At 09:06 AM 7/16/97 +0100, Joan Haran wrote:
>I must confess, the "kenners" were something I didn't think very clearly
>about. I was too focussed on how the "brooder" might fit into their
>society, and the idea that to be equal women had to give up the _power_ to
>give birth naturally. Now that we all know about how IVF works, I would
>question whether the brooder would fit. "Harvesting" the raw materials
>required to create babies outside the womb does not seem to me to be the
>choice that would be made by radicals wresting the control of science from
>the oppressors. What do you think, Janice?
Yes, I should have mentioned the brooder as well. The idea that the "power"
to conceive and bear children necessarily creates an imbalance between the
sexes is not very convincing to me. It seems akin to the belief that since
men on average have a higher percentage of muscle mass than women they will
always hold the "power" of physical force over women. Power in either case
is largely a matter of perception and social convention. It might have been
more plausible to envision a society whose views on childbearing were
radically transformed than to come up with a technological fix to the whole
issue (which is fraught with its own "power" issues, such as who decides
which genes to mix, and what happens if a person doesn't want to be
sterilized, etc.).
-- Janice
-----
Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT
http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/jedhome.htm
Listening to: Feed Your Head, Volume 2; The Best of Márta Sebestyén
"...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected;
the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and
servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
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