#gena corea

German feminists have known all along that the stakes in this issue are high. They are particularly sensitive to the ways in which these technologies can and are beginning to be used to manufacture human beings to specifications and, in the process, to reduce women to breeders or, less elegantly, to raw material for a new manufacturing process.

Unlike U.S. feminists, they organized as a movement on the issue and began spreading their critique beyond the feminist movement.

That the stakes are indeed high became dramatically evident in December 1987.

The German equivalent of the FBI (the 'Bundeskriminalamt") staged thirty-three simultaneous raids, many of them against feminists, throughout the Federal Republic of Germany, December 18 at 4:30 p.m. A total of 430 heavily armed police burst into the workplaces of activists. Fifteen to thirty in a group, the police swept into homes in Cologne, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf. In Essen, Duisburg, Bochum, and Hamburg, the raids were directed overwhelmingly against feminist critics of genetic and reproductive technology, according to Prozessgruppe Hamburg, a watchdog group.

The targeted critics have written and spoken on such issues as in vitro fertilization, amniocentesis, sex predetermination, and genetic engineering. They have actively opposed surrogate motherhood. Many worked together in a massive coalition to stop Noel Keane's attempt to open a branch of his U.S. surrogate business, United Family International, in Frankfurt. (Keane's New York firm arranged the Mary Beth Whitehead surrogate contract.) Their campaign to stop the sale of U.S. women to European men for breeding purposes ended successfully January 6, 1988 when a West German court ordered Keane's business closed, three months after it had opened.

Grounds for the police raids? In many cases, the women were not given any. But the next day, newspapers reported that the police conducted the searches to ascertain whether any of the individuals were members of a terrorist organization. They were specifically looking for a group called Revolutionaren Zellen and its feminist wing, Rota Zora.

The police were operating under Paragraph 129a of the terrorist act, "Support or Membership in a Terrorist Organization."

The women raided were forced to undress. All "non-changeable marks" on their bodies—scars, moles, etc. —were noted down in police records. The women were fingerprinted.

Two well-known and widely respected women were arrested: Ulla Penselin, active in two groups in Hamburg, Women Against Genetic Engineering and another group critiquing population control policies; and Ingrid Strobl, a journalist for eight years with the national feminist magazine, Emma. Strobl is accused of buying a clock used in a bombing attack against Lufthansa offices in Cologne to protest the exploitation of Third World women in the sex-tourism industry. Both women were charged under the terrorist act, Paragraph 129a. Strobl remains in prison while Penselin has since been released.

In the nationwide raids, police confiscated materials from an archive on genetic and reproductive technology established by women in Essen and from private homes and apartments. They seized drafts of the women's speeches, material prepared for seminars, names and addresses of those attending seminars, published work, videos, tapes of radio programs, scientific articles, postcards, brochures and private address books.

The police raids appear to be an attempt to stop the widespread antigenetic technology movement in Germany by linking legal organizations with more militant ones, Maria Mies, author of Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale and professor of sociology at the Fachhochschule in Cologne, told me in a telephone interview from her home.

"No concrete accusation or crime was being investigated," she pointed out. "This means that women doing 'Aufklarungsarbeit,' that is, researching reproductive or genetic engineering or talking about it or giving seminars, are already doing enough to provide a pretext for the attorney general to launch such a police action."

Mies, an organizer of the world's first massive feminist conference against reproductive and genetic technology in Bonn in 1985, said of the police action: "We think it is an effort to criminalize and intimidate the whole protest movement of women against reproductive and genetic engineering and frighten others away from participating in order to prevent the movement from spreading even more widely."

Mies added: "We are planning another conference against reproductive and genetic engineering just to demonstrate that we are continuing our work."

The experience of pregnancy is completely closed off to half of the human race. The feeling that it ought to be shared out more equally – at least in terms of cultural status, if not physical pain or risk – is a cornerstone of patriarchy. It underpins narratives which make the process of reproduction a male creative act, and legal and social norms which inscribe male ownership of women and children (naming conventions, custody biases, abortion restrictions, the intense regulation of female sex lives). It is fundamentally patriarchal to seek to 'reassign' reproductive authority to male people. This is a problem for those who claim feminism takes nothing away from men. Many men would like to retain a central role in a biological process which excludes them, only in ways that are less scientifically untenable and socially inconvenient than before.

