From surrogacy to ectogenesis : reproductive justice and equal opportunity in neoliberal times

It is a truism, if not trite, to observe that feminist approaches to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have been varied, multi-faceted and contested. In this review essay I focus on two recent monographs that highlight new challenges for those engaging with questions of gender and justice in the age of the ‘biotech mode of reproduction’ (Thompson 2005). The biotech mode of reproduction in the twenty-first century is not just a question of the development of specific biotechnologies. It never was. In the past policy-makers used to refer to ‘ELSI’, the ethical, legal and social issues raised by a technology, and treated these concerns separately. The ELSI paradigm is telling for its absence of specific references to the political and the economic aspects. It also reflects the dominance of so-called ethical (more specifically bioethical) discourses and approaches to new technologies. If the ELSI framework has been shaped by liberal understandings of biomedicine and ART, biopolitics, the ‘politics of life itself’ (Rose 2007), has been a common theme in critical and feminist theorectical approaches to ‘medical bodies’ as thematised in this special issue.