Procreation or Production?

Procreation

Reproductive technologies have changed child-bearing in profound ways. Traditionally, deep emotional bonds have joined a man and a woman in sexual bonds of love to give birth and form a family. However, sexual procreation is being increasingly replaced with baby making as a commercial production that we undertake with doctors and specialists.1.

New family forms

Beginning in the 1960's, social movements which accepted and encouraged new sexual and family behaviors played into the rapid commercialization of reproduction. Single parenting, divorce, planned parenthood, abortion, the normalization of homosexuality, the decline of legal and moral support for marriage, liberalized sexuality, and female postponement of child bearing for education and career were creating social support for the movement of society away from reproduction through procreation toward reproduction through scientific and commercial production.

The expanding market of production

By 2003, procedures of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) accounted for 1% of the live births in the U. S. (and 18% of the multiple births). 2. By 2004, making babies had developed into a three billion dollar business.3. Expanding the market is of primary concern in business ventures.

Questions are raised

Advances in reproductive technologies challenge our sexual and family relationships, our human freedom and dignity, and our ethical and religious foundations. Many ethical and legal questions are raised by these new technologies. 4.
* How far should commerce and reproduction mix?
* Are the rights of children of the new biology being ignored?
* What is it doing to the way we think about ourselves, each other, and our children?

Reproductive technology and genetic engineering are destabilizing our procreative foundation and even threatening new forms of reproductive control. Our beliefs about parenthood, kinship and personhood are being brought into crises as our cultural definitions of relatives and kinship ties are redefined.

Brave new biotech world

The new millenium moved us solidly into a brave new world when the human genetic code was cracked in the year 2000, outlining the biochemical recipe, encoded in our DNA, for manufacturing and operating a complete human being. 5.

Eric Lander, of the Mass. Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research at Whitehead, outlined social dangers. 6.
1. Our privacy will be jeopardized because there will be temptation to pry into other's genomes.
2. Genetic determinism will oversimplify our expectations of behavior.
3. Once you see humans as a product of manufacture you cross a line, raising the greatest danger.

The new bio-industrial world

Commerce in genetic materials is fashioning a bio-industrial world that raises more troubling issues than any other economic revolution in history. 7. Well-credentialed and well-financed researchers propose the complete restructing of human life in the construction of a genetic super race. Many of these scientists have a financial stake in the commercial corporations that promote reproductive technologies, serving as advisors or sitting on boards of directors.8

Government response to ART

In 2004, The President's Council on Bioethics called for information gathering, monitoring, and reporting of the uses and effects of ART with special concern for increased consumer protection in regard to the health and development of children born with ART and the health and well-being of women who use these services. 9. Dr. Leon Kass, the former chair of the Council on Bioethics says, "There is a need for boundaries and oversight in areas of deep public disagreement." 10.


References:
1. Howard, Agnes. R. 2006. "In Moral Labor". First Things. March, No.161:9.
2. Wright, Victoria Clay, Jeani Chang, Gary Jeng and Maurizio Macaluso, 2006. "Assisted
Reproductive Technology Surveillance - United States, 2003." Center for Disease Control,
MMWR Surveillance Summaries: May 26,/55(SSo4):1-22.
3. Spar, Debora L. 2006. The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the
Commerce of Conception. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
4. McNulty, Timothy J. 1987. "Ethics of Babymaking". Bryan-College Station Eagle. Sunday,
August 30: 1 E.
5. Lemonick, Michael D. 2000. "Gene Mapper" Time. Vol. 156, No. 26. December 25:110.
6. Golden, Frederic and Michael D. Lemonick. 2000. "The Race is Over". Time. Vol. 156,
No.1 . July, 3:22.
7. Rifkin, Jeremy. 1998. "God in a Labcoat: Can we control the biotech revolution before it
controls us?" The Foundation on Economic Trends. Utne Reader. May-June: pp. 66-71,
106-108.
8. Howard, Ted and Jeremy Rifkin. 1977. Who Should Play God? The Artificial Creation
of Life and What it Means for the Future of the Human Race. Center for Urban
Education.
9. The President's Council on Bioethics, March 2004. "Reproduction and Responsibility: The
Regulation of New Biotechnologies."
http://bioethicsprint.bioethics.gov/reports/reproductionandresponsibility/chapter10.html.
10. Kass, Leon R. 2004. "Reproduction and Responsibility" The Wall Street Journal. April 1:
Opinion Page.


These concerns were presented in a 23 page paper entitled:
Who's Rocking the Cradle? From Procreation to Production
Presented at the 2007 Southwestern Sociological Association Meetings
March 15-17, 2007 in Albuquerque, NM

The paper can be accessed on the internet at my website: http://www.wrestlingwithangels.com/