knowledge

as resistance

The Feminist
International
Network of
Resistance to
Reproductive
and Genetic
Engineering

stevienna de saille
Knowledge as Resistance
 Stevienna de Saille

Knowledge as
Resistance
The Feminist International Network
of Resistance to Reproductive and
Genetic Engineering
Stevienna de Saille
Institute for the Study of the Human
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-52726-4 ISBN 978-1-137-52727-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950309

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: t h a l I a Australian Visual Poet. Concrete Poem titled “Passionately Forward”
especially written for members of FINRRAGE Australia. Copyright 1986

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
 Preface

In 2005, while I was doing a Master’s degree in the Centre for

Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, a woman
named Jalna Hanmer came to give a talk on the Feminist Archive North
(FAN), a repository in the Brotherton Library’s Special Collections, for
which she was a trustee. She carried with her a crate full of purple-inked
newsletters, some titles familiar to me, some not, representing the early
history of the British Women’s Liberation Movement. Intrigued, I
accepted her invitation to come see FAN for myself and wound up as a
volunteer archivist for the next 6 years.
During my MA I helped unpack and process a very large collection of
documents Jalna was donating to the archive, which centred on her time
in the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and
Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE). I became fascinated by the material,
too often getting little preservation done as I got caught up in reading
instead, encouraged by her offhand remark that as an activist FINRRAGE
represented some of the best work of her life, and she thought it would
make great material for a PhD one day if someone could think of some
interesting questions to ask.
The thought stayed with me as I finished my degree and went on to
take a non-academic job. I knew by then that I wanted to go on to do a
PhD, but I had been researching women in online communities and had
assumed I would continue in that field. However, as an adopted person,
vii
viii Preface

I had definite concerns about the way third-party reproduction was too
often framed in ways which pitted biological against social parentage and
ignored the biographical needs of the child. FINRRAGE seemed like a
perfect PhD topic, focusing on issues I wanted to better understand,
without being directly personal. Eventually, I suggested this to Jalna, who
responded enthusiastically. She helped organise agreement from Renate
Klein and Maria Mies to gain access to the Australian and German
archives as well, and in October 2008 I began my PhD in the School of
Sociology and Social Policy at Leeds.
Initially, I kept trying to find an analytical approach in the social move-
ment literature; however, it quickly became apparent that FINRRAGE
was not going to fit any of its theoretical models particularly well. There
were no dues, no membership lists, it was neither a single organisation
nor did it really seem to constitute a social movement on its own. Instead,
as I began to read my way through the organisational documents in the
FINRRAGE collection and tried to identify potential interviewees, I
noticed two unusual trends. One was that these were not simply feminist
activists; they were also doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics and social
workers, bringing that expertise into the network. The other was that,
rather than choosing protest as a tactic, they had instead chosen to create
knowledge. Not just the kind of knowledge that activists would usually
create—the newsletters and manifestos and statements which outline a
position of resistance and why it’s important to take it. This I was familiar
with from my own years in the direct action environmental movement.
But FINRRAGE did something different, something more. Boxes and
boxes and boxes of more; articles and books and conference papers, docu-
ments that I thought the women had been reading to inform themselves
about the technologies they opposed, which turned out actually to have
been written by the women in the network. Whether their analysis had
been right or their efforts a success was far less interesting than trying to
understand who they were, and how they had created all this together,
what it meant to use the process of knowledge creation itself as a protest
tactic, as a form of organised resistance. While knowledge creation has
always been a feminist weapon of choice, rarely has it been directed at a
topic so technical, while it was emerging on a global scale.
 Preface ix

These were the questions that set me off on a project it has taken almost
a decade—from the first interview in 2008 until the last in the spring of
2017—to complete. There are now 28 women from 14 countries whose
stories are woven throughout this book; each of them with their own
partial perspective, each touching upon dozens of other stories which
remain untold. While I have tried to at least mention as many of the
women as I could to acknowledge their work, I am also painfully,
apologetically aware that there will be some inadvertently left out, some
whose names I did not know, and many more whose names appear on
book chapters, articles and conference attendance lists who I could not
locate, or whose identification as FINRRAGE members I could not con-
firm. I cannot, therefore, claim this book to represent anything more
than a story about FINRRAGE, one refracted through the murky lenses
of distance and time and told by someone who was not there to see events
unfold. I can only try to tell it well.

Leeds, UK Stevienna de Saille
5 July 2017
 Acknowledgements

This book has been through a number of stops and starts since it origi-
nally began as a doctoral project in October 2008. Funding was provided
through a PhD bursary from the School of Sociology and Social Policy at
the University of Leeds, and the Worldwide Universities Network
Research Mobility Programme, which allowed me to undertake a visiting
fellowship at the University of Sydney for four months in 2010. My
thanks go to Anne Kerr and Paul Bagguley, for their patience, advice,
editorial comments and the occasional kick-start when the thesis seemed
overwhelming, and to Maureen McNeil and Angharad Beckett, for their
insight and suggestions. I would also like to thank Catherine Waldby,
Melinda Cooper and Lindy Gaze for warmly hosting me at the University
of Sydney. Additional thanks to the archivists in Special Collections at
the University of Leeds, and to the volunteers at Feminist Archive North,
who taught me about the importance of preservation and how to do it.
Thanks are also due to the many other people who gave me books,
papers and ideas which nudged my thinking in completely unexpected
directions: Donna Dickenson and the members of the IAS/WUN
Biopolitics Symposium; Sally Hines, Zowie Davy and Maria do Mar
Pereira for reminding me why I am still a feminist; the Postgraduate
Forum on Genetics and Society for leading me into STS and especially
Rachel Douglas-Jones for sticking it out till the end; Sandra González-
Santos for continually urging me back to the topic; Yuuka Sugiyama and
xi
xii Acknowledgements

Chiaki Hayashi for their help with Japanese translation; and Noemie
Bouhana for academic advice given in between marathon bouts of crit-
ters, zombies and things that go boom in the night. My thanks as well to
Susan Molyneux-Hodgson for taking the newbie in hand, and to my
colleagues in the Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman) at the
University of Sheffield, and especially Paul Martin, for giving me the time
and space I needed to finish.
A particular and extremely heartfelt thank you goes to the women of
FINRRAGE, for their generosity, hospitality and years and years of
patience. To say ‘I could not have done it without you’ is a vast under-
statement. I would also like to thank t h a l i a for use of her illustration,
and my editors at Palgrave, particularly Joanna O’Neill.
Last, but not remotely least, my thanks to Imona Haninger for con-
tinuing to put up with the madwoman in the attic, and all my friends and
family who accepted being ignored for months on end with grace and
affirmations of confidence. I hope to make it up to all of you soon.
Portions of this book were previously published in de Saille, Stevienna.
2014. ‘Fighting Science with Social Science: Activist Scholarship in an
International Resistance Project’. Sociological Research Online 19 (3): 18,
available at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/3/18.html. Used with
permission.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

Part I Action and Reflection: A Story of FINRRAGE in

28 Voices 27

2 Emergence 29

3 Expansion 69

4 Abeyance 133

Part II Studying It Up: The ‘FINRRAGE Position’ as

a Cognitive Praxis 179

5 Demonstration in Publication 181

6 Knowledge as Resistance 221

xiii
xiv Contents

Appendix: The Women of FINRRAGE Interviewed for

This Book 257

References 261

Index 291
 Abbreviations

AID Artificial insemination by donor

ANZAAS Australia-New Zealand Association for the Advancement
of Science
ART Assisted reproductive technologies
BARD Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development
CATW Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (USA)
CEDRH Human Reproductive Rights Studies Commission (Brazil)
DAWN Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era
DHSS Department of Health and Social Security
ELSI Ethical, legal and social issues
ESHRE European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology
FAN Feminist Archive North
FINNRET Feminist International Network on the New Reproductive
Technologies
FINRRAGE Feminist International Network of Resistance to
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GRAEL Green-Alternative European Link (Germany/Belgium)
GREPM Groupe de recherches et d’evaluation des pratiques médicales
[Research Group for Evaluation of Medical Practices]
(France)
HEW Department of Health, Education and Welfare (USA)
xv
xvi Abbreviations

HFEA Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (Great

Britain)
ICG International Co-ordinating Group, FINRRAGE
Germany, 1989–1997
ICPD United Nations International Conference on Population
and Development (Cairo, 1994)
IDAC Institute for Cultural Action (Brazil)
IRAGE (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering
Isis-WICCE Women’s International Cross Cultural Exchange
IVF In vitro fertilisation
IWHC International Women’s Health Coalition
IWHM International Women and Health Meetings
LACAAP Latin America, Caribbean, Asia, Africa and Pacific
countries
MIC Management and Investment Companies (Australia)
MP Member of Parliament
NBCC National Bioethics Consultative Council (Australia)
NGO Non-governmental organisation
NHMRC National Health and Medical Research Council
(Australia)
NHS National Health Service (UK)
NPSU National Perinatal Statistics Unit (Australia)
NRT New reproductive technologies
OBOS Our Bodies, Ourselves
PROGAR Project Group on Assisted Reproduction (UK)
QVMC Queen Victoria Medical Centre, Melbourne
REDEH Rede de Defesa da Espécie Humana/Rede de Desenvolvi-
mento Humano [Network for Defense of the Human
Species/Network for Human Development] (Brazil)
RMT Resource mobilisation theory
RWH Royal Women’s Hospital, Melbourne
RZ Revolutionäre Zellen (Germany)
SMT Social movement theory
SPUC Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (UK)
SSK Sociology of scientific knowledge
STS Science and technology studies
 Abbreviations xvii

UBINIG Unnayan Bikalper Nitinirdharoni Gobeshona [Policy

Research for Development Alternative] (Bangladesh)
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development (Rio, 1992)
US(A) United States of America
VSRACI Victorian Standing Review and Advisory Committee on
Infertility (Australia)
WGNRR Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights
WHO World Health Organization
WLM Women’s liberation movement (broadly 1960s–1970s)
WRRC Women’s Reproductive Rights Campaign (Britain)
WSIF Women’s Studies International Forum
Names and Collections Abbreviated When
Listing Archival Documents

FAN/JH/FIN Feminist Archive North, Jalna Hanmer Collection,

Documents of the Feminist International Network of
Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering
(FINRRAGE). In Special Collections, Brotherton Library,
University of Leeds.
FAN/FINDE Feminist Archive North, Collection of the International
Co-ordinating Group of the Feminist International Network
of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering
(FINRRAGE). In Special Collections, Brotherton Library,
University of Leeds.

xix
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 The cognitive space of FINRRAGE in 1985 18

xxi
 1
Introduction

Tell them stories of action and reflection, these things belong together.
Maria Mies, Germany

In July 2011, while I was attending Women’s Worlds for the first time, I
had the chance to see a recently released documentary on the develop-
ment of the surrogacy industry in India. The film, Google Baby (Brand
Frank 2009), provides a clear and detailed look at the ways in which the
general movement to outsource labour more cheaply to India and the
availability of gametes over the Internet had combined into a new and
fast-growing business model, where poor and often illiterate Indian
women were contracted to carry babies for rich Westerners while housed
away from their families in closely packed dormitories where their behav-
iour was strictly controlled. Filmed without narration and without seek-
ing to direct the audience one way or another, it is a startling portrait of
the ways in which technology, poverty and the very human hope for a
better future combine within a deeply interconnected, vastly unequal,
globalised world.
It was also not at all unpredicted.

© The Author(s) 2017 1

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_1
2 1 Introduction

The Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive

and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) was a mixture of Anglo-European
feminists, often drawing on ideologies learned as part of the women’s
liberation movement in the 1970s and anti-population policy activists
from the global South. Most active between 1984 and 1997, the net-
work’s trajectory also reflects some of the broader currents in feminist
history and can be seen as a microcosm of global feminist activism |dur-
ing this time. Its stated purpose was to develop a particular ‘position’ of
resistance to in  vitro fertilisation (IVF), prenatal diagnosis, and even
some forms of birth control. However, as I hope to show, ‘the FINRRAGE
position’ was far more complex and far more internally diverse than it
might appear from the most publicised writings. Above all, FINRRAGE
represents a rare period of intense collective feminist engagement with an
emerging platform technology with profound implications for humanity
as a whole, one which depends absolutely on access to some of the most
difficult-to-reach cells of a woman’s body.
It is also an area where mainstream feminist organisations are often still
reluctant to engage. Despite the proliferation of academic feminist litera-
ture on the topic, some organisations continue to maintain that the sci-
ence is too intimidating and assisted reproduction is of interest only to
the small group of women who might need it; therefore it is not part of
their political agenda (Gougon 2008). In the meantime, outcomes which
were initially dismissed as science fiction, such as babies with four, five or
even six parents1; children created to be tissue-compatible organ donors;
womb transplants2; surrogacy industries in poorer nations; a brisk
international market in eggs, sperm and embryos3; anti-pregnancy ‘vac-
cines’; and various techniques for genetic validation of the embryo and
foetus have all now moved from the laboratory into the global clinic. The
recent development of techniques which promise to reliably engineer
heritable changes into the human embryonic genome makes it impera-
tive to consider how access to women’s bodies and women’s reproductive
tissue has always been crucial to the development of these fields.4 Whether
one does or does not approve of the result, it is no longer science fiction,
and quite possibly never was. Thus, the issues which FINRRAGE called
into question have only become more relevant as new fields, new tech-
niques, and new problems based on the ability to separate the embryo
 1 Introduction 3

from the human body and ever more precisely control the processes of
reproduction emerge. This represents the primary focus of this book.
Whatever one’s ‘position’ on the technologies in question, the emergence
of an organised feminist response aimed at producing woman-centred
knowledge about new reproductive technologies (NRT),5 during the
period in which IVF was becoming institutionalised as ‘treatment’ for
ever-widening categories of people, is an important episode for both fem-
inist history and for the study of science and technology in society, and a
rare opportunity to explore the ways in which actors in strongly opposi-
tional movements develop sufficient knowledge to productively engage
with complex scientific issues.
At the same time, the conceptual division of knowledge into the binary
categories of ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ tends to belie the lived reality of social
movements by placing professional experts outside the social movement
field, even when the same professionals are clearly within it. Knowledge
in social movement theory (SMT) has generally been approached through
categories such as collective identity formation (Friedman and McAdam
1992) and framing (Snow et al. 1986). As a more recent analytical con-
cept, it may refer to organisational practices and negotiation of meaning
(Kurzman 2008; Casas-Cortes et al. 2008), embodied experience of one’s
own position in society (Esteves 2008) or simply information. In science
and technology studies (STS), however, movements and movement
actors are acknowledged both as having important role to play in the way
scientific knowledge is translated into society (Habermas 1987), and as
having the capacity to challenge the way scientific knowledge itself is
developed and warranted. In studies of scientific controversy, they can be
considered as knowledge-creators in their own right, most notably in
health-based and environmental justice movements, which often base
their knowledge-claims on activist-collected empirical data (see Epstein’s
groundbreaking 1995 study of ACT UP, or Martinez-Alier 2011 on the
effect of activist knowledge on the field of ecological economics). It is also
acknowledged that scientists, as well as STS scholars, can be movement
participants in their capacities as credentialed knowledge-holders (see
Woodhouse et al. 2002; Frickel 2004). The STS argument that science is
not value-free, nor are the individual humans who produce it, owes much
to early feminists who had the relevant expertise in biology, philosophy
4 1 Introduction

and sociology to problematise male bias in the production of scientific

knowledge (excellently collected in Harding and O’Barr 1987; Keller and
Longino 1996). However, even within STS, analyses and epistemological
perspectives developed by feminist scholars still often go unacknowl-
edged (Whelan 2001). How activists produce knowledge, in particular
how they develop evidence to support their resistance when science has
little interest in their questions, represents the second focus of this book.
In the following sections, I will first sketch out the development of the
research, before considering how my questions look when formulated
through an approach which centres on movements as knowledge-
producers in their own right. Here, I will introduce an approach which
considers ‘resistance’ as a complex interplay of different forms of opposi-
tional consciousness, and which informs my exploration of FINRRAGE
as a cognitive praxis, creating and disseminating knowledge about NRT.

A Brief Introduction to the Research

The field of qualitative research has changed substantially in both demo-
graphics and methods of representation since Ann Oakley (1981) argued
against the standard approach to conducting ‘neutral and objective’ inter-
views. If traditional paradigms were androcentric, and could only pro-
duce androcentric data, then women had to be free to invent tools that
could incorporate intuition, emotion, connection and other elements of
the research experience which were traditionally frowned upon as subjec-
tive and biased (Acker et al. 1983). Methodological innovation was key to
the development of women’s studies (Cook and Fonow 1986), as it has
been key to my own research. In general, it has been argued that what
makes a research project feminist (rather than simply a gendered analysis)
are its emancipatory aspects—‘a transformative view of women’s destiny’
(Rose 1987, 267), the inclusion of women and women’s lives in studies of
the social world (DeVault 1996) and a legitimation of women’s ways of
‘doing knowledge’, including producing knowledge in a form which ordi-
nary women could access (Acker et al. 1983); in other words, research
which is for women, not merely about them (Stanley and Wise 1990). I
see the ‘feminist’ in this particular project as having an interpersonal
 A Brief Introduction to the Research 5

dimension, reaching towards ‘theory derived from experience analytically

entered into by enquiring feminists’ (Stanley and Wise 1990, 24), as it is
essentially a story told in multiple voices, including my own. Although
the research did not have a directly empowering aspect, such as gathering
data to directly address a social problem, there is a form of empowerment
which comes from the opportunity to tell a story the women clearly
wanted to tell. Overall, the women I interviewed were proud of their
accomplishments in FINRRAGE, and frequently reiterated how glad
they were that someone wanted to talk to them about it. This aspect of the
project, of making visible what was felt to be a piece of feminist history in
danger of being lost, was—and continues to be—important to all of us.
From the beginning, then, the intellectual interests of the network
have helped to guide the way I have studied it. In this sense, I view my
position as something more akin to the director of a play, where I retain
an overview of the ‘big picture’ and a significant level of control, but the
final product is made richer through creative contribution from all. I
chose a life history approach to my interviews, as this is both more satis-
fying for the participants,  who get to tell their stories largely uninter-
rupted, and because it is a longer process which allows researcher and
researched to come to know each other beyond the interview setting
(Armitage and Gluck 2002). It is also a technique often used in social
movement research, particularly when studying past action, for its ability
to uncover the reasoning processes used by activists as part of their
involvement (Della Porta 1992). FINRRAGE then becomes part of the
overall trajectory of an activist life, rather than an isolated instance of col-
lective action, so that the interviews were not merely about filling in the
blanks left by archival documents or verifying their accuracy, but were
instead focused towards the role FINRRAGE had played in the women’s
intellectual and political development, as well as the role each woman
had played in developing the intellectual and political work of the net-
work. In the spirit of ‘no intimacy without reciprocity’ (Oakley 1981,
49), I also allowed my respondents to ask me any question that I asked
them, and in some instances our discussions continued long after the
recorders were turned off. Many of the women also had their own theo-
ries and questions about women’s knowledge practices, and several
pointed to the specific analysis I was trying to develop as the reason they
6 1 Introduction

had chosen to take part in the research. Thus, while differences in the
positionality of researcher and respondent will inevitably shape the pro-
cess of an oral history interview, the life course approach did indeed sup-
port the more collaborative project I desired. Power turned out to be a
particularly flexible commodity in this project, as some of my partici-
pants had literally written the book on feminist methodologies (Klein
1983; Mies 1983), and so the dynamics of our positions were frequently
reversed by my real-world position of doctoral student versus well-known
professor. Knowing that they would read my work with both a partici-
pant’s right of response and the eyes of established academics has cer-
tainly made writing about the research somewhat daunting, but it has
also offered an invaluable level of scrutiny to ensure that, despite the
difficulty of trying to honour multiple and sometimes conflicting
accounts, I would represent the overall history of the network in a way
that felt authentic to all. This, for me, was crucial, particularly as they had
all agreed to participate under their own names. However, it is also cru-
cial to acknowledge there are dozens of women with equally pertinent
stories to tell who are not represented here, and who may have changed
the overall account in ways that cannot be known.
As an international network of organisations as well as individuals,
FINRRAGE included hundreds of women during its international period
(1985–1997) and had national contacts in 37 countries on every conti-
nent except Antarctica. However, although many of the women have
maintained connections to each other, particularly those still working
professionally on issues around reproductive and genetic technologies, in
most parts of the world the international network has been quiescent
since the late 1990s. FINRRAGE may also  be unrepresentative of the
majority of grassroots feminist organisations in terms of the general level
of education of the participating women. In addition to sociologists, phi-
losophers, economists and historians, the network included lawyers,
medical doctors, biologists and geneticists. This mix of women trained in
the natural or social sciences and women who would normally be consid-
ered the ‘lay public’ also creates an unusual opportunity to question defi-
nitions of ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ and to develop a more nuanced understanding
of the kinds of expertise social movement actors may call upon in the
course of creating movement knowledge.
 A Brief Introduction to the Research 7

I began my research in the FINRRAGE collection (FAN/JH/FIN) in

the Feminist Archive North, which is housed in Special Collections in the
Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. The collection, compiled by
Jalna Hanmer, comprises the organisational papers of the British group
and other documents relating to her activities as part of the international
network, including her work as managing editor of the academic journal
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (IRAGE),6 her attendance
at feminist and fertility industry conferences and her own extensive collec-
tion of research materials and news clippings. The papers of the International
Co-ordinating Group in Germany (FAN/FINDE) were later added as a
separate collection and include the network’s international research archive
and additional materials from European, Asian and South American
groups. Internally generated video materials include a short video on a
1989 conference in Bangladesh and ‘Soft Cell’ (Mondale 1987), a one
hour documentary on genetic engineering shown on Channel Four in the
UK, which included an extensive round-table discussion by FINRRAGE
women from various parts of Europe. The other large source of internally
generated materials were those written by the network members them-
selves—peer-reviewed articles, books, conference papers and public talks,
informal articles and submissions for government consultations. The total
of both collections was approximately 82 6-inch deep archival boxes, or
approximately 40 cubic feet of material. The analysed internal papers con-
sist of organisational material such as letters, memos, minutes of meetings,
grant proposals, research proposals, documents relating to conference
planning and proceedings, and other means by which the historical life of
the network could be traced. FINRRAGE Australia also finished a digitali-
sation project in 2009, making many key documents available online,
including local newsletters, conference papers and reports, many of the
articles from the academic journal, and submissions to government con-
sultations.7 I was also able to view Robyn Rowland’s extensive collection of
radio and television interviews during our interview, and other papers in
the Jessie Street  National Women’s Library while at the University of
Sydney on a Worldwide Universities Network Research Mobility grant in
2010.8 These documents comprise the primary internal data.
Although not using historical triangulation methods, wherever possi-
ble I have also tried to verify events and information through external
8 1 Introduction

materials, both those collected by the network and by myself. In addition

to the books and other research materials in the archival collections, I
have also collected materials published by others in which FINRRAGE is
discussed, as well as social science and medical literature, and records of
public consultations, parliamentary debates and legislation for the period
during which FINRRAGE was active as an international network (includ-
ing its first year as FINNRET, 1984–85). I used a keyword search of the
term ‘test-tube baby’ in the LexisNexis newspaper archives and made
extensive use of the online archives for The New York Times, The Times
(London), The Age (Melbourne) and The Sydney Morning Herald to see
what information was available to the public during this time. I have also
consulted several of the larger circulation grassroots feminist publications
available at the Feminist Archive North (FAN), particularly off our backs,
Spare Rib and Trouble and Strife to contextualise ‘ordinary’ feminist
engagement with the technologies in Britain in the earliest years of the
network.
This material also helped dictate which countries I would concentrate
on, as it was not possible to give all 37 equal attention. My key areas
became the UK and Australia for their strong FINRRAGE presence and
their position as leaders in the fertility industry of the mid-to-late 1980s;
Germany as the largest national network and the international coordina-
tor in the 1990s; and Bangladesh as the organisational hub for the global
South. One hundred and forty-six women were eventually identified as
having participated in FINRRAGE in some manner, either through
mailing lists, documents of local activities and regional meetings, atten-
dance lists for the larger international conferences, or recommendations
from other interviewees. Searching the Internet for biographical and con-
tact information immediately showed an unusual trend: 61 of the women
held PhDs or other higher degrees, and this was as true for women from
developing countries as for the Anglo-Europeans (although I was less
likely to find information about the women from the global South over-
all). With or without PhDs, many appeared to have been involved in
carrying out research. Some had testified before governments as experts.
Some had spoken from their own experience with infertility. Other
women had engaged with the technologies through their clients, as fam-
ily lawyers, social workers or women’s health activists. This breadth of
 A Brief Introduction to the Research 9

expertise was apparent across all the countries, richer or poorer, and
included a distinct group of social scientists who had merged their activ-
ism with their professional career, developing a high level of authority
outside the network itself.
The second trend I quickly noticed was that the women of FINRRAGE
had collectively produced a very large body of published works in a num-
ber of languages, as well as an academic journal. My questions now began
to clarify around the ways in which the women had developed the net-
work as a collective knowledge project, at a time when reproductive and
genetic technologies were still niche areas little understood even by other
scientists. As I was working inductively, my potential interviewees were
chosen for their potential to shed light on these processes, based on a
number of factors including geographic area, diversity of network roles
and organisational visibility, recommendations from others and occa-
sional serendipity such as receiving conference travel grants to Japan and
Brazil, which allowed me to come face-to-face with women I could not
have interviewed by phone or Skype. Sampling was also partly dictated
by the logistics of locating people 25 years after the events, which ulti-
mately skewed the sample towards academics, for whom I was more likely
to find a webpage with a current email address. Overall, 24 interviews
were carried out between 2008 and 2011, with a further 4 added between
2015 and 2017. However, it should be noted that the most regretted
limitation to this project is that the cohort I was able to gather were
largely white, middle-class European women. Overall, it turned out to be
extremely difficult to identify possible respondents in developing nations,
as some women were representing organisations which no longer exist or
did not identify as FINRRAGE members, having simply attended a local
conference, while others could not be contacted. Although I have tried to
make up for this as much as possible using the archival documents, I do
not, therefore, claim to have fully described the history of FINRRAGE
on its international level as there were clearly groups in Spanish-speaking
South America, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, Thailand, Zambia and
other countries about which there was little information beyond a name
and address on the national contacts list. Documents are produced in a
specific context for a specific purpose (Clemens and Hughes 2002), and
because the bulk of these were collected by one person, they must be
10 1 Introduction

understood to be both incomplete and unintentionally biased towards

that person’s experience (Platt 1981).
As I could not do participant observation (apart from one instance of
joining a FINRRAGE panel organised by Renate Klein for Women’s
Worlds 2011), I also could not use purely ethnographic methods, but I
did want to create that kind of rich description of the trajectory of the
network. Part of my methodology was to become as immersed in the
world of FINRRAGE as possible during the main interview period
(2010–11) through reading the archival and published works, listening
to tapes of meetings and conference presentations, and watching videos
of media appearances and documentaries about the network, trying to
understand how the network looked to those who had been in it. In this
sense, ‘objectivity’ was something I deliberately attempted to lose during
the data collection process, then—following Haraway’s (1996) idea of
commitment to a faithful account from a situated and admittedly partial
perspective—attempted to regain as I began to weave it all together. For
obvious reasons, this can produce uncomfortable tensions as different
points of view will inevitably produce different accounts of the same
events. I needed an analytic approach which could ensure enough critical
distance from the data to write about the areas of conflict without being
overly sympathetic to any particular interpretation, but also did not
require me to make a determination of what had ‘really’ happened. For
this reason, I have drawn from the symmetry principle of the ‘Strong
Programme’ more commonly used within the sociology of scientific
knowledge (Bloor 1976), rather than historical tools such as triangula-
tion of evidence. The principle has four components used to determine
how belief in scientific fact comes about: it looks for causal explanations,
judged impartially and applied symmetrically regardless of whether the
science is normatively considered to be ‘true’ (such as physics) or ‘false’
(such as astrology) as both arise from specific social conditions. Adapted
to social movements, it allows examination of how a movement sources,
develops and warrants its evidence, and helps in navigating conflicting
accounts of events, so that it becomes possible to present differing
accounts as arrows pointing to significant areas of analytic interest rather
than trying to arrive at a determination of truth. As I was interested in the
content of the stories, rather than their presentation, I have also chosen
 Considering Social Movements Through a Cognitive Lens 11

to treat the interviews and documents symmetrically as texts, rather than

analysing the interviews as episodes of narrative meaning-making, which
would be the more common analytic framework for life course interviews
(see, e.g. Riessman 1987). Thus, this book has been shaped in part by a
feminist epistemology, and in part by ideas drawn from science and tech-
nology studies, which merits some further discussion before moving on.

