Medical and Reproductive Technologies and Women's Rights ...
Women are increasingly becoming targets of medical intervention through newer and more advanced scientific technologies. While on the one hand, contraceptive technologies tend to prevent fertile women from having children, another set of technologies called the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) enable those who cannot have them. Yet, both these technologies are similar in that they target women’s bodies by intervening and altering the physiological processes.
As part of the health movement and the autonomous women’s movement, Sama has repeatedly campaigned against technologies that target women’s bodies to either assist birth, control birth or facilitate the determination of the sex of the foetus.
Sama is currently engaged with ARTs, which have far reaching social, medical and economic implications on women and the society as a whole. These technologies claim to provide a solution’ to the ‘problem of infertility’ by medicalizing it, and do nothing to mitigate the social stigma attached with infertility. Sama’s engagement with ARTs is guided by the perspective that the interrelationship between reproductive technology and its end user is governed by gender and further compounded by caste, class, religion and ethnicity, sexual orientation and other social relations of power. As long as these underlying currents are not identified, the concepts of choice and empowerment will remain words and these technologies will go on propagating a gender bias in general and towards women’s health in particular.