As Mary O'Brien pointed out in 1981's The Politics of Reproduction, however much wanting babies is cast as a 'woman thing', men are obsessed with paternity. To deny it, she writes, 'is to make nonsense of centuries of strenuous masculine activity to negate the uncertainty of fatherhood'. In a reversal of the myth of penis envy, second-wave texts such as O'Brien's or Gena Corea's The Mother Machine (1985) emphasised men's natural position as one of alienation from the reproductive process and any assurance of biological lineage. A pregnant woman is never in doubt as to whether the foetus is really inside her body and not someone else's; without a number of measures which limit women's sexual freedom and other men's access to her, a man can never be absolutely certain that the same foetus is connected to him and not another man.

'Man's nullity as a parent appears unbearable to him,' wrote Corea. '[. . .] His assertion of a right to the child must be supported by ideologies of male supremacy and by a host of social structures.' In any culture that still encourages women to view their reproductive potential as a liability, such assertions may seem strange or even hysterical. They envy us? But the structures, myths and rituals exist. Look at forced marriage. Look at the right's obsession with female sexual purity. Look at the paternity tests that were a staple of nineties talk shows. Look, if you dare, at the left's new-found obsession with claiming men can get pregnant, too, or even that humans can change sex as easily as clownfish. Female bodies are not meant to do something that male bodies can't. If you cannot stop them doing it – and especially if you still require them to do it – you must take it upon yourself to define and control what pregnancy is and, by extension, what women are.

There is a degree to which modern reproductive technologies have sought to get around the mean, exclusionary nature of pregnancy. As yet, however, no human being has been gestated to term outside a female body. Even if this were to become a possibility, there remains only one type of body that can do this without any form of external intervention (beyond impregnation itself). To many, this doesn't seem fair. It didn't seem fair to men in the past, and it does not seem fair to those now insisting on kindness, empathy and the complete denial of competing rights are the solution to all injustices. There must, it is felt, be some way of rearranging things so that anyone who wants a baby all of their own can have one. There must be some way of solving the problem of female people not sharing their femaleness. Why can't pregnancy – like woman, like man – be whatever we want it to be?

The answer to this is simple and frustrating: because pregnancy just isn't like anything else. As the sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman has argued, this very uniqueness has been a problem for patriarchy, but it has also been a problem for liberal feminism, which has rebelled against the things men have done to counter reproductive alienation without necessarily grasping that female reproduction is not itself to blame. In her 1989 book Recreating Motherhood, Rothman noted that both patriarchy ideology and liberal feminist thinking had 'come to the same conclusion about what to do with the problem of the uniqueness of pregnancy: devalue it. Discount it so deeply that its uniqueness doesn't matter'. The liberal feminist devaluation of pregnancy Rothman identifies – rooted in a tendency to blame any recognition of reproductive difference for women's oppression rather than men's chosen response to said difference – has played a role in distorting social justice-based approaches to pregnancy, especially in light of the two trends which have become far more dominant since the time at which she was writing. The first is that of denying the social and political salience not just of pregnancy, but of biological sex in its entirety. The second is that of validating individualism (the so-called 'true' self) at the expense of accepting the contingent, relational nature of our identities. The very beginnings of human life show that relationality is not an add-on to personhood. 'Just be kind' politics cannot tolerate the singularity of pregnancy, its sex-specificity, its mixture of fuzzy edges and firm boundaries. And if your politics cannot tolerate pregnancy – and you will not change your politics – you will reach a point at which your politics cannot tolerate the class of humans who get pregnant.

In Full Surrogacy Now, self-described cyborg feminist Sophie Lewis dismisses O'Brien's Politics of Reproduction by describing it as 'trans-exclusionary' and 'romantically gynocentric'. Wasn't that the Ancient Greeks' issue with pregnancy too? Hasn't that always been everyone's issue with pregnancy, with womanhood itself? It's all far too womb owner-focused! Women need to stop being so gynocentric and trans-exclusionary and give someone else a turn at being them. There is a connection between the ancient devaluation of female reproduction and the current moral panic over female people existing as women at all. Somewhere between the two lies feminism's own misplaced anxiety over biological essentialism. In seeking to free ourselves, there are ways in which have ended up tightening our own restraints.