ART eligibility for lesbians and single heterosexual women in Victoria: How medicalisation influenced a political, legal and policy debate

Abstract

This article analyses the seven year long Victorian political, policy and law reform debate over eligibility criteria for assisted reproductive technology (ART), emphasising the ways in which medicalised discourse and assumptions framed the arguments advanced by various stakeholders. It argues that despite the positive political, social justice and health gains for lesbian and gay prospective parents and their children that were ultimately achieved, the case made for the decriminalisation of self-insemination and increased access to clinical ART services also involved some disappointing political and intellectual compromises along the way. Although lesbian activism regarding ART eligibility criteria was often consistent with a position of what could be called ‘constructive medicalisation’ (Broom and Woodward 1996), the debate also demonstrated how easily constructive medicalisation arguments were side-lined in favour of arguments drawing on dominant medicalised discourses about infertility treatment and risk.