Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ndmmz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T12:25:52.915Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reproduction without Sex—But with the Doctor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2021

Eugene B. Brody
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Nine years after the appearance of the world's first “test tube baby,” the public is being deluged with technical and ethical opinions about non-coital reproduction. U.S. legislators, policymakers, and lawyers, energized by the court battle about “Baby M,” are reconsidering the rights of would-be parents and of the children created by the new technologies. But in the course of this turmoil one salient fact has been ignored: social policy and technological advances in respect to reproduction are mediated for the individual woman through her interaction with her doctor.

Doctors have gotten by with remarkably little scrutiny in this regard. The perception of them as benevolent magicians has, indeed, been enhanced. The only criticism has come from religious leaders concerned with the experimental use of fetal or reproductive materials, and from those who see the doctor-scientist “playing God.”

Type
Viewpoint
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Fall 1987 , pp. 152 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brody, EB, Sex, contraception and motherhood in Jamaica, Cambridge: Harvard, 1981.Google Scholar
Apfel, RJ, Fisher, SM, To do no harm: DES and the dilemmas of modern medicine, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Brody, EB, Klein, H, The intensive care nursery as a small society: Its contribution to the socialization and learning of the pediatric intern, Paediatrician 1980, 9: 169–81.Google ScholarPubMed
Van Hall, E, The impact of the new reproductive technologies on women's rights and roles, Unpublished contribution to the WFMH report to UNESCO, 1987.Google Scholar
Soules, M, Editorial, Fertility and Sterility 1985, 43: 511–13.Google Scholar
Van Hall, , supra note 4.Google Scholar
National Women's Consultative Council, Manufacturing babies: What reproductive technologies mean to women, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Australian Government, Canberra, 1986.Google Scholar
Brody, EB, Rights, privileges and obligations: The physician as bioethicist, in Maday, B, ed., Anthropology and society, Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1975.Google Scholar
Gallup Organization, Attitudes toward contraception, unpublished report to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Princeton, N.J., March 1, 1985.Google Scholar
Becker, G, Nachtigall, R, The conceptualization of infertility as chronic illness, American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, 1986.Google Scholar