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The production of cloned or genetically modified babies would involve the creation and manipulation of human embryos outside the body. Providers of fertility services and biotech companies would likely develop professional and economic interests in the modified embryos and fetuses that would not necessarily coincide with the best interests of the women carrying them.

Human cloning and inheritable genetic modification would move decisions about reproduction further away from women, and create new pressures on women's experience of reproduction. Subtle or coercive influence about whether to clone, whom to clone, and which traits to select might be applied by a partner, an insurance company, a doctor, a counselor, a social circle, the fashions of the season, or biotech marketers. Women could find themselves simultaneously losing control of their own pregnancies and childbearing decisions, and subject to vastly increased pressures to produce the "perfect baby."

In this way, the capability to produce cloned and genetically redesigned babies would exert new pressures on women making childbearing decisions, threatening to turn them into "eugenic gatekeepers."

In addition, women carrying cloned or genetically manipulated fetuses would experience the inevitable failures in particularly intimate ways, as miscarriages, stillbirths, and the deaths of their infants. Mothers would shoulder much of the responsibility for any physical problems or psychological difficulties that a cloned or genetically modified child might experience.


Related Articles

Resources >> CGS >> Q&A: Preimplantation Diagnosis and Sex Selection

Resources >> CGS >> Sign-on letter to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine regarding sex selection


Off-Site Links

The Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment (CWPE) is a multi-racial alliance of feminist activists, health practitioners and scholars. They have been actively involved in the critique of the use of PGD for sex selection. The committee has also maintained a commitment to critical engagement with other genetic and reproductive technologies.
http://www.cwpe.org/


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