UNNATURAL SELECTION

...This technological imperative is likely to prevail with in vitro fertilization, egg donation, sex predetermination, and embryo evaluation...

...Using this technique, an embryo would be transferred into a breeder who would herself contribute none of the child's genes...

...Similarly, women have been asking for donor eggs because they are not happy with some aspect of themselves...

...Agrowing number of women around the world see the threat the new reproductive technologies pose to women as a class...

...The delegates passed a resolution condemning "men and their institutions that inflict infertility on women by violence, forced sterilization, medical maltreatment, and industrial pollution, and repeat the damage through violent 'repair' technologies...

...What's more, embryo flushing and transfer would open up the Third World as a source of surrogate mothers, Stenhura said...

...John Stenhura, president of the Bionetics Foundation, Inc., which helps arrange for births to breeders, has predicted that once surrogate motherhood becomes commonplace, the price paid to breeders will come down...

...Physicians and scientists continually expand the technology—always, they say, to relieve human suffering...

...They are organizing a resistance movement...

...I sometimes get concerned about what's going to happen to us in ten, fifteen years' time," said one woman in the Australian study...

...They will know that women provide only the raw materials from which men manufacture people to desired specifications...

...Only "healthy" embryos would be transferred back into women...

...Women enter the clinics, become pregnant, give birth, and live happily ever after...

...Some women have had to quit their jobs in order to stay in these programs...

...Previctimization has already become a lucrative practice in India, according to Mona Daswani, a social worker in Bombay...

...H Those who have had several miscarriages...

...In the northeast regions, 30 per cent of women of reproductive age are sterilized...

...We German women have a special responsibility to stop this...

...Bangladesh, for example, has an incentive program to induce women to submit to sterilization...

...Richard Seed, a pioneer in the development of the embryo flushing and transfer procedure, predicts that the technologies will start out as infertility treatment but will indeed eventually be used for the control of human evolution...

...Our identity...

...The use of reproductive technologies for such a purpose was predicted long ago...

...Doctors there have set up businesses to detect female fetuses through amniocentesis...

...Clinics are free to define success any way they choose, and they choose not to define it in terms of live births...

...What's more, in buying and selling parts of women's bodies (eggs, wombs, hormones) in a new institution of reproductive prostitution, the technodocs and their business colleagues expose women to physical and psychological risks—risks that are hidden behind the smile of the happy mother...

...Being in an IVF program forces women to center their lives more explicitly around reproduction, as many in the Crowe study stated...

...In 1935, Dr...

...All the women sociologist Christine Crowe interviewed in an Australian study of IVF patients told her that the two weeks after the embryo transfer are a period of intense anxiety...

...Already we have had couples come and ask us if a male other than the husband could donate sperm because they were not happy with the husband's appearance or personality," says Professor Carl Wood, head of the IVF team at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia...

...They expected 600 women to attend...

...When reproductive technologies are introduced, they are presented as solutions to the problems of a small number of women...

...Women in Australia have been given a similarly unrealistic picture of their chances of success...

...As technodocs decide which women's genes are superior and which are inferior, who may reproduce and who is not "healthy" enough to, they distance women still further from our bodies, our selves...

...Equally familiar are the accompanying photographs of happy mothers or grinning white-coated physicians holding perfect babies conceived in the laboratory...

...The headlines are familiar: Last-Chance Babies: The Wonders of In Vitro Fertilization, New Hope for the Infertile, Our Twin Test-Tube Miracle...

...Population control agencies from Western nations, primarily the United States, make intrauterine devices (IUDs) and birth control pills—but not diaphragms—available to Third World women...

...Embryos would be flushed out of every pregnant woman and evaluated...

...Winchester, MA 01890...

...All these clinics were operational and collecting fees ranging from $1,375 to $7,000 and averaging $4,085 per attempt...

...Box 751...

...Alan De Cher-ney, clinic director of Yale University's In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) program, calls them...

...They use donor sperm with IVF and, more rarely, donor eggs...

...Surrogate motherhood, a growth industry in itself, may turn poor women into paid breeders...

...The same pattern is evident with ultrasound, amniocentesis, Caesarean section, and genetic testing and counseling...

...I think it is really important that some research is done on the long-term effects of the hormonal treatment we're getting...

...There's nothing that can describe what you go through, the mental torture you put yourself through," one said...

...One woman told Burton, "My husband went to pieces...

...it does not...

...Germany pursued a policy of Auslese und Ausmerze under the Nazis...

...We support the recovery by women of knowledge, skill, and power that gives childbirth, fertility, and all women's health care back into the hands of women...

...Unnatural Selection BY GENA COREA Awoman sits down before a white-coated authority figure who tells her, with great sympathy in his voice, that there is a slight problem with her eggs—they carry undesirable genetic traits—and that, for the sake of her unborn child, perhaps she should use donor eggs taken from another woman's body...

...The media often portray test-tube baby-making as harmless and risk-free...

