The shadows of assisted reproduction
On July 25, 1978, Louise Brown, the first person born from in-vitro fertilization, was born in the United Kingdom. in vitro Developed by Patrick Steptoe and Robert G. Edwards, their research was primarily driven by scientific and clinical motives, such as ending infertility. From the 1980s, when the first clinics began to appear, to the present day, this milestone of ending infertility has been presented as scientific progress and individual freedom, but it also conceals a way of monetizing the desire to become parents. Underlying all of this is a very complex web of interests and power relations that specifically affect women's bodies, bodies that are impacted not only physically but also psychologically. According to materialist feminism, the body is not an abstract and inviolable space, but a place traversed by relations of production, reproduction, and exploitation. Assisted reproduction transforms bodily functions such as ovulation, gestation, and genetic capacity, and it does not transform all bodies equally; it is women who bear the physical, hormonal, and emotional risks of the process.
Single women, lesbian couples, older women, or women with specific diagnoses are often excluded from public reproductive healthcare systems and, therefore, subjected to discriminatory criteria. A very high price is paid for treatment that, in many cases, is not covered by public healthcare and instead falls into the hands of private clinics that turn it all into a lucrative business, fitting perfectly into a neoliberal market logic. With this, we continue to fuel global inequalities, the interests of biopolitics, the speculation surrounding the commodification of life, and the persistence of normative control over women's bodies.
Michel Foucault already defined biopolitics as a set of techniques by which power manages life, bodies, and populations. Reproduction, as the point of intersection between the individual body and social continuity, occupies a central place in this strategy of governing life. Reproductive technologies are not, in this sense, neutral, since they form part of a system that produces subjectivities, norms, and hierarchies. And it is impossible to escape them.
It seems that, at the very least, and after clarifying the scenario we are dealing with, women who opt for this type of reproduction should be guaranteed the good health of the embryos and not be allowed to experience situations like the one that erupted a few days ago, when it became known that a Danish sperm donor He had a cancerous mutation. The uncertainty this case creates is not anecdotal or emotional; it is structural, related to healthcare, law, and even ontology. The Danish donor, from whom nearly two hundred children have been conceived with the transmission of Li-Fraumeni syndrome, exposes profound weaknesses in the assisted reproduction system, such as the breakdown of precautionary measures, the uncertainty surrounding the children's health, the lack of accountability, and the crisis of confidence in scientific knowledge.
