Women As Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women's Freedom - Hardcover

Raymond, Janice G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1875559264 ISBN 13: 9781875559268

Publisher: Spinifex Pr

Synopsis

An expose that uncovers the alarming ethical, legal and political implications of high-tech biomedical reproductive technologies. The author argues that these technologies are neither liberatory nor an issue of reproductive choice. Rather, they violate the integrity of women's bodies, perpetuate prostitution and an international trafficking in women and children, and are a threat to women's basic human rights. The author lectures internationally on reproductive and genetic technologies, feminist theory and bioethics. Her books include A Passion for Friends, The Transsexual Empire, and she is co-author of RU 486: Misconceptions, Myths and Morals.

About this title

From the Publisher:

A leading feminist ethicist's searing expose uncovers the alarming implications of high-tech biomedical reproductive technology and its threat to women's basic human rights.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A radical feminist's angry call for an end to reproductive technologies and contracts that she views as violence against women. Raymond (Women's Studies & Medical Ethics/UMass at Amherst; The Transsexual Empire, 1979) characterizes much reproductive technology as ``brutality with a therapeutic face,'' and she says that reproductive contracts (such as those involving surrogacy) create international traffic in fetuses and women's bodies. To make her points, she reviews new technologies and procedures like in-vitro fertilization, sex predetermination, embryo transfer, fetal-tissue transplants, implantable contraception, and postmortem Cesarean sections, describing how they work and what their consequences are for women. Raymond provides a scholarly analysis of the political, legal, and ethical implications of these technologies, but she's not above using name-calling (``technotwits'') and loaded language (``ejaculatory fatherhood''; ``spermatic market'') to get her message across. She parts company with feminists who see reproductive technologies and contracts as liberating women and providing them with choices, and she disagrees with those who call for regulating these technologies, calling instead for their abolition because, she says, they abuse women's bodies under the guise of scientific advancement. Raymond urges women to reject the idea of motherhood as their true destiny and source of power, arguing that women's real power stems not from their biological capacity but from their courage to act in the world. In conclusion, Raymond calls for an international convention against medical exploitation of women--a convention that would declare contractual and technological reproduction to be a violation of women's human rights. Challenging ideas, expressed clearly and forcefully, that go provocatively against the grain of mainstream feminist thinking. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Spinifex Pr
• ISBN 10: 1875559264
• ISBN 13: 9781875559268
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288