In Everything Conceivable: How Reproductive Technology is Changing Men, Women and the World (2007), Liza Mundy retraces much of the same ground as, inter alia, Lori Andrews’ The Clone Age and Robin Marantz Henig’s Pandora’s Baby. More than other books in the genre, this reads like an extended op-ed based on such articles of faith as: abortion and birth control are unalloyed goods; gender is a social construct used to oppress American women; sovereign consumers should get what they want; and judgmentalism is bad, unless, of course, she makes the judgments. Just because these are the zeitgeist doesn’t mean they’re valid or functional notions.
Mundy wants to preserve some old norms and institutions in a technologically transformed setting. For example, she’s offended that co-workers of a man who is having trouble impregnating his wife would joke about “knocking his wife up” for him. Offensive? Maybe, but aren’t everyone’s notions of family and parenthood disordered by reprotech, which, through its commerce in eggs and sperm, has facilitated acceptance of what the commentator Andrew Kimbrell calls “technological adultery?” Would a co-worker’s knock-up be such a big departure from purchasing sperm, which she approves?
The author also clings to obsolescing, romantic notions about dating and marriage. She identifies strongly with the wounded legions of women to whom men have been reluctant to commit and blames these men for women’s need to use reprotech. Yet, if females generally select mates elsewhere in the animal kingdom, who can say that human females are not also doing so? Perhaps, instead of being a reaction to male immaturity, sperm purchases allow women to satisfy their hyperselective impulses by enabling them to have kids by men who ignore them in real life.
Regardless, although it seems judgmental to say so, Mundy is undeniably correct that many men won’t commit at an appropriate age. She can’t apprehend why and muses, as if she’s on “The View,” that the use of reprotech by hip women might engender a generation of sensitive, commitment-philic New Age males. Extremely unlikely. I am scarcely more certain of anything than this: men love women’s bodies. They will do a lot to get access to them and will even marry, if necessary. When birth control and abortion became freely available, women became more willing to give risk-free sex without demanding commitment. Consequently, men were empowered to postpone, and to dishonor, marriage. Just as in the days of Aristophanes, women have the power to change men’s behavior. Where’s today’s sisterhood?
The author’s selective awareness of context manifests itself in some other odd sensibilities. For example, she deems it wrong to use Jersey Shore airplane ads to solicit egg sales. Is she equally troubled by billboards, college newspaper ads or junk mail coupons that make the same pitch? If she’s OK with the multi-embryo creation/disposal aspect of IVF, would she be bothered by Village Voice ads that tout a bar as “The Home of the Frozen Embryo?” If the underlying reprotech practices are good, why should one be put off by public mention of them? In the same vein, Mundy paints endearing portraits of same sex gamete buyers. I wonder if a 12 year old can be as detachedly comfortable as Mundy is concerning the children’s identities, or with two daddies sharing bed time down the hall at night.
The caliber of logic is low in other ways. For example, the author thinks she’s exposed the hypocrisy of embryo research opponents when she asserts that embryo research might ultimately save some embryos. However, as the reprotech enterprise intrinsically kills many embryos, why should one support these practices on the prospect that a few embryos might eventually be saved, especially when this research would entail all manner of dysfunctional, tangential experimentation with clinical applications, such as intensified embryo selection? She also thinks she’s cleverly trapped an embryo destruction opponent by asking whether that person would support the use of a strainer to capture embryos that naturally fail to implant. A useful hypothetical should have some basis in reality. Allowing at least one person who did not share her biases to edit the book might have improved the analysis presented.
These biases even distort the factual presentation. For example, with a tinge of female schadenfreude but little apparent basis, Mundy attributes lower teen pregnancy rates to male teenagers having fewer, weaker sperm than a decade or two ago. She also suggests that most infertility just happens, irrespective of the conduct of the infertile. Instead of backing this assertion with statistics or histograms, she merely provides a long list of infertility’s causes. Similarly, however, many people die from many causes. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a large behavioral component to, or age influence on, the most common causes of death, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Certainly, the typical fertility clinic customer has postponed child-rearing until it is personally and socially– but perhaps not biologically-- convenient. Aside from age and overweight, in a culture where there are over ten million new cases of STDs each year, many have STD-- or abortion-- scarring that impairs fertility. The embryologist Dr. Diane Irving has observed that, although no formal studies have been conducted, an anecdotal report conveyed to her by Australia’s Monash Institute suggested that 75% of IVF use may be precipitated by such scarring. Given the flak the fertility industry received for its attempts to alert women to the impact of age on fertility, would it ever objectively study or publicize such information about the effects of STDs and abortions?
In another PC stroke, Mundy asserts, using scant and dubiously interpreted figures, that more poor women than rich women are infertile. This would be surprising for several reasons, including that having kids while unmarried is, both anecdotally and statistically, the primary pathway to American poverty. Yet, even if it were true that poor women are infertile more often because their STDs go undiagnosed, it would only undermine Mundy’s assertion that infertility is idiopathic, not conduct-based.
