Human Reproduction

In the 21st century, the essential physiological facts of human reproduction were unchanged from the time that human beings first evolved. Men and women engaged in sexual intercourse, as a result of which women sometimes became pregnant and bore children. The development of contraception and the availability of abortion had given women some degree of control over the chance of pregnancy, but the central fact remained that sex and reproduction were fundamentally linked, at any rate for women. If sex did not necessarily lead to reproduction, there was no reproduction without sex.

Likewise, at the turn of the century, the fundamental social institutions of childrearing had not changed very much since the institution of the patriarchal family came into being at some time in prehistoric antiquity. If a woman who engaged in heterosexual sex had some prospect of thus becoming a mother, a man who did so had some prospect of becoming a father.

Now fatherhood has always been a more artificial institution than motherhood (Baber and Allen, 136). The actual fact of childbearing was, after all, uniquely female (Baber and Allen, 102). Until the development of genetic testing late in the last century, the fact of fatherhood could not be determined. It was an act of faith on a man's part to accept that a woman's child was also "his." It may well be argued that the patriarchal family itself evolved as a sort of reciprocal compromise; a man accepted some shared responsibility for a gi

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pass, at least not in any direct sense. Most reproductive centers are owned and operated by women. Court decisions have held that males have no proprietory interest in their donated sperm. Polls show that women continue to feel empowered by full control over their reproductive lives. The "familial" feminists are still a minority of feminist activists, and many continue to feel somewhat cut off from the mainstream of the movement, rather as "pro-life" feminists did a generation ago. What appears to be happening, however, is something quite different from man "controlling" reproduction in any direct sense. Instead, men are taking the opportunity to withdraw from reproduction, and therefore from all responsibility for childrearing. The common phrase from men has become "not my child, not my problem." The recent court decision in Srinaji v. Ruiz in effect wrote this into law, holding that in the absense of prior consent, a man could not be required to pay child support for a child not biologically his own, even if he and the mother were married at the time she had the embryo implanted. The introduction of male contraceptives such as virilin has tended to exacerbate this effect. Use of virilin, "the condom you can feel thro

Category: Medical - H