Considering Social Movements

Through a Cognitive Lens
Despite frequent assertions that the public does not trust science, its tacit
epistemic power can still be seen on all sides of any public debate, in
statements such as ‘the facts are the facts’ or ‘technology is neutral, it’s
how it’s used that makes it good or bad’. From a normative ‘deficit’ point
of view, the lay public can only make judgments about technology based
on morals, values and opinions, and those who oppose dominant narra-
tives of technological progress are characterised at best as reacting from
ignorance which can be ameliorated by being given the ‘proper’ facts
(Wynne 1992) and at worst as social deviants driven by irrational belief.
In this sense, movements of resistance to specific technologies such as
genetically modified crops or nuclear power must rely on a somewhat
different knowledge process from identity movements as they cannot rely
on group-level claims made from shared embodied knowledge and per-
sonal experience. Actors in technological movements, aware that their
knowledge-claims as non-experts are easily dismissed, will thus often seek
to develop scientific as well as social arguments in order to demonstrate
the validity of their response; these may even become ‘scientific counter-
publics’ which include academic experts and are thus more able to ques-
tion official narratives of public benefit (Hess 2011).
Social movement theory (SMT), while acknowledging the rationality
of protest, is often working from that same normative concept of science
in which the production of facts and facticity cannot be interrogated.
Without a system through which we are able to separate and analyse the
use of different forms of movement knowledge practices, we are not able
to compare them to each other or to processes in different fields, therefore
12 1 Introduction

we are not able to see what, if anything, may be unique to the way knowl-
edge is deployed through social movements, despite the claim that ‘pro-
duce knowledge’ is precisely what social movements are meant to do
(Habermas 1981). This has meant that ‘knowledge’ in SMT can describe
a variety of processes, including, as Kurzman (2008, 5) suggests, ‘any
other understandings that we may choose to identify’.
Studies from the field of STS show quite clearly that activists can
indeed insert themselves into the process of creating verifiable factual
knowledge. Epstein’s (1995) work on ACT  UP provides an exemplary
case study of the complexities of expertise in protest movements that
engage directly with the foundational premises of science. In this instance,
activists were not protesting a technoscientific innovation but were
instead attempting to insert themselves into the process of developing a
new treatment for AIDS that would respond to their needs, not merely
to the dictates of ‘pure’ science. While most of the movement’s knowledge-
claims were delivered to the medical elite through credentialed interme-
diaries, some members of ACT UP were eventually able to gain a seat at
the researcher’s table in their own right through becoming ‘a new species
of expert that could speak credibly in the language of the researchers’
(ibid., 417). Some were speaking from lived experience, both with the
disease and as participants in clinical trials—forms of embodied expertise
which were not directly accessible to the research professionals. Others
learned to connect their claims to long-standing arguments in the litera-
ture of clinical trial design. Through these forms of ‘lay’ expertise, activ-
ists were able to systematically gather evidence about the ways in which
the design of gold-standard double-blind clinical trials induced wide-
spread non-compliant behaviour in the participants, such as exchanging
medication in the hope they could avoid receiving the placebo at least
some of the time, calling into question the very methodology by which
supposedly ‘clean’ data about the effectiveness of AZT was being pro-
duced. However, Epstein’s research also suggests that while non-
credentialed activists can ‘in certain circumstances become genuine
participants in the construction of scientific knowledge’ (ibid., 409), they
are still structurally barred from the institutions which would allow them
real control. Even had they attracted the funding and developed the clini-
cal skills to run their own trials, ACT UP as an organisation would not
 Considering Social Movements Through a Cognitive Lens 13

have had access to the drugs, the hospital facilities, or the academic jour-
nals which validate scientific facts through peer review. Fuller suggests
that while a knowledge-claim may be made by an individual, it takes
others, with a shared methodology, to test it to determine its truth. Thus,
he argues, knowledge is not really derived through empirical evidence but
through a ‘socially ascribed status’ (Fuller 2002, 30) which determines
whether the knowledge-holder can be considered a credible source. In
science this is mediated through peer review, with greater credibility
accruing to those most frequently cited; therefore, ACT UP’s empirical
data could not become scientific knowledge until published by a creden-
tialed agent. It is perhaps for this reason that movement knowledge is
always presumed to be not-science, and that movements amongst scien-
tists and academics, even when explicitly politicised and linked to the
efforts of street protest, are seen at best as ‘kindred phenomena’ (Frickel
and Gross 2005, 225), rather than part of the social movement field.
The cognitive praxis paradigm (Eyerman and Jamison 1991) proposes
a solution which can investigate movements as knowledge-producers by
situating them within their broader social and historical context, looking
at the new forms of knowledge and ideas produced, and tracing their dif-
fusion into the wider society as evidence of social change. Working from
Smelser’s (1962) value-added model of movement emergence, Eyerman
and Jamison (1991, 57) agree that an ‘illustrating event’ which demon-
strates the problem clearly must occur, but argue that this must appear
within a context in which there are already individuals capable of taking
up the problem, who can identify opportunities through which the
energy created by the illustrating event can be mobilised into a collective,
rather than an individual, response. In this way, movements build on
previous movements, on both a macro and an individual level. In this
formulation, the cognitive praxis of a movement is best seen as it emerges
and consolidates through the actions of an identifiable set of ‘movement
intellectuals’ (ibid., 98–99) who are formed within, not outside it. As
praxis is the process by which theory is transformed into action, it is
through these individuals that the opportunity for emergence is created
as they open a cognitive space in which new thoughts and ideas can be
developed to challenge normative assumptions. It is the knowledge a
movement produces and how, its theory more than its campaigns and
14 1 Introduction

organisations, which distinguishes its unique cognitive praxis. Thus,

while Eyerman and Jamison agree with Habermas that movements bring
scientific ideas into the social realm to be tested, the cognitive praxis para-
digm also considers that movements have their own knowledge interests
and as such can be producers as well as interpreters of knowledge.
The paradigm focuses on three forms of knowledge, identified as
‘dimensions’, which can be studied in retrospect against a broader histori-
cal backdrop: cosmological, technological and organisational. The cos-
mological refers to the underlying belief system, the technical to both the
topics taken up by the movement and solutions proposed, and the organ-
isational to the relationship between movement knowledge and the for-
mal knowledge it engages with, as well as the more familiar elements of
strategies, tactics and goals. The cognitive praxis paradigm has its limita-
tions, which will be discussed more fully in Chap. 6, but chief amongst
these is that in their original formulation, Eyerman and Jamison also tend
to consider knowledge as ‘new thoughts and ideas’ (ibid., 55), rather than
empirically validated facts. Despite overtures to constructivist approaches
to science, they do still appear to consider professional science and the
people who do it to be separate from the space(s) which social move-
ments inhabit, even though they see the movement as reshaping and cre-
ating new scientific fields. The movement itself, they argue, is necessarily
transient (ibid., 65) and its main action is for its ideas and activists to pass
into institutional settings, so that protest is no longer necessary and the
mass eventually disappears.
The question of how movements convince others that their belief is
true is addressed as a matter of creating a specific consciousness around
a topic through which these ideas can be pursued. While ‘conscious-
ness’ is normally defined as an awareness of self, in social movement
studies it has a deliberately political aspect, what Eyerman and Jamison
(ibid., 68), drawing from Goffman, refer to as a ‘cosmology’—a cogni-
tive framework through which the movement’s knowledge interests will
be shaped and processed. Thus, consciousness must be ‘raised’ from a
state of unquestioning belief in received precepts, through the forma-
tion of knowledge-generating projects aimed at revealing the conditions
in which that belief has been generated, so that its naturalness may be
 Visualising Movement Space and Consciousness 15

questioned and contested. Mansbridge (2001) describes this as a pro-

cess of identity formation in which one’s consciousness of self is delib-
erately reshaped to understand oneself as a member of a historically
oppressed social group whose exclusion is caused by external forces
rather than individual failings, and therefore can only be challenged
collectively. However, as both feminist theory and STS have clearly
shown, the same processes may be directed at questioning the natural-
ness of the scientific process itself. Thus, all movements must have some
kind of knowledge practices which help form a group identity from
which it becomes possible to act as a collective against the dominant
normative consciousness, whether that identity is understood to be bio-
logical, ideological or otherwise constructed. Rather than considering
social movement organisations through ideal types based on strategies
and goals, this book also seeks to refine the cognitive praxis paradigm
by exploring the idea that movements, organisations and individual
activists operate in an oppositional space of sometimes overlapping
political consciousnesses which should be thought of not as ideologies
but as cognitive meta-frames which help direct the movement’s analysis
of the problem(s) through considering its relationship to control.

Visualising Movement Space

and Consciousness
I begin with the premise that all oppositional movements must be based
in some form of cognitive liberation from received ideas, whether from
the idea that one’s biology makes subordination natural, or from cul-
tural assumptions such as ‘there is no alternative to the market’, or ‘tech-
nology is neutral’. Ingalsbee (1996), for example, suggests that
direct-action environmentalism promotes the formation of an ‘alterna-
tive consciousness’ through which a radical resistance to the neo-liberal
underpinning of both the state and the established environmental
movement may be articulated. This is a form of collective identity for-
mation which marks one as a member of ‘the movement’ not so much
through organisational affiliation as through a permanent alteration of
16 1 Introduction

consciousness and conscious action, demonstrated by a lifestyle which

attempts to limit consumption and resists incorporation into the mar-
ket. Ingalsbee’s suggestion that through these actions activists develop
an underlying world view which extends beyond incidents of protest
also suggests that movements create a difference in the way information
is actually processed, organised and understood—in effect, a change in
Goffmanesque (1974) meaning-organising, not merely ideological,
frames. Feminists from the women’s liberation movement (WLM) era
who are no longer politically active, for example, have claimed that they
continue to see the world from within the framework learned in the
movement, and that in fact it cannot be unlearned, even if their choices
eventually had to become more pragmatic (Whittier 1990, 92–93). This
may also help to explain why activists are frequently involved with more
than one issue, beyond being recruited through pre-existing submerged
(Melucci 1989) or overlapping (Jasper and Poulsen 1995) personal net-
works. If the general framework is similar, there may be a feeling of
continuity which allows activists to see connections between familiar
and new problems, and to. move between organisations or campaigns
whose analysis is coherent with the oppositional consciousness they
have already developed. For example, the biocentrism which Ingalsbee
speaks of as a cosmology which privileges all life equally (in opposition
to elevating human needs above all else) may also be perceived as part of
the underlying world view of movements as diverse as indigenous sover-
eignty, animal rights and ecofeminism, although expressed in very dif-
ferent ways.
Similarly, different strands within the same movement may incorpo-
rate different oppositional meta-frames, and therefore different means of
producing knowledge around the movement’s central problems and dif-
ferent strategies for change. Sandoval, for instance, argues for five ideo-
logical categories for her own theory of oppositional feminist
consciousness, which she characterises as a means of breaking through
hegemonic ideology and transforming power relations: equal rights, revo-
lutionary, supremacist, separatist and differential. While the other cate-
gories are recognisable, in Sandoval’s (2000, 44) framework the differential
category draws from her own experience in what she calls ‘US Third
World feminism’ and is characterised as a ‘kaleidoscope’ of the other four
 Visualising Movement Space and Consciousness 17

‘utilised as a theoretical and methodological device’ which allows devel-

opment of a new subject position which can function ‘within, yet beyond,
the demands of dominant ideology’. Although like Mansbridge, she
frames oppositional consciousness as a function of identity politics, she
also argues that the same movement can produce multiple forms of oppo-
sitional consciousness, which will then guide different strategic responses,
and that all five may be expressed at once (ibid., 45).
Drawing from all of these ideas, I would therefore suggest a model in
which there are three broad categories of oppositional political con-
sciousness—liberatory, egalitarian and alternative—which can be
thought of not as ideologies but as cognitive meta-frames which overlap
in various ways to produce spaces in which different responses to the
same problems may flourish. The differences within the three forms can
be seen through considering their relationship to control. Broadly speak-
ing, what I have called a liberatory consciousness sees control as some-
thing to be taken from the dominant group to use for its own purpose.
An egalitarian consciousness seeks a more equitable distribution of con-
trol, while an alternative consciousness argues against the use of control
entirely, rather than seeking to share or take it from the dominant group.
My purpose here is to loosen the conceptual tie between ‘consciousness
raising’ and identity politics and provide a more detailed sense of
FINRRAGE’s overall cognitive praxis than can be provided by assigning
categories such as radical, socialist, liberal, cultural, or postmodern femi-
nist, particularly as these labels do not always accurately describe the
underlying belief system of the women I spoke to (and indeed some
argued quite forcefully against any such categorisation). Nor, as Davis’
(2007) study of the processes of translating Our Bodies Ourselves into dif-
ferent languages shows, do they travel particularly well in either space or
time. In a movement so focused on technological control of biological
processes and very much influenced by the simultaneous emergence of
feminist critiques of science and technology, how technology itself was
perceived—as a neutral tool or as an expression of dominant interests—
is a more crucial determinant of how an analysis would be shaped and
who it could speak to than the usual political categories would suggest.
The illustration below should help make this conceptualisation clearer as
the narrative unfolds (Fig. 1.1).
18 1 Introduction

Fig. 1.1 The cognitive space of FINRRAGE in 1985

In this illustration, the outer circle represents the cognitive space of

oppositional feminist consciousness at the time FINRRAGE emerged,
with the overlaps representing spaces in which more than one kind of
consciousness can be seen to operate with varying degrees of comfort
and/or tension. It is not meant to be an absolute representation, but is
meant to serve as an aid to exploring the ways in which these underlying
consciousnesses form a movement’s cognitive praxis. The size of the
three spheres and of FINRRAGE is not to be taken as signifying the rela-
tive amount of space these occupied in global feminism, but rather as a
way to roughly visualise where the network itself lay in relation to these
three consciousnesses at the time of its emergence. Likewise, the terms
liberatory, egalitarian and alternative are not direct stand-ins for radical,
liberal and socialist feminism. In this representation, socialist ideologies
would be found in the blended area to the left, where liberation from the
yoke of capitalism creates a more equal and fair society, while anarchism
would occupy the blended area to the right, where a society of moral
equals does not need state control. The permeability of the border of the
oppositional space as it passes through the egalitarian consciousness sig-
nifies the capacity for this particular consciousness to also inform main-
stream organisations which are otherwise not oppositional to the
dominant discourses of economic progress—as is the case with what is
normally thought of as liberal feminism—but do see themselves as
 Visualising Movement Space and Consciousness 19

pursuing feminist goals. More than one interpretation can be given to

these spaces, for example, the consciousness-raising groups of the WLM
can be said to demonstrate an egalitarian shape and internal relations,
while seeking liberatory goals.
FINRRAGE is thus positioned mainly across spaces in which control
is to be taken back or resisted, rather than shared. Drawing from the
idea of a ‘diffuse collectivity’ (Oliver and Johnston 2000), or outsiders
who are familiar with a movement and may be mobilised briefly when
needed, the fuzzy border around FINRRAGE signifies the adjacent
spaces around the network occupied by fellow-travellers who have simi-
lar concerns and take part in some activities, but do not necessarily
identify as members.9 Finally, these configurations are not static, but
will change as the organisation and the surrounding oppositional space
changes over time. Were we able to fast-forward the illustration, we
would see the liberatory consciousness of the larger space shrinking
throughout the 1990s, leaving the alternative to occupy much more of
FINRRAGE’s cognitive praxis.
Thinking of movements in this manner allows a different kind of
question to be asked, such as how does the ‘cognitive space’ movements
are meant to create also help to shape the kinds of consciousnesses which
can comfortably operate within them? Where does a new movement or
organisation lie in relation not only to the pre-existing political context,
which Eyerman and Jamison claim is essential for its emergence, but to
the other oppositional consciousness(es) of the time, place and culture
within which it is situated? My purpose here is not to create yet another
set of ideal types, but to show how the overlaps and tensions between
these three consciousnesses can shape the cognitive praxis of individuals
and organisations within oppositional movements into what might be
better called a kind of conscienceness-raising,10 something akin to raising
a barn in that it first requires construction of an oppositional meta-frame
within which the processing of new knowledge can take place, so that
what has formerly been taken as a foundational truth can be interrogated
and a new understanding formulated around that frame as the basis for
collective action. In other words, raising conscienceness describes not
only raising awareness of an issue, but linking this to a moral impetus to
20 1 Introduction

take a certain kind of action to address it. These ideas will inform the
narrative in Part 1 and will be more fully explored in Part 2.

The Structure of This Book

FINRRAGE’s historical trajectory appears to fall into three distinct peri-
ods, and this has been used to structure the three history chapters in Part
1. As the most visible collective knowledge work was done at the interna-
tional meetings, and there is extensive internal and external documenta-
tion on these activities, I have concentrated mainly on these. I have also
sought to briefly spotlight events unfolding in certain countries through-
out the time in question, so that their contextual differences may be com-
pared, allowing a fuller picture of the international dimensions and
concerns of the network to emerge. Chapter 2, Emergence, begins with
the first individual feminist engagements with new reproductive tech-
nologies and culminates with the 1984 Women’s Worlds conference in
Groningen, from which an early version of the network emerged. The
Expansion period in Chap. 3 covers the time from the 1985 ‘Emergency
Conference’ in Sweden, where the network’s name, strategy, agenda and
most of the key participants were solidified into a new organisation,
FINRRAGE, to the second international conference, which took place in
Bangladesh in 1989, after which the network’s geography and focus
began to move from Europe to the developing world. In Chap. 4, I will
discuss the final international conference in Rio and the activities led by
the Bangladesh chapter, UBINIG, as the international network moved
into Abeyance. In Part 2, I will first explore the written output of the net-
work in Chap. 5, before turning back to re-evaluate Eyerman and
Jamison’s cognitive praxis paradigm through the lens of shifting political
consciousnesses in Chap. 6, using its cosmological, organisational and
technical categories to more deeply explore FINRRAGE’s knowledge
practices and the ways in which this produced the shape of the organisa-
tion, their approach to the technologies and the arguments and strategies
they chose as ‘resistance’, including a more specific examination of the
kinds of expertise the women brought to FINRRAGE and developed
 Notes 21

within it. Finally, in the short epilogue that concludes Chap. 6, I will take
the opportunity to consider the relevance of FINRRAGE’s work to the
field today.

Notes
1. It is currently possible for children to have both a biological and social
father, and genetic, mitochondrial, gestational and social mothers, all of
whom may be different individuals. Mitochondria are organelles within
the cell which generate energy and carry their own mtDNA, inherited
only through the female line. Where mitochondrial illness may be a risk,
nuclear DNA from the mother’s egg can be transferred into a donated
egg before fertilisation so that the child is still genetically related, and if
female, will now pass the donor’s mtDNA on to her descendants.
Technically germline engineering, the procedure was approved by the
UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority in 2015 (HFEA
2016).
2. After 11 failed experiments worldwide, a 35-year-old Swedish woman
recently gave birth to the first child conceived after transplantation of
the uterus of a postmenopausal donor (Brännström et al. 2014).
3. There are now services which create anonymised embryos in bulk for
direct sales to prospective parents; in this scenario, ownership of the
embryo rests with the clinic until purchased (Zarembo 2012). A subse-
quent article in the New England Journal of Medicine reasoned that this
was both legal and ethical as sale of gametes is not prohibited in the
United States (Cohen and Adashi 2013).
4. A process called CRISPR-Cas9, which occurs naturally in bacteria, is
now being used to cut DNA, making precision genome editing possible
(Doudna and Charpentier 2014). In a recent hearing on the ethics of
human germline engineering held by the US National Academies of
Science, it was decided that using this technique on human embryos
could be acceptable for some severe illnesses (NASM 2017).
5. Although this term has fallen out of use, I have chosen to retain it here
as it was the way the technologies were referred to at the time. It also
functions to connect new technologies for contraception to those for
assisted conception, which as will be shown, was a key issue for
FINRRAGE.
22 1 Introduction

6. ‘Issues in’ was added to the original title in the third year at Pergamon’s
request, to clarify that it was not a scientific journal.
7. Available at http://finrrage.org. Where documents can also be accessed
there, I have referenced them as electronic resources instead of as part of
an archival collection.
8. ‘Liberation or Loss? Women act on the new reproductive technologies’,
Australian National University, Canberra, May 1986. Collected confer-
ence papers, unbound. Archived at Jessie Street National Women’s
Library, Sydney: JSNWL Q174.25 NAT.
9. This would describe one member of my cohort, Rebecca Albury, a femi-
nist working closely with the issues who attended some events and was
on the mailing list for a number of years, but did not think of herself as
a ‘member’ of FINRRAGE.
10. I draw here on Calver et  al. (2005) who propose the idea of a ‘forest
conscienceness’ which links awareness of the forest’s intrinsic value with
the imperative to take care when it is used for economic purposes.

References
Acker, J., Barry, K., & Esseveld, J. (1983). Objectivity and Truth: Problems in
Doing Feminist Research. Women’s Studies International Forum, 6(4),
423–435.
Armitage, S., & Gluck, S. B. (2002). Reflections on Women’s Oral History: An
Exchange. In S. Armitage, P. Hart, & K. Weathermon (Eds.), Women’s Oral
History (pp. 3–22). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Bloor, D. (1976). Knowledge and Social Imagery (2nd Ed, 1991). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Brand Frank, Z. (2009). Google Baby. Israel/USA: Brandcom Productions/HBO.
Brännström, M., Johannesson, L., Bokström, H., Kvarnström, N., Mölne, J.,
Dahm-Kähler, P., Enskog, A., Milenkovic, M., Ekberg, J., Diaz-Garcia, C.,
Gäbel, M., Hanafy, A., Hagberg, H., Olausson, M., & Nilsson, L. (2014).
Livebirth After Uterus Transplantation. The Lancet, 385(9968), 607–616.
Calver, M., Bigler-Cole, H., Bolton, G., Dargavel, J., Gaynor, A., Horwitz, P.,
Mills, J., & Wardell-Johnson, G. (2005). Why ‘A Forest Consciousness’? In
Proceedings of the 6th National Conference of the Australian Forest History
Society, Augusta, Western Australia, 12–17 Sept 2005. https://www.
treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/24854. Accessed 22 Aug 2017.
 References 23

Casas-Cortes, M. I., Osterweil, M., & Powell, D. E. (2008). Blurring Boundaries:
Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements.
Anthropological Quarterly, 81(1), 17–58.
Clemens, E.  S., & Hughes, M. (2002). Recovering Past Protest: Historical
Research on Social Movements. In B. Klandermans & S. Staggenborg (Eds.),
Methods of Social Movement Research (pp. 201–230). Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Cohen, I. G., & Adashi, E. Y. (2013). Made-to-Order Embryos for Sale – A
Brave New World? New England Journal of Medicine, 368(26), 2517–2519.
Cook, J. A., & Fonow, M. M. (1986). Knowledge and Women’s Interests: Issues
of Epistemology and Methodology in Feminist Sociological Research.
Sociological Inquiry, 56(1), 2–29.
Davis, K. (2007). The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels
Across Borders. Durham: Duke University Press.
Della Porta, D. (1992). Life Histories in the Analysis of a Social Movement. In
M.  Diani & R.  Eyerman (Eds.), Studying Collective Action (pp.  168–193).
London: Sage.
DeVault, M. L. (1996). Talking Back to Sociology: Distinctive Contributions
of Feminist Methodology. Annual Review of Sociology, 22(1), 29–50.
Doudna, J.  A., & Charpentier, E. (2014). The New Frontier of Genome
Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9. Science, 346(6213), 1258096.
Epstein, S. (1995). The Construction of Lay Expertise: Aids Activism and the
Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials. Science, Technology, &
Human Values, 20(4), 408–437.
Esteves, A. M. (2008). Processes of Knowledge Production in Social Movements
as Multi-Level Power Dynamics. Sociology Compass, 2(6), 1934–1953.
Eyerman, R., & Jamison, A. (1991). Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Frickel, S. (2004). Just Science? Organizing Scientist Activism in the US
Environmental Justice Movement. Science as Culture, 13(4), 449–469.
Frickel, S., & Gross, N. (2005). A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual
Movements. American Sociological Review, 70(2), 204.
Friedman, D., & McAdam, D. (1992). Collective Identity and Activism:
Networks, Choices and the Life of a Social Movement. In A. D. Morris &
C. M. C. Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (pp. 156–173).
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fuller, S. (2002). Social Epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
24 1 Introduction

Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience.

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Gougon, D. (2008). Explaining Inaction: Feminist Organizational Responses to
New Reproductive Technologies. PhD, Department of Political Science, Rutgers
University. 
Habermas, J. (1981). New Social Movements. Telos, 49(4), 33–37.
Habermas, J.  (1987). Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and
Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Haraway, D. J. (1996). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In E. F. Keller & H. E. Longino (Eds.),
Feminism and Science (pp. 249–263). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harding, S., & O’Barr, J. F. (Eds.). (1987). Sex and Scientific Inquiry. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Hess, D.  J. (2011). To Tell the Truth: On Scientific Counterpublics. Public
Understanding of Science, 20(5), 627–641.
HFEA. (2016).  Mitochondrial Replacement. Human Fertilization & Embryo
Authority. http://www.hfea.gov.uk/6896.html. Accessed 17 May 2017.
Ingalsbee, T. (1996). Earth First! Activism: Ecological Postmodern Praxis in
Radical Environmentalist Identities. Sociological Perspectives, 39(2), 263–276.
Jasper, J. M., & Poulsen, J. D. (1995). Recruiting Strangers and Friends: Moral
Shocks and Social Networks in Animal Rights and Anti-Nuclear Protests.
Social Problems, 42(4), 493–512.
Keller, E. F., & Longino, H. E. (Eds.). (1996). Feminism and Science. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Klein, R. (1983). How to Do What We Want to Do: Thoughts About Feminist
Methodology. In G. Bowles & R. Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women’s Studies
(pp. 88–104). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kurzman, C. (2008). Meaning Making in Social Movements. Anthropological
Quarterly, 81(1), 17–58.
Mansbridge, J. J. (2001). The Making of Oppositional Consciousness. In J. J.
Mansbridge & A.  Morris (Eds.), Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective
Roots of Social Protest (pp. 1–19). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual
Needs in Contemporary Society. London: Century Hutchinson.
Mies, M. (1983). Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research. In G. Bowles
& R.  Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women’s Studies (pp.  117–139). London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mondale, N. (1987). Soft Cell. Channel Four, 11 Jan 1988. 23.00 hrs.
 References 25

NASM. (2017). Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance.

