odds; nurturing that is minutely, laboriously calibrated to a particular child on a particular day. The wisdom that arises from having been assigned this task since time immemorial does not make us essentially better people; it does not mean that we are better suited to these responsibilities than men; but it does give us access to a precious wisdom that is a resource for the species as a whole.
That wisdom is: that love matters, and it matters more when it takes us out of ourselves.
The acts of nurturing a child against the personal inclination of the moment, against convenience, of accepting a child who may or may not be healthy, of entering into all the relationships with new relatives who might not be your first choice of companion - all these acts bring with them crucial lessons in patience and tolerance, more necessary now than ever if we are to live as a greater family in an increasingly diverse, conflict-ridden, interconnected and globalised world.
It's too late. There is already a generation and a half of bastard, orphaned men and women like myself that will smash their dreamworld to pieces. We have no fear, and no mercy for these avowed abortionists, feminists and other socialists who try to take away not only our right to live, but all the other rights which are so-called 'garanteed' by the Constitution. We know we have no rights but the ones we take and keep with our own bare hands; we'll never trust anyone and will fight anyone who gets in our way. Choke on THAT, 'Naomi'.
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