the time. (All the references cited in this discussion date to the early 1990s). "A common theme that ran through all of the prolife, antiabortion, right-to-life stories is the perception that abortion weakens the social pressure on men to assume the consequences of their sexual activity" (Baber and Allen, 118). The feminist movement, in its late twentieth-century form, only accentuated that effect. "The women's movement ... assuredly has helped to transform and overturn the laws, practices, and habits of mind that made men at least nominally responsible for women" (Fox-Genovese, 102).
The men and women of, say, 1990, had a clear sense that they were living in a revolutionary epoch in terms of reproduction, childraising, and the relationships between men and women. The introduction of the Hwang technique of in-vitro fertilization, however, dramatically changed the situation. In-vitro fertilization had been experimented with well before Emmet Hwang reported on his work in 1997, but it remained a costly and exotic procedure. The simplicity and low cost of the Hwang procedure, however, meant that any middle-class (or even relatively poor) woman could provide ova to be fertilized by selected sperm, and then choose the embryo she wished to have implan
...