National Academies of Science and Medicine. Washington, DC: National
Academies Press. https://www.nap.edu/read/24623. Accessed 14 Mar 2017.
Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms. In
H. Roberts (Ed.), Doing Feminist Research (pp. 30–61). London: Routledge.
Oliver, P., & Johnston, H. (2000). What a Good Idea! Frames and Ideologies in
Social Movement Research. Mobilization, 5, 37–54.
Platt, J. (1981). Evidence and Proof in Documentary Research 1: Some Specific
Problems of Documentary Research. The Sociological Review, 29(1), 31–51.
Riessman, C. K. (1987). When Gender Is Not Enough: Women Interviewing
Women. Gender & Society, 1(2), 172–207.
Rose, H. (1987). Hand, Brain and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the
Natural Sciences. In S. Harding & J. O’Barr (Eds.), Sex and Scientific Enquiry
(pp. 265–282). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the Oppressed. Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press.
Smelser, N.  J. (1962). Theory of Collective Behavior. London: Routledge &
Keegan Paul.
Snow, D., Burke Rochford, E., Worden, S., & Benford, R. (1986). Frame
Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.
American Sociological Review, 51(4), 464–481.
Stanley, L., & Wise, S. (1990). Method, Methodology and Epistemology in
Feminist Research Processes. In L.  Stanley (Ed.), Feminist Praxis: Research,
Theory, and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology (pp.  20–60). London:
Routledge.
Whelan, E. (2001). Politics by Other Means: Feminism and Mainstream Science
Studies. The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie,
26(4), 535–581.
Whittier, N. (1990). Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s
Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Woodhouse, E., Hess, D. J., Breyman, S., & Martin, B. (2002). Science Studies
and Activism: Possibilities and Problems for Reconstructivist Agendas. Social
Studies of Science, 32(2), 297–319.
Wynne, B. (1992). Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and
Public Uptake of Science. Public Understanding of Science, 1(3), 281–304.
Zarembo, A. (2012, November 19). An Ethics Debate over Embryos on the
Cheap. Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/19/local/la-
me-embryo-20121120. Accessed 17 May 2017.
 Part I
Action and Reflection:
A Story of FINRRAGE in 28 Voices
 2
Emergence

…you had to know a lot to begin to understand this issue. We always spent a
lot of time, you know, trying, helping everyone to understand the biology, the
basic science of the thing. And we didn’t understand it either. We had to find
out what it was, we had to study it up.
Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interview 1

Although artificial means of reproduction had been debated in medical,

scientific and philosophical circles for at least 30 years before Louise
Brown was born, it could be argued that her birth in England in July
1978 was the illustrating event which suddenly brought technological
procreation into the public sphere through the worldwide media frenzy it
produced. Before that event, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was a small, sci-
entifically marginalised, underfunded and ethically contentious field
(Edwards and Steptoe 1980). It was also highly competitive, with both
British and Australian teams eager to be the first to prove the technique
could work (Kannegiesser 1988; Challoner 1999). Thus, the origin story
that the fertility industry tells about itself, then and in retrospect, is very
much told in a male voice, even where vocalising dissent, with little

© The Author(s) 2017 29

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_2
30 2 Emergence

acknowledgement of the unknown number of women upon whose bod-

ies the experiments necessary to further the science had been carried out.
The formal narratives told by the practitioners about the early days of
IVF (Edwards 2001; Jones 2003; Leeton 2004; Cohen et al. 2005) have
by now become reified by the more informal memoirs produced around
significant events such as the 30th anniversary of the first Australian child
(Lopata 2010; McBain 2010), or Robert Edwards receiving the Nobel
Prize in 2010 (Johnson 2011; Gardner and Johnson 2011). These narra-
tives are steeped in the imagery of heroism and conquest, written as the
‘history of a dream’ (Brown 2005) or a triumph of the excluded—vision-
ary scientists working on shoestring budgets from labs in converted store-
rooms (Edwards and Steptoe 1980) and janitors’ closets (Lopata 2010),
keeping their hormonal preparations in shoeboxes (McBain 2010), and
supported by bake sales organised by hopeful mothers and grandmothers-
to-be (Martin 1986).
Reading between the lines of the early medical literature, however, the
field more closely resembles a collaboration between animal husbandry
and bench science: Robert Edwards began his career as a mouse embry-
ologist (Jones 1995), while the Australian team’s counterpart, Alan
Trounson, earned his PhD unsuccessfully trying IVF in sheep (Cohen
et al. 2005, 440, Wood and Westmore 1984, 41). In A Matter of Life, his
account of the development of IVF co-authored with Patrick Steptoe,
Robert Edwards writes extensively of his difficulties in obtaining human
ova for his fertilisation experiments (Edwards and Steptoe 1980). In the
mid-1960s, he managed to obtain a fellowship at Johns Hopkins with the
gynaecologists Howard and Georgeanna Jones in order to obtain excised
ovarian tissue from their surgical practice (Jones 1991), but human eggs
proved too difficult to mature in vitro (Edwards et al. 1966). He subse-
quently became interested in gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe’s work on
laparoscopy as an alternative to pelvic surgery, and approached him at a
Royal Society of Medicine meeting in London suggesting a collaboration
(Challoner 1999). In laparoscopy, the abdomen is filled with carbon
dioxide in order to create a space for a tiny camera and manipulation
instruments to be inserted through small incisions near the navel made
under general anaesthetic. Although Steptoe had developed the proce-
dure for female sterilization, it also allowed a surgeon to guide a long
 2 Emergence 31

needle through one of the incisions to reach the ovaries and aspirate any
maturing eggs (Steptoe 1968). Using hormonal stimulation to produce
multiple mature follicles, Steptoe and Edwards began the first of a series
of experiments in which they attempted to retrieve mature human ova
from inside a woman’s body, fertilise these in a petri dish and transfer the
resulting embryos back to the woman, in the hope they would implant
and produce a child (Steptoe and Edwards 1970). Although their fund-
ing request for a dedicated clinic was turned down by the UK’s Medical
Research Council in 1971 on a number of grounds, including fear that
the procedures were too experimental to be carried out on patients and
that Edwards was not medically qualified to run an infertility clinic
(Johnson et  al. 2010), the team eventually found financial support
through private donations and the Ford Foundation and were allocated a
small surgical space at Kershaw’s Cottage Hospital by the Oldham Area
Health Authority, where Steptoe was employed as a gynaecologist for the
NHS. This work eventually resulted in four pregnancies, one of which
would be Louise Brown, the culmination of a grand rush of experiments
before Steptoe would be forced by NHS requirements to retire, and the
team no longer had access to facilities or patients (Edwards and Steptoe
1980).
Meanwhile, newspapers and popular magazines such as The Economist
(1979) publicised the failures as well as the successes. Of the four women
in that last group who did become pregnant, another gave birth to a
healthy boy in January 1979, but the third foetus had been triploid, car-
rying three sets of chromosomes instead of two, and the fourth was born
at 21 weeks and had died within two hours (Steptoe et al. 1980, 767).
Although the estate of Bourn Hall in Cambridgeshire had been pur-
chased for Steptoe and Edwards by a benefactor in 1978, overtures to
venture capitalists had not initially been successful, for fear that parents
might sue if abnormal babies were born (Edwards 2005, 6). By the time
Bourne Hall did open in 1980, IVF children had already been born in
India and in Australia, where scientists had been competing fiercely with
the British team from the start (Challoner 1999, 48),1 and the following
years would see a huge rush of clinics opening up around the world.
For the very few feminists who had been monitoring the scientists’
papers even before the birth of Louise Brown, there was a deep concern
32 2 Emergence

about technologies for reproduction, which they saw as part of an increas-

ingly mechanised and managerial view of the world (Rose and Hanmer
1976). However, the voices of women—in part because few women were
doctors, scientists, clergy or politicians at this time—were notably absent
at all levels of the early period of debate. Even amongst feminists, for
whom control of reproduction had always been a central issue, IVF was
not immediately seen as significant. Within the grass-roots activist litera-
ture of the latter half of the 1970s, there is scant evidence that feminists
were even aware of these experiments in artificial conception, let alone
that they were particularly concerned. Scarlet Woman, a British socialist
feminist newsletter, did question where the ova for such experiments
were coming from, and suggested campaigning against genetic engineer-
ing (McNeill 1978), but these are only two brief lines in a double issue of
50 pages devoted to reproduction, circulated just before Louise Brown
was born. In the British radical magazine Trouble and Strife, Naomi
Pfeffer (1985, 50) similarly reported that her attempts to set up work-
shops on infertility at women’s health conferences in England in the very
early 1980s met with virtually no response. A later article in the same
publication suggested that ‘any analysis requires a great deal of scientific
knowledge. Perhaps that is why so many of us have been slow and reluc-
tant to confront the issues’ (Berer 1986, 29).
Outside the feminist press, there was a great deal of controversy about
IVF in the early 1980s, but in general this was based on moral arguments
about the sanctity of life, rather than any danger to women’s health,
although some parties did voice concern about the health of any children
born through IVF.2 Women who had undergone the procedures did not
talk publicly about their experience, nor were there outlets in which to
speak privately, as clinics at this time did not provide counselling services
(Machin 2008). Medical literature which described the process of egg
collection did show that it required instruments inserted into the abdo-
men under general anaesthesia (Steptoe and Edwards 1970) and could
damage healthy reproductive organs through perforation or abdominal
adhesions post-surgery. However, the mainstream media continued to
make the actual process of IVF sound relatively straightforward, albeit
rarely successful: it was simply a matter of removing some eggs, fertilising
them in a petri dish, and replacing the resultant embryo in the womb.
 2 Emergence 33

This, in effect, promoted the erroneous idea that retrieving eggs was no
more complicated than donating sperm (see, e.g. Fleming 1980).
However, not all feminists considered technological control of repro-
duction to be problematic. Shulamith Firestone (1979) argued that tech-
nology should liberate women from the onus of childbearing so that they
could achieve their full potential as human beings. Other feminists advo-
cated using sex selection to give birth only to girls, and there was a grow-
ing movement, particularly amongst lesbians, for using do-it-yourself
artificial insemination to conceive and raise children wholly free of the
influence of men (Birke et  al. 1990, 114–115). In these positions of
technology-as-liberation, it is not the tool itself, but the use to which it is
put which makes it good or bad, and arguments could at times be dis-
turbingly reminiscent of the rhetoric employed by advertising agencies to
promote new household goods by claiming they would free women from
the drudgery of their housewifely role.
Writing from a more critical, constructivist perspective, Hilary Rose
and Jalna Hanmer argued that Firestone had ignored the influence of
capital on science, and as long as economic production was geared
towards male interests and increasing control over nature, the prediction
that something like an artificial womb would liberate women was akin to
asking ‘male biological engineers…to create the feminist Utopia’ (Rose
and Hanmer 1976, 219). Such technologies, they argued, would not give
women more control over their reproductive lives, but would ultimately
put control of reproduction entirely into male hands, thus robbing
women of their crucial value to men. Nor could women create similar
technologies to their own design, as they did not have the necessary insti-
tutions or resources, and even if they one day did, most women would
not actually want to give up the experience of carrying their own child.
Hanmer’s and Rose’s analysis, produced through a close reading of sci-
entific and medical papers, was one of the first attempts by feminists both
to extensively describe the procedures used, and to grapple directly with
the predictions of the reproductive scientists themselves. However, the
political consciousness through which each viewed the science was some-
what different. Hanmer’s attention had been caught in the early 1970s by
newspaper reports of scientists trying to prenatally determine the sex of a
foetus (see, e.g. Keenan 1971; The Times 1971), which she immediately
34 2 Emergence

connected to her work on violence against women, an association Rose

did not necessarily share.3 Hanmer’s early writings often referred to a
lengthy 1971 New Atlantic article by a well-known science journalist
which was meant to provide an overview of the history and current state
of reproductive science for the general public. ‘The Obsolescent Mother’
(Grossman 1971) begins by characterising birth as a ‘disturbance, and
more or less a shock’ and claims that ‘the transformation of childbirth
from painful and dangerous event to safe and efficient routine was thanks
to men, to the energy of males’ who had developed the practices of gyn-
aecology and obstetrics. Arguing strongly in favour of Steptoe’s and
Edwards’ (at that point unsuccessful) experiments in artificial concep-
tion, which he describes in careful detail, Grossman advocates the use of
technology to replace nature in every step of the reproductive process,
from growing the foetus in an artificial womb to eliminate birth defects
to raising the children in state-run nurseries, thus ‘freeing’ women from
all aspects of motherhood. Although he seems genuinely concerned that
women should be ‘liberated from the special pains and dangers of their
biology’—and in language not substantially different from Shulamith
Firestone’s—in Grossman’s version it is clearly through the heroic work of
men that this liberation would be achieved.
In Hanmer’s analysis, such Huxlean visions were more likely to reduce
women’s social value even further by removing their one irreplaceable func-
tion—gestation—after which there would be no need for females to exist
in any great number, since one woman could serve the sexual needs of any
number of men (Hanmer and Allen 1980). This assertion was not pulled
from her imagination, but taken directly from the writings of a prominent
scientist who advocated as a method of population reduction producing a
pill which would ensure only male babies would be born, after which the
few females left would be treated like queen ants, living in purdah and
given as rewards to outstanding men (Postgate 1973, in Rose and Hanmer
1976, 214; Hanmer and Allen 1980, 216). While admitting that such fan-
tasies were extreme, Hanmer worried that men like Postgate, a noted
microbiologist and eugenicist, had both the intellectual and institutional
resources to create the technologies they envisioned, and that they sincerely
believed—as claimed—that this would be an improvement to humanity,
‘the most laudable ambition you could ask of a biologist’ (Postgate 1995,
 2 Emergence 35

60). Edwards himself had published articles in medical journals predicting

that his in vitro conception process could be used for male infertility, pre-
implantation diagnosis of genetic disease, and transfer of embryos to unre-
lated carrying mothers, justifying this on the grounds that ‘to give a couple
their own wanted child obviously needs no justification’ (Edwards 1974,
10). Rose and Hanmer (1976, 216), however, argued that:

…their work, while using the language of helping women, is in fact deeply
conservative in terms of preserving women’s role. Their speculation that
some women, who are better breeders, could carry the babies of other
mothers, suggests a form of biological emancipation of a dominant class of
women achieved only by the biological exploitation of another class.

Reading between the lines of Steptoe’s and Edwards’ numerous papers,

they further argued that the claim that reproductive technologies would
bring hope to ‘desperate’ women was merely a smokescreen to appropri-
ate the necessary raw materials—ova and embryos—needed for the
development of technologies which would ultimately be about engineer-
ing ‘better’ humans:

In and of themselves these potential developments need not be oppressive

to women; it is the social meaning they may be given and the way in which
they may be enforced on the population that is potentially oppressive.
Before coercion will come the con trick, the argument, of how it is really
all being done for women’s benefit. (ibid., 226)

Although this could be seen as the beginning of a feminist analysis

informed by an alternative consciousness which tends to question not just
who, but whether anybody should have control over things that were oth-
erwise natural, freely accessed and/or collectively owned, similar misgiv-
ings about Steptoe’s and Edward’s work did appear in critiques developed
by men. In the same issue of The Atlantic, the Nobel winner James Watson
pointed ominously to Steptoe’s and Edwards’ work with the claim that
should they succeed, this would likely lead to ‘a frenetic rush to do experi-
mental manipulation with human eggs’ (1971), although he was more
worried that this would eventually lead to cloning ‘man’. Writing in the
36 2 Emergence

Hastings Center Report, Christopher Lasch (1972, 3) called Grossman’s

‘touching solicitude’ for the freedom of scientific enquiry a too-oft-heard
refrain meant to silence any questions about the social consequences of
these technologies by burying them beneath the rhetoric that this ‘relent-
less progress’ was not only inevitable, but ultimately good.
Overall, however, what men tended to problematise was the outcome,
not the ways in which this ‘frenetic rush’ would fall upon women, whose
eggs were required for such experiments. Hanmer’s emphasis on aggre-
gate effect rather than IVF’s possible benefit to a small number of indi-
viduals was a reflection of her initial concern about scientists seeking to
develop technologies for sex selection, whose potential implications were
now becoming evident through declining sex ratios in cultures which
were using technology to identify and abort female foetuses. She now also
began focusing her attention on the question of making women’s bodies
available to science for the purposes of experimentation. These two inter-
ests, informed by her work in the women’s refuge movement, would now
open space for an alternative consciousness about new reproductive tech-
nologies (NRT) as a form of control over women’s bodies that needed to
be actively resisted, just as the birth of Louise Brown provided an incon-
trovertible impetus to urgently speed up the formation of a feminist
response.

Gathering Resistance
In the US, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW)
had convened an Ethics Advisory Board in 1979, which deemed that
IVF research could be publicly funded through the National Institutes
of Health (HEW 1979), but the Board’s charter had expired in 1980
and the newly elected president Ronald Reagan refused to authorise the
recommendations (Gunning and English 1993, 21–22). Whereas IVF
was viewed with suspicion but little protest in the UK and Australia at
this time, Howard and Georgeanna Joneses’ attempt to establish the first
US clinic at a little-known medical school in Virginia met with vocifer-
ous challenge from the right-to-life movement, which had grown
increasingly coordinated after the Supreme Court decision legalising
 Gathering Resistance 37

abortion in 1973 (National Right to Life 2012). Lawsuits and demon-

strations ensued, delaying the opening of the clinic by several months
(Jones 1995), but also publicising it internationally, so that by the time
it did open in March of 1980 it already had a waiting list of 2500 cou-
ples from around the world (Franklin 1980). Ironically perhaps, it was
the settlement from a lawsuit filed by the medical school against a local
paper for libel, which helped fund their research for several years (Biggers
2012, 8; Jones 1995, 40). The first IVF child in the US would be born
here in 1981, followed by children in Austria, France, Germany and
Sweden in 1982.
As the debate had been heating up in 1979, the biologist Becky Holmes
had obtained a grant from the National Science Foundation to organise
a conference on ‘Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction Technology:
Analysis by Women’, which was held at Hampshire College in Amherst,
Massachusetts in June that year. Janice Raymond, at that time Five-
College Professor of Women’s Studies and Medical Ethics and also based
at Hampshire College, had done her PhD research on transsexual surgery
and was interested in the questions this raised about what makes a
woman. She too had now begun to research sex preselection. Along with
Holmes, she was a co-organiser of the conference and made sure this was
a key issue, making Amherst one of the first conferences ever to discuss
sex determination research in a feminist context.4 The conference also
covered a wide range of technologies, from contraception, foetal moni-
toring and other interventions into childbirth, to do-it-yourself insemi-
nation and the very new high-tech solutions for infertility, both achieved
and projected.
Raymond invited as keynote speaker Gena Corea, a journalist who had
recently published a controversial book, The Hidden Malpractice (1977),
in which she accused the American medical profession of deeply institu-
tionalised sexism which had profound effects upon women’s health.
Corea was now in the process of researching a new book, The Mother
Machine, which she had started in preparation for a talk on test-tube
babies at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in DC in 1978, an
invitation originally offered to Gloria Steinem, who passed it to Corea on
the recommendation of Robin Morgan, who was friends with both.5 As
Corea tells it:
38 2 Emergence

… one thing I knew before I started the research was that [the doctors]
were saying that the new technologies were being developed out of com-
passion for the suffering of infertile women, and they wanted to help these
women who were suffering so much. … I knew that was not true because
for years I had been reading the OB-GYN journals, and the medical litera-
ture, I had been interviewing doctors, I had never seen a word of compas-
sion, I had never heard any concern for infertile women expressed in the
years that I worked on The Hidden Malpractice, or did all of these inter-
views. All I had heard was a kind of contempt for infertile women, theories
like women can’t have babies because they’re resisting their natural female
role … so that invitation gave me the impetus to begin reading and trying
to figure out what was going on.

At Amherst, both Corea and Raymond addressed the discussions

from their knowledge of medicine as an institution, and characterised
these technologies as promoting a dependence on doctors who para-
doxically seemed unconcerned about follow-up research to assess the
long-term effects of their ‘treatment’. The papers from the conference
were ultimately collected into two volumes, with discussion of assisted
conception technologies making about one-third the total. In their
introduction to Vol I, the editors wrote that the conference was not
aiming for closure, but rather sought to open a discussion foreground-
ing women’s views across the traditionally drawn lines of expertise
which separated scientists and clinicians from health care workers,
patients, policymakers and the interested general public (Holmes et al.
1980, x–xi). Use of the term ‘closure’ suggests that the preface may have
been written to negotiate the expectations of both readers and the fund-
ing body, who may have been expecting echoes of the conference on
recombinant DNA research which had taken place in Asilomar,
California, just a few years prior, at which scientists had agreed a set of
guiding principles to end a brief, self-imposed moratorium on their
research (Berg 2008). The structure of the conference did follow a simi-
lar ‘crisis’ model, in which the members of a particular field are called
together to review the state of research with the purpose of producing a
statement which will close debate or outline a programme of action on
a key issue. However, the Amherst conference was not called by
 Gathering Resistance 39

practitioners of the science (who had, at any rate, hardly imposed a

moratorium on their own work), nor by those with the power to create
or change science policy, and in fact had not been intended to do more
than reframe the issues to a women-centred view. This did not necessar-
ily mean a negative response; some of the women at the conference
argued strongly on behalf of IVF and prenatal diagnosis, citing their
professional and/or embodied experience and often highlighting ways
in which these could produce personal conflict. The transcripts of the
discussions which conclude each section suggest, in fact, both that the
editors placed great importance upon these more informal exchanges,
and that the aim of the conference had been increasing knowledge
rather than achieving consensus (see Culpepper’s 1981 summary in Vol
II for an overview of the conference as a whole). However, because the
funding body was a public institution which did have the power to
influence policy, the Amherst organisers decided to utilise the ‘surge of
participant activism’ (Holmes et al. 1981, 311) engendered by the con-
ference to pass a set of policy recommendations to be fed back to the
funders. Despite the more liberatory consciousness evident in the sub-
missions by Raymond, Corea and many others who sought ways that
women might take back some measure of control, the recommenda-
tions followed a more egalitarian mode of thinking, advocating the
inclusion of women on relevant boards and other publicly funded deci-
sion-making bodies, a widening of the definition of ‘expert witness’ to
include infertile people, and the creation of fora to bring lay, academic,
activist and professional women together to determine models and pro-
grammes of research into human reproduction. While Lublin (1998),
in her overview of FINRRAGE, seems to consider the Amherst confer-
ence as the beginning of the network, this is not the origin story told by
the women themselves. However, it was indeed a key point along the
way, as it first brought together some of the people who would eventu-
ally help found the network a few years later. Although the Amherst
conference itself did not have the political force to generate sustained
action, it did begin to create connections among ‘like-minded’6 women
who had similar concerns about where the technologies might be going,
and who were now beginning to draw their knowledge together.
40 2 Emergence

Test-Tube Women

Unlike Hanmer, Raymond and Corea, Renate Klein had not begun to
research reproduction prior to becoming active around it. Originally
trained as a neurobiologist in Switzerland, Klein had taken a postgraduate
diploma in development studies in the late 1970s, and had gone on to
teach science in Paraguay, where she grew disillusioned with her colleagues
and with the relevance of science to her students. Finding herself eventu-
ally drawn towards feminism, she went to Berkeley to do a BA (Honours)
in women’s studies, and by the early 1980s, had moved to London, where
she was researching ‘the hopes and dreams’ of the field for her PhD.7
During this time, she co-edited Theories of Women’s Studies (Bowles and
Klein 1983), a formative collection on the methodologies of the emerging
discipline, and was asked to join the editorial board of Women’s Studies
International Forum (WSIF), where Dale Spender was Editor. In her rec-
ollection, it was through these connections that she was given the idea to
edit a book on NRT rather than having the idea herself:

I was there at a meeting at Dale Spender’s house and somebody – I can’t

think of who – said to me what do you think of a test tube baby and I said
I don’t know, I mean I barely knew that Louise Brown had been born in 78.
Now we’re talking 1981…and she looked at me and said you’re a biologist,
you should do a book on that subject….so I wrote to Shelley [Minden,
whom she had known in Berkeley] and said would you be interested in
doing something and she said yes, yes… let’s ask Rita Arditti if she wants
to do it with us… And really the point of all this is that at the beginning
when we sent out the call for papers for Test-Tube Women none of us really
had much of a position. Apart from maybe knowing when I had been a
scientist how tunnel-visioned scientists were and how they really wouldn’t
let any other explanation come and intrude into their ultimate aims.8

Klein’s story underlines the general feeling among feminists at the time
that NRT was a subject for experts, not ordinary women. Like Becky
Holmes, who had organised the Amherst conference, Klein, Minden and
Arditti were all trained as biologists and had experienced the culture of
laboratory science first-hand, which had demanded modes of thinking
 Gathering Resistance 41

and practice that they eventually came to see as problematic. Arditti was
now a member of Science for the People, a left-wing organisation of sci-
entists and engineers protesting the misuse of science, along with Harvard
biologist Ruth Hubbard, who had given a paper arguing strongly against
IVF at Amherst (Hubbard 1981); both were part of the small community
of feminist academics in the Boston area who were interested in the issue.
Being in England, Hanmer had not heard about the Amherst conference
until afterward, but had subsequently been invited to Massachusetts by
Holmes, where she had met Raymond and Corea. All were now specifi-
cally contacted by Klein and colleagues and asked to submit chapters for
the book.9
Klein and Minden also put out a general call for papers in 1982,10
which was sent to international feminist newsletters as well as academic
publications. Like the Amherst conference, Test-Tube Women: What Future
for Motherhood? (Arditti et al. 1984) ultimately covered a very wide range
of reproductive subjects, from contraception, abortion and infant mortal-
ity, to amniocentesis, disability, pregnancy and IVF, and drew upon vari-
ous forms of knowledge from personal experience to empirical research to
theoretical ethics. The contributors, although mainly academic, also
included a teenaged reproductive rights activist, midwives, health work-
ers, journalists and creative writers, and were drawn from the US, Britain,
Australia, New Zealand, India and Germany. Klein herself locates the
formation of her own resistant stance as a kind of radicalisation through
knowledge, wholly rooted in the process of editing the book:

…basically every paper showed us some other aspect, some other prob-
lem…There were so many different aspects of it in that book that by the
time we had finished the book we were all three totally opposed to it. But
I think it’s important to point out that we didn’t just come to it knowing
fully, you know, we didn’t have a fully-fledged analysis or even a theoretical
position when we started.11

Published in 1984, Test-Tube Women seems to have attracted the atten-

tion of a surprisingly wide readership, also suggesting that NRT’s chal-
lenge to normative social and legal conceptions of parenthood was
profound enough, and had attracted enough public attention, that those
42 2 Emergence

who were not necessarily feminists would pick up the text. Bernard
Dixon, at that time the editor of New Scientist, said the book should be
read by Steptoe and Edwards themselves.12 Reviewed by a male paediatri-
cian and his geneticist wife in the American Journal of Human Genetics
(Hecht and Hecht 1986), it was considered an ‘unorthodox’ work written
to ‘incite activism’, but the reviewers do not necessarily seem to consider
this a shortcoming as they understand its intended audience to be ordi-
nary women. Rather, the review concludes by comparing the book to the
famed statement from the Gettysburg address—‘of the women, by the
women and for the women’, concluding that ‘reproductive genetics is
ammunition in the rifles of the insurgents’ (ibid., 264)—although it is
difficult to discern if the authors considered themselves to be on the side
of the union or the rebels. Likewise, a review in Sociology of Health and
Illness (McKay 1985) notes that while the perspective may be ‘intense’
(ibid., 276), the information therein has not been available to the layper-
son, and for this alone it should be read. What is most interesting about
these reviews is that while they all point out the activist language, none
challenge the accuracy of the information, although presumably the
reviewers had the expertise to do so if needed.
In feminist circles, however, the book provoked a much more polarised
response. While some praised it, The Women’s Review of Books argued that
Test-Tube Women as a collection had failed to analyse ‘women’s assertion
of autonomy and “choice” through the use of these technologies’ (Fine
and Asch 1985, 8). The conclusion was that there was ‘too much rhetoric
and polemicism about exploitation, with women cast as victims’ (ibid.,
9). However, while Fine’s and Asch’s objections appear to reflect a classic
liberal versus radical argument, it should be noted that radical feminists
were not necessarily against IVF (Firestone was a radical feminist, after
all). More than a matter of ‘liberal’ versus ‘radical’, what instead can be
seen is a fundamental axis of difference in the way that technology itself
was perceived, whether it was understood as an expression of the domi-
nant ideology of the society in which it is developed and used (and there-
fore always an instrument of control which would reinforce that position),
or whether technology was in and of itself neutral, but open to abuse
(Steinberg 1997). These diametrically opposed analyses—one, that a
woman was taking control of her life by undergoing IVF, and the other
 Gathering Resistance 43

that IVF in fact requires her to surrender control of her body and her life
to science for an extended and indefinite period of time (Raymond
1984)—would remain a central point of tension in the feminist response
to NRT.

