Photographs of loving mothers are again gracing the pages of the daily press as the latest IVF debate rages on. This time, however, they are lesbian mothers. Filled with longing for a child, they convince us that love lies at the core of this issue, otherwise dressed up in the language of rights and the politics of anti-discrimination.*
Motherlove, that highly contentious emotion and attitude of care, spills over to a reading, viewing public. We want to believe that this is all that is at stake. Women especially can identify with the blighted lives of those who suffer infertility or whose life choices deny them the deeply bodied pleasures of the relationship with a child. We are told, and we believe, that the desire is a natural urge, a human feeling, the foundation of our lives. Motherlove is something we can connect with, and it's normal, whether you are heterosexual or not.
The language of rights and anti-discrimination attempts to rationalise and codify these deeper sentiments. Yet this preoccupation of liberal thought takes little heed of larger questions about the shape of the society in which we express our love, or hopes for it. This language, a legacy of the nineteenth century, is blind to the form that social life is taking as we enter the twenty-first century. Technoscience and the raft of new medical technologies are sold to us according to the humanistic ideals of an earlier time - they offer us human fulfilment - in a period when the cutting edge theorists of postmodernity tell their elite students we have entered a post-human era.
Some people have always argued that IVF is not merely a medical treatment that will solve the problem of infertility. For them, there has been a concern that it will facilitate 'lifestyle choices'. Whether IVF is a health matter, or something else, has been at the crux of recent debate over the rules for using IVF. But the notion of lifestyle choice is also a way of framing the problem that can take us much further into understanding the power of this technology than the language of rights and discrimination.
It raises a much broader range of questions than whether a particular social group, lesbians in this case, should be allowed that choice. It helps us to see more clearly that what is at stake is our collective vision of the 'good life' and the sort of society in which we live.
The notion of a lifestyle choice tends to trivialise the desire of women in non-heterosexual relationships and those outside a family setting to have a child. As the avalanche of human interest stories featuring lesbian couples shows, the desire goes deep. It doesn't feel like a choice, but an essentially human longing. Lesbians, in this representation, are just like everybody else and thus have equal rights to have a child.
Of course, only twenty or so years ago there could be no 'right' to have a child in this sense. The technology did not exist that would even begin to allow the formulation of this proposition: the 'right' of the infertile to have children, the 'right' of non-heterosexuals to conceive. Forms of discrimination did exist that limited individuals' reproductive freedom, but they were social. They were not defined against a physiological incapacity or a technological possibility. To give birth to a child was something more akin to a gift - of nature or of God - than a right.
Whether anyone has a right to a child remains a highly contentious issue. Rights, in their brief modern history, have usually borne a relationship to some concept of what the human spirit might be or might aspire to be. Rights were intended to protect and let flourish something that was already incipient, but which could be downtrodden by some oppressive force.
John Stuart Mill believed that human beings were given their 'human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed'. 'Every increase in any of [our] capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment' - those things that would be protected and enhanced by a notion of rights to education, to free speech, to a break with custom - would bring us closer to our true humanity.
Today rights are invoked in relation to all sorts of access and equality of opportunity questions that rely on this idea. Yet in our society, just what the human essence is, or what might properly flourish, is seriously in question. Certainly aspects of what it was to have a human body set a natural limit on what we could hope for, and rights were contained within certain taken-for-granted boundaries.
Today the body - especially the reproductive body - is radically de-naturalised and its limits appear to be arbitrary. There appear to be no limits in contemporary circumstances to rights arguments and anti-discrimination politics. Far-fetched as it might have seemed, ethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filippini was right to ask the question he did recently about men's rights to bear children. Technology will make this a posssibility. But on what basis will we say that men have no right to bear children if the technology makes it practically possible and the language of equality is invoked?
The other striking aspect of contemporary rights language is the implicit, sometimes explicit, sense of a right to self-definition. Again, self-definition has its roots in an old liberal notion of our right to express our free individuality. But in the context of the new reproductive technologies, self-definition becomes a very different creature from that conceived by the nineteenth-century philosophers. Self-definition in fact is a more respectable way of talking about the trivial notion 'lifestyle choice'.
There are many people in academia, and many gay theorists, who do indeed argue that the new reproductive technologies will and should offer something like a lifestyle choice or means to self-definition, beyond all conventional limits to our human bodies. In this argument, state regulation of the technologies which attempts to limit their use to heterosexuals is merely 'noise' in the technological system. Allowed to run openly, smoothly, the various IVF technologies - which include any combination of donor sperm and ova and surrogacy - confirm the choices open to us in the production of ourselves.
From this point of view, there never was anything essentially human and technology now proves it. There is no longer any need to speak of rights in the sense of letting flower our inherent potential or natural urges, or any need for arguments about equality. What we thought were inherent human qualities are open to re-engineering. In other words, there is no human nature and technology will help us to engineer the selves we desire.
In the same way, queer theory - which is only one way of thinking about homosexuality - has argued for a flourishing of the 'many sexualities'. That is, according to queer theory, 'male' and 'female' are not and should not be the two terms around which all other definitions of sex or sexuality flow. Homosexuality is not a product of the heterosexual family; rather, transvestism, transsexualism, hermaphrodism and the varieties of homosexual and heterosexual sexual practice are all autonomous, equally valid and normal sexualities in their own right.
These self-definitions and practices are not to be defined against some given notion of male and female. These are not the starting points around which a variety of possibilities emerge, for this ultimately privileges heterosexuality. Writers such as Judith Butler in America make this clear: 'The culturally constructed body will be liberated, neither to its "natural" past, not to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.'
Queer theory foresees a proliferation of 'gender configurations' that will deprive the 'narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: "man" and "woman".'
There are at least two points of view then around which the rights of gays to have children, and the right not to be discriminated against, might be argued. In the public discussion so far, these have not been clarified. There is the one story, that gay mothers are just like 'us', that we are all human together and so should be treated 'equally'; and there is the other story, that what we take to be essentially human is essentially in dispute, that nothing is a given in our sexual and procreative lives.
For example, from the point of view of queer theory and various versions of postmodern thought, what we take to be 'woman', and what we implicitly value in motherlove, are arbitrary. These notions offer us no foundation for making judgments about how the new technologies should be used.
One of the problems with technologies such as IVF is that whatever limits are placed on them, they tend to restructure the range and kinds of choices we may make. But it is not just infertility that is able to be overcome; IVF influences how we think about social relationships. Typically, those of small 'l' liberal leaning merely apply old ethical arguments about human rights and anti-discrimination in a situation where the standards of what it meant to be human have disintegrated. It could be argued that humanistic anti-discrimination politics - which appeal to us all - are a way of blinding us to the scenario that queer theorists more accurately foresee. That is, a vision of the world without normative boundaries, where the new technologies will facilitate radical processes of arbitrary self-definition.
But this does not mean that we have to accept the apparent liberation these thinkers and the technologies they celebrate foretell. Indeed, the great flowering of heterogeneity they promise may be our oppression.
We have to ask what kind of a future is proffered by the sorts of technologies that grow from IVF - a future where social life is configured according to technoscientific know-how?
What we need is an argument not against the use of IVF by lesbians, but about what the new technologies mean, or whether we want them at all. Whether they are used by gays or heterosexuals, they open onto a world in which the mother, and the culturally potent experience of childbirth, may not mean what most of those who presently argue for IVF wish them to.
* This comment was first published in the Spectrum section of The Sydney Morning Herald, 26th August, 2000.
