The Womb as Operation Room: Feminist Technology Studies without “Failures of Nerve”

Abstract

If the male seed is not strong enough for impregnation, this weakness can be compensated by medical intervention in (parts of) the female body. If something in the unborn child is not quite right, this can be diagnosed and occasionally even surgically repaired—again by means of intervention in the female body. Paradoxically, now that women have achieved an unprecedented level of emancipation and autonomy, and their life fulfillment no longer exclusively lies in the (re)production of husband and child, the advent of new technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), prenatal diagnostics, and fetal surgery leads to an increasing subjection of women to medical treatment for the benefit of others. What has been acquired via the political and social front door—independence, relative freedom, right of self-determination—seems to slip away again through the medical-technological backdoor. The woman, reduced to a manipulable body, may once more cushion the problems of men and children. I probably formulate it less diplomatically than she does, but this issue, with its strong political connotations, is the main theme of van der Ploeg’s dissertation, Prosthetic Bodies. The Construction of the Fetus and the Couple As Patients in Reproductive Technologies. Even in the more empirical chapters, one consistently senses this normative commitment. But van der Ploeg never relapses into a politically correct vocabulary about the oppression of women by the power of male physicians. On the contrary, van der Ploeg shies away from such classical sociological formulations in terms of professional authority and medicalization. She does not reject the medicaltechnical world but, rather, embraces it by carefully reconstructing the shifts that have