Britain: First Steps

Although the UK government was initially reluctant to take any kind of

action (Gunning and English 1993, 27), in 1982 the Department of
Health and Social Security finally appointed a committee headed by
Mary Warnock, a moral philosopher and Mistress of Girton College,
Oxford, to examine the ethical implications of IVF and embryo research
and make recommendations to guide subsequent legislation. At this time,
there was still very little dialogue about NRT amongst feminists in
Britain, either in their own publications or in the mainstream press, but
the imminent delivery of the Warnock report was seen as an opportunity
to invigorate a feminist debate. At the end of March 1984, the Women’s
Reproductive Rights Campaign (WRRC) in Leeds organised a two-day
women-only conference complete with crèche and disco, for which
Hanmer and Klein were asked to organise the workshop programme.13
These were structured as a teach-in, preparing women to understand the
report so that they could consider ways to resist the recommendations.
Most of the first day was taken up with small group discussions attempt-
ing to demystify the technologies. The women received a packet of docu-
ments at registration, which included a lengthy overview of the
technologies supplied by the Department of Health and Social Security
(DHSS) to the Warnock Committee, which was relatively jargon-free,
and therefore accessible to the general reader, and another by Liz Frazer
and Debbie Cameron outlining radical perspectives, which included a
critique of both Firestone’s position and the ‘brothel model’ argument
developed by Andrea Dworkin, in which she suggested women could one
day be housed together as breeders in much the same way as they already
were for prostitution.14 Also included in the information packet were two
submissions to the Committee, one from the radical grass-roots organisa-
tion Rights of Women, and the other from Women in Medicine. Both
44 2 Emergence

organisations argued that sex selection was undesirable as most couples

would choose boys as first or only children, that it was ‘unrealistic to
assert that infertile women have a real choice in entering IVF programmes’
and that it was an unethical diversion of women’s health services.15
The second day was devoted to ‘radical feminist perspectives’ on the
effect of the technologies on women as a group and possible modes of
action.16 Hanmer and Klein each led a workshop; Hanmer’s outline for
hers reads like a plan for covert action more than a research project,
including trying to get an advance copy of the report, trying to gain
access to the upcoming third World In Vitro conference in Finland, and
sending a woman to Bourn Hall asking for sex selection to find out the
response.17 Although none of these suggestions were likely to be taken
up, what is of note is that they are geared towards the kind of actions an
activist, not an academic, might take—informal (and somewhat subver-
sive) ways of generating knowledge which any woman could use. The
conference documents also asserted the claim that by virtue of being
women, ‘we are all experts’, playing down Hanmer’s and Klein’s academic
credentials in favour of stressing that formal education was not necessary
to understand what was at stake. While it might not be possible to directly
challenge male control over the technologies themselves, they argued,
this did not mean that women could not take some control over the
debate:

Most [of these] are high technology and out of easy control by women. The
male ‘experts’ of science and technology also manipulate public under-
standing with easy unchallenged access to the media and they dominate
the so-called debate on ethics…the aim is to explore the implications for
ALL women, be they fertile or infertile, with special attention to the
women the establishment will try to silence: Disabled women, Black
women and Lesbians, so that we can begin to think about what we want
and what we can do.18

In keeping with the stress at the workshops on what any woman could
do, in their written response to Warnock the organisers described them-
selves as ‘a group of feminist doctors, scientists, researchers, students,
mothers, midwives, healthcare and social workers’.19 This careful descrip-
 Gathering Resistance 45

tion of the various participants can be seen as an attempt to advertise the

different forms of expertise women could exhibit—professional, medi-
cal, embodied, lay—in order to promote the claim that these were not
issues beyond the grasp of ordinary women, yet still using the qualifica-
tions of some to confer credibility on the whole so that their objections
would not simply be dismissed as an irrational, hysterical, ignorant
response. Reviewing the conference for WSIF,20 Klein and her colleague
Christine Zmroczek acknowledged the intellectual diversity of the
women present in Leeds (while noting that black women were under-
represented), and urged more discussion in feminist settings using a
women-centred frame of reference to uncover the real motivations of the
‘experts’. In addition to knowledge building, they too put forward the
possibility of radical direct action: ‘infiltrate relevant governmental
offices, leak information…[sic] destroy data and human experimentation
material; be subversive, think originally and creatively’.21 But they also
suggested more mundane strategies such as drafting a response to the
Warnock report as a short-term action, and the building of a network
within which women could discuss the issues brought up by IVF, includ-
ing the social pressure towards motherhood and discrimination against
unmarried women and lesbians in the way the technologies were likely
to be regulated and used.
However, this attitude of resistance was not unanimous amongst self-
identified radical feminists. The WRRC, under whose name the confer-
ence had been organised, was generally supportive of IVF and altruistic
(but not commercial) surrogacy, and had expressed a strongly egalitarian
consciousness, concluding that it was ‘unfair that biology should decide
who has children’ and that infertile people had ‘as much right to have
children’ as those who did not need help (see Henry 1984, 16). In their
conference report for the relatively new radical magazine Trouble and
Strife, Hanmer and fellow organiser Elizabeth Powell-Jones (1984,
45) concluded that:

[w]e did not think it was necessary to have a complete consensus of opin-
ion, a ‘feminist line’, but we did agree about how to approach the issues.
There is a need for more information and discussion. We agreed that there
is a need for action. We agreed that we reject the underlying philosophy
46 2 Emergence

upon which the medical profession, and we think the Warnock Inquiry, are
basing their recommendations for practice. We can therefore work together
to demand increased control by women over all reproductive technologies,
both old and new. We agreed there is a need to present an alternative view
to the general public and to widen the discussion within the movement.
There is a particular need for a network of women to monitor develop-
ments and more opportunities to come together to consciousness raise
around these issues.

These emerging feminist voices were still quite far from the locus of
fertility experts, right-to-life movements, religious authorities and social
conservatives who at this point dominated the discussion in the British
public sphere (see Mulkay 1997, 12–15). The underlying philosophy of
the Report—that science should be able to progress—had led to the con-
clusion that embryo experimentation was necessary in order to perfect
the technology and could be allowed up to 14 days (Warnock 1985),
which the HEW had also recommended. However, the initial response to
this from both the general public and members of Parliament (MPs) was
more negative than the scientists had expected, and even the Committee
members were divided (Challoner 1999, 68). While the Australian scien-
tists would adopt a largely adversarial position to regulation, frequently
threatening to leave the country (Hepburn 1992), the British scientists
instead formed a lobbying group, PROGRESS, and successfully took
control of the debate in Parliament (for an excellent discussion of this
process, see Mulkay 1997), beginning by establishing their own Voluntary
Licensing Authority in March 1985, and circulating a code of practice
which was intended to restore confidence that the clinics could regulate
themselves (Gunning and English 1993, 47–49). It would take six years,
including several failed attempts by MPs to introduce private members’
bills designed to make the human embryo a legal person (and not coinci-
dentally make abortion illegal), but the Warnock recommendations
eventually would become legislation, creating the Human Fertility and
Embryology Authority (HFEA) in 1990 as the first national regulatory
body in the world.
Overall, the concept of science as a privileged institution separate from
the rest of society was reinforced in these deliberations through the
 Gathering Resistance 47

scientists’ insistence that governance should be discussed in the civic

sphere, while research continued in the protected sphere of knowledge.
In Australia, however, the feminist project had taken a much different
route, and the competitive drama between the country’s leading IVF sci-
entists had been much more publicly evident. Here, at least one feminist
voice was already very much in the middle of the debate.

Australia: From the Inside Out

While the English team had been simply a scientist and a gynaecologist,
the much larger Australian IVF team which began in 1971 was a collabo-
ration between clinicians from the University of Melbourne who were
working on ovarian stimulation at Royal Women’s Hospital (RWH) and
scientists from Monash University working on a procedure for IVF at
Queen Victoria Medical Center (QVMC). According to their biogra-
pher, the Australian team was ‘devastated’ after hearing of Louise Brown,
and ‘more or less ceased to function during the latter half of 1978’
(Kannegiesser 1988, 71–72). While Steptoe and Edwards had published
each step of their work throughout the 1970s, they now refused to pub-
lish the protocols used for these last patients, drawing accusations of
excessive secrecy from others in the field, whose inability to duplicate the
procedure led to speculation that the British team did not actually know
why their protocol, which had used Lesley Brown’s own natural cycle for
egg retrieval, had worked (Kannegiesser 1988). Professor Carl Wood, the
Monash scientist who was head of the project, eventually decided to split
the lead scientists and make them compete to speed up results (Cohen
et al. 2005). The immediate effect was that the two teams stopped sharing
information, exacerbating already-existing personal antagonisms (Lopata
2010). There was concern from RWH that the QVMC team might
‘unjustly’ (Kannegiesser 1988, 44) get the credit for a child born from an
egg they had collected; however, when the first Australian IVF child,
Candice Reed, was finally born in June 1980, all the publicity actually
went to RWH (see, e.g. Ballantyne 1980). This generated ‘considerable
hard feelings’ among the QVMC team (Kannegiesser 1988, 75), made
worse when the RWH team published the details of the pregnancy
48 2 Emergence

without mentioning the Monash/QVMC team (Lopata et  al. 1980).

Wood and Trounson retaliated with a stepped-up programme of publica-
tion based on considerable experimentation with drugs to induce super-
ovulation and increase control over the woman’s menstrual cycle, and
with the numbers of embryos replaced (see Trounson et al. 1981 for an
example). Monash would eventually claim the first IVF twins (1981),
first donor egg birth (1983), first frozen embryo birth (1984), and 12 of
the first 15 babies in the world (Monash IVF 2012). Given the atmo-
sphere of antagonistic competition amongst the Australian specialists, it
is probably not a matter of chance that the world’s first IVF triplets
(1983) and quadruplets (1984) were also born in Australia (at Flinders in
South Australia and RWH, respectively).
Of all the women in FINRRAGE, the Australian social psychologist
Robyn Rowland probably came closest to inhabiting the position of
‘insider’ in the development of IVF.  In 1982, she had returned to
Melbourne from New Zealand, where she had been teaching women’s
studies and researching the experiences of couples who were child-free by
choice (Rowland 1982) and contacted Carl Wood asking for permission
to do research with couples on IVF. Wood handed the request off to Prof.
John Leeton, now director at QVMC for artificial insemination by donor
(AID), who explained that there were not very many people on IVF and
suggested she research couples using AID instead.22 By this point, AID in
humans had been practised in Australia for approximately 10  years
(Gould 1986), but—as in other countries—was not publicly discussed;
Rowland herself was not aware the process had ever been used outside the
cattle industry.
Rowland eventually agreed, and for the next two years carried out a
series of interviews with the public and with couples and medics involved
with AID in Melbourne, the results of which she presented at medical
conferences and eventually published in Clinical Reproduction and
Fertility, the journal of the Fertility Society of Australia (Rowland and
Ruffin 1983). Rowland found herself unsettled when some of her inter-
views revealed wrong sperm delivery, single donors for whole ethnic com-
munities, and a disturbing amount of secrecy overall. Suggesting a study
of sperm donors’ attitudes to secrecy, she was told by the AID medics that
they were medical students specifically selected because they had no
 Gathering Resistance 49

interest in the offspring, and would not want to talk to them about it 20
years later. Instead, she found the men were from a variety of occupa-
tions, that more than half would not mind meeting their offspring once
they turned 18, and that their main concern about retaining anonymity
was that they not become financially or legally liable for any children
conceived, which was indeed possible under existing Victorian law should
their identity become known (Rowland 1983). The reasons the legal and
medical professions had given for maintaining secrecy, in particular that
it was in the child’s best interest not to know they were AID-conceived,
she argued, were not only based on false information, but were causing
psychological harm to all parties (Rowland 1985b). She began speaking
at adoption conferences and in the media, calling for records to be prop-
erly maintained, and for AID offspring to be included in the movement
to open records for adoptees.23
During this period, she also suggested to Wood that an ethics commit-
tee be set up to monitor applications to do research with IVF clients.24
Two meetings took place, at the second of which the doctors began talk-
ing about a new technique, lavage, which consisted of inseminating a
fertile woman to conceive, then flushing the embryo from her uterus and
transferring it to the uterus of the intended mother—in effect, a form of
egg donation which would not require retrieval of the egg. Doctors were
already experimenting with the process in California, where 29 attempts
had yielded 12 retrievals, although one ‘donating’ woman had been left
with an ectopic pregnancy and another with a pregnancy which miscar-
ried (Bustillo et al. 1984). As Rowland tells it:

I said, ‘There’s a bit of a problem with this, like what if you flush it and you
push it right up into the fallopian tubes, or what if it’s damaged on the way,
and then you’re going to put it in another woman? There seems to me to be
huge moral issues here.’ And there was this terrible silence. It felt like min-
utes, it was probably about thirty seconds of dead silence. And then they
went on like I hadn’t spoken. And I thought, oh I’m out of here.25

By this time, Rowland had also been subject to increasing attempts by

one of the QVMC doctors to control her AID research, demanding per-
sonal approval of all her projects, and inclusion of the names of all the
50 2 Emergence

doctors on the team on any further publications.26 As her research was

funded through Deakin University, where she was employed, and not
through Monash, she was able to refuse, but the lavage incident appears
to have been the last straw in a situation that was already difficult.
Rowland resigned from the ethics committee early in 1984; however, her
resignation did not become news until May, when she gave an interview
to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio station while in
Canberra presenting a paper which called for a moratorium on IVF at the
annual Australia–New Zealand Association for the Advancement of
Science (ANZAAS) Congress.27 The next morning, the Sydney Morning
Herald proclaimed: ‘Doctor wants in-vitro babies program halted’
(Morgan 1984), while in Melbourne the headline read ‘IVF researcher
quits over “reprehensible techniques”’ (West 1984). Although the articles
do go on to identify Rowland as a social psychologist and not a medical
doctor, these and other headlines in papers around the country over the
next week gave the impression that a member of the IVF research team
had resigned on moral grounds. This impression was bolstered by another
raft of articles the following week claiming that Wood and Rowland had
publicly clashed over issues of secrecy at another prominent conference
on bioethics (Whitlock 1984).
While the intensity of the publicity around Rowland’s resignation may
have been unexpected, it was part of (and perhaps helped produce) a
larger wave of unease amongst the Australian public as the rapidity of
technological innovation in reproduction was becoming more apparent.
In the Australian state of Victoria, where Monash IVF was located, a
Committee to Consider the Social, Ethical and Legal Issues Arising from
In Vitro Fertilisation had been convened in the spring of 1982, under the
direction of the respected jurist Louis Waller. The Waller committee very
rapidly produced an Interim Report (Victoria 1982) assessing the state of
the technologies, a second on the use of donor gametes (Victoria 1983),
and a final report on surrogacy, frozen embryos and embryo research
(Victoria 1984). The three reports would become the basis of the
Infertility (Medical Procedures) Act 1984, the first legislation regulating
IVF programmes in the world, albeit on a state rather than national level.
The committee itself would become the permanent Victoria Standing
Review and Advisory Committee on Infertility (VSRACI). Similar
 Gathering Resistance 51

state-level committees were convened in South Australia, Western

Australia, Queensland and Tasmania during the period between 1984
and 1986. On a Commonwealth level, Rowland herself had already been
invited to join the Law Reform Committee of the Family Law Council,
chaired by a Senior Judge of the Family Court of Australia, Austin Asche,
which was tasked with considering uniform national legislation to clarify
the legal status of children born through assisted conception (Family Law
Council 1985).
Attending the same 1984 bioethics conference at which Rowland had
clashed with Wood, Louis Waller had been on a panel with the chairman
of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) ethics
committee. Both had expressed worry that the honour system through
which the NHMRC monitored the ethics of medical research was not
adequate to stem the IVF researchers’ constant desire to keep going ‘one
step further’ (Elias 1984). As had been the case in Britain when the exis-
tence of foetal research became news in the early 1970s, the Australian
public’s present outrage appeared to be fuelled not just by the practice of
lavage, or even IVF itself, but by fear of what else might be happening in
the secrecy of the lab. Between the lines of the publicity around Rowland’s
resignation was a growing public and professional unease that each new
permutation of the technology—twins, triplets, quadruplets, egg and
embryo donation, frozen embryos, commercial surrogacy, ‘treatments’
for male infertility involving otherwise fertile women, and now embryo
flushing—had been presented by the doctors as a wonderful fait accom-
pli. There was effectively no oversight to what IVF clinics were doing.
Nor was the legal system prepared for the complexities of third-party
procreation.
This unease was bolstered by the concurrent coverage of two embryos
left frozen at Monash after an unsuccessful attempt at IVF in 1982, by an
American–Chilean couple who were subsequently killed in a plane crash
bringing home an adopted child from Argentina. In June 1984, probate
lawyers discovered the existence of the embryos, sparking off a worldwide
debate about whether they had any kind of legal status. Cast as ‘orphans’
(Sydney Morning Herald 1984; Veitch 1984; Schauble 1984), for weeks
the papers discussed whether the embryos could inherit the Rios’ consid-
erable fortune, or be put up for adoption, as a Victorian right-to-life
52 2 Emergence

group demanded. For those who suggested they should be destroyed, as

the couple had left no will, who would actually have the responsibility for
making that decision? Interviewed in Melbourne,28 Rowland was quoted
as saying this was the result of the QMVC team ‘willfully pursuing the
technological race’ without community dialogue (Elias and McIntosh
1984), while the prominent Catholic bioethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filippini
criticised the Waller committee, which had been created, to consider
exactly these questions, for ‘shelving the issue’ of cryopreservation in its
first two reports, despite a number of submissions indicating such prob-
lems were likely.
The agreement of three well-known men who were presumed to
have significant expertise—the head of the medical council, the judge
tasked with evaluating IVF practice and a cleric whose opinion was
often sought by non-religious parties because of his familiarity with
medical ethics—did much to bolster the credibility of Rowland’s argu-
ment that IVF was developing too fast and with too little attention
paid to its social and legal implications. In addition, the IVF doctors’
attempts to defend themselves by attacking her ‘insider’ credentials
appear to have backfired badly:

In those days, none of these hospitals had PR sections, so the doctors were
on their own, and hopeless at it. And so they start saying things like Robyn
Rowland never worked at this hospital and we don’t know who she is, and
it was ridiculous. When I was saying well of course we used to meet in
Carl’s office.29

Rowland had already gained a public profile of being vehemently

opposed to secrecy because of her work on AID and her connection to
the adoption movement, which positioned her as trustworthy and open.
Rather than detracting from her credibility, the QVMC doctors’ initial
denials of her presence at the embryo flushing meeting looked similar to
strategies used by the powerful to suppress whistle-blowers (see Martin
1998), and opened up their other claims to question. Instead of making
it look as if Rowland was lying, the doctors’ denials instead reinforced the
public’s impression that she was part of their team, even if not working
directly with the technologies herself. Her assertions were therefore
 Gathering Resistance 53

considered to be reliable evidence as to what the doctors were really doing

behind closed doors and if anything, her media profile increased:

I think the first reason was I was seen to be an insider coming out. And in
some ways, I was. So, that always has quite a bit of credibility, you know,
‘she was there, she knows, you know they said that’ sort of thing…The other
reason was [the Australian public] loved debates and controversy, and I
wasn’t afraid of the doctors…And that was at a time when people still
bowed to doctors, so there had never been public debates about anything
like this with medical science or doctors.30

Rebecca Albury (1999, 16), a feminist also active around NRT in

Australia at the time, credits the publicity generated by Rowland’s resig-
nation with opening the space for a variety of feminist voices to be heard.
However, Albury also suggests this was greatly helped by the political
structure of Australia, particularly the very successful ‘femocrat’ strategy
adopted by the women’s movement, which meant that even radical femi-
nists could be elected as Senators:

As a political scientist my explanation for this is twofold: one is [Australia

is] small in population. And secondly, we’re overgoverned. So there’s actu-
ally always someone to send your submission to. And your friends are in
the bureaucracy. And elected to office… there’s a sense of if you want to be
in it, you can…[D]uring the 80s that Labor government was very big on
consultation and I don’t mean in a hollow sense. But in which people could
say things, and it got a part of the story…it makes things appear here that
seemed to be invisible or on the margins elsewhere.31

In addition to making certain issues more visible, the wider context of

committees convening in different parts of Australia does seem to have
created space for feminist arguments to be heard in a way they never were
in Britain. The NHMRC, for example, eventually rejected embryo flush-
ing in strong and surprisingly women-centred terms. Even with a wom-
an’s consent, the procedure was deemed to be using her ‘as a means to an
end in a way which may be thought to violate something central to her
personality…to ask a woman to be an embryo donor is not simply to put
her at risk of injury; it is to do her wrong’ (NHMRC 1985, 5). This was
54 2 Emergence

quite the opposite of the situation for feminists in Britain, where the
women’s liberation movement had deliberately carved out a sphere quite
separate from the state, and where the more traditional structures of gov-
ernment were far less permeable, leaving them largely outside the
Parliamentary processes resulting from the Warnock report and still
struggling to be heard.

‘Death of the Female?’: The Groningen Panel

In the interval between her resignation and the media furore, Rowland
had also taken part in a workshop panel on NRT which she had organ-
ised with Becky Holmes from Amherst. Submitted for the Second
International Interdisciplinary Congress of Women (familiarly known as
Women’s Worlds) in Groningen, the Netherlands, the panel called upon
the informal network which had begun to coalesce around the women
involved in Test-Tube Women, to which Rowland had also contributed a
chapter the year before (Rowland 1984).32 Women’s Worlds is still one of
the largest global feminist conferences and provides a meeting ground for
academics, policymakers and activists; it was, therefore, considered to be
a major opportunity to bring attention to NRT in an international
sphere.
Social psychologist Roberta Steinbacher (another contributor to Test-
Tube Women who had also been at Amherst) and Madhu Kishwar, a
founder of the influential Indian journal Manushi, were added to the
panel alongside the biologist Betty Hoskins, who had been Holmes’ co-
editor for the Amherst conference proceedings, Gena Corea and Renate
Klein. Janis Raymond was the discussant, and Jalna Hanmer, who had
given a paper at another panel, was present in the audience. Titled ‘Death
of the Female?’, the workshop focused on drawing connections between
scientists aiming to perfect new methods of preselecting a baby’s sex
(Rowland 1985a; Holmes and Hoskins 1985; Steinbacher 1985), reports
of increasing sex ratio imbalances in India since the introduction of
amniocentesis (Kishwar 1985) and other aspects of NRT. It was perhaps
Corea’s paper on The Reproductive Brothel that was the most disturbing to
the audience, relying as it did on accounts of a recent case in which a
 ‘Death of the Female?’: The Groningen Panel 55

brain dead woman’s body had been kept ‘alive’ for nine weeks, until her
foetus was viable enough to extract via caesarean section. Drawing on
Andrea Dworkin’s (1983 in Corea 1985) linkage of the brothel model for
prostitution with the already extensive use of IVF in the cattle industry,
Corea surmised that once embryo transfer was perfected, there was every
possibility that Third World women—alive or dead—could be gathered
into carefully supervised groups to factory-produce white babies for the
West (1985, 42–45).
After years of individual efforts to engage other feminists, it was at last
the right audience and the right speakers at the right time. Recounting
the story 25 years later, Rowland and Klein still remember it as an electric
experience:

Klein: There were all these people, it was like 500 people, and
they were clapping—
Rowland: (overlapping) It was in front of all these people and they
were absolutely going berserk. And we thought ooh.
(surprised) But it was like they, they were really dis-
turbed by it.
Klein: But it was Jalna who said, I think from memory at least,
it was Jalna who said we need a network, and everybody
said yes, YES!33

The excitement of the moment is apparent even in the transcribed text.

In a broadly international context, such as Groningen, where the panel
attendees would have been self-selected for their interest in the topic, this
would mean that at least some of the women were also desperately seek-
ing others who felt that this issue, which feminists in their home coun-
tries seemed to consider low priority, was actually of huge concern. For
Rowland in particular, who was having such a difficult time at home, it
was a transformative relief:

I think I thought at the time, oh thank god for this, because there I was
having these terrible interviews with doctors on the TV. And feeling like,
god I was on my own. And then suddenly there was this huge number of
people, women who had the same kind of feeling, and opinion.34
56 2 Emergence

As envisioned in Hanmer’s concluding chapter to Test-Tube Women,

which finishes on an urgent plea for discussion, research and organisation
(Hanmer 1984), the panel ended with the workshop drafting a statement
for immediate circulation, announcing the foundation of the Feminist
International Network on New Reproductive Technologies (FINNRET).
A Swedish academic, Martha Ullerstam, offered to help coordinate an
international ‘emergency’ conference devoted to NRT, to be held at her
university in Lund as soon as possible. In the meantime, women could
focus on collecting information pertinent to their country, which Klein
offered to collate and redistribute. A sign-up was circulated, which pro-
vided the first list of national contacts.35 Rowland and Raymond agreed
to serve as contacts for Australia and North America, respectively, while
Ullerstam became the contact for continental Europe and a fourth
woman was briefly the contact for Britain, a role which Hanmer eventu-
ally assumed. Various other women agreed to set up networks for
information-sharing in their own countries by coordinating with already-
existing reproductive rights and women’s health groups as well as inter-
ested individuals. By the end of 1984, there was an Australian network
with representatives in several states, and a smaller one in Britain with
London and northern branches, as well as a scattering of women across
the US, Europe and South America, representing approximately 20
countries in all. The panel presentations, including Hanmer’s, were col-
lected and published as Man-Made Women (Corea et  al. 1985), which
ends with a call for women to develop a ‘revolutionary consciousness’
around NRT as they had on other issues during the initial struggles of the
WLM (Hanmer 1985).
In the narratives told even by the women who had not been there, but
particularly for the five who were what I will call the ‘original’ group
(Corea, Hanmer, Klein, Raymond and Rowland), the decision to form a
knowledge-sharing network at Women’s Worlds is always a powerful, joy-
ful, spontaneous event. However, by tracing the personal and intellectual
links backwards, one can see that this was an event eight years in the mak-
ing, from Hanmer’s and Rose’s 1976 paper, to Amherst in 1979, through
Test-Tube Women, to Leeds earlier in 1984, and presumably including a
number of other less visible efforts by the various women involved along
the way. This is not necessarily to call into question the impression of
 ‘Death of the Female?’: The Groningen Panel 57

spontaneity for those attending—having made the suggestion in other

settings with apparently very little response, there would certainly have
been a great power in feeling it finally come together. This was also the
first time the suggestion of collective action had been put forward in a
broadly international context, which may have provided the crucial dif-
ference in emphasising that NRT was not just an issue for white women
in richer countries. As Raymond put it:

[Amherst] brought together disparate people from different disciplines,

activists in the women’s health movement, women who had experiences
some of the ravages of the technologies. So that was really my first intro-
duction to it on a kind of communal level, collective level … But
[Groningen] was where I met all of the women who subsequently became
FINRRAGE. And right off, I mean we hit it off very well, we speculated
about what necessity it was, but about how wonderful it would be also if
we could organise something internationally. I mean you couldn’t do this
without doing what was going on internationally because the centres of
this technology were international … and we also wanted it to be non-
Western based, that is in terms of the technologies themselves, because we
realised that there really were two disparate ways in which reproductive
technologies developed … one was the emphasis on fertility in the western
world, and the other is the emphasis on infertility in the non-Western
world.36

In a subsequent review of the Second Women’s Worlds, which was

critical of the lack of diversity in general, it is notable that the ‘Death of
the Female?’ panel was singled out as an example of creating a diverse
analysis even with limited physical representation of non-European
women (Bunch et al. 1985). Moreover, the emphasis on developing an
analysis of the connections between these two forms of control over
reproduction would come to be one of the defining qualities of the net-
work as it expanded.
Thus, the context within which the five ‘original’ women came together,
and the ways in which their knowledge interests, friendship networks,
and professional and intellectual trajectories eventually coalesced, was
key to the emergence of the network. Women’s Worlds provided the cru-
cial opportunity for a group of feminists to present their concerns to a
58 2 Emergence

critical mass of engaged, relatively educated, ‘like-minded’ women from

around the world, gathered in one place, in a setting that encouraged
action, during a time when growing media attention to the ethical, social
and legal complications of NRT made the issue harder to ignore or to
marginalise as of interest only to a few infertile women. However, while
the ‘Death of the Female?’ panel had shown that there were feminists
around the world with an interest in learning more about the broad range
of technologies which came under the heading of NRT, it was not yet
clear how to develop collective knowledge around such highly technical
subjects. At this point, the strategy identified was mainly monitoring the
scientific research and making that information available to other women
to act upon in their home countries. However, it was becoming clear that
not only could women find the answers to their own questions, but that
there might be an audience ready to listen.

