Be Wary of the Techno-Fix
By Marcy Darnovsky,
Boston Review
| 11. 19. 2018
In Merve Emre’s essay "All Reproduction is Assisted," her commitment to the emancipatory power of reproductive technologies is untroubled by her own accounts of unsatisfactory endings. Perhaps she assumes that one day soon, when the technologies improve, they will set us free.
In her essay, Merve Emre declares that “all reproduction . . . is assisted.” Few feminists of any wave or stripe would disagree. But if the statement that none of us go it alone is solid, some of Emre’s other moves put her on shaky ground. In her opening volleys, she skips lightly across fifty years of feminist thinking about reproductive technologies, leaping from Shulamith Firestone to Adrienne Rich to xenofeminism, with a brief stop at Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1984). She arrives at a diagnosis of contemporary reproductive culture: it is infected, she says, by “the discourse of the natural.” She takes contemporary feminism to task for this state of affairs, suggesting that it has not been sufficiently enthusiastic about high-tech reproduction and asserting that it “has not done a good enough job articulating what alternate strategies of reproduction may be.”
Is that really a fair critique of feminism today? Most feminists have long been aware that simplistic appeals to nature can justify anything, including gender inequalities and oppression. And while questions about “nature” and “technology” are very...
Related Articles
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...
By Jessica Mouzo, El País | 10.03.2025
DNA is the molecule of life: this double-helix structure, present in every cell in the body and organized into fragments called genes, stores the instructions for making organisms function. It is a highly precise biological machine, but sometimes it breaks...
GeneWatch UK has prepared a briefing on the genetic modification of nature for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress in October 2025
The upcoming Congress claims to be “where the world comes together to set priorities and drive conservation and sustainable development action.” A major concern for those on the outside is that the Congress may advance plans to develop and encourage the use of synthetic biology in nature conservation. This could at first glance sound like...