From test-tube women to bodies without women

In this article I summarise twenty-five years of international feminist resistance to reproductive and genetic engineering. Drawing on the work of FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering) I list the main objections of feminist critics to the global commodification of women. Under the guise of ‘doing good’ and the catch cry ‘women want it’ (i.e. allegedly to alleviate the suffering of infertility/too much fertility, or eliminate genetic imperfection), reproductive and genetic engineers have reduced women — and their babies — to a series of body parts and tissues that can be traded, screened and eliminated at will. Discussions include the many physiological as well as psychological dangers inherent in the medicalisation of in/fertile women's lives and their children through the Big Business of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and related genetic technologies in a global context. I also critically examine the pro-technology position of liberal feminists including their much touted concept of ‘choice’. Lastly, I ask where the recent opening of the door to embryonic stem cell research via commercial and ‘altruistic’ egg cell ‘donation’ is taking society and how long it will be before cloning of human beings is justified as ‘for our own good’ and women's alienation to their own body (parts) will lead to their annihilation.