Feminist STS and Fertility Dystopia

You should never read an email in a hurry. A few months ago I accepted an invitation to be a part of a "science and policy" workshop on, what I read, as "Social Justice and IVF" (In Vitro fertilisation -- a tech I am very familiar with and have researched on for a while). It was in a city I wanted to visit. I needed a break from UCT, and they were willing to pay for my flight, so I said "YES, Please!" The workshop is in a few weeks and yesterday I read the email, carefully... only to realise that the invitation is actually for a workshop on "Social Justice and IVG". IVG? IVG? What is IVG, I asked myself in panic mode. IVG, now that I have taken a crash course on it this weekend, and read a million scientific articles on it, I can confidently tell you, is a short form for "In-vitro gametogenesis, an experimental technique that allows scientists to grow embryos in a lab by reprograming adult cells to become sperm and egg cells." (Suter 2022). I will not bore you with the details of gametogenesis, but in short, this tech. has been tried on mice, and baby mice have been created through skin cells of just one mouse! In essence, this technology would allow single individuals to procreate without the genetic contribution of another individual; and facilitate “multiplex” parenting, where groups of more than two individuals procreate together, allow same-sex couples to have children who are biologically related to both of them; it will allow us to make embryos in plenty and experiment on these as much as we please, an easy step up for designing babies, it will allow YOu to reproduce with just YOU. Who needs relationships which are not for companionship but for making babies? Not anymore. What IVG does is (potentially, once tried on human) it eliminates the need for a second individual, a partner, for genetic procreation. This ability to procreate without the use of anyone else's genetic material sounds pretty similar to cloning to me, but hey, I am a feminist STS scholar, not a geneticist, so I could be wrong. But one thing this fem STS scholar knows for sure, mice do not = humans.

There is the scientific impulse in this, which I totally appreciate, it is exciting to try these new tricks out on mice, in a laboratory. But then there is the real world of humans. Let us spend some time thinking about the social impact and consequences of these technologies which, have the potential to challenge age-old hierarchies and systems of inequities, do away with heteronormativity, disrupt all notions of the two parent model, but, guess what, despite these radical potentials, new tech often end up reaffirming structures of inequality based on race, class, gender, caste, and ableism. Can we talk about this more?