Letter

Start with the experience

Dear healthmatters — In asking whose interests the new reproductive technologies serve, and highlighting the complex nature of infertility, Pat Spallone (Whose bodies? Whose Choice?, issue 11) raises some interesting issues.

It is important that the feminist responses to the new technologies build on the best traditions of the women’s health movement — powerfully used in criticising medical approaches to pregnancy and childbirth — where personal experience, articulate and shared, becomes integral to challenges to medical orthodoxy.

Feminist responses to the new technologies as they relate to infertility will be more thorough if they take into account the complex nature of the experience of infertility and of infertility services, which many women may or may not choose to use, and of which technologies such as IVF are only one part.

Although there is, as Pat Spallone points our, the need for an urgent response to rapidly moving developments in reproductive technologies, these must not be at the expense of the experiences of those involved — otherwise responses will risk being seen as over polemical, and alienate the infertile.

There is some irony in the issue getting its best airing in the context of high-tech procedures, but the current debates to create a valuable opportunity to challenge the silence and myths surrounding infertility, enrich feminist critiques of the new technologies, and ultimately, the reproductive rights lobby as a whole.