Fertility Technology by Donna J. Drucker

Author:Donna J. Drucker [Drucker, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Intending parents wanting a child that looks like them—a desire that appears uncontroversial at first glance—is deeply problematic.

Examining race in ARTs shows how deeply some child-seekers value whiteness in their potential future offspring and the desires of intending parents to have children who resemble them—often at a very high price. In addition to following patterns of economic inequalities, “global ART markets tend to reproduce racial hierarchies, as they are prone to benefit people who have higher social status and exploit those who do not.”8 Meanwhile, those who want gametes from providers of color have a more difficult time finding them. More broadly, it shows how much control some intending parents want to exert over a highly technical process, and how the values of individual choice in consumer capitalism extend to the manifestation of a specific desired child. As Camisha A. Russell reflects, ARTs “reinforce existing inequalities in local and global labor markets . . . [and] reinforce the privileging of whiteness and the naturalization of racial categories.”9 In short, intending parents wanting a child that looks like them—a desire that appears uncontroversial at first glance—is deeply problematic, as it not only reinforces racial hierarchies, but also gives rise to unrealistic expectations that a potential child will not just look like the intending parents but be like them.

In another vein of embryo selection regarding a potential child’s health, the process of selective reproduction (in the form of preimplantation genetic diagnosis [PGD] and preimplantation genetic screening [PGS/PGT-A]) influences the type of embryos that physicians and users seek to implant. Clinics conduct PGT-A tests to detect chromosome translocation, which is a possibility when women have several miscarriages or implantation failures and want the “healthiest” embryo possible implanted. They can also be used when women know their hereditary disease status and want to avoid passing diseases onto their future children. Fertility clinic staff use the test results to advise would-be parents regarding which embryos to implant. Reading the embryos is still more of an art than a science, and in these cases, there is not a clear boundary between assisted reproductive technologies and selective reproductive technologies.

A commercial technique derived from PGT-A is MicroSort, which enables clinicians to separate out sperm with X and Y chromosomes. Couples can then avoid having children of one sex if they have a hereditary history of a sex-specific disease. MicroSort uses ICSI to insert the gendered sperm into the egg before IVF. The company and fertility clinics often refer to spermatic selection with IVF as “family balancing,” but it can obviously be used in patriarchal societies to avoid having girls. However, the company’s argument is that the application of this technology “could avoid abortion by establishing desired pregnancies based on characteristics in the resulting child.”10 Even if true, that reasoning does not address the sexism underlying a decision-making framework in which prospective parents would abort female fetuses simply because of their gender.

Selective reproduction is currently available to avoid neurodegenerative and hypertrophic myocardial pathologies, for example. However, it is not

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