Mundy, a science advocate, asserts a priori– and emphasizes above all else– that there is an unstoppable drive to have biological children. If this desire is so fundamental, why do so many, so actively suppress this desire for so long, and some forever? The sentimental assertion that all are driven to reproduce ignores the strong social influences on reprotech demand. Following the women’s movement’s vigorous efforts in the ‘70s and ‘80s to devalue children– and most men’s compliance, for the reason stated above-- babies have become chic. She writes of the childless feeling left out in relation to other adults or being disappointed because they don’t have what other adults have. The reprotech industry sells to this re-emerging market of people who thought thirty five was a fine age to settle down, or maybe, to modify their standards. She asserts that this is the first generation in history to be aware that there are limits to the age at which women can bear children. No, her generation simply was the first to be misled to disbelieve what women have known since the beginning of time.
Mundy attempts to marginalize reprotech opponents by failing to cite discussions with them– these seemingly never occurred– and by using such rhetorical devices as dismissive labels and derisive quotation marks. But maybe it’s not (purportedly) “selfish” to use reprotech. Maybe it’s literally, epistemologically selfish: how could one act on behalf the unconceived, who do not exist when one opts for reprotech? Mundy asserts, without citing or seemingly interviewing any reprotech opponents, that reprotech opponents, who inhabit the “Far Left” and “Far Right,” “fetishize” nature. One might just as easily say that Mundy fetishizes ‘70s-derived notions of women’s rights, though I’m sure she’s convinced hers is a sound, thoroughly principled perspective. She also calls reprotech opponents’ thinking “reductive.” What is more reductive than Fed Ex’d sperm?
Most fundamentally, Mundy places the desires of the individual above the interests of the culture. She never explains why this is a good bias. In a culture that places many restrictions on individual conduct for the ostensible benefit of the group and has even sent millions of very young men (yes, men) to be maimed or die in wars– both bad and purportedly good ones-- it’s not like some haven’t already been required to pay a very high price on behalf of the group. Beyond that, Mundy never explains why the culture should affirmatively enable all who want to reproduce to do so. For example, while she implausibly suggests that reprotech might even be essential to save the species, the reproductively unchallenged are doing a good job of species propagation on a planet that many already deem unsustainably overpopulated. Nor does she consider the distributive dimensions of reprotech costs. While she complains that only seven states require insurers to cover IVF, she doesn’t say that it costs each premium payer in those states $500/year. She never questions why, in a country of 300 million people, 47 million of whom lack health insurance, millions of people collectively spend billions of health insurance dollars annually to subsidize high risk, high cost pregnancies for high-consuming individuals.
As a consumerist, Mundy’s biggest misgivings about reprotech are the challenges imposed upon parents by the disproportionate number of multiple births, birth defects and subsequent developmental problems among reprotech offspring. She maintains that reprotech does not entail design because it can engender such surprising, untoward results. Yet, just because things can go awry does not remove the influence, and psychological dimension, of design; one could cheat on an exam and still fail it. Even short of those betes noires, cloning and germline modification, design undeniably drives the extant practices of sex selection, egg and sperm purchases and ever-expanding embryo selection. Selection is, itself, merely a form of design.
Mundy never tells us where the lines are between acceptable and unacceptable selection might be drawn. Nonetheless– and despite the deselection of 95% of those embryos diagnosed to have Down’s Syndrome-- the author is confident that parents and the culture can be trusted to draw these lines in the right place. Unfortunately, as many others have already observed, it would be very difficult to enact any laws limiting specific reprotech applications in a consumerist culture in which reproductive choice is a Constitutional right, even– given Roe v. Wade’s essentially unlimited maternal mental health exception– to the extent of allowing full-term abortions of fully formed humans. A fortiori, lumpy, little, deselectable embryos don’t stand a chance. Thus, even if a majority would support laws such as the author supports, to limit embryo selection for sex, the minority who still wanted to select for sex could invoke Roe and the law would be stricken as an infringement on liberty. Further, even if such laws designed to narrowly regulate reprotech were upheld against Constitutional challenges, given the micro-level of the technology and the vast numbers of shadowy fertility clinics, these laws would be unenforceable as long as these clinics remain in business.
Aside from disregarding the inevitable, socially stratifying ride down the slippery slope, Mundy ignores the most insidious and pernicious impact of reprotech, namely that as the natural reproductive process is supplanted, a new moral and psychological context is being created. On behalf of a distinct minority, children have been transformed from gifts of God or nature into purchased, lab-mediated, quality controlled commodities.
Individualist/consumerists don’t apprehend that using reprotech is like building one’s dream home in Yosemite Valley: it pleases the consumer and their family and friends, but it costs the culture something far more precious and universal, namely the notion that life is sacred. Don’t expect a world in which the will of the sovereign consumer trumps all else to resemble the one in which your parents grew up, or to be a very good place to raise kids.