...Now, in many industrialized countries, it is used in most cases...

...Doctors receive a bonus for each sterilization they perform...

...Entrepreneurs in the United States view these developments as potential bonanzas...

...Daswani estimates that 78,000 female fetuses were aborted this way between 1978 and 1983...

...Indications for the procedure continue to grow...

...The fascist government selected those it deemed worthy to live and reproduce...

...Michael Soules of the University of Washington at Seattle's IVF program...

...In vitro fertilization, in fact, is rarely successful...

...This is the future many women are being sold in this, the softening-up phase of the Reproductive Revolution...

...Of the twenty-six clinics which did produce births, twenty had five or fewer...

...The Vallinge conference pointed toward a different approach to infertility...

...I've heard of a few girls who've had that happen...

...H Women whose eggs may have been damaged by toxins in the workplace...

...In such ways, and by otherwise controlling the development, the twinning, the size, etc., of the embryo, and the duration and other conditions of pregnancy and labor, considerable changes may be wrought in our methods and customs concerned with the production of children—changes permitting a much greater degree of control over our choice of these children, even before we reach the ideal condition of complete ectogenesis, or development of the egg entirely outside the mother's body...

...Women in both the Burton and Crowe studies reported the devastating effects those failures had on them...

...Gena Corea is author of "The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs" and "The Hidden Malpractice" (Harper and Row, 1985...

...Researchers are also developing hormone-releasing IUDs that prevent birth for twelve years and an anti-pregnancy vaccine...

...This step would complete the already pernicious "population control" policies that are practiced, with Western money and supervision, in the Third World...

...the others would be discarded...

...I felt I was dying...

...One company plans to provide the embryo transfer "service" in a network of clinics around the country...

...She is the U.S...

...Instead, 2,000 came from all parts of West Germany, several other European countries, India, and the United States...

...Sex predetermination techniques may also translate sexual prejudice (a preference for male children) into a sexist reality...

...Most women do not come away from the clinics with babies...

...The industry can then go to poverty-stricken parts of the country where women would be more than willing to accept a fraction of the current $10,000 fee...

...Yet another aspect of the disturbing reality behind the media gloss is this: Such new reproductive technologies as embryo freezing, gene therapy, and the sexing of embryos provide a way to control evolution...

...That's an incredible downer after going through all this and being one of the few people who get pregnant only to have it lost...

...Low self-esteem, fostered by a culture that continually tells women they are not bright enough or attractive enough, and that tolerates high levels of ego-destroying violence against women, makes her vulnerable to his suggestion...

...Women are on a wrenching emotional roller-coaster ride as they attempt to clear the many hurdles of an IVF program...

...Other firms are starting sex predetermination clinics for clients who insist on raising boy babies...

...These developments "would greatly extend the reproductive potencies of females possessing characters particularly excellent," said Muller...

...In this sense, the new reproductive technologies constitute an attack on women at a very deep level...

...It is because contraception is not available on a reasonable basis that so many women go for sterilization," she says...

...A few women get good news: the embryo is implanted...

...If successful on a grand scale, they could intensify the class system: Poor women, here and in the Third World, would serve primarily to carry the embryos of the upper class, and males would far outnumber females...

...More unreasonable contraceptives are on the way: Trials are being conducted on women with Norplant, a pellet surgically implanted under the skin to release progesterone for five years...

...In vitro fertilization was originally proposed for use only on women who were infertile because of blocked or absent fallopian tubes...

...In obstetrics, for example, electronic fetal monitoring was introduced for use on women in high-risk pregnancies...

...For all the puffery about these wonderful new technologies, the remarkable fact is that they do not work well at all...

...One year later, in Bonn, West Germany, the women's section of the Green Party and the Feminist Social Science Association, which included FINRRAGE members, sponsored "a meeting against the technologies, not a pluralistic discussion on its supposed advantages and disadvantages for women," the organizers said...

...Everybody is happy with these new options for parenthood, or so it would seem...

...Many of the clinics which have produced no test-tube babies at all or only one or two still claim astonishing success rates—some as high as 25 per cent...

...In Brazil, too, sterilization of poor women is widespread, according to Dr...

...The menace of high-tech motherhood At least one—British IVF pioneer Robert Edwards—has announced plans to divide embryos...

...The technodocs' suggested candidates for in vitro fertilization with donor eggs include: H Women with genetic deficiencies...

...I think we need to know how many women are treated, how many pregnancies occur, how many deliveries occur over a period of time____I think a lot of women feel cheated because it [IVF treatment] is so financially expensive and disruptive of our lives...

...These include a positive response to the ovulation-stimulating hormonal drugs, ovulation at the right time for the egg-retrieval team (if team doctors operate too late, the eggs will be released and lost to their suction devices), successful capture and fertilization of the eggs, and, finally, implantation of embryos in the uterus...

...That image ignores the potential risks involved in giving powerful hormones to women to induce the ripening of multiple eggs in their ovaries...

