Reproductive Justice, Health & Rights
Advocates for reproductive health, rights, and justice are increasingly aware of the safety and social risks of assisted reproductive technologies and other human biotechnologies, particularly for women and children.
While assisted reproduction has helped many people create families, the long-term risks of these technologies – particularly those that require egg provision – are grossly understudied. In the U.S., assisted reproduction has developed almost entirely in the commercial sector and is notoriously underregulated.
Heritable genome editing, if allowed, would develop in this same commercial sector. Reproductive justice advocates draw attention to the risks to women and children’s health and wellbeing, the historical context of population control and reproductive oppression, and the likelihood that it would exacerbate reproductive, racial, and disability injustice.
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Photo from Belly of the Beast, used by permission
Yesterday, California became the third state in the nation to...
International Commercial Surrogacy - Defining Risks and Driving Change [Surrogacy360]
Powerful new “gene editing” techniques have put the prospect of genetically modified human beings on the foreseeable horizon. Should we use these tools to improve the human species? Are they needed to prevent the transmission of genetic diseases? Would manipulating the genes of future children and generations open the door to new kinds of discrimination, inequality, and eugenics? Marcy Darnovsky unpacks the controversies that have erupted in recent months about how we should — and should not — use gene editing tools, and explores the technical, social, and ethical stakes of these imminent decisions.
Harriet discussed her experiences writing and talking about the increasingly powerful “medical-industrial complex,” the erosion of informed consent in biomedical research, and the ways that commercial dynamics have aggravated issues of distributive and social justice. She also describes the resistance she has encountered when writing about these topics, especially in response to her recently published book Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future. She addressed opportunities for scholars to engage more directly in communicating their ideas to broader audiences and the difficulties they may face in “going public.” And she pressed the case she makes in Deadly Monopolies for what Osagie Obasogie called, in a review of the book “a broader political consciousness of science and technology.