Notes
1. The second IVF child in the world was actually a girl born in India, just
after Louise Brown. Technically, she was the world’s first in vitro concep-
tion, but the embryo had been frozen for three months to aid implanta-
tion (which makes her also the first child born from a frozen embryo).
Unfortunately, the Indian Council of Medical Research refused to
believe Subhas Mukerjee, the doctor who had carried out the work, and
he committed suicide in frustration. In 1997, one of the scientists
responsible for the birth of India’s first ‘official’ IVF child examined the
doctor’s notebooks and confirmed the claim (Kumar 1997; see also
Bharadwaj 2016).
2. The Ethics Committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and
Gynaecologists, for example, did devote a section to the follow-up of
children, which they unanimously considered important; however, no
mention is made of their mothers (RCOG 1983).
3. Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interviewed in Leeds on 19 February 2010 (inter-
view 2 of 3).
4. Janice Raymond, USA, interviewed by phone on 21 July 2011.
5. Gena Corea, USA, interviewed via Skype on 14 April 2017.
6. Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interviewed in Leeds on 19 February 2010 (inter-
view 2 of 3).
 Notes 59

7. Renate Klein, Britain/Australia, interviewed in Melbourne on 23 June

2010 (interview 1 of 3).
8. Klein, ibid.
9. Letter, Klein to Hanmer, 19 November 1982: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01.
10. Call for Papers for Test-Tube Women: FAN/JH/FIN 04/01/01.
11. Klein, interview 1.
12. From Dixon’s review for its sibling publication, New Society, taken from
the back cover of the 1985 reprint of Test-Tube Women by Pandora Press,
London.
13. Conference schedule, Leeds, 1984: FAN/JH/FIN 01/02/01.
14. DHSS Document A; Radical Perspectives on Reproductive Technology:
FAN/JH/FIN 01/01/01.
15. Women in Medicine (draft) submission, page 6: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01/01.
On the marked-up draft in the FINRRAGE archive, Hanmer notes that
this is the only feminist evidence from a medical group supplied to
Warnock.
16. Conference agenda, Leeds, March 24–5, 1984: FAN/JH/FIN 01/02/01.
17. Workshop outline, Hanmer: FAN/JH/FIN 01/02/01.
18. Conference abstract, Leeds, 1984: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01/01, emphasis in
text.
19. Draft response to the Warnock Report, author unknown (presumably
Klein), 1984: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01/01.
20. Renate Klein and Christine Zmroczek, ‘Reflections on the Conference
on the New Reproductive Technologies, Leeds, UK March 24–25’,
Feminist Forum. Undated, c. April 1984. FAN/JH/FIN 01/01/01. At
this time, the Feminist Forum was a typed newsletter circulated to those
subscribed to WSIF. It later became an official part of the journal.
21. Reflections, ibid., 4.
22. Robyn Rowland, Australia, interviewed in Geelong on 24 June 2010
(interview 1 of 3). Rowland also tells this and the following stories in an
unpublished manuscript, Confronting the Experts, an excerpt of which
she gave to the author during the interview process.
23. Rowland, interviewed in Geelong on 25 June 2010 (interview 3 of 3).
24. Rowland, Confronting the Experts (excerpt). In the manuscript, Rowland
describes herself as chair of this committee, which included herself, Carl
Wood, John Leeton, John McBain and Alan Trounson; in other words,
the leading IVF researchers in Melbourne at the time.
25. Rowland, interview 1.
26. Ibid.
60 2 Emergence

27. The annual ANZAAS Congress, like all large conferences in Australia, is
widely reported in the general press.
28. Articles by the same authors also appeared on pages 4, 11, and 13 of this
day’s newspaper.
29. Rowland, interview 1.
30. Ibid.
31. Rebecca Albury, Australia, interviewed in Wollongong on 20 September
2010. Albury is referring to Rosemary Crowley and Olive Zakharov, two
radical feminist senators who were appointed to the Senate Select
Committee on the Human Embryo Experimentation Bill in 1985.
Crowley and Zakharov wrote a dissenting report which argued that the
only appropriate decision makers for the disposition of embryos were
‘the gamete donors and/or the woman into whose uterus an embryo will
be received’ (Australia 1985, 91). They were not, however, opposed to
embryo experimentation, and in fact rejected the Bill on the grounds
that it would hinder rather than enable research.
32. Originally funded with seed money from the Ford Foundation and the
National Science Foundation, the first Congress was held in Israel in
1979, and drew enough attention to launch the country’s women’s stud-
ies programmes, at Hebrew University and the University of Haifa (Safir
2005). The second Congress which took place five years later in
Groningen drew approximately 800 participants; it has since been held
in a different country every three years.
33. Robyn Rowland and Renate Klein, interviewed together in Geelong, 24
June 2010 (interview 2 of 3 for both).
34. Rowland, interview 2.
35. As Hanmer explains it, the ‘e’ was added to make it easier to pronounce.
36. Janice Raymond, USA, interviewed by phone on 21 July 2011.

References
Albury, R.  M. (1999). The Politics of Reproduction: Beyond the Slogans. St
Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Arditti, R., Klein, R., & Minden, S. (Eds.). (1984). Test-Tube Women: What
Future for Motherhood? London: Pandora Press.
Australia (1985).  Human Embryo Experimentation in Australia.  Senate Select
Committee on the Human Embryo Experimentation Bill 1985. Canberra:
Australian Government Publishing Service.
 References 61

Ballantyne, T. (1980, June 24). Day One in the Life of Candice. Sydney Morning
Herald, p. 1.
Berer, M. (1986). Breeding Conspiracies: Feminism and the New Reproductive
Technologies. Trouble and Strife, 9, 29–35.
Berg, P. (2008). Meetings That Changed the World: Asilomar 1975: DNA
Modification Secured. Nature, 455(7211), 290–291.
Bharadwaj, A. (2016). The Indian IVF Saga: A Contested History. Reproductive
Biomedicine & Society Online, 2, 54–61.
Biggers, J.  D. (2012). IVF and Embryo Transfer: Historical Origin and
Development. Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 25(2), 118–127.
Birke, L., Himmelweit, S., & Vines, G. (1990). Tomorrow’s Child: Reproductive
Technologies in the 90s. London: Virago.
Bowles, G., & Klein, R. (1983). Theories of Women’s Studies. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Brown, S. (2005). ESHRE: The First 21 Years. Brussels: European Society of
Human Reproduction and Embryology. https://www.eshre.eu/~/media/
sitecore-files/About-ESHRE/The-first-21-years.pdf. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Bunch, C., Carrillo, R., & Guinée, I. (1985). Feminist Perspectives Report of
the Feminist Perspectives Working Group to the Closing Plenary. Women’s
Studies International Forum, 8(4), 243–247.
Bustillo, M., Buster, J.  E., Cohen, S.  W., Thorneycroft, I.  H., Simon, J.  A.,
Boyers, S. P., Marshall, J. R., Seed, R. W., Louw, J. A., & Seed, R. G. (1984).
Nonsurgical Ovum Transfer as a Treatment in Infertile Women. JAMA: The
Journal of the American Medical Association, 251(9), 1171–1173.
Challoner, J.  (1999). The Baby Makers: The History of Artificial Conception.
London: Macmillan.
Cohen, J., Trounson, A., Dawson, K., Jones, H., Hazekamp, J., Nygren, K.-G.,
& Hamberger, L. (2005). The Early Days of IVF Outside the UK. Human
Reproduction Update, 11(5), 439–460.
Corea, G. (1977). The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Mistreats
Women. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Corea, G. (1985). The Reproductive Brothel. In G. Corea, R. Klein, J. Hanmer,
H.  B. Holmes, B.  Hoskins, M.  Kishwar, J.  Raymond, R.  Rowland, &
R. Steinbacher (Eds.), Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies
Affect Women (pp. 38–51). London: Hutchinson.
Corea, G., Klein, R., Hanmer, J., Holmes, H. B., Hoskins, B., Kishwar, M.,
Raymond, J., Rowland, R., & Steinbacher, R. (Eds.). (1985). Man-Made
Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women. London:
Hutchinson.
62 2 Emergence

Culpepper, E.  I. (1981). Uncovering Patriarchal Agendas and Exploring

Women-Oriented Values. In H.  B. Holmes, B.  B. Hoskins, & M.  Gross
(Eds.), The Custom-Made Child?: Women-Centered Perspectives (pp. 301–310).
Clifton: Humana Press.
Dworkin, A. (1983). Right-Wing Women. New York: Perigee Books.
Edwards, R. G. (1974). Fertilization of Human Eggs In Vitro: Morals, Ethics
and the Law. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 49(1), 3–26.
Edwards, R. G. (2001). The Bumpy Road Human In Vitro Fertilization. Nature
Medicine, 7, 1091–1094.
Edwards, R.  G. (2005). An Introduction to Bourn Hall: The Biomedical
Background of Bourn Hall Clinic. In P. Brinsden (Ed.), Textbook of In Vitro
Fertilization and Assisted Reproduction: The Bourne Hall Guide to Clinical and
Laboratory Practice (pp. 1–8). Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.
Edwards, R., & Steptoe, P. (1980). A Matter of Life: The Sensational Story of the
World’s First Test-Tube Baby. London: Sphere Books Ltd.
Edwards, R.  G., Donahue, R.  P., Baramki, T.  A., & Jones, H.  W. J.  (1966).
Preliminary Attempts to Fertilize Human Oocytes Matured In Vitro.
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 96(2), 192–200.
Elias, D. (1984, May 26). Waller Joins In Vitro Ethics Calls. The Age (Melbourne).
Elias, D., & McIntosh, P. (1984, June 19). Committee Was Warned of Embryo
Danger. The Age (Melbourne), p. 1.
Family Law Council. (1985). Creating Children: A Uniform Approach to the Law
and Practice of Reproductive Technology in Australia. Canberra: Australian
Government Publishing Service.
Fine, M., & Asch, A. (1985). Review: Who Owns the Womb? The Women’s
Review of Books, 2(8), 8–10.
Firestone, S. (1979). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
London: The Women’s Press.
Fleming, A. T. (1980, July 20). New Frontiers in Conception. The New York
Times, sec. 6, p. 14.
Franklin, B. A. (1980, January 9). U.S. Clinic for Conception Outside Body
Approved. The New York Times, A14–A14.
Gardner, R. L., & Johnson, M. H. (2011). Bob Edwards and the First Decade
of Reproductive Biomedicine Online. Reproductive Biomedicine Online,
22(2), 106–124.
Gould, H. (1986). The Bioethics of Playing God – An Interview with Robyn
Rowland. National Outlook, pp. 9–11.
Grossman, E. (1971, May). The Obsolescent Mother. The Atlantic Monthly, 227,
39–50. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1971/05/the-obsoles-
cent-mother/4201/. Accessed 22 Feb 2017.
 References 63

Gunning, J., & English, V. (1993). Human In Vitro Fertilization: A Case Study
in the Regulation of Medical Innovation. Aldershot: Dartmouth.
Hanmer, J. (1984). A Womb of One’s Own. In R. Arditti, R. Klein, & S. Minden
(Eds.), Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? (pp.  438–448).
London: Pandora Press.
Hanmer, J.  (1985). Transforming Consciousness: Women and the New
Reproductive Technologies. In G. Corea, R. Klein, J. Hanmer, H. B. Holmes,
B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond, R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher (Eds.),
Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women
(pp. 88–109). London: Hutchinson.
Hanmer, J., & Allen, P. (1980). Reproductive Engineering: The Final Solution?
In L. Birke, W. Faulkner, S. Best, D. Janson-Smith, & K. Overfield (Eds.),
Alice Through the Microscope: The Power of Science Over Women’s Lives
(pp. 208–292). London: Virago.
Hanmer, J., Powell-Jones, E., & Leonard, D. (1984). Who’s Holding the Test-
Tube? Trouble and Strife, 3, 44–53.
Hecht, F., & Hecht, B. (1986). Book Reviews: Test Tube Women. American
Journal of Human Genetics, 38(2), 263–264.
Henry, A. (1984). Fuckless Babies. Spare Rib, 144(July), 15–16.
Hepburn, L. (1992). Ova-Dose?: Australian Women and the New Reproductive
Technology. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
HEW. (1979). Report and Conclusions: HEW Support of Research Involving
Human In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer, May 4. Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare. Bethesda: Ethics Advisory Board. http://
www.archive.org/details/hewsupportofrese02unit. Accessed 5 July 2017.
Holmes, H.  B., & Hoskins, B. (1985). Prenatal and Preconception Sex
Choice Technologies: A Path to Femicide? In G. Corea, R. Klein, J. Hanmer,
H.  B. Holmes, B.  Hoskins, M.  Kishwar, J.  Raymond, R.  Rowland, &
R. Steinbacher (Eds.), Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies
Affect Women (pp. 15–29). London: Hutchinson.
Holmes, H.  B., Hoskins, B.  B., & Gross, M. (1980). Birth Control and
Controlling Birth: Women-Centered Perspectives. Clifton: Humana Press.
Holmes, H. B., Hoskins, B. B., & Gross, M. (1981). The Custom-Made Child?:
Women-Centered Perspectives. Clifton: Humana Press.
Hubbard, R. (1981). The Case against In Vitro Fertilization and Implantation.
In H.  B. Holmes, B.  B. Hoskins, & M.  Gross (Eds.), The Custom-Made
Child?: Women-Centered Perspectives (pp. 259–262). Clifton: Humana Press.
Johnson, M. (2011). Robert Edwards: The Path to IVF. Reproductive Biomedicine
Online, 23, 245–262.
64 2 Emergence

Johnson, M.  H., Franklin, S.  B., Cottingham, M., & Hopwood, N. (2010).
Why the Medical Research Council Refused Robert Edwards and Patrick
Steptoe Support for Research on Human Conception in 1971. Human
Reproduction, 25(9), 2157–2174.
Jones, H. (1991). In the Beginning There Was Bob. Human Reproduction, 6(1),
5–7.
Jones, H. W. (1995). The Norfolk Experience: How IVF Came to the United
States. In A. T. Alberda, R. A. Gan, & H. M. Vemer (Eds.), Pioneers in In
Vitro Fertilization: The Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Oss, the Netherlands,
November 5, 1993 (pp. 25–43). New York: Parthenon.
Jones, H. W. (2003). IVF: Past and Future. Reproductive Biomedicine Online,
6(3), 375–381.
Kannegiesser, H. (1988). Conception in the Test Tube: The IVF Story, How
Australia Leads the World. South Melbourne: Macmillan.
Keenan, M. (1971, September 15). Growing Point: Choose Your Child’s Sex.
The Times (London), p. 16.
Kishwar, M. (1985). The Continuing Deficit of Women in India and the Impact
of Amniocentesis. In G.  Corea, R.  Klein, J.  Hanmer, H.  B. Holmes,
B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond, R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher (Eds.),
Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women
(pp. 30–37). London: Hutchinson.
Kumar, T.  C. (1997). Architect of India’s First Test Tube Baby: Dr Subhas
Mukerji. Current Science, 72(7), 526–531.
Lasch, C. (1972). Birth, Death and Technology: The Limits of Cultural Laissez-
Faire. The Hastings Center Report, 2(3), 1–4.
Leeton, J. (2004). The Early History of IVF in Australia and Its Contribution to
the World (1970–1990). Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics
and Gynaecology, 44(6), 495–501.
Lopata, A. (2010, June 23). 30th Anniversary of IVF in Australia. https://www.
mivf.com.au/new-developments-in-ivf/latest-news-on-ivf/30th-anniversary-
ivf-australia. Accessed 27 Sep 2017.
Lopata, A., Johnston, I.  W., Hoult, I.  J., & Speirs, A.  I. (1980). Pregnancy
Following Intrauterine Implantation of an Embryo Obtained by In Vitro
Fertilization of a Preovulatory Egg. Fertility and Sterility, 33(2), 117–120.
Lublin, N. (1998). Pandora’s Box: Feminism Confronts Reproductive Technology.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Machin, L. (2008). The Social and Ethical Context of Embryo Donation. PhD,
School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds.
 References 65

Martin, C. (1986, June 24). A New and Fertile Field for Investment. Bulletin
(Australia), pp. 6–10.
Martin, B. (1998). Strategies for Dissenting Scientists. Journal of Scientific
Exploration, 12(4), 605–616.
McBain, J. (2010). Children of a Fertile Revolution: IVF. Melbourne IVF. http://
www.mivf.com.au/ivf-latest-news/children-of-a-fertile-revolution-ivf.aspx.
Accessed 6 Jul 2017.
McKay, S. (1985). Test-Tube Women, What Future for Motherhood? (Book
Review). Sociology of Health & Illness, 7(2), 275–276.
McNeill, S. (1978). Reproduction Workshop. Scarlet Women, 6(7), 3–6.
Monash IVF. (2012). History of IVF. Monash IVF Australia. https://monashivf.
com/about-us/history. Accessed 22 Jan 2017.
Morgan, S. (1984, May 18). Doctor Wants In-Vitro Babies Program Halted.
Sydney Morning Herald, p. 3.
Mulkay, M. J. (1997). The Embryo Research Debate: Science and the Politics of
Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
NHMRC. (1985). Embryo Donation by Uterine Flushing: Interim Report on
Ethical Considerations. National Health and Medical Research Council.
Canberra: Australian Government Pub. Service.
National Right to Life. (2012). How the Nation’s Largest and Most Effective Pro-
Life Group Began. http://nrlc.org/archive/Factsheets/FS01_NRLCToday.pdf.
Accessed 20 Mar 2017.
Pfeffer, N. (1985). Not So New Technologies. Trouble and Strife, 5, 46–50.
Postgate, J. (1995). Eugenics Returns. Biologist, 42(2), 96.
Raymond, J.  (1984). Feminist Ethics, Ecology and Vision. In R.  Arditti,
R. Klein, & S. Minden (Eds.), Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?
(pp. 427–437). London: Pandora Press.
Rose, H., & Hanmer, J. (1976). Women’s Liberation, Reproduction, and the
Technological Fix. In D. L. Barker & S. Allen (Eds.), Sexual Divisions and
Society: Process and Change (pp. 199–223). London: Tavistock.
Rowland, R. (1982). An Exploratory Study of the Childfree Lifestyle. The
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 18(1), 17–30.
Rowland, R. (1983). Attitudes and Opinions of Donors on an Artificial
Insemination by Donor (Aid) Programme. Clinical Reproduction and Fertility,
2(4), 249–259.
Rowland, R. (1984). Reproductive Technologies: The Final Solution to the
Woman Question? In R. Arditti, R. Klein, & S. Minden (Eds.), Test-Tube
Women: What Future for Motherhood? (pp. 356–369). London: Pandora Press.
66 2 Emergence

Rowland, R. (1985a). Motherhood, Patriarchal Power, Alienation and the Issue

of ‘Choice’ in Sex Preselection. In G.  Corea, R.  Klein, J.  Hanmer, H.  B.
Holmes, B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond, R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher
(Eds.), Man-Made Women: How Reproductive Technologies Affect Women
(pp. 74–87). London: Hutchinson.
Rowland, R. (1985b). The Social and Psychological Consequences of Secrecy in
Artificial Insemination by Donor (AID) Programmes. Social Science &
Medicine, 21(4), 391–396.
Rowland, R., & Ruffin, C. (1983). Community Attitudes to Artificial
Insemination by Husband or Donor, In Vitro Fertilization, and Adoption.
Clinical Reproduction and Fertility, 2(3), 195–206.
RCOG. (1983). Report of the RCOG Ethics Committee on In Vitro Fertilization
and Embryo Replacement or Transfer. Royal College of Obstetricians and
Gynaecologists. London: Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
Safir, M. (2005). How It All Began: The Founding of Women’s Worlds Congress
and International Network. Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress on
Women, Seoul, Korea, June 19th-24th.
Schauble, J.  (1984, June 18). Dilemma over Orphaned Embryos. Sydney
Morning Herald, p. 3.
Steinbacher, R. (1985). Sex Choice: Survival and Sisterhood. In G.  Corea,
R. Klein, J. Hanmer, H. B. Holmes, B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond,
R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher (Eds.), Man-Made Women: How Reproductive
Technologies Affect Women (pp. 52–64). London: Hutchinson.
Steinberg, D.  L. (1997). Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Steptoe, P.  C. (1968). Laparoscopy and Ovulation. The Lancet, 292(7574),
913–913.
Steptoe, P. C., & Edwards, R. G. (1970). Laparoscopic Recovery of Preovulatory
Human Oocytes After Priming of Ovaries with Gonadotrophins. The Lancet,
295(7649), 683–689.
Steptoe, P.  C., Edwards, R.  G., & Purdy, J.  M. (1980). Clinical Aspects of
Pregnancies Established with Cleaving Embryos Grown In Vitro. BJOG: An
International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 87(9), 757–768.
Sydney Morning Herald. (1984, June 19). Orphan Embryos Face Uncertain
Legal Future. Sydney Morning Herald, p. 3.
The Economist. (1979, February 3). Test-Tube Babies: Doing What Comes
Naturally – Almost. The Economist, p. 88.
 References 67

The Times. (1971, March 5). Scientists Develop Baby Sex Tests. The Times
(London), p. 1.
Trounson, A.  O., Leeton, J.  F., Wood, C., Webb, J., & Wood, J.  (1981).
Pregnancies in Humans by Fertilization In Vitro and Embryo Transfer in the
Controlled Ovulatory Cycle. Science, 212(4495), 681–682.
Veitch, A. (1984, September 5). Orphan Embryos Adoption Plea by Doctor.
The Guardian, p. 6.
Victoria (Committee to Consider the Social, Ethical, Legal Issues Arising from
In Vitro Fertilization). (1982). Interim Report. Melbourne: Victorian
Government Printing Office.
Victoria (Committee to Consider the Social, Ethical, Legal Issues Arising from
In Vitro Fertilization). (1983). Report on Donor Gametes in IVF. Melbourne:
Victorian Government Printing Office.
Victoria (Committee to Consider the Social, Ethical and Legal Issues Arising
from In Vitro Fertilization). (1984). Report on the Disposition of Embryos
Produced by In Vitro Fertilization. Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing
Office.
Warnock, M. (1985). A Question of Life: The Warnock Report on Human
Fertilisation and Embryology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Watson, J. (1971, May). Moving Toward the Clonal Man. The Atlantic Monthly,
227. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1971/05/moving-toward-
the-clonal-man/5435/. Accessed 22 Feb 2016.
West, R. (1984, May 18). IVF Researcher Quits over ‘Reprehensible Techniques’.
The Age (Melbourne), pp. 1–2.
Whitlock, F. (1984, May 25). Test-Tube ‘Miracle Workers’ Attacked. The
Australian.
Wood, C., & Westmore, A. (1984). Test-Tube Conception. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall.
 3
Expansion

…the challenge in the whole thing was that we would be reading about
technologies that would be changing at the rate of knots…And we had to come
up with a feminist position on that because there had never been one before,
because the technology hadn’t been there. So, what is A Feminist Position on the
use of foetal tissue to generate eggs, do you know what I mean?
Robyn Rowland, Australia, interview 2

As discussed in the previous chapter, the period from the late 1970s to
the mid-1980s was a time of highly competitive experimentation in IVF,
where attempts to develop a new technological intervention were often
revealed only when the scientists claimed a successful birth. Despite its
still very limited success, by 1984 IVF had moved from the category of
bench science to experimental medical treatment, and was now becom-
ing commercialised through the development of private, for-profit clin-
ics. Children had been born in the UK, India, Australia, the United
States, Austria, France, Sweden, Germany and Canada (in that order),
although these were still painfully few compared to the numbers of
women enrolling on IVF programmes. In addition to the Warnock

© The Author(s) 2017 69

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_3
70 3 Expansion

Committee and those convened in Australia, ethics and oversight

committees had also been convened in Ontario, Canada, and on a
national level in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and France, all of
which included some form of public consultation.1 Research pro-
grammes aimed at improving egg retrieval and embryo implantation
rates through experimentation with different regimes of hormonal stim-
ulation continued. Originally intended to allow women with blocked
fallopian tubes to have their own biological child, the procedures now
included egg and embryo donation, freezing of embryos and processes to
address male infertility which required the fertile female partner to
undergo IVF in order to circumvent the need for AID. Experimentation
also included new tools and methods for recovery of oocytes, such as
inserting a needle through the vagina to be guided by abdominal ultra-
sound instead of laparoscopic surgery, changes to culture preparations
for embryo fertilisation and an increase in the numbers of embryos
implanted—ultimately resulting in the world’s first IVF quadruplets
being born, somewhat unsurprisingly, via Monash  IVF. Processes pre-
dicted in the early scientific papers, such as pregnancy by egg donation
and from frozen embryos had now resulted in healthy children. Partly
because of the increasing profile of technical solutions to infertility since
1978, genetic surrogacy had already begun to emerge in the United
States as a service arranged by lawyers and matching agencies.2 By 1980,
Noel Keane, an American lawyer in Michigan, was arranging contracts
for women to bear babies conceived via artificial insemination and hand
them over to the genetic fathers for $10,000 (Walz 1980), although he
would eventually be forced to relocate to Florida when the practice was
deemed baby-selling under Michigan law (Spar 2006, 76). Attempts to
perfect embryo transfer between women as a ‘safer’ form of surrogacy
(i.e. safer for the client as the carrying mother was thought less likely to
become attached to a child to which she was not related) and attempts
to perfect ways to verify the sex and health of the embryo before implan-
tation were well underway.
By this time there was also growing demand for clarity in the civil
sphere, throwing the most fundamental questions about the meaning of
life, humanity, family and the processes of scientific ‘progress’ into the
public arena, often along with the scientists themselves.3 Although all of
 FINNRET Begins: Women Say NO, Amsterdam 1984 71

the early specialists seem to have understood the need for public discus-
sion of the social, ethical and legal implications of in vitro conception in
order to position IVF as an ‘acceptable and desirable form of treatment
for infertility’ (Edwards and Steptoe 1983, 1268), they did not seem to
understand themselves as personally implicated in this debate through
their own research. Asked about the furore over embryo experimentation
in the United States, for example, Howard Jones answered, ‘I am basically
a biologist…When does the soul enter the embryo? For me, it is not a
problem’ (Cohen 1979). In the most benign interpretation, this sug-
gested it was a question which science simply could not answer; however,
it could also be interpreted to suggest that such questions were ultimately
irrelevant and should not stand in the way of the inevitable march of
scientific progress. During this time, there were almost no accounts from
the women who were undergoing IVF, except to celebrate some kind of
‘first’.
This was the context in which FINNRET emerged, one where right-
to-life and other conservative groups had already shaped the discussion
into a battle for the ‘sanctity of the human embryo’ on the one hand, and
the ‘plight of desperate couples’ on the other. In the latter framing, the
creation of human embryos thus became necessary both to fulfil the hope
of having children, and to undertake the research necessary to improve
IVF’s still rather dismal rates of success. However, for the most part the
women upon whose bodies the processes had to be carried out remained
outside the frame. The formation of FINNRET, it was hoped, would cre-
ate a new cognitive space for women around the world to begin working
together to raise consciousness around the idea that a ‘woman-centred’
perspective was a missing and vital part of the public debate.