...it exterminated those it viewed as undesirable...

...Stenhura speculated that Central America, Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia would be appropriate places to find women who could gestate the babies of middle-class infertile couples from the Western nations...

...This entails artificially inseminating women, flushing embryos out of them, and transferring those embryos to other women—a procedure fraught with risk for all the women involved...

...Then, quickly, physicians expand the indications and enlarge the number of patients...

...But physicians quickly extended IVF so that now even fertile women married to men with low sperm counts are counted among IVF candidates...

...The widespread practice of exaggerating the IVF pregnancy rate appears to be a marketing ploy to lure infertile couples in to become active IVF patients," he wrote in a recent editorial in the professional journal Fertility and Sterility...

...They freeze human embryos...

...He sees this trend as positive...

...Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis of the Brazilian Ministry of Health...

...At the level of consciousness...

...They know their job is on the line by having to go into the hospital every day...

...Hermann J. Muller, a Nobel laureate geneticist, foresaw embryo transfer, ovarian transplants, the farming of eggs from ovaries maintained in cultures in laboratories, and parthenogenesis (development of antgg without fertilization...

...I think it's dishonest to give a success rate based on the number of positive pregnancy tests per number of women who have embyro transfer," said one woman in a study of IVF patients conducted by Barbara A. Burton...

...Recognizing that infertility is often caused by political, social, and economic conditions, we support compassionate treatment of infertile women and intensive study into the prevention of infertility," the resolution stated...

...One told Crowe, "After my first go, they [the employers] told me that I either go off the program or I give the job away...

...Women may assume that a 25 per cent success rate means they have a 25 per cent chance of having a baby if they enter the IVF clinic claiming that rate...

...But beneath the media gloss lies a profoundly disturbing reality...

...Some physicians have suggested that in the near future, people may use the sperm and eggs of other, genetically healthier people...

...The women are offered a sari and the equivalent of several weeks' wages if they agree to relinquish their fertility...

...Motivators"—who may be health and family-planning workers, mid-wives, or simply male agents with no background in health care—receive a fee for each sterilization candidate they deliver...

...Then it's really tough," says James Holman, former head of the IVF program at Duke University...

...Misreporting seems to be a particular free-market problem, according to Dr...

...The media accounts of new reproductive technologies all tell the same story of infertile women pleading with physicians who, prompted by compassion for the suffering of these would-be mothers, wave their magic test tubes and perform miracles...

...Others have their hopes dashed...

...We had quite a few who got pregnant and then aborted...

...When a female fetus is found, it is aborted, she says...

...Last July, FINRRAGE held an emergency conference in Vallinge, Sweden, and women from eighteen countries participated...

...She opts for donor eggs and bears a child unrelated to herself...

...H Older women who would like to have a baby but fear, because of their age, that they would produce a handicapped child...

...A 1983 study in Bangladesh found that in a large percentage of the sterilization centers, surgical gloves and gowns were not changed between operations, and that almost half the centers did not sterilize equipment adequately...

...This may be happening here," one organizer said, "because German women are so clear on where all this leads...

...Janice Raymond, a University of Massachusetts bioethicist, calls this "previc-timization"—the elimination of women before they are even born...

...It was a rude awakening to meet other women who were going through for their fourth or fifth attempt...

...The anti-pregnancy vaccine is the other side of in vitro fertilization," says Brazil's dos Reis...

...Others simply quit their jobs: "You can't be expecting your bosses every three months to let you have virtually a month off," said one woman...

...Among those aspects were appearance and intellectual capacity...

...Our generation were guinea pigs for the Dalkon Shield, and now we're guinea pigs for a new form of modern technology...

...In the United States, a Medical Tribune survey of 108 IVF clinics found that half the responding fifty-four clinics have never sent a woman home with a baby...

...She is not surprised to hear that her eggs are as inadequate as the rest of her body (breasts too small, thighs too fat) though the news does shame her...

...Some firms are offering to rent breeders, called surrogate mothers, to paying customers...

...These are the "technodocs," as Dr...

...In the already immensely powerful medical establishment, a new tier of experts is beginning to hold sway...

...There is also evidence that in the summer of 1984, women in a flood-devastated area were denied relief wheat unless they underwent sterilization...

...The technodocs are pursuing motherhood for Western, white, married women, no matter the cost to these women, and are pursuing sterility for women in the Third World, no matter the cost to those women...

...It was the first time anywhere in the world that such a large group of feminists had recognized the threat the technologies pose to women's present and future lives...

...Future generations of women, growing up in a world of male-run reproductive industries, will have no sense of themselves as beings capable of procreating...

...At a meeting in the Netherlands in 1984, the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) was born...

...Richard Seed says embryo evaluation may become part of routine prenatal care...

...Another said, "I entered the program with a rosy glow of expectation...

...Once the embryo is outside the woman's body and in a laboratory dish, it is available for manipulation, including genetic engineering...

...contact for the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (F1NRRAGE), P.O...