MacArthur Grant Sheds Light on Reproductive Technologies
By Elayne Clift,
Sentinel Source
| 09. 18. 2014
[References CGS]
A couple has had miscarriages, considered in-vitro fertilization, discussed adoption and finally opted for a surrogate to bear their baby in India. They visit her before signing on and feel that the agency’s “gestational mothers” are well cared for and decently compensated. But how much do they really know about the practice of cross-border surrogacy?
Thanks to a recent MacArthur Foundation grant to the Center for Genetics and Society and Our Bodies Ourselves, the information gap surrounding surrogacy and other assisted reproductive technologies will be addressed, with an emphasis on human rights and social justice. Light will also be cast on the rapidly growing industry assisted reproductive technologies has spawned.
“Cross-border surrogacy raises thorny questions,” says Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “Some people look at women selling their eggs or reproductive capacity as an individual right within the context of wage labor. Others see these practices as deepening gender and class inequalities in a not-so-free market.”
“Most information available in the mainstream fails to paint a complete picture,” adds Ayesha Chatterjee of Our Bodies...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 11.24.2024
Gig work in childcare, nursing, and transportation; non-invasive prenatal testing; gene editing; and space expeditions can all be attributed to one mistaken, pervasive assumption: that “we can innovate our way out of the thorniest problems, including reproductive ones” (22). In Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, feminist political theorist Jennifer Denbow demonstrates why the U.S. has put so much of its hopes, and its money, on technological “innovations”––and why that hasn’t addressed...
By Tamsin Metelerkamp, Daily Maverick | 11.18.2024
The National Health Research Ethics Council (NHREC) has confirmed that heritable human genome editing (HHGE) remains illegal in South Africa, after changes in the latest version of the South African Ethics in Health Research Guidelines sparked concern among researchers that...
By Bernice Lottering, Gene Online | 11.08.2024
South Africa’s updated health-research ethics guidelines, which now include heritable human genome editing, have sparked concern among scientists. The revisions, made in May but only recently gaining attention, outline protocols for modifying genetic material in sperm, eggs, or embryos—changes that...
By Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian | 11.19.2024
Photo "Elon Musk Presenting Tesla's Fully Autonomous Future" by Steve Jurvetson on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Is Elon Musk the dinner party guest from hell? It sure seems that way. Not only is the man desperate for people to...