FINNRET Begins: Women Say NO,

Amsterdam 1984
In addition to disseminating their own analysis, the fledgling organisation
which had been created at Groningen now needed to find other ‘like-
minded’ women, both to widen their knowledge base, and to build their
network. Perhaps the most important point FINNRET was trying to
72 3 Expansion

make was that NRT was not a purely individual issue, but would affect all
women in one way or another. The collection of papers from Groningen,
Man-Made Women, argued that the technologies were not just about con-
trol of women’s bodies and efforts to prevent girls from even being born,
but had classist and racist assumptions about who should be encouraged
to procreate at all (see, e.g. Holmes and Hoskins 1985). FINNRET
organisational documents of this period show a concern with the lack of
representation of black women at the Leeds conference, and a discussion
of strategies for reaching out to different groups, on the assumption that
these issues would be likely to affect poor and minority women more.4 It
was decided that FINNRET women should go to conferences, such as
the International Women and Health Meetings (IWHM), where Third
World women were more represented and listen to their concerns.
Whereas the first IWHM meetings had concentrated mainly on abortion
rights, the scope of these had now expanded and the fourth meeting,
billed as a Women’s International Tribunal and Meeting on Reproductive
Rights, was expected to also focus on forced sterilisation and other abuses
of contraceptive technologies in developing countries, as well as consider-
ing the structural conditions in which women lived.5 It was decided to
send a delegation of FINNRET affiliates, including Linda Wilkens and
Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta from the Netherlands, and Elizabeth Frazer from
Britain, to the Tribunal in Amsterdam, both to talk about NRT and to
gather information to report back to the group.6 An informal, unsigned
document attached to Frazer’s conference report communicates the same
sense of urgency at the NRT workshops as at the panel at Groningen:

Women who discussed this came from both ‘first’ and ‘third’ world coun-
tries. All of us felt that our knowledge of reproductive technology was
minimal but we were united in our fear of the long term consequences for
women … we think that hindsight will be of no value, and that now is the
time to address ourselves and our consciousness to the issue … there is a
need to get behind the ‘front’ propoganda [sic] … Our recommendation
therefore is that we demystify these issues, and demand and struggle for
access to the information we need.7

Most of the participants in Amsterdam were from the developing

world, and the report notes that they tended to see NRT as a Western
 FINNRET Begins: Women Say NO, Amsterdam 1984 73

problem which did not concern them as much as coercive population

control policies and the dumping and testing of contraceptives which
were not approved for use in the West. However, those who came to the
workshops did see a danger of poor women being ‘economically forced to
lease their wombs’, and suggested that the connections with population
control which had begun to emerge in the discussions needed to be taken
up and developed:

As is so often the case, what may appear to help first world women is
destroying those in the third world … The eugenics ideology underlying
this research is fundamentally racist … We feel that a campaign is necessary.
Various methods of gaining some control were discussed…Most impor-
tant, this has to be a popular issue with women, we must make it meaning-
ful to a wide audience in a creative way. Our proposal then is that we unite
for the power to know, to have access to knowledge and finally to decide.8

Both reports communicate an urgency not only about the lack of

knowledge, but the difficulty of getting any useful information at all.
Even with access to a university library and librarians to help find the
appropriate scientific papers, even if the women had the skills to read
and understand them, this would not necessarily answer the questions
they had, because the questions themselves were not of interest to the
(mostly) men doing the research. Formulating those questions would
be a necessary first step. Thus, the real importance of the FINNRET
workshops in Amsterdam was not so much that they brought the exis-
tence of the network to the attention of a new and more internation-
ally diverse group of feminist activists, but that they brought an
embodied perspective of population control to the attention of
FINNRET through the often harrowing stories told by women at the
meeting (see Laws 1985) which began to reveal more about how the
two issues were connected.
The meeting also brought FINNRET to the attention of the keynote
speaker, Farida Akhter, and vice versa. As the founder of Unnayan Bikalper
Nitinirdharoni Gobeshona (UBINIG), a Dhaka-based research organisa-
tion which aimed to provide an alternative to mainstream population pol-
icy,9 she and her colleagues were trying to gather empirical data about the
effects of population control which was robust enough to be persuasive,10
74 3 Expansion

but she also had the lived experience to help other women interpret her
data. As a child, Akhter had fought to study biological science in the hopes
of becoming a doctor and became one of four girls in an all-boys secondary
school, as there was no science teaching in the girls’ secondaries in Dhaka
at the time. However, once she reached medical school, she found that she
did not want to have to cut up cadavers and wound up taking an advanced
degree in economics instead. One of her first jobs after she finished was on
a research project examining women’s cooperatives, funded by the Canadian
government through the World Bank:

[W]e found that they were doing very good work, actually, in terms of the
co-operatives. The women were given opportunities and they were using
it…But from the donor’s point of view we found that when we were writ-
ing the report, and every time that we met the donors, they were consumed
with how many children did they have, did they take contraceptives …. it
was not enough for us to say that the women were doing quite good. It was
not enough for us to say that they were earning an income. It was not
enough for us to say that they were quite happy … So that was my first
understanding of the population policies.11

As with Klein’s story of how her resistance to NRT was formed through
editing the papers in Test Tube Women, Akhter relates this as her origin
story, her radicalisation-through-research experience. The narrow focus
of the donors made her suspect that whatever good might come of the
money made available for easing the economic conditions of the rural
poor, this was only a smokescreen to coerce women into ‘family planning’
programmes12; the research commissioned by the donors was never really
intended to help the women have better lives. In starting UBINIG earlier
that year, Akhter wanted to free herself from the population policy com-
munity, and engage only in projects that would really help the people
they were researching. Because they refused to take money from donors,
UBINIG was free to carry out their own ad hoc research as well as funded
projects, and to write about whatever they saw:

[My colleague] went for a research on conditions of slum women, and she
said you know I saw a woman, she showed me her arm, there were six cap-
sules underneath her skin. And she said that she got it in a family planning
 FINNRET Begins: Women Say NO, Amsterdam 1984 75

clinic. I said, oh we have to go back there! We didn’t know what Norplant

looked like, actually. So, we immediately went and talked to her and found
that there are ten other women in the same slum who were given [this] and
she didn’t know what it was, she only knew that it will help any family
planning. But she was not feeling well after taking that for the last three
months, she has breathing problems, she feels dizzy, she’s not happy with
it. That’s why she complained, look somebody put it here and I cannot take
it out, you know, what to do. So, we had an interview of all these ten
women. … And immediately I wrote a small, very small report on
Norplant…. I [wrote] what it does, and then what these women were feel-
ing. And then submitted it to the organisation who was doing [the distri-
bution], you know, women’s health conditions. They were furious, because
they were projecting its success.13

Akhter’s story illustrates a crucial question about what non-qualified

activists can contribute to formal knowledge production. Akhter sees
UBINIG as an activist organisation above all, and researchers are often
trained in-house to carry out projects which gather knowledge to address
problems the community raises. UBINIG was able to be the generative
source of empirical evidence because she was willing and able to make
contact with women who did have embodied knowledge. Moreover, it
was evidence which would be extremely difficult for others to produce,
not only because Norplant was new and women in the slums tended to
move around (so any delay meant they might have lost their primary
contact), but also because it would take a local to carry out and contextu-
alise the research.14 Akhter’s credibility was supported by both tacit and
explicit knowledge about being a woman in Bangladesh, and her growing
international reputation as an invited keynote speaker at important con-
ferences like IWHM. Her story also suggests that formal knowledge may
be created through informally published research if credibility can be
derived through quasi-academic structures such as large international
women’s conferences, where an invitation to give a keynote address con-
fers a level of epistemic authority on the speaker (as well as a citable
speech, even if informally printed), particularly if the data is then dis-
cussed by established scholars in their own publications. Within
FINRRAGE itself, although Akhter was not the only woman from the
Third World in the network even at this time, many of the European
76 3 Expansion

women I interviewed indicated that it was the strong stance against pop-
ulation policy she brought to the network at the very start which made a
significant change in their own conscienceness about the way in which the
entire issue of overpopulation was being framed, and their feeling that
contraceptive programmes were not necessarily designed to help promote
women’s control over their own lives, but rather to advance state and
donor interests.

Britain: The Embryo Wars

Although the Amsterdam meeting was covered in detail in the grassroots

radical newsletters and magazines (see Henry 1984; Laws 1985), in gen-
eral feminists in Britain were having much less success being heard in the
mainstream press than their Australian counterparts at this time. Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher’s family rhetoric was reinforcing traditional
ideas about motherhood being a woman’s greatest achievement at the
same time that her government was cutting many of the programmes,
such as nursery places and child benefit, upon which single working
mothers on low incomes relied (Segal 1983). This mixed message that
only certain kinds of mothers were desirable left British FINNRET with
little room to manoeuvre in a debate which positioned IVF doctors either
as heroes for making families (as long as the couple was married and pre-
sumably white) or as out of control and constituting a threat to tradi-
tional family life (Lewis and Cannell 1986).
In addition, a number of other issues were occupying the left-wing
press at this time, particularly Thatcher’s rollback of the welfare state, and
her protracted battle with striking mineworkers in the North. The strike
had unexpectedly opened enormous political opportunities for women
from the mining areas who had formed into a national organisation,
Women Against Pit Closures, in the spring of 1984. This became a focal
point for feminist support over the next year, despite the fact that most of
the miners’ wives insisted that they did not think of themselves as femi-
nists (Rowbotham and McCrindle 1986). Overall, competition with
other issues was seen as making it difficult to get the ‘message’ into the
hands of women who were in the political arena, and getting other
 FINNRET Begins: Women Say NO, Amsterdam 1984 77

grassroots feminists to accord a campaign against NRT the same level of

importance as fighting Thatcher’s policies:

[I]t’s really important what happened, to put it in terms of the date and
where feminism was at that point, in the early 80s. And it was still incred-
ibly difficult. We had no state support really for domestic violence, or any
other forms of violence against women. The issues around health, abortion
were being hard fought over. And health issues in a general sense. And
women’s studies was only just trying to begin to get a foothold … So there
was a whole myriad of different kinds of issues, [on] all of which we faced
really heavy opposition … I’m saying this to explain why we really couldn’t
do anything about Edwards and Steptoe.15

With the Warnock report now due to be released, there was a push
over the summer of 1984 to get the fledgling British FINNRET group
recognised, so that it would have some authority to publicly address the
issues alongside the more established organisations which had made sub-
missions to the committee, such as Women in Medicine, Rights of
Women, and the Women’s Reproductive Rights Campaign (all of whom
had also been represented at the Leeds conference in March). In addition
to announcing the formation of FINNRET to the Leeds participants and
scheduling meetings in Nottingham and London in June,16 the group
also issued a press release to the media offering themselves as analysts.17
Writing to the rest of the Lund conference committee (Corea, Hanmer,
Raymond and Rowland), Klein notes with some excitement:

Our move into action consisted in a letter sent out to about 30 journals/
newspapers …We’ve set up an answering machine message and are now
waiting (somewhat frightened!!) what will happen. We realise that people
want to talk with ‘authorities’ – now we have to get the message through
that we are all authorities even if we’re not Profs. and Drs. and theolo-
gians etc!!18

Less dramatic than Rowland’s resignation, which was happening at

about the same time,19 the announcement did not create an equivalent
response. However, this was unsurprising in light of all the other voices
already in the arena, particularly the very loud opposition of the Society
78 3 Expansion

for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC), an anti-abortion lobby-

ing group who were actively preparing MPs to fight the Warnock recom-
mendations when they were opened to Parliamentary debate. With a
Conservative government sympathetic to arguments about the sanctity of
family and human life, it was at this point expected that most of the
Warnock recommendations would be rejected on the grounds that IVF
created spare human embryos, the destruction of which for any purpose,
particularly experimentation, was immoral (Mulkay 1997, 17–18). As
the debates over the Warnock Report (1985) began in the House of
Commons in July 1984, there seemed to be little room for any criticism
of IVF based on arguments about handing control over who could
become a mother to doctors and politicians (a key issue for lesbians and
deliberately single mothers, as Warnock had now recommended that
DIY artificial insemination should become a criminal offence) or on the
basis that it constituted experimentation on women’s bodies (the report
was silent on this matter, as it was silent about the removal of eggs and
ovaries during unrelated gynaecological procedures).20 FINNRET had
the difficult task of trying to frame their objections to make visible their
concerns about women’s bodies being used in this way without appearing
to side with the anti-abortionists.21
In November 1984, the British group brought Gena Corea over from
the United States. Rowland was already at Exeter University on study
leave from Deakin in Melbourne, and with the encouragement of Pandora
Press, who had published Test Tube Women in June, the group was able to
put together a short speaking tour to drum up interest in FINNRET and
to widen awareness of the issues presented in the book.22 Klein, Hanmer,
Corea and Rowland spoke in Bradford (where Hanmer was now a
Lecturer in Social Work), Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Bristol,
Cambridge, Exeter and Canterbury. The tour lasted two weeks and fin-
ished with a meeting in London on 10–11 November. The meeting was
not necessarily a resounding success—Rowland describes the four surviv-
ing it ‘bruised and battered’,23 and Klein later reported that a group from
the Women’s Reproductive Rights Information Centre who were pro-
IVF had walked out in protest.24
In the same letter, Rowland also describes taking part in a YWCA
conference entitled A Child at Any Price?, which put her on a panel with
 FINNRET Begins: Women Say NO, Amsterdam 1984 79

Dr. David Davies, director of the Dartington North Devon NHS Trust
and a member of the Warnock Committee. Rowland reports that Davies
told her that women had been invited onto the Warnock committee (a
key complaint of the various women’s groups), but the feminists had all
refused because it was a government endeavour. Rowland admits to the
others that there might be some truth in that. She also adds that Davies
was not terribly responsive to the ideas put forth by FINNRET until
after her talk, at which point he asked her to send him everything they
had. Rowland felt that this was proof of the network’s claim that very
little about women’s actual experience of IVF had been discussed in the
Warnock committee’s internal deliberations, and that it had been a phil-
osophical exercise in utilitarianism focused on the embryo.25 However, it
also suggested that if they could develop their own authority vis-à-vis
other ‘experts’, there were some within the policy community who would
at least listen to what they had to say.
Rowland’s letter also indicates the considerable ambivalence with
which the technologies were being received at this time. Within the
strongly pro-family climate of Conservative politics, the British public
appears to have found ‘straightforward’ IVF, or the making of babies for
married couples who couldn’t conceive naturally, relatively unproblematic
(Gillon 1984, 16). This was encouraged by popular publications such as
Steptoe’s and Edward’s account of the work that led to the birth of Louise
Brown, which frequently referred to the ‘desperation’ of their patients
(Edwards and Steptoe 1980). What mainly caught and held the public’s
attention was the controversy around the use and disposition of the ‘sur-
plus’ embryos which were the inevitable by-product of widespread adop-
tion of the superovulation techniques which had driven Monash’s early
string of successes (see Wood et al. 1981). For most feminists concerned
with the issue, superovulation was a much more important site of ambiva-
lence and discussion than questions about experimentation on surplus
embryos, which many feminists wanted to avoid as any argument for the
sanctity of the embryo would provide support for arguments against
abortion. Superovulation, however, directly impacted women’s bodies,
allowing IVF doctors to control the reproductive cycle by using hormones
first to create an artificial menopause, then intensely stimulate the ovaries
to produce more mature eggs than normal, after which ovulation could
80 3 Expansion

be induced, allowing the doctor to retrieve the eggs at a specified time

(Templeton et  al. 1984). This required women to submit to a difficult
regime of technological surveillance and control, but was considered far
‘easier’ for the doctors than following the natural menstrual cycle (see
Edwards and Steptoe 1980, also Edwards 1981, 253). Because the whole
procedure carried significant risk—particularly of injury during egg
retrieval and of ovarian hyperstimulation, a condition which could lead to
infertility and, in rare cases, death—doctors argued that reducing the
need to repeat egg collection for every IVF cycle was beneficial to the
patient, a claim difficult to refute once it became technologically possible
to freeze any excess embryos. However, the extent to which doctors were
experimenting with higher and higher doses of hormones to produce
increasing numbers of eggs could be discerned through a close reading of
scientific papers outlining some other form of success (see, e.g. Edwards
and Steptoe 1983; Cohen et al. 1985).26
British FINNRET did eventually succeed in getting a briefing meeting
with Labour MP Jo Richardson, the Opposition Spokesperson on wom-
en’s rights, hoping that she would ‘ask awkward questions in the House
of Commons’.27 In Parliament, Richardson criticised the Warnock com-
mittee for not including a lay representative from a women’s group, or
inviting any of the wide range of women’s groups who had submitted
written evidence to give oral testimony,28 but her position on IVF was
essentially supportive. This seems to have discouraged any further
attempts by the British group to directly influence Parliamentary politics,
which they saw as unlikely to succeed due to the disenfranchised place of
women in the British political structure.29 Instead, they chose to continue
the women’s liberation movement model, concentrating on consciousness-
raising activities within the civil sphere.

The ‘Emergency’ Conference: FINNRET

Becomes FINRRAGE
By this time, the mailing list for FINNRET had 542 women in 10 coun-
tries, who were sent an invitation seeking women who were working on
reproductive technology in community health or women’s health, research,
 The ‘Emergency’ Conference: FINNRET Becomes FINRRAGE 81

counselling or government policy to come to Sweden for the Women’s

‘Emergency’ Conference on the New Reproductive Technologies in July
1985. As part of the application, the women were asked to indicate why
they wanted to participate, what their own experience with the technolo-
gies was, and what issues they wanted to address.30 The responses show a
very broad base of expertise, including the Commissioner of the Victorian
Law Reform Committee and approximately a dozen geneticists, with par-
ticipants coming from as far away as Japan, New Zealand, Israel, India,
Bangladesh, Canada, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil. Although there were
already plans to publish the proceedings, in the numerous memos
exchanged between the original group, there was definite resistance to any
suggestion from the publisher that they should choose women who were
already well known as it would ‘subvert our purposes totally if we went
around looking for speakers on the basis of their fame’.31 Rather, the desire
was for a ‘rich diversity…to tackle the complex topic of the new reproduc-
tive technologies from multifaceted perspectives’.32
The ‘Emergency’ conference took place from 3 to 8 July, in Vallinge,
just outside of Lund, Sweden. The geographical diversity of the partici-
pants reinforced the impression from Groningen that feminist interest in
NRT was both global and growing. Unlike the experiences reflected in
the conference reports from Amsterdam and Groningen, where interna-
tionalism seemed to have been experienced as divisive (Henry 1984;
Bunch et al. 1985), all of the women I interviewed who had been at the
‘Emergency’ Conference spoke of this as being the most powerful and
transformative element. As Lene Koch from Denmark put it:

… it must have been about 100 women speaking in all languages. And
everybody was helping everybody, translating to understand each other, it
was an amazing way of feeling community and sisterhood, it was wonder-
ful…And in my career it was a turning point. Because at that time I decided
to do my research and my PhD in that field. And that was really very much
determined by the fact that I had met all these very articulate and clever,
clever women. And realised that this was, yeah, I wouldn’t hesitate to say a
revolutionary technology.33

Klein, in her opening remarks, had asked for the women to be patient,
to ‘respect each other’s different grasp of English’ and to ‘be very careful
82 3 Expansion

with each other, listen and respect our points of views and our personal
involvements’—a plea which the women seem to have taken to heart.34
The structure of the conference was intense; the women were all housed
together for five days, beginning each day with breakfast at 8  am and
continuing until 10  pm each night, and although meal breaks of two
hours for lunch and dinner had been scheduled, these were often utilised
for impromptu sessions. On a tape made to share the event with
Rowland,35 who had become ill and been forced to return to Australia
shortly before the conference, Corea and Klein noted that so many
women now wanted to speak that they were constantly adding more to
the sessions and overrunning. In addition to papers, country reports were
presented from Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Denmark,
England, France, Ireland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway,
Switzerland, Sweden, the United States and West Germany.36 These cov-
ered the state of technological development, impending regulation, pub-
lic discussion and feminist response. Taken together, they painted a
surprisingly detailed picture of the state of reproductive technology
worldwide in 1985 and the cultural differences which governed the prac-
tice of IVF, despite the fact that many of the women who presented the
reports did not normally carry out research, and most did not speak
English as a first language. In Israel, for example, where survival as a
nation was constructed as precarious and voluntary childlessness was not
a social option, informal interviews with IVF doctors carried out by a
member of an Israeli infertility self-help group showed that all the doctors
were willing to violate the regulation against treating unmarried Jewish
women as long as they agreed to donate eggs to other Jewish patients.37 In
Japan, where the discourse of eugenics was so strong that disabled women
were routinely sterilized and prenatal diagnosis was almost impossible to
resist, public condemnation of IVF had become so intense that meetings
of the Japanese Fertility Society had to be held under armed guard.38
Prenatal/preimplantation diagnosis was also emphasised by the women
from Germany, who opposed it as bringing back unwanted eugenics from
the Nazi era, but also noted that disabled women already felt margin-
alised from the women’s movement and needed more support.39 Analysing
such cultural differences became a central part of the network’s knowl-
edge strategy in terms of understanding how social, political and eco-
 The ‘Emergency’ Conference: FINNRET Becomes FINRRAGE 83

nomic context shaped different uses and regulatory concerns when the
same technologies were deployed in different parts of the world.
The country reports also revealed how some of the ‘star’ practitioners
were using the media to export the technologies to other countries. Ana
Regina Gomes dos Reis, a medical doctor working in the Brazilian
Ministry of Health, used newspaper accounts to document the adoption
of IVF in Brazil (Reis 1987), where Alan Trounson had just spent several
weeks teaching Brazilian scientists the ‘Monash method’ as part of a tele-
vised event in which patients recruited from all over the country were
sequestered with TV crews on two floors of a prominent Sao Paulo hos-
pital while they underwent IVF. It was during this so-called ‘obstetrics
carnavale’ that one of the women suffered respiratory arrest during ova
retrieval and subsequently died,40 leading news accounts to speculate that
the attending physicians may have been concentrating more closely on
the monitor showing the famous Australian doctor about to pierce the
patient’s follicles than on her anaesthetic levels. Three of the women with
science backgrounds also gave papers explaining genetic engineering
technologies (Bradish 1987; Bullard 1987; Minden 1987), bringing this
up as an important topic because of the potential military applications of
embryo research.
The ‘Emergency’ Conference also provided a platform to share formal
empirical research with like-minded women, a support system which
would become particularly important for the postgraduate students in
the network, many of whom were doing groundbreaking research.
Christine Crowe, for example, had done an honours thesis in which she
had interviewed 16 women about their infertility.41 Now a PhD student
at the University of New South Wales in Australia, she had come all the
way to Sweden looking for a more receptive audience for her work:

I knew that it was original material and I wanted to get it out there … So
I gave a paper at the conference, and I think that was, I’m pretty sure that
was the first empirical work in this area … I felt an accord about the cause,
because I could see this is Pandora’s box that that’s been opened.42

Crowe’s research is possibly the first scholarly account of why women

chose to undergo IVF. One of her findings was that the women in her
84 3 Expansion

study were actually less concerned with biological relationship than their
husbands (who generally preferred to have no children rather than adopt)
but felt an intense social pressure to use IVF to create a child related to
both parents for his sake, and to keep trying even when there was clearly
no chance for success (Crowe 1987).43 Deborah Lynn Steinberg, carrying
out interviews with IVF practitioners, looked at the not-particularly-
subtle ways clinics discriminated against lesbians and disabled women
who were seeking AID (Steinberg 1987). Gena Corea and a colleague,
Susan Ince, who worked for the Medical Tribune, an industry weekly
newsletter, reported on their survey of success rate reporting practices
amongst the United States’ 108 IVF clinics (Corea and Ince 1987).44 Of
the 54 clinics who did answer the survey, half had never succeeded in
producing a child, although some of these claimed ‘success rates’ as high
as 25%. The study confirmed the widely held suspicion that clinics were
reporting chemical, ectopic and spontaneously aborted clinical pregnan-
cies as part of their ‘success’ rates (ibid., 135),45 as well as revealing numer-
ous other ways in which IVF statistics were being manipulated. One
doctor from a well-respected programme even admitted that ‘percentage
of live births per laparoscopy’, the statistic feminists defined as the only
one which really mattered to a woman trying to have a child, was the one
calculation no one ever used because it would be so bad for the team’s
morale (ibid., 134).46 Because it had been published in a medical newslet-
ter, and not the feminist press, the Tribune version of the article was
considered authoritative outside the network, and was subsequently
quoted in law journals as evidence of the low actual success rates of IVF,
even after the figures were long out of date (Dickey 1986; Fabricant
1990; Harvard Law Review Association 1989). This was exactly the kind
of result the network was seeking, positioning their questions as worthy
of investigation, and warranting their evidence as valid.
Widely discussed during the strategy sessions which took up most of
the last day was the need for a coordinated programme of research in
areas which were being systematically ignored: investigating women’s rea-
sons for rejecting as well as accepting IVF, causes and prevalence of female
infertility worldwide, and exploring the possibilities of initiating self-help
infertility counselling groups in women’s health centres and promoting
‘soft’ technologies such as diet, herbs and yoga to help women conceive
 The ‘Emergency’ Conference: FINNRET Becomes FINRRAGE 85

(Jansen 1987). To strengthen this new evidence base, and to create an

opportunity for warranting their knowledge through academic citation,
the entire conference proceedings were gathered into a publication edited
by two of the women from the British group, Patricia Spallone and
Deborah Lynn Steinberg, and published as Made to Order: The Myth of
Reproductive and Genetic Progress (Spallone and Steinberg 1987b).
The most notable outcome of the Sweden conference, however, was
the incorporation of genetic engineering and a firm stance of resistance
into the network’s name. As one of the main advocates of the change,
Maria Mies explains it as emanating from a strong belief that:

You cannot just say on, feminist interest to moderate and to watch what’s
going on and then to write down what we know as biologists or doctors or
sociologists. We have to say that we don’t want this. And that we resist this
kind of development.47

In her published autobiography, Mies (2010, 214) remembers this as a

‘forceful debate’, which resulted in the name of the network being
changed from Feminist International Network on New Reproductive
Technologies (FINNRET) to Feminist International Network of
Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE).
Structurally, little else changed. Each country had a national contact who
volunteered to collect news clippings, articles, local newsletters, cam-
paign info—anything that might be of interest to the network-at-large—
and send these to the international coordinator, whose main responsibility
was to gather everything into ‘infopacks’, often of 200 or more pages, to
be distributed to those who had asked for them several times a year. The
structure, like the WLM organisations from which many of the women
came, was deliberately non-hierarchical so that being a national contact
did not confer any particular decision-making power, and fully autono-
mous so that one became a member of FINRRAGE ‘simply by declaring
one was’.48 With no membership applications or dues to pay, the closest
equivalent to a membership list would be the mailing list for the info-
packs, for which a donation of £35 per year to cover photocopying and
postage was requested.49
86 3 Expansion

Following the crisis model implied in the name ‘Emergency’

Conference, the meeting also set out to produce a consensus statement.
This laid out the broad alternative consciousness which would continue
to inform the network’s general approach to technological control of
reproduction:

…the female body, with its unique capacity for creating human life is being
expropriated and dissected as raw material for the technological production
of human beings. For us women, for nature, and for the exploited peoples
of the world, this development is a declaration of war…we do not need to
transform our biology, we need to transform patriarchal, social, political,
and economic conditions…We resolutely oppose all attempts through
genetic and reproductive engineering, to bring about a racist and fascist
division of women into ‘valuable’ women in the industrial world, who
should have children, and ‘inferior’ women in exploited countries who are
forbidden to have children. (Spallone and Steinberg 1987b, 211–212)

Despite being recorded as a consensus statement, however, terms such

as ‘declaration of war’ were perhaps stronger than some of the women
were comfortable with, and indeed some of those who attended the
Sweden conference chose not to become involved with the new network.
Others criticised the intense concentration on information-exchange as
following male knowledge paradigms (Jansen 1987), and there was also a
second declaration specifically from the Third World women. This was
aimed at the organisers and noted that in a packed quasi-academic format
it was difficult ‘to express fully our cultural differences on account of the
language and expression barrier’, and demanded that the next conference
include more dancing, feeling, and opportunity to share their ‘disorgan-
ised, terrific and absolutely unexplained joy of life’ (FINRRAGE 1987).

