Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?

Originally published in 1984, when new reproductive technologies were just beginning to become part of the public discussion, this edition was published with a new preface in 1989. The Editors wanted to look carefully at how much real choice reproductive technologies offered to women. Genetic engineering, sperm banks, test tube fertilization, sex selection, surrogate mothering, experimentation in the so called ’third world’, increased technological intervention in childbirth - were we taking pregnancy and the birth process out of the dark ages or into a terrifying ’brave new world’?

They ask who controls it? Who benefits? The technological machine grinds on, in headline-grabbing leaps or in quiet developments in research laboratories: but what are the implications for women worldwide? Still a huge industry today, this reissue can be read in its historical context.

Rita Arditti

Dr Renate Klein is a Swiss-Australian biologist and social scientist who has been a feminist women’s health activist since the early 1980s. She was Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne until 2006. She is the (co) editor/(co) author of 19 books, among them Theories of Women’s Studies, Test-Tube Women, Infertility, Radically Speaking and Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation. Since 1991, she is also Director and Publisher at Spinifex Press.

Shelley Minden became concerned about the impact of reproductive technologies on women’s lives while working in medical genetics laboratories in the 1970s. She has a master of science degree in biology and lives in Seattle, Washington.