Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology
Charis Thompson
Departments of Rhetoric and Womens' Studies, U.C. Berkeley
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Sex, Drugs, and Money: The Public and the Monopoly of Desperation in U.S. Reproductive Technologies
Calls are often made for engagement of "the public" in the new reproductive and genetic technologies. This paper tries to explain why the public in the case of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) is a problematic concept, and ends by suggesting ways in which accountability to the demos can be enhanced despite the absence of a single public agora around these technologies. In the paper I argue that the publics of ARTS paradoxically turn out to be most accurately understood by focusing on three overlapping notions of privacy. ARTs in the contemporary United States exploit a unique intersection of three realms that are private: private lives including legal privacy protections; the autonomy of science; and the private sector. The intersection of these privacies is a powerful way of coordinating citizens and the state and science. "The monopoly of desperation," whereby monopolistic tendencies come from the demand-the so-called "desperation" of patients-rather than the supply side, makes the development of ARTs in this quasi-private space highly entrepreneurial yet in many more regards than critics have given it credit, exemplary in the field of biomedicine. The implementation of the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act has resulted in a data-collection instrument that regulates assisted reproductive technology clinics in significant ways. This unique data collection, analysis and publication effort arose from the different kinds of privacy: intensive centralization of and saturation with information by the relevant medical and pharmaceutical professional organizations in the interests of self-regulation and research aimed at increasing and improving the specialty; pressure from and information provision by influential nation-wide patient support groups supporting access to infertility treatments as part of reproductive privacy; legal activism in family and property law (adoption, parentage, inheritance, and child support); and government cooperation in semi-privatized regulation and accountability.
4:00PM
Monday, April 4
203 Wheeler Hall Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: Office@ohst7.berkeley.edu