Germany: ‘Erst die kuh, dann du’

Germany’s first test-tube babies had been born in 1982, and according to
the country report given in Sweden, there were now approximately 60
IVF clinics, both privately and publicly funded.50 As in other countries, a
Commission had been convened in 1984, led by Ernst Benda, which
 The ‘Emergency’ Conference: FINNRET Becomes FINRRAGE 87

considered IVF, genetic diagnosis and gene therapy as related technolo-

gies, largely focusing on moral obligation to the embryo. Its recommenda-
tions would restrict IVF to married couples and forbid embryo research
except where the state granted an exception based on its benefit to medical
science (Benda 1985).51 A parliamentary working group on genetic engi-
neering and reproductive technologies had been formed in 1983 under
the auspices of Erika Hickel, then a newly elected Green Party MP, and
included FINRRAGE affiliates Sarah Jansen as her research assistant and
Helga Satzinger as a staff scientist. This group also included both men and
women who were expert in veterinary and human medicine, pharmacol-
ogy, biology and social sciences, and met in Bonn every six weeks to dis-
cuss the issues, write papers, and try to create lines of political argument.52
In April of 1985, Jansen, along with others from the Women’s Section of
the Green Party and colleagues from the journal Beiträge zur Feministischen
Theorie und Praxis, organised a feminist Congress, Women Against
Genetic and Reproductive Engineering, in Bonn.53 According to Maria
Mies (2010, 213), the slogan ‘erst die kuh, dann du’ (first the cow, then
you) refers to Corea’s talk at the Congress, which drew links between IVF
as already practised in the cattle industry and her idea of the reproductive
brothel.54 Other invited speakers included Mies, Erika Hickel, Renate
Klein, the American biologist Ruth Hubbard, who had contributed a
piece on prenatal diagnosis to Test Tube Women (which was being launched
at the conference in German translation as Retortenmütte, or Test Tube
Mothers), and Mona Daswani, an activist from Mumbai who spoke about
the introduction of hormonal injections such as Depo-Provera and Net-En
as methods of population control in India. Relatively short in time (it
took place over a weekend), the main focus beyond the speakers were the
all-day working group sessions, mainly on genetic engineering but also
including explorations of ‘feminine identity’ and possibilities for resis-
tance on a Parliamentary level (Brockskothen et al. 1986). As Satzinger
tells it, the Congress—which had expected about 500 women—was:

… amazing, I think 2000 women came. We were overwhelmed by appli-

cants. And that sparked off a dramatic public debate in Germany on repro-
ductive technology and genetic engineering.55
88 3 Expansion

According to Satzinger, who had studied biology at the University of

Berlin in the 1970s, this particular time period in Germany was highly
productive for activists, and characterised by a broad public discussion:

…it was all around the 80s this completely interwoven amalgamation of
anti-nuclear, pro-ecology, feminist, anti-militaristic, anti-violence, pro
global justice style of politics. In biology, genetic engineering and repro-
ductive technology were the hot topics of the time … So we had networks
of people who studied together and developed a critical perspective. There
were Science for the People groups with the aim of explaining problems
with new technologies to the public. We discussed the use of science and
technology and what we wanted or what we didn’t want … and at a time
where we still could live on a very low economic basis after having studied.
You could earn money and save money and have time and to use this time
for political work, which is different I think today.56

However, there were other ways in which the political landscape of

Germany in the 1980s was very different from the English-speaking
countries so far discussed. As in the rest of Europe, many on the left had
roots in the student revolutions of 1968, but in Germany these were a
particularly violent reaction to the 1966 election of a former Nazi officer
to the Chancellorship and a return to vicious suppression of public dis-
sent (Rethmann 2006, 72). The relationship of the public to the medical
profession was also more complex due to the legacy of medical experi-
mentation on Jews, the disabled and other targeted groups during World
War II, and while IVF was not a prominent discourse in the German
mainstream in 1984, because of its possibilities for eugenic engineering,
it was as serious issue as any other issue for the left. Militant resistance
groups were also still part of the movement scene. One of these was Rote
Zora, the women-only cell which in 1984 split from the Revolutionäre
Zellen (RZ) in order to concentrate on actions against population policy
and reproductive and genetic engineering (Rote Zora 1993).57 Like RZ,
Rote Zora activists kept their membership secret, held ordinary jobs and
were active in other organisations on the left; unlike RZ they directed
violent resistance only at property, not people. Calling it a ‘contribution’
to the Bonn Congress, in 1985 the group set off bombs in the unfinished
 The ‘Emergency’ Conference: FINNRET Becomes FINRRAGE 89

Heidelberg Technology Park with the aim of scaring away potential inves-
tors (ID-Archiv 1993), an event which was included in the German
report given at the FINRRAGE ‘Emergency Meeting’ in Sweden in July,
as part of the resistance activities happening there.58
Property damage was not always considered a contravention of ‘anti-
violence’ within the broader German left, which was strongly based in a
liberatory consciousness that was anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and
believed itself aligned with decolonisation struggles going on in the Third
World (Rethmann 2006), so that property ownership was often consid-
ered a form of structural violence. In an anonymous interview given to
the popular feminist magazine EMMA, Rote Zora (1984) claimed that a
spectrum of action was necessary for the women’s movement, since most
oppression was legal. The bookstores and consciousness-raising groups
and congresses were considered to be:

… a strong part of the development of the struggle…. [but it] requires a

continuous movement whose aims cannot be integrated, whose uncom-
promising section cannot be forced into legal forms, whose anger and dedi-
cation to non-parliamentary struggles and anti-institutional forms is
expressed without limit…. Oppression is only recognized through resis-
tance. Therefore we sabotage, boycott, damage, and take revenge for expe-
rienced violence and humiliation by attacking those who are
responsible.59

Altogether, Rote Zora took part in a dozen bomb campaigns between

1982 and 1988, alone and with RZ, against targets they identified as
involved in genetic engineering, forced sterilisation, sex trafficking and
exploitation of women workers (Rote Zora 1993). They were claimed by
the left press to have had ‘wide popular support’, particularly amongst
feminists (Autonomedia 1989), although according to Satzinger, many of
the feminists she knew did not agree with the use of violence in political
activities precisely because part of their critique of genetic and reproduc-
tive technologies was that they were a form of violence.60 Instead, they
concentrated on educational work, on raising public awareness and dis-
seminating information, particularly about the connections between the
technologies being developed now and their connections to the past.
90 3 Expansion

Germany was also a milieu in which the entire society was implicated in
the legacy of eugenic social engineering, which also facilitated much less
confrontational action. The Green Party, led by Petra Kelly, had come
into power in the 1983 elections through a platform demanding that the
political establishment honestly address the past, and end the continuing
abuse of science and technology in the service of domination. As Satzinger,
who was a member of the working group on genetic engineering which
was supporting the Greens in Parliament, notes:

…there was this big big public debate that was different [than] England
and that is why the Greens were successful, because we wanted this very
strong public discussion, where does it want to go to, what should the sci-
ence want to be, in what direction do we want to go? …We were invited to
give talks by women’s groups from the unions, from the Catholics, from
the Protestants, from the lawyers, women’s lawyers federations. We could
cross suddenly the political borders and boundaries and talk to each other.
That was absolutely amazing, how many people were able to
communicate.61

This ability to mobilise a broad coalition in support of single-issue

campaigns which did not require long-term commitment was rare out-
side of Germany; FINRRAGE women in the Anglophone countries had
found themselves vilified by other feminists if they appeared alongside
any group which had a pro-life stance.62 The swift reaction to Noel Keane,
the American surrogacy broker who, in 1987, attempted to set up an
agency in Frankfurt arranging surrogacy in the United States for German
couples, showed both how effectively the German FINRRAGE network
could use this kind of coalition and how widespread the distaste for com-
mercialisation of motherhood was in German society at this time.
Surrogacy contracts were unenforceable as fathers had no legal claim to
children born outside of marriage, which meant any cases had to be
treated as adoption, which could only be arranged by the state. Within
weeks of Keane’s arrival, the city of Frankfurt was persuaded to file an
injunction on those grounds, although no laws had yet been broken, and
the agency was closed by court order (Winkler 1988).
 The ‘Emergency’ Conference: FINNRET Becomes FINRRAGE 91

In addition to the historical experience with Nazi-era science having

been so overtly incorporated into state interests, many mainstream insti-
tutions which wielded great power in German society, in particular the
churches, shared the same concern about valuing some lives over others
because of perceived ‘imperfections’ such as disability or race. Germany
was at this time simultaneously undergoing a withdrawal of state benefits
(amplified with the election of the Christian Democrats in 1982) and an
expansion of services for prenatal diagnosis which was covered by state
insurance and supported by a law which allowed parents to sue a doctor
if prenatal counselling was not offered and they subsequently gave birth
to a disabled child (Loveland 2017). There was a strong movement for
disability rights which argued that prenatal diagnosis was asking women
to perform a eugenic duty not to burden the state with those presumed
not to be economically productive (Degener 1990).63 This ensured that
prenatal diagnosis and related technologies would remain a highly con-
tested and debated issue as the Benda recommendations moved into leg-
islation. Both surrogacy and egg donation were subsequently banned
under the Embryo Protection law enacted in 1990, which conferred a
protected status on the embryo in vitro, but also prohibited preimplanta-
tion genetic diagnosis. Ultimately, the effort to bring IVF under legisla-
tive governance in Germany in the 1980s has been seen as a combination
of the ability of the Green Party, feminists, disability activists and others
on the left to sustain a coalition with the churches (Robertson 2004;
Richardt 2003), and the widespread disapproval for any kind of manipu-
lation or testing of the embryo because of the ongoing association with
the Nazi concept of unwertes Leben or unworthy life.64

Australia: The Cradle of Reprotech?

As in Germany, the Australians were also building their own national

network during this time. Rowland had made a video of a seminar talk
given shortly after her resignation (1984), which was presented at the
July 1984 Women and Labour conference. This was a biennial congress
which had been held since 1978, and was considered to be the most
important event for Australian feminists, attracting about 1500
92 3 Expansion

participants (Murdolo 1996). In the video Rowland argues for a morato-

rium on further advances on IVF in order to allow for public debate, and
for a measure of control to be drafted on a national level. The primary
question for feminists, according to Rowland, was the application of
‘choice’ to these new technologies. Was IVF really a choice in the face of
pronatalist rhetoric—a particularly strong discourse in Australia, which
considered itself underpopulated (Hepburn 1992, 8–9)? Could the use of
poor and marginalised women’s bodies for ova or surrogacy ever be justi-
fied by feminists? At what point should individual needs and desires give
way to protecting the interests of women as a social group?
By this time, Victoria’s Committee to Consider the Social, Ethical and
Legal Issues Arising from In Vitro Fertilisation (also known as the Waller
Committee) had issued four reports, two of which, on donor gametes,
had caused the Victorian government to call a moratorium on egg dona-
tion. Queensland (1984), Tasmania (1985) and Western Australia (1986)
were all conducting inquiries, and the Australian Family Law Council
(led by Asche, and including Robyn Rowland) had issued their report on
the legal status of IVF children in 1985 (Family Law Council 1985). A
private member’s bill—the Human Embryo Experimentation Bill 1985—
had been tabled in the Australian Parliament by the Tasmanian Senator
Brian Harradine, seeking to outlaw embryo experimentation entirely,
which practitioners claimed would have the effect of shutting down all
the IVF clinics in Australia (Waugh 1986).65 At the same time, the news-
papers seemed to be churning out a constant stream of new ‘break-
throughs’, particularly from the highly competitive teams in Melbourne.
Rowland’s talk had a similar galvanising effect at the Women and
Labour conference as the panel had had at Groningen. In particular, it
caught the attention of Lariane Fonseca, a medical student now turned
women’s health activist, who was part of the organising committee for
the conference. Encouraged by Rowland, Fonseca began to put together
a National Feminist Network on New Reproductive Technology, which
she initially ran from the Women’s Community Health Centre in
Adelaide.66 In May 1986, along with Australian National University, the
network organised a three-day national conference in Canberra,
Liberation or Loss? Women act on the new reproductive technologies, which
attracted approximately 200 women, flying Corea and Raymond over to
 The ‘Emergency’ Conference: FINNRET Becomes FINRRAGE 93

give keynote speeches.67 In addition to workshops concentrating on resis-

tance, there was also an attempt to include discussion from the perspec-
tive of infertile women. Barbara Burton (1986), a local feminist who was
fighting for better access to IVF,68 gave a paper which clearly shows some
of difficulties in trying to negotiate a position which acknowledges a
technology as risky and perpetually experimental (and sometimes irre-
sponsibly so, according to her own experience with Monash) yet still
supports it.69 Lindsey Napier (1986), a social worker who was running an
infertility self-help group, also offered a workshop with the attempt to
‘establish a dialogue’ between the two largely polarised positions of rejec-
tion and ‘choice’.70 Although most of the presentations were values-based
discussions, there were those which drew on the work of the National
Perinatal Statistics Unit (NPSU), which had recently issued an overview
of IVF outcomes from 1979 to 1984 (NPSU and FSA 1985), the first
such data to be collected worldwide. These included not only live births—
estimated at 7.9% of women starting IVF programmes—but also health
service expenditure on allowable rebates for parts of the procedure, as
well as the increased medical care required for miscarriages, caesarean
deliveries, preterm and underweight births and postnatal complications,
all of which occurred at much higher rates than the rest of the population
(see also Rowland 1986; Hepburn 1992).71
At the same time, the amount of money being made by private clinics
was driving investment in new business models, as well as technological
innovation. Monash IVF was deep in a controversial negotiation to mar-
ket its protocols as IVF Australia, financed through a private venture in
the United States which would give Monash University and Wood’s team
royalties on their techniques worldwide (Hepburn 1992, 59). While the
content of the university’s negotiations with Wood’s team was largely
secret, the fact of the transfer had been reported in the press from late
1984 onwards, generating much controversy in a country that was not
yet comfortable with the idea of turning taxpayer-funded research into
private profit—exacerbated in this case because private IVF was already
too expensive for most couples, and public clinics had waiting lists of
years. IVF Australia was eventually launched with AUD 4.5 million in
venture capital, about one quarter of which came from a new company
licensed under the 1984 Management and Investment Companies (MIC)
94 3 Expansion

Program, which was designed to stimulate the transfer of university-

developed knowledge into the private sector by offering investors a 100%
tax break on their investments in ‘small, young, high-growth, employment-
creating, export-oriented, and internationally competitive business’ such
as IVF (Wan 1989). Widely covered as a national debate, the popular
national news magazine, The Bulletin—reporting that a rival clinic
planned to float an AUD  4 million listing on the Australian stock
exchange—was only half joking when they called IVF a ‘fertile field for
investment’ (Martin 1986).
While many press reports struck a note of national pride in the idea
that Australia had something to teach the Americans (who at this point
had not been having nearly the same success),72 a lengthy article in the
business press noted that in addition to projected revenue of AUD 6.5
million per clinic per year, licensing the protocols would also have the
effect of allowing Wood’s team to work outside the very restrictive envi-
ronment in Australia. These and numerous other press clippings were
widely circulated through FINRRAGE’s infopacks, along with an
exchange of letters between Corea and Monash University in which she
protested the transfer, and several leaked documents outlining the
University’s plans.73
These events, reported at the conference by Ramona Koval (1986), a
geneticist turned science reporter, underlined one of the network’s other
primary arguments: that IVF was an international and largely unregu-
lated industry which could only be resisted by international coordination
amongst feminists. Reviewing the Liberation or Loss? conference for
Australian Feminist Studies, one of its organisers (Ramsey 1986, 128, n.9)
noted that the declaration that passed unanimously at the end—which
largely echoed the one from Sweden—had gathered enough media atten-
tion for the NHMRC to take its recommendations for a permanent
national commission seriously. Another proposal prepared by the New
South Wales Women’s Advisory Council, which included some of the
conference attendees, would also become the basis of the National
Bioethics Consultative Committee (NBCC), a permanent body formed
in 1988.74
The situation of FINRRAGE in Australia stands in stark contrast to
the position of the group in Britain during the same period, both of
 FINRRAGE in Europe 95

which saw high-profile committees deliver important reports which

shaped subsequent legislation, and both of which saw conservative mem-
bers of Parliament introduce unsuccessful bills which were ultimately
aimed at rolling back abortion rights in the guise of protecting the embryo
from research. The British group, however, despite being one of the most
prolific and visible groups in international FINRRAGE in terms of
knowledge production, neither chose to nor is likely to have been able to
insert a critical feminist voice into the Parliamentary debates which
continued into the late 1980s.75 In contrast, the ‘extravagant claims…
and thoughtless futurology’ (Albury 1999, 16) which the IVF entrepre-
neurs continued to display in newspaper interviews and television appear-
ances made feminist concerns about wild experimentation, lack of
informed consent and the use of misleading success rates visible in
Australia as issues to be taken seriously.

FINRRAGE in Europe
Amongst feminist groups in Europe overall, there had been limited grass-
roots discussion up to this point, although with a handful of works now
published, it was already possible to see two distinct viewpoints emerg-
ing. One was rooted in an egalitarian consciousness which championed
the technologies for their capacity to mitigate the unfairness of infertility
and saw IVF as promoting women’s autonomy, agency and choice. The
other saw IVF and its related technologies as putting women’s bodies and
their procreative capacities under male control; for the most part this
analysis derived from an alternative consciousness which rejected the
technologies entirely as it was deemed not really possible for women to
take any kind of control back from the fertility establishment once
enrolled in an IVF programme. Thus, the liberatory consciousness sug-
gested instead ways of challenging the pronatalism inherent in IVF by
reclaiming women’s autonomy to also choose not to be mothers at all.
These positions, and the space between, tended at this point to be rela-
tively underdeveloped. In addition to displaying the international
breadth of the network, therefore, Sweden had also marked a turning
point for the network’s collective knowledge project. Now the women
96 3 Expansion

were beginning to develop knowledge together. For the fledgling net-

work, the following year would see a flurry of activity as it sought to take
advantage of the political opportunities created by impending legislation
to solidify its knowledge interests and try to place a woman-centred anal-
ysis into the broader field.

Brussels 1986: The Feminist Hearing

Two of the German Green Party women who had attended Bonn,
Margret Krannich and Annette Görlich, were now working in the
Women’s Bureau of the Green-Alternative European Link (GRAEL) at
the European Parliament in Brussels. Neither were scientists, nor were
they academics, but both had been involved in the student movement as
teenagers in the early 1970s, and had continued to be active in the wom-
en’s and ecological movements while at university. Both felt very strongly
after Bonn that the issue was being taken over by male experts and there
needed to be feminist voices brought into the discussion on a European
level.76 The European Union Committee on Legal Affairs and Citizens’
Rights had met on 27–29 November 1985 to discuss reproductive tech-
nology, and was scheduled to meet again on 19–21 March 1986 to dis-
cuss genetic engineering. Görlich and Krannich wanted to use the
resources available to them at GRAEL to bring a feminist debate directly
to the Parliament.
Brussels was actually two conferences: a formal, two-day Feminist
Hearing on Genetic and Reproductive Technologies, which took place at the
European Parliament on March 6–7, and a separate FINRRAGE strategy
session on the 8th, at the Université des Femmes. Because of its location
the Hearing was able to attract an unusual amount of mainstream public-
ity for a feminist event:

[W]e made the point to also invite to the hearing women and scientists
who gave a feminist point of view, so this success was about normalcy …
We had articles in Belgium and Austria, the television from UK and Ireland
and the feminist press … So spreading it in the women’s community and
in the wider press was quite successful I would say. And also our aim of
 FINRRAGE in Europe 97

influencing the discussion within the European Parliament, within the

institution. It was quite interesting because we had the summary of the
conference translated and given to every member of the legal committee of
the European Parliament. The legal committee was at the time the commit-
tee responsible for the decisions on genetic engineering and reproductive
technology. So we were quite proud that our paper was a success and
became a kind of reference of the ongoing debate.77

The minutes for the Hearing show that a variety of viewpoints were
brought forward during the discussions, suggesting that the audience
was not necessarily opposed. Some valorised the quest for motherhood,
others supported the technologies as increasing women’s choice while
simultaneously promoting population control as a method of ‘protect-
ing’ Third World women against too many children; meanwhile, a
woman from India asked why she should not be allowed to have as
many children as a white woman in the West.78 In general, however, the
FINRRAGE women seem to have seen this as an opportunity to try to
raise consciousness about the ways in which contraceptive and concep-
tive technologies were the same sides of an inherently racist coin.79
Although it is true that engaging directly with diametrically opposed
positions can be counter-productive in a grassroots setting where there
may be no rules to keep the discussion from descending into unproduc-
tive argument, in a more formalised venue it can be an excellent knowl-
edge-generating process, widening the cognitive space of the overall
debate. The Hearing did produce at least two areas of consensus, in the
call to fight any restriction of NRT to married couples on the grounds
that the state should not decide who could become a mother (even
though this was seen as enabling access to IVF rather than resistance)
and for feminist self-help groups for infertile women.
For an activist knowledge project, giving papers at a meeting inside the
European Parliament not only made space for their arguments to be
heard by people with power to act on them through legislation, it also
validated FINRRAGE’s claim to expertise through an important political
body’s willingness to listen:
98 3 Expansion

…FINRRAGE and the FINRRAGE women took up the issue very early.
And they were expert very early. So they were better experts [than] you
found on the subject in the European Parliament at the time. And that
was also a big chance to bring up a feminist point of view together with
this expertise, which was appreciated in a certain sense. And I think it
was also one of the reasons why FINRRAGE women could really have
some influence in the early years of debate…people and also highly edu-
cated people didn’t have as much information as FINRRAGE women at
that time.80

The Feminist Hearing also projected the FINRRAGE women as

experts by drawing nearly all their speakers from three professional
groups which would already be generally recognised as credible knowl-
edge-holders: biologists, academics and activists from policy-oriented
organisations. These professions would normally be represented in the
policy community, so that despite being both women and feminists (two
normally under-represented groups in policy circles), the venue of the
debate combined with the women’s professional qualifications added
weight to arguments which might otherwise have been ignored if seen to
be coming from mere activists. While it is not possible to directly trace
the influence this might have had, it is worth noting that both of the
resolutions which incorporated the official Parliamentary meetings (on
artificial insemination in November 1985, and genetic engineering in
late March 1986, just after the Feminist Hearing) took a surprisingly
woman-centred standpoint which brought it very much within
FINRRAGE’s cognitive space, and which were critical of the technolo-
gies in ways which the Warnock Report, at that point the ‘gold standard’
of committee reports (Spallone 1987), was not. In particular, the final
resolutions passed by the European Parliament stated that the technolo-
gies did not actually treat infertility and that research into preventable
causes of infertility was more desirable than technological intervention
after the fact, that IVF caused ‘great physical and psychological stress’ for
women with very low success, that there were ‘serious problems’ of com-
mercialisation, and that sale of gametes or surrogacy services of any kind
should be illegal (European Parliament 1989, 171–173). This would
suggest that while some of the linguistic rhetoric used by some of the
 FINRRAGE in Europe 99

FINRRAGE writers, particularly in the early collections, may have been

seen as ‘going too far’,81 the underlying analysis was not always seen as
too radical for mainstream political discussion. Moreover, both resolu-
tions stated categorically that discussion of the disposition of embryos
was to be separated from any discussion of abortion (European Parliament
1989, 166, 172). This was a significant departure from the normal com-
mittee discourse and—in theory, if not in practice—an important point
which opened a much-needed space for feminists to argue for respect for
the embryo’s humanity without being forced into an anti-abortion posi-
tion against their will.

Mallorca 1986: Experts Only Need Apply?

According to the original ideas of the founding group, an important part

of the network’s mandate would be to reach out to women on a grassroots
level, holding international conferences in places the technologies were
not being publicly discussed, rather than someplace they might find a
larger Bonn-style audience. By the end of 1986, there had been several
national conferences organised by FINRRAGE affiliates in conjunction
with other entities—some large and university-sponsored, like the
Liberation or Loss? conference in Canberra, and some much smaller, like
the first Austrian women’s conference organised by Aurelia Weikert and
Johanna Riegler in Vienna that same year, to which they were able to
invite Gena Corea as a speaker.82 There were also a number of meetings
organised with local groups outside the network in which individual
FINRRAGE members were also active.
In October, the First European Feminist Conference on Reproductive
and Genetic Technology took place in Mallorca, Spain, organised by
Verena Stolcke, a professor of Anthropology at the University of
Barcelona, and Leonor Taboada, who was president of the Asociacion de
Mujeres para la Salud,83 a Spanish women’s health organisation which
was co-credited with FINRRAGE as the conference sponsors. Because
the women wanted to be housed together as they had been in Lund and
in Brussels, this meant the numbers had to be kept small, so that the
conference could remain affordable. As in Sweden, women were asked to
100 3 Expansion

supply biographical information when they applied for the limited num-
ber of places, but this time, controversially, willingness to actively work
for FINRRAGE was part of the application and everyone was expected
to present. Some affiliates at the Brussels strategy meeting had objected
to these conditions on the grounds that it might deter women who were
interested in just knowing more from attending.84 Ultimately, however,
the decision appears to have been largely economic, based on the limited
scope for funding at short notice and the need to provide translation and
to support women travelling from the Third World. This suggests that
the original knowledge strategy was already beginning to pull in two
directions, one towards consolidating the network’s reputation as author-
itative experts, and one towards the original purpose of educating as
many women as possible on a grassroots level so that they could be active
in their own countries. Whether deliberate or not, the need to demon-
strate some form of credentials when applying to attend would construct
the event as a community of experts, in both a positive and a negative
sense. To try to limit the negative interpretation that women without
credentials were not welcome to apply, it was decided to advertise
Mallorca as a planning meeting for a Tribunal of Medical Crimes Against
Women, which Hanmer had advocated before as a possible event, simi-
lar to the International Tribunal of Crimes Against Women she had
attended in 1976.85 The hope was that this would self-select for women
who were in agreement with the assertion that IVF was a new form of
medicalised violence against women, and who wanted to work towards
some kind of demonstrative event.86
Because it was co-organised by someone within the health commu-
nity, the Mallorca conference had a significant appeal to feminist doc-
tors, with probably the highest attendance of medical professionals of
all the FINRRAGE conferences. Marsden Wagner of the World Health
Organisation,87 Marcelo Palacios, Chairman of the Spanish
Parliamentary Commission for IVF, and Sixto Pareda, director of the
largest maternity hospital in Madrid, all appeared as part of a plenary
discussion panel chaired by Klein and Taboada as the representatives of
FINRRAGE and AMS, the only time men from the ‘official’ epistemic
community concerned with NRT were invited to speak at an interna-
tional FINRRAGE meeting.88 Whereas the Lund conference had had a
 FINRRAGE in Europe 101

grassroots-activist feeling to it, with the women helping to translate for

each other and attending all panels and workshops together, Mallorca
was run more like a large, well-sponsored feminist congress such as
Women’s Worlds, with official translators and parallel sessions. Many of
the panels concentrated on the situation in Spain, with doctors speak-
ing on the delivery of IVF services and lawyers assessing the Spanish
Parliamentary Commission’s Report on Human IVF and AI (Spain
1986), which had been passed into law with little debate in April (see
also Varela and Stolcke 1989, 232). Several of the network’s PhD stu-
dents—Christine Crowe (Australia), Lene Koch (Denmark), Linda
Wilkens (Netherlands) and Annette Burfoot, Sarah Franklin and
Deborah Lynn Steinberg (Britain)—presented papers based on their
doctoral research. There were also papers on strategies for resistance.
Loosely, the activities could be grouped into four areas: courses on the
basic science of genetics run by biologists, papers on the state of the
IVF industry delivered by doctors and scientists, non-technical papers
on ethical and social issues mainly delivered by academics, including a
half-day on population control and a full day on motherhood, and
papers discussing FINRRAGE actions. The informal ‘country reports’
were now delivered as traditional conference papers and scattered across
different sessions. As in Sweden, each day concluded with a long, open-
ended strategy meeting which began at 7:30 pm and sometimes lasted
well into the night.89
The packed sessions meant that, in fact, the strategising which some
felt should have been the main purpose of the conference was never com-
pleted; there was a need for more time for sleep and relaxation, but also
more time to ‘talk about our production and sharing of knowledge, what
we mean to each other, what FINRRAGE means to us as a network.’90
The strategy sessions left at least some women wrestling with questions
about whether certain tactical options like drafting alternative legislation
or taking part in official commissions under the name of FINRRAGE
might be worth pursuing. But the key issue appears to have been the
increasing pushback from other feminists coming at the questions from a
technology-neutral stance which claimed that every woman had a ‘right’
to a healthy biological child:
102 3 Expansion

How close do we get with this point of view to eugenics, how close do we
get to the delusion of technical fixes to every problem? Will we have to
redefine the right to self-determination of women? Do we reject any pro-
tection of the embryo/fetus? Is an embryo just something like a chicken
liver? How can we argue against research and experiments on embryos/
fetuses without threatening the right to abortion?91

Although the epistemic questions raised by Krannich and Görlich

above were far from being answered (and are in fact still being debated),
in some aspects the Mallorca conference appeared to be a step towards
mainstreaming a critical feminist perspective through the involvement
of NRT ‘insiders’—a marked difference from Sweden just the year
before. Organisationally, Brussels had shown that it was possible to pro-
mote a more critical, woman-centred analysis at an international level,
and the very positive reaction of men such as Marsden Wagner showed
that there was indeed space for some elements of their critique even
within the formal epistemic community dealing with NRT. This was
reinforced by the quasi-professional aspect of the Mallorca conference,
which some felt could be built upon if FINRRAGE had the authority of
formal NGO status at the United Nations, particularly as this would
allow the network greater access to high-level international discussions
about contraceptive technology and population control. Amongst the
original group of five, steps to enquire what this would entail began to
be  taken, however, there was no  clear sense yet whether this was where
the network should go.

