Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
sitting and in my case with several men (it is a teaching
hospital) in suits without the neutralising, professionalising
reassurance of white coats. This indignity aside, the sight of
your own ovaries, follicles or fetus represented by the
fragile, ghostly black and white imagery of ultrasound before
you on a screen can be pretty awesome. It is one of the
bonuses of IVF to have frequent scans, beginning with the
image of your embryos to late in pregnancy. Inevitably women
develop a relationship with pre-
embryos because of their visual
presence. In a very recent case
in the UK the two women failed to
overturn the ruling by the Human
Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority (HFEA) that their
frozen embryos could not be used
without their ex-partners and
husbands consent. The men did not
wish the embryos carrying their
genes to be born after the
divorce/separation and refused permission for the women, one
of whom had Polycystic Ovaries Syndrome and the other of whom
had had ovarian cancer and had had her ovaries removed. Thus
using their frozen embryos represents their only chance to
have a baby of their own. One of the women told The Sunday
Times that when she and her then husband had succeeded in
producing embryos they had even named one of them "Cain" (cf.
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/furse.html (7 van 35)31-3-2005 18:21:46