Reproductive Technologies
Book Description
Every technology has its pros and cons, but reproductive technologies seem to present especially agonizing choices. For people suffering from infertility, the technologies offer the incomparable gift of a chance to have a child. For the critics of the technologies, they variously present a threat to the well-being of children, to motherhood, to God's will, and to the future of humanity itself. The...
MoreEvery technology has its pros and cons, but reproductive technologies seem to present especially agonizing choices. For people suffering from infertility, the technologies offer the incomparable gift of a chance to have a child. For the critics of the technologies, they variously present a threat to the well-being of children, to motherhood, to God's will, and to the future of humanity itself. These conflicting attitudes and passionate commitments appear to make a consensus nearly impossible to achieve. // However, societal experience of reproductive technologies suggests that the opportunities they offer will triumph over opposition, no matter how adamant that opposition may be. In short, reproductive technologies are here to stay. // The earliest intervention in reproduction - artificial insemination, introduced in the 1800s, - became entangled in the controversy over eugenics, the idea of improving humans through selective reproduction. Artificial insemination, write historians Cynthia R. Daniels and Janet Golden, "was a highly secretive medical procedure of questionable legal status in its early years. Only families deemed acceptable by doctors had access to this technology and it was up to physicians to find the donors, who were typically selected for their physical resemblance to the husband and for their educational and professional attainments." // The idea that a successful father would donate his sperm to impregnate the wife of another man was shocking enough to nineteenth-century sensibilities, but adding to that a deliberate effort to raise intelligence or to increase physical fitness led to intense controversy. Eugenics got a bad name after the Nazis and many U.S. authorities applied it in explicitly racist ways. Nevertheless, while forced sterilization (one of the techniques of eugenics) has been banned, artificial insemination has survived and is now mainstream. // Similarly, the announcement of the birth of Louise Brown, the world's first "test-tu...
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