Race and Reprogenetic Technologies *

In the 1980s, Margaret Atwood, Gena Corea, and other feminists imagined dystopias in which white women's reproduction was valued and privileged and women of color's reproduction was devalued and exploited. Two decades later, feminist scholars have continued to critique the hierarchy that anthropologist Rayna Rapp aptly calls "stratified reproduction" by contrasting white and minority women's opposing relationship to reproduction-assisting technologies. I recently reconsidered the positioning of white women and women of color in the reproductive hierarchy, however. Rather than place these women in opposition, I tied them together in relation to the neoliberal trend toward privatization and punitive governance. Both population control programs and genetic selection technologies reinforce biological explanations for social problems and place reproductive duties on women that privatize remedies for illness and social inequities.

Population control ideology attributes social inequities to childbearing by poor women of color, thereby legitimizing punitive regulation of these women's reproductive decisions. Like punishment of poor women's childbearing, reprogenetics also shifts responsibility for promoting well being from government to the individual by making women responsible for ensuring the genetic fitness of their children. In the last year, while working on a book project exploring the growth of biotechnologies that incorporate "race" as a genetic category, I have come to reconsider once again the opposition of white women and women of color in the reproductive caste system in relation to reproductive technologies. The position I just described, like the 1980s reproductive dystopias, still casts white women as the only consumers of reproductive technologies and women of color only as victims of population control policies. It assumes that white women are the only ones with access to these technologies and that women of color are not part of the politics of reprogenetics, except by their exclusion or exploitation.

The recent expansion of both reproductive genetic screening and race-based biomedicine, however, may signal a dramatic change in the racial politics of reproductive technologies. First, the important role of genetic screening in the new biopolitics that gives individual citizens the responsibility for ensuring good health by reducing genetic risk may support the wider incorporation of reprogenetic technologies into the neoliberal health care system. Second, companies that market race-based biotechnologies now promise to extend the benefits of genetic research to people of color. Women of color are now part of the market and cultural imaginary of the new reprogenetics. We need a new approach to race, gender, and reprogenetics that accounts for the changing racial politics of genetics and reproduction – one that critically examines the role of race and racism in the emergence of reproductive technologies that incorporate advances in genetic science. What are the implications of including women of color in the market for reprogenetic technologies and in the expectation that women will use them to manage genetic risk?

Expanding the Market for Reproductive Technologies

In Killing the Black Body, I discussed the role of race in images promoting the fertility industry. I pointed out that pictures showing the success of reproduction-assisting technologies were always of white babies, usually with blond hair and blue eyes, as if to highlight their racial purity. The only time black babies figured in media coverage of these technologies was in stories intended to evoke revulsion precisely because of their race. The high tech fertility business, including genetic screening services, no longer appeals to an exclusively white clientele. Although fertility clinics perform sex selection for a range of clients, the controversy surrounding this service has centered on Chinese and Indian women. Images on fertility clinic websites routinely show people of color alongside claims advertising clinic services and their benefits. The Reproductive Science Center of the San Francisco Bay Area explicitly welcomes clients of color, stating "All ethnicities are welcome to donate." Similarly, Pacific Fertility Center boasts, "Our ethnically diverse registry is comprised of an extensive number of potential egg donors."

The marketing of high tech reproductive services to women of color is part of a broader inclusion of minority groups in the testing and production of cutting edge biotechnologies, such as genetic ancestry testing and personalized medicine. There is strong support for racial therapeutics among some black advocates, researchers, and physicians precisely to redress past discrimination and fulfill longstanding demands for science to attend to the health needs of African Americans. Some fertility clinic websites not only market their reprogenetic services to people of color; they also perform race-based genetic testing as part of those services. For example, Pacific Fertility Center's website includes the statement, "Genetic screening is also recommended, based on ethnic background." Fertility clinics' use of race in genetic selection procedures may help to reinforce the erroneous belief that race is a biological classification that can be determined genetically or that genetic traits occur in human beings according to their race. We cannot, then, categorically exclude women of color from the use of genetic selection technologies.

Neoliberalism, Race, and Reproductive Technologies

The marketing of reprogenetics to women of color is taking place in the context of neoliberal shifts in governance that may encourage the expansion of genetic screening technologies to a broader clientele. Widespread prenatal testing has already generated greater surveillance of pregnant women and assigned them primary responsibility for making the "right" genetic decisions. Genetic testing serves as a form of privatization that makes the individual the site of governance through the self-regulation of genetic risk. Reproductive genetic technologies, in particular, introduce a new gendered division of labor and surveillance as women bear the brunt of reprogenetics' contribution to the neoliberal restructuring of health care.

In addition, reprogenetics incorporates a seemingly benign form of eugenic thinking in its reliance on reproductive strategies to eliminate genetic risk rather than social strategies to eliminate systemic inequities. This medicalized view assumes that any difficulties experienced by people with disabilities are caused by their physiological limitations that prevent them from functioning normally in society. These technologies facilitate the shift from state to private responsibility for ensuring health and welfare within the context of persistent race, gender, and class inequities, devastating reductions in social programs, and intense state surveillance of marginalized communities.

Poor women, especially women of color, currently face financial and other barriers to receiving high tech infertility services. Because genetic screening is now considered an essential part of preventive medicine, however, these technologies are becoming integrated into social welfare systems and private insurance schemes and are likely to become increasingly available to poor and low-income women. The aim of IVF is to produce the birth of a live baby; the aim of PGD and fetal diagnosis is to prevent the birth of certain children. While government welfare systems have disdained facilitating childbearing by poor women of color by funding fertility treatments, they may therefore treat genetic testing differently.

The current ban on federal funding of abortion places a significant limit on state genetic selection programs. In states that do not provide Medicaid-funding for abortion, poor women could receive state-sponsored genetic testing, but would have to pay for the cost of selective abortions themselves. Yet it is not hard to foresee future federal and state legislation that exempts "therapeutic" abortions based on genetic testing from the ban on abortion funding. In the neoliberal future, the state may rely on the expectation that all pregnant women will undergo genetic testing to legitimize its refusal to support the care of disabled children. Likewise, health insurance companies may require its policyholders to participate in a prenatal genetic screening regime that selects out embryos and fetuses predicted to have a disability.

There would still be certain reproductive technologies that would be reserved for the wealthiest citizens and outside the reach of most women of color. Indeed, the neoliberal reification of market logic is likely to intensify the exploitation of poor and low-income women of color for their reproductive services. Paying them to gestate eggs for more privileged women or to produce eggs for genetic research could intensify even as the women are encouraged to use genetic technologies to screen their own children.

* * *

A reproductive dystopia for the 21^st century could no longer exclude women of color from the market for high tech reprogenetics. Rather, it would take place in a society where racial and economic divisions are reinforced by extending genetic testing to them. In this new dystopia, the biological definition of race is stronger than ever, validated by genetic science and cemented in the popular culture by race-based biotechnologies. The state has disclaimed all responsibility for supporting its citizens, placing the duty of ensuring public welfare in all women's self-regulation of genetic risk. But I can also imagine a new utopia arising from feminists' radical resistance to enlisting women as genetic screeners in service of a neoliberal agenda, a resistance that is emboldened by new alliances -- joining reproductive justice with antiracist, disability rights, and economic justice movements that recognize their common interest in contesting a race-based reprogenetic future.

*Based on Dorothy E. Roberts, "Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?," Signs 34 (2009): 783-804.