Donor Insemination and the new reproductive technologies, we not only have to confront the far right but also some anti-science brands of radical feminism, who argue that the New Reproductive
Technologies (combined with inintervention in creasing childbirth) represent a threat to women's power to control reproduction and childbirth.
Ironically, Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex argued rather the opposite. con cluding that women would only gain their liberation if they stopped having children
"naturally" with men, and had them through donor insemination. This leads to the second question; the need for these techniques to be available to all women, on demand, regardless of marital status and sexual orientation.
It is a myth that women have control over reproduction in
The dominant class society.
mode of organising reproduction is through the patriarchal family and the ruling class is having problems in dealing with these new techniques, not because they are such amazing scientific developments, but precisely because they can undercut the traditional notion of motherhood and fatherhood.
What we see, for example, in the debate around the Embryology Bill is a desperate attempt, by the far right, to assert the biological role of fatherhood and to limit access both to
DI and the NRTs to single women and lesbian women.
It is the social relations in which children are reproduced that are focussing the attention of several right-wing amendments to this Bill.
Some of these are lunatic amendments, which are just not implementable. One wants to alter a clause in the Bill which says the husband of the women should be the father of the child, and where a different man donates the sperm, to ensure that the sperm donator is the father!
Another amendment secks to restrict access for single and lesbian women. Donor Insemination is already very restricted on the
NHS, and generally only available to women with a male partner, so this amendment is very dangerous. Donor Insemination should really not need to be considered in this Bill al all; it is a very simple technique which has been used widely for over a century. Infertility treatment, involving advanced In-vitro fertilisation is at the moment often restricted by the expense involved: and these facilities.
should be available to all women and men on the NHS.
The message of the New Reproductive
Techniques is not wholly positive for women,
FEATURES
MALE CHURCH,
MALE PARLTAMENT
WOMENS:
LIVES.
NO To
MALE CONTROL
Would women be more liberated if they turned to donor insemination? however, because they not only put pressure on women to fulfil their lives through reproduction, but they also put pressure on women to have the "perfect baby'. Socialists must take a critical stance on both these issues.
We favour giving women more choice, more freedom to fulfil a variety of roles in their lives, including the right to choose not to have children. This is why the threat to abortion time limits posed by Anne Widdecombe's proposed amendment is such an enormous threat to the gains we have won.
Abortion rights are a separate issue from those raised in this Bill which focusses on Embryo experimentation, human infertility and the New Reproductive techniques. The right-wing are trying to confuse the issues to get government time to cut abortion time limits to overtur the gains made in the 1967 Act. They hope to use the new consensus over the possible 'viability" of the foetus at an earlier stage to stop abortion after 24, 22 or 20 weeks. The fight against this amendment will inevitably be a top priority for socialist feminists who have traditionally understood the significance of the '67 Act and the fight for the right to choose.
It is because we favour giving women a real choice about how to run their lives that we also take a critical stance on the issue of disabilty posed in this debate. We defend research that helps to identify genetic disorders but we also campaign for facilities for the disabled to give women a real choice about carrying a disabled foetus up to term. Finally we suuport the right, defended in the existing Bill, of any woman who bares a child to keep it if she chooses, regardless of any legal contract. We also support the ban on commercial surrogacy but will defend the right of women to have children for other women if they so choose.
Many of these demands can only be fully realised in the context of a free, comprehensive, state health care system which responds to the needs of working class people and women.
Labour Parties should ensure they are informed about these issues and Labour MPs have prepared a whole series of progressive amendments ready to put before Parliament in this debate. If such amendments are not forthcoming or are voted down, they should vote against this Bill. Unfortunately the Labour Party, in dramatic contrast to the far right, is unprepared for this debate and is beginning to concede the crucial argument on abortion time limits.
The task of revolutionary socialists cannot therefore be clearer. It is to get out onto the streets and into the trade union and labour party branches to organise a massive fightback against the reactionary amendments and to demand that the Labour Party gets its parliamentary act together and bangs down clear amendments to this Bill, along the lines expressed above. This would help to push the Tories onto the defensive and show that Labour really takes the cause of women seriously.
Valerie Coultas