| Summary: | Reproductive technologies such as alternative insemination
and in-vitro fertilization, and their implementation through
surrogacy, have been developed and managed in Canada without
enough concern for the interests and needs of women. There is a
lack of regulation establishing safety standards and protection
for the needs of the women participating. There is also
discrimination in determining who shall be allowed access to the
procedures. The theoretical basis for the development of the
technologies and their discriminatory implementation can be found
in the ideologies of motherhood, privacy and notions of formal
equality.
Woman has been socially constructed by men as an object - an
object that is partially defined by her reproductive function. We
can only understand reproductive technologies within this context
of women's situation - that is, as the 'Other' that men have
created. A woman's gendered identity includes the possibility of
pregnancy and motherhood. Difference from men based on this
biological potential is used to justify inequality.
Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
may be a means to assert women's rights to control of the
technologies. However, the articulation of Charter rights may be
constrained by patriarchal assumptions of who should be a mother,
notions of public/private that limit Charter applicability and do
not recognize state involvement in maintaining a system of
inequality, and notions of formal equality that assume that women
and men are equal if they are treated as 'the same'. These
assumptions remain as potential obstacles to a mobilization of
the Charter.
In order to challenge the theoretical basis of the
development of reproductive technologies it will be necessary to
the subordination of women. This will entail the deconstruction
of the patriarchal foundations of the social, legal and political
systems that identify men as the norm and women as difference. By
recognizing and affirming difference in a vision of equality that
does not prioritize 'sameness', it will be possible to redefine
what motherhood means by including the many experiences of
different women. Thus, the technologies will be developed with
the interests of women as the primary concern and they will no
longer be made available solely to those who conform to the
ideologies of motherhood that prioritize heterosexual, middle
class women.
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