Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
connects us to parts of ourselves at a cellular level, vividly
and beguilingly. For these "embryos" are actually only a
bundle of cells, perhaps eight on average, encoded with genes.
In medical parlance "pre-embryos" for they haven't reached the
stage, fourteen days after fertilisation, known as "primitive
streak" when the first signs of the nervous system start to
appear, at which point by law in the UK they have become
embryos and cannot be used for research. The status of the
embryo, the question of whether it is a person or a thing and
at what point it achieves personhood remains the pivotal
question in all bio-ethical considerations, whilst the welfare
of the child, in British law remains the principle of law.
10 We sub-fertiles see inside ourselves. We see
infinitesimally small fragments of our genetic material begin
to grow. We are hooked into our relationship with this process
and its manifestations via available technologies. Becoming an
IVF user is a journey into a collaborative relationship with
science and technology. Willy nilly, as Donna Haraway asserts,
we become a cyborg, our chances of reproducing totally locked
in to the application of technologies via which we see
ourselves with fresh eyes, hope with fresh heart, submit our
bodies to explicit interventions. Our reproductive strategies
marry the organic with the inorganic, the programmed with the
spontaneous, the predictable with the unpredictable. "Cyborg
replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction," Haraway
proposes, "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic
time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/furse.html (9 van 35)31-3-2005 18:21:46