Frankfurt 1988: Frauen II

The question of whether to become an NGO was still a key topic for a
seminar held in Berlin on 17–19 June 1988, to consolidate on the suc-
cessful action against Noel Keane the year before by codifying and
strengthening a German network of FINRRAGE-affiliated groups and
individuals ahead of a second national Congress, where it was hoped to
build on the success of Bonn (Satzinger and Spallone 1988). In the
agenda-setting documents circulating just before the meeting, it is clear
 FINRRAGE in Europe 103

that FINRRAGE was having some success in its goal of bringing women’s
voices into the public debate, but there was also a sense, voiced by Verena
Stolcke, one of the organisers for the Mallorca conference, that the femi-
nist debate overall had evolved (at times, she notes, into bitter attacks).
Recently, the original group had announced that they had been successful
in getting a grant to start an academic journal, to be called (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis (IRAGE).92 Stolke felt it was necessary to use the new journal to
look more closely at specific contexts in a comparative manner, and to
pay attention to how the ‘supposed neutrality of science and technology’
was being called upon in these debates.93 The division between these two
approaches to technology was perhaps nowhere so apparent as in Britain,
where a bitter argument had been raging in the letters section of the radi-
cal feminist magazine Trouble and Strife after an article which strongly
criticised the group for its approach had also accused Rowland and Klein
of speaking at a press conference organised by anti-abortionist MPs sup-
porting Enoch Powell’s Unborn Children Protection Bill in favour of the
bill (Berer 1986). Like Harradine’s Bill in the Australian Parliament, this
presumed to put strict controls on embryo experimentation and was
being publicly fought on the grounds that it would largely shut down the
practice of IVF, whereas feminists widely regarded it as a new way to
attack legal abortion through granting personhood to the embryo.
Amongst other letters from FINRRAGE women written in reply,
Rowland’s sought to clarify that the event had taken place before the Bill
had even been released, and that she had actually been invited to speak to
a mixed group from both the House of Lords and the Commons about
reproductive technology in general:

I specifically said at that talk that I would not discuss the unseen Bill and
that I did not support anything which threatened abortion rights for
women … I felt that it was very important that MPs heard that there was
a feminist position on the new reproductive technologies … Most opposi-
tion to embryo experimentation has come from an embryo-centred forum.
But I oppose it because I ask the question: ‘Where do the embryos come
from?’ They come from eggs. And where do the eggs come from? They
come from women. But which women? … With abortion we claimed the
104 3 Expansion

right to choose, but we really meant the right to control our bodies and our
lives. We have to then ask  – do the new reproductive technologies give
women greater control over our lives? (Rowland 1987)94

Rowland goes on to point out that new technologies for verifying the
status of the foetus were much more likely to threaten abortion rights
through personification, and feminists should be wary of these develop-
ments. For Rowland, as for much of FINRRAGE, the seemingly incom-
mensurate positions of supporting abortion rights while opposing embryo
experimentation were not incommensurate at all when the woman was
central to the frame, as she remained the subject of both. Although the
discussions in other countries could be less combative, the real dilemma
was that feminists were unlikely to be able to stop embryo experimenta-
tion themselves, but alliance with groups whose focal point was the
embryo risked losing not only the woman-centred analysis, but their
standing amongst other feminists.
Thus, the question of what formerly taken-for-granted concepts such
as ‘self-determination’ now meant in the context of resisting NRT would
be a key topic for the second German Congress. Women Against Gene
and Reproductive Technologies took place from 28–30th October 1988,
organised by FINRRAGE Germany and a number of groups in which
the FINRRAGE women were also active, including Gen-Archiv (Essen),
Women’s Centre (Bochum), Women’s Health Centre (Frankfurt) and
the Journal of Feminist Theory and Practice (Cologne).95 This second
Congress was slightly larger than the one 3 years prior in Bonn, and
according to Klein, reviewing the Congress for IRAGE, firmly rejected
any ‘wishy-washy statements’ about choice (Klein 1989, 91). The focus
instead was on the eugenic implications of controlling women’s repro-
duction.96 In addition to debating the various bills regulating embryo
research which were now being drafted in several German states (see
Robertson 2004, 101–103), the preface to the Congress reader also
framed the Congress specifically as an act of resistance to the new federal
law on terrorism.
Despite their ‘gift’ to the Sweden conference in 1985, Rote Zora was
not a part of the FINRRAGE network, and as a clandestine organisation
it was not known for certain who any of the women actually were.97
 FINRRAGE in Europe 105

However, the existence of an aligned faction of women engaging in vio-

lent resistance against reprogenetic technologies was well known through-
out the network. In December 1987, several members of German
FINRRAGE had been arrested as part of a government raid on 33 offices
and homes of people suspected of engaging in what the government
termed ‘extreme condemnation’ of genetic technologies (Gen-Archiv
1988, 103). This included physicians critical of prenatal screening, and
volunteers at the Gen-Archiv, a mixed-gender group who collected data
on reprogenetic technologies and served as consultants to universities,
trade unions, and churches, and in whose offices the research archives for
German FINRRAGE were housed. The official charge of possessing
Anschlag-relevante Themen, or documents on any subject that had been
used as justification for a bomb attack, even if this was by a different
group, was new. According to Erika Feyerabend, a FINRRAGE affiliate
who was arrested as part of the raid on Gen-Archiv workers, because
there had been no success over the years in identifying members of the
RZ or Rote Zora, the term had been made so broad that virtually anyone
possessing any left-wing literature could now be charged with being a
member of a clandestine terrorist cell:

…the police and this Staatsshutz  – something like CIA or so  – say that
Gen-Archiv are a terrorist [organization] because we know others who are
also involved politically in this issue of genetic engineering and reproduc-
tive technology… And everyone who’s really engaged in this with a radical
position was really suspected to be part of this terrorist group. And you
have this wonderful law which makes it possible without any proof to have
done any action against the law, you can be judged as being a member of a
terrorist group. They do not need to prove it, ja? And that was the case.
And two women were put into prison.98

FINRRAGE members, both individually and in the name of the net-

work, became closely involved in the international campaign for the
release of the two women, Ulla Penselin and Ingrid Strobl, with the
British group even writing to Amnesty International London on their
behalf.99 Penselin, who was affiliated with German FINRRAGE, was
eventually charged with ‘bare membership’ in Rote Zora and held in
prison for eight months before being released in August 1988 without
106 3 Expansion

trial.100 Strobl, a journalist, was accused of buying an alarm clock which

had been used in an RZ action in 1986. Though the charges were never
proven, she was eventually sentenced to 5 years and released after serving
2 (ID-Archiv 1993).101 The other dozens of arrested activists, including
Feyerabend, were all released without charge but were kept under surveil-
lance for several years.102 Although Ingrid Strobl was still in jail awaiting
trial at the time of the Frankfurt conference, there was an enthusiastic
heroine’s welcome for Ulla Penselin, who made a plenary address to the
Congress demanding Strobl’s release (ibid., 93).
Germany presents the single case where ‘resistance’ was taken to this
level. The raid on Gen-Archiv, a respected knowledge-producing organ-
isation, was taken by many in FINRRAGE to signal the accuracy of their
suspicion that there was more to embryo research than just making better
babies. In her subsequent report, Klein refers to the Congress as a specific
‘answer to these intimidations’ (Klein 1989, 92), and notes that a group
of about 250 who had gone to demonstrate for the release of political
prisoners at the local jail were herded back to the venue by about 100
police in riot gear, a situation which the local women acknowledged was
now the norm.
In the conference reader circulated in English and German before the
event, the Gen-Archiv co-organisers (which included Feyerabend)
explained that they wanted to make time for a more fundamental discus-
sion about science, moving from questions about who controls the tech-
nology to how the technology itself is shaped by a particular world view
which would not change if it was controlled by women. Nor were women
necessarily the bearers of other kinds of knowledge merely because they
were women, as women too were taking up the chance to ‘partake in the
dividing up of nature’ and to benefit from the promises of better health
through new consumer goods. They suggested instead a ‘vertical’ method
based on historical analysis of how a field of science has evolved com-
bined with a ‘horizontal’ method which looks at how it has interacted
with other developments in society.103
Non-German-speaking FINRRAGE women also gave papers and
workshops at this conference, including some of the women from India
and South America. Vibhuti Patel, an economist attending her first
FINRRAGE conference, presented a paper on the use of techniques for
 FINRRAGE in Europe 107

sex selection in India,104 while Jyotsna Agnihotra Gupta gave a compara-

tive study of how ‘freedom of choice’ differed between India and the
Netherlands, based on her PhD research. Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis
offered a workshop on the testing in Brazil of a new anti-pregnancy vac-
cine which was designed to create antibodies to placental hormones.105 A
number of sessions also sought to grapple head-on with the question of
self-determination, led by the Women’s Centre in Bochum, which—
while acknowledging its beneficial use in the early WLM and in decolo-
nisation struggles—asked if self-determination was still a useful concept
if feminists were increasingly using it to prevent other feminists from
questioning ‘the existing coercive patriarchal economic/social/political
conditions’ which led to pregnancies being unwanted, or to women turn-
ing to pornography and prostitution as a means of making a living, which
were not precisely choices when made in the context of domination.106 A
paper by Heidrun Kaupen-Hass and Sabine Schleiermacher also traced
the connections between Nazi-era research organisations and present-day
German biological science (see also Kaupen-Hass 1988 and Schleiermacher
1990). More than any other part of the international network except
Japan, it was the German groups who stressed the links between IVF,
genetic engineering and eugenics through close collaboration with
women from the disability movement, and through making explicit con-
nections to the country’s uncomfortable past.
The FINRRAGE strategy meeting which followed was a much quieter
two-day event, with the first day again devoted to informal reports about
the legal situation in each country, and the second to extensive discussion
about strategy. The question of NGO status was considered important
enough to be allotted a two hour slot all its own, and Hanmer, having
written to the UN to better understand what needed to be done, had
prepared a set of notes delineating pros and cons, which was circulated
before the event.107 One major impediment was that they would need an
office as they would need to liaise with UN agencies, which meant sub-
stantial funding would need to be found. The positives would be access
to information, the right to attend certain UN meetings, and the right to
submit responses to proposed policies. Hanmer’s notes suggest that this
would be useful for fund-raising (a constant problem) and with making
their position ‘known and acceptable’, which might give women more
108 3 Expansion

chance to influence national policies through international interven-

tion—in other words, validating FINRRAGE as part of the epistemic
community around NRT and related issues at a supranational level.
Despite this preparation and the time allotted for discussion, there was
still no clear decision either way. Much the same fate would befall the plans
previously made in Brussels to hold an International Tribunal of Medical
Crimes Against Women. Both point to clear problems of resources—money
and time and energy—which the women felt they did not have beyond
what they were already contributing. Becoming an NGO was likely to solve
the first problem, but only by exacerbating the other two. There was also
resistance to the idea of professionalising to this extent. However, the inabil-
ity to come to a decision would also become its own problem in light of
increasing pressure from the outside in terms of dwindling funding streams
and, in many Western countries, the waning of the women’s movement in
terms of large-scale protest actions from which new energy and a next gen-
eration of participants could be drawn. In the South, however, many wom-
en’s health organisations were already NGOs, and considered themselves
part of a global movement which had been building since the declaration of
the Decade of the Woman in 1975. This was the basis for siting the next
international FINRRAGE conference in Comilla, Bangladesh, to be organ-
ised by UBINIG, the plans for which were now well underway.

Bringing the West East: Comilla 1989

Much of the information on new contraceptives (particularly Norplant
and anti-pregnancy vaccines) which was used by FINRRAGE affiliates in
the West had its origins in research and campaigns carried out by UBINIG
and other loosely affiliated women’s health groups in Bangladesh, Brazil
and India. However, there had long been a sense that, as Akhter later
wrote, the ‘intensity of experience’ which women from the Third World
tried to bring into the population arena was lost in the Western settings
of most conferences, however sympathetic the women tried to be.108 The
choice of Comilla was therefore strategic, to allow the Western women to
experience the realities of Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations,
and to allow activist women from across South Asia, normally unable to
 Bringing the West East: Comilla 1989 109

participate in international conferences unless they held positions in

well-funded NGOs, to attend and to be the majority group. This was
considered essential to strengthening the network’s arguments, first by
developing their knowledge about the connections between contra- and
conceptive technologies by learning from Southern organisations resist-
ing population control, and second by creating an opportunity to discuss
the ways that conceptive technologies were likely to affect poorer women
in developing countries, so that the introduction of practices like
commercial surrogacy could be better monitored and resisted at both
local and international levels.109
After being postponed for a year due to red tape from the Bangladeshi
authorities, the FINRRAGE-UBINIG International Conference finally
took place at the end of March 1989 at the Bangladesh Academy for
Rural Development (BARD), a well-known institution near Comilla
(about 60 miles south of Dhaka) which specialises in research for training
local communities and officials in alternative development programmes.
The motto of the conference was ‘Growing stronger together’, a reference
to the conference’s purpose of strengthening ties between women in dif-
ferent parts of the developing world, as well as bringing Northern activ-
ists to experience the conditions of the South.110 The conference lasted
for over a week, with the women having full run of BARD’s campus, and
Bangladeshi organisation representatives coming down from Dhaka by
bus each day.
The intellectual agenda of the conference was laid out in three key
papers. Maria Mies, acknowledging the huge divisions in feminist
thinking around these issues, looked closely at the ways in which the
demands of global capitalism formed the basis within which NRT was
deployed in both the North and the South (Mies 1989, later printed by
UBINIG to be circulated by the network).111 Akhter’s paper focused on
a rebuttal to the rights-based discourses (see Akhter 2005, 67–74),
while Klein drew out the links between embryo research enabled by
IVF and research into inducing infertility through technologies such as
pregnancy vaccines, currently being tested on women in the South.
The conference was divided broadly into four themes. The first, popu-
lation control, included original research papers on women’s practices
from Bangladesh and Zambia and broader analysis on global policy
110 3 Expansion

from the Philippines, as well as workshops on specific contraceptives

which were being resisted, such as injectables and Norplant. The sec-
ond theme was genetic engineering, mainly papers on agricultural
genetic modification, an issue which was beginning to be resisted as a
matter of colonialism in the South. The third theme covered IVF and
other technologies and included an overview by the Forum Against Sex
Determination and Sex Pre-Selection (1991) of their successful cam-
paign in Maharashtra to have the use of prenatal diagnostics for sex
selection banned.
One panel in the third theme discussed Bhopal, where a gas leak from
a Union Carbide plant in 1984 had killed at least 20,000 people, and
exposed approximately 200,000 more to varying levels of toxicity over
the next several years (Varma and Varma 2005, 38). Of the exposed
women who were pregnant at the time of the leak and survived, 40%
either miscarried or delivered stillborn children (ibid., 43). In the years
directly after, the spontaneous abortion rate for exposed women remained
an estimated four to ten times the Indian average, and about half the girls
who had been pre-adolescent at the time, including those still in utero,
were now experiencing what was termed ‘menstrual chaos’, including
heavy, painful, irregular or non-existent cycles (Sarojini et al. 2006, 72).
In February of 1989, a highly controversial final settlement between the
government of India and Union Carbide had been reached, reducing
compensation from $3bn to £489m, very little of which would actually
go directly to the victims (Varma and Varma 2005, 43). In activist circles,
there had been a great deal of protest around the issue, both locally and
internationally. Nalini Bhanot, an activist from the New Delhi women’s
health group Saheli, gave a paper outlining the leak and its aftermath and
requested that the conference pass a resolution condemning the settle-
ment, which it did (Bhanot 1991). Some of the Indian women’s health
groups also wanted the conference to support their campaign for ongoing
free access to amniocentesis and other forms of prenatal diagnosis for
women who had been affected by the gas leak and worried that their
children would be disabled. However, this ran counter to the position of
some of the FINRRAGE women, from both North and South, who were
adamantly against any form of prenatal testing.
 Bringing the West East: Comilla 1989 111

A case such as that presented by the women of Bhopal perfectly illus-

trates the tension between rejection of prenatal diagnosis on the grounds
that it advanced technological control over a women’s reproductive
decision-making processes by forcing her to validate whether her child
was worthy of being born, and the devastating individual consequences
for poor women and their disabled children in a society with no access to
basic health care and no state support. Agreeing that prenatal diagnosis
should be allowed in exceptional cases like Bhopal or Chernobyl not only
undermined the fundamental analysis that these were the technologies of
eugenics and as such should not be allowed, but could also be seen as a
danger to disabled people in general as it strengthened the normative
assumption that it was good to ensure that babies with impairments were
not allowed to be born. Sensitivity to embodied and cultural forms of
knowledge, while essential, could not necessarily help solve such dilem-
mas because some of the Indian activists who had been trying to have the
government ban amniocentesis altogether because of its widespread and
increasing use for sex selection were also divided as to its use in Bhopal.
Akhter, the main organiser for UBINIG, did not feel that the tensions
over the issue of prenatal diagnosis in Bhopal had disrupted the confer-
ence,112 but others felt very strongly that it had, and that this pointed to
deeper problems within the network’s knowledge practice. The disagree-
ment over prenatal diagnosis for Bhopal also appears to have dovetailed with
a more personal dispute over publication of the papers from the Comilla
conference. Three of the women in British FINRRAGE had negotiated a
contract for the conference proceedings with a well-known activist press in
London without realising it had already been agreed that UBINIG would
publish it in Bangladesh.113 Although the British publisher agreed to void
the contract, and all attended Comilla as planned, the group’s internal ten-
sions seem to have come to a head at the FINRRAGE strategy session, and
had significant consequences for the network as a whole. The unfortunate
and very visible outcome was that the British group was no longer able to
function as it had, and save for Hanmer, all the women from that group who
had been at Comilla left the network entirely shortly after their return.
Whatever the proximate external and internal causes, what is apparent
is that the inherent tensions which came to a head at Comilla had been
embedded in the network’s knowledge practice from the start. In the
112 3 Expansion

particular liberatory-alternative consciousness shared by Akhter, Mies

and the rest of the original group, theory was based upon women’s lived
experience and action. Women were considered to be a political, rather
than a biological class (Atkinson 1974 in Rowland and Klein 1990, 275),
whose bodies were ‘the currency of patriarchy’ (ibid., 279). In a letter sent
to Hanmer during the planning phase for the conference, Akhter had
expressed the need to maintain a strongly resistant stance at Comilla
against the rights-based discourses of self-determination and autonomy
that were beginning to gain dominance within the women’s health move-
ment as a whole:

It is extremely important, Jalna, that the philosophical position of

FINRRAGE should be clear to all women…To me, it is completely two
different trends in women’s movements and have enormous significance for
the future. Our difference must be articulated clearly and precisely.114

Much of Akhter’s political consciousness was based on her research

with marginalised communities of Dalit and indigenous women from
rural areas or the slums of Dhaka, and was informed by what she had
learned from them about the extremely limited conditions in which their
decisions were made. In her argument against the imposition of Western
ideals on Southern contexts, she was strongly backed by Maria Mies, who
had taught at the Goethe Institute in Pune, India for many years as a
young academic, and shared Akhter’s commitment to supporting
attempts by marginalised communities to preserve their traditional sub-
sistence economies and resist capitalist appropriation of rural farmland
and forcible inclusion in the market.115 Population policy, they argued,
was a means by which Third World governments enacted donor demands
on the bodies of women in ways which had nothing to do with ‘choice’
in any meaningful sense (Akhter 2005). The research UBINIG had been
doing on the effects of long-acting contraceptives such as Norplant often
brought them into discussion with women who had received the implant
as part of programmes which injected them for free but charged to have
them removed, so that many of the women could not afford to have them
taken out, even when the side effects were severe (UBINIG 1991). This
concern with the imposition of Western concepts such as ‘choice’ and
 Bringing the West East: Comilla 1989 113

‘autonomy’ on the South Asian context was not Akhter’s alone, but was
shared by many of the women who were carrying out similar research. As
Jyotsna Agnihotra Gupta explains:

From my own research, and other research [what I see] is that the same
ideas of autonomy cannot apply in the Indian context…it’s not just the
state which can impinge on your autonomy, but in India in particular the
family. Autonomy vis-à-vis the state is one thing, but autonomy vis-à-vis
your own husband and your mother-in-law for instance, that’s a very dif-
ferent situation than for women in the west…I mean that’s what I would
say would be the FINRRAGE position because it has often been criticized,
sometimes even in terms of the Luddites, they reject all progress and mod-
ern technology and so on. Whereas I usually subscribe to that position. I
do not see it as something that is just rejecting technology and progress for
the sake of rejecting it, because it’s calling into question older ideas about
the body and so on. [I see it as] arguing very strongly through empirical
research how these technologies actually are harmful to women.116

Such tensions were not unique to FINRRAGE, but rather they

appeared to be part of a broader shift in oppositional spaces taking
place not only throughout feminism but across the spectrum of move-
ments which had their roots in the vibrant liberatory-alternative con-
sciousnesses of the mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Any
strongly oppositional consciousness in an identity-based movement
will inevitably produce tension between a collective analysis and indi-
vidual lives, so that sometimes positions which are analytically consis-
tent can wind up feeling morally wrong. The mainstream championing
of individual self-determination during the economic shifts of the
1980s made it increasingly difficult to argue from an alternative con-
sciousness which claimed that women should resist a particular tech-
nology or practice because of its potential collective impact. It is also
possible that the younger members of the network, having still been
teenagers in the 1970s, would be less likely to draw on experiences in
neo-Marxist movements against imperialism, or from the conscious-
ness-raising era of the WLM, or as pioneers of women’s studies (although
they were certainly pioneers in legitimising NRT as topics of enquiry in
114 3 Expansion

their respective fields). They were thus cognitively positioned in a less

clearly defined space:

I’m pretty sure that there became an intellectual difference, or a perspective

difference … And I think that started a difference within FINRRAGE. And
I think that came to a head at the conference in Bangladesh. So there was
a very anti-poststructuralist feeling from others in FINRRAGE at the time.
So I think that was the intellectual foundations of some people leaving
FINRRAGE. Including myself.117

In this sense, the dispute was also informed by the underlying struggle
between liberatory and postmodern feminism, so that shifting positions
based on relative context could be seen as effectively having no position
at all, fomenting tension between the academic generations. As the origi-
nal group had become close friends through working to establish
FINRRAGE, the PhD students had by now also formed a strong friend-
ship network through the international meetings. In this sense, some of
the tensions at Comilla can also be seen as a conflict between what were
essentially two close-knit circles of friends, a not infrequent occurrence in
structureless organisations, where one group may be experienced as dom-
inating in the absence of a hierarchical leadership, whether it means to
take control or not (Freeman 1972). However, suggesting that the differ-
ences were merely generational would be far too simplistic. Some of the
younger members did agree with the position of ‘strictly no’ on reproge-
netic technologies as a whole,118 while some of the women’s liberation
movement women, such as Penny Bainbridge,  felt quite strongly that the
position put forward at Comilla was ‘hardline and inflexible…like a
fundamentalist approach to things, and all the down sides of that’.119
Moreover, as Davis (2007) argues, with reference to similar arguments
within the editorial group of Our Bodies, Ourselves which were taking
place at about the same time, women who had been with the network
since Sweden may have felt that denial of their viewpoint was also a denial
of their rightful part in the origin story of FINRRAGE.
A more positive outcome of the Comilla conference was the establish-
ment of an Asian hub of FINRRAGE, with approximately 80 women
coming from Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, India and Indonesia, as
 Notes 115

well as a large contingent from all over Bangladesh, to attend the

FINRRAGE-UBINIG Regional Meeting the following year,120 so it is dif-
ficult to assess the true scope or impact of the disagreement on the net-
work as a whole. Additionally, these events took place in a context in
which a general shift in the entire global reproductive rights movement
towards a more choice-based analysis had been building for some time—
as had already been noted in the many sessions attempting to grapple with
‘self-determination’ in Frankfurt—and this does seem to have played a
strong part in the discussions at Comilla. Rather than considering these
fractures as emanating from FINRRAGE’s own ‘position’ or organisa-
tional shortcomings, the next chapter will show that it may be more pro-
ductive to think of tensions within the network as a reflection of tensions
in the larger cognitive space of feminism in which it was embedded.

Notes
1. See Walters (1987) for a comparative overview.
2. Keane was also the lawyer who arranged the surrogacy services of Mary
Beth Whitehead, genetic mother of ‘Baby M’, whose refusal to give up
her daughter became a high-profile case which challenged the enforce-
ability of surrogacy contracts (see Merrick 1990).
3. See Cohen, et al. (2005) for an excellent example of some of this resis-
tance, and the scientists’ response.
4. Minutes of FINNRET action meeting, 15 June 1984: FAN/JH/FIN
01/03.
5. The Amsterdam conference is considered to be the foundation of the
reproductive rights movement. Its organisers, the International
Contraception, Abortion and Sterilisation Campaign, became the
Women’s Global Network on Reproductive Rights (WGNRR) after
this meeting (see Maiguashca 2001 for a fuller discussion of the activi-
ties of that network).
6. Elizabeth Frazer, typed manuscript, ‘Report from Women’s International
Tribunal and Meeting on Reproductive Rights (aka 4th International
Women and Health Meeting) Amsterdam, Netherlands, July 22–28
1984’: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01/02. I have used the terms affiliates/mem-
116 3 Expansion

bers and groups/chapters interchangeably throughout the book as the

women themselves used both.
7. Second workshop report, author and date unspecified but presumed to
be either Gupta or Wilkins. Typed manuscript attached to first above,
emphasis and errors in the text: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01/02.
8. Second workshop report, ibid.
9. In English, the organisation’s name is Policy Research for Development
Alternative.
10. Much of this was later collected and published in English as Depopulating
Bangladesh (1995) and Resisting Norplant (1995).
11. Farida Akhter, UBINIG/Bangladesh, interviewed in Ottawa on 6 July
2011 (interview 1 of 2).
12. In Bangladesh at this time, the government’s method of choice was
sterilisation. Speaking of another project which was ostensibly about
diarrhoea prevention but was also focusing on contraception, Akhter
noted that they seemed to have decided to prevent diarrhoea by pre-
venting people from being born (ibid., interview 2, 7 July 2011).
13. Akhter, interview 2.
14. Ibid.
15. Hanmer, interview 1 (17 January 2008).
16. Letter to Leeds participants, undated, circa May 1984: FAN/JH/FIN
01/01/02.
17. FINNRET, Press release in response to the Warnock Report, 4 June
1984: FAN/JH/FIN 0/01/02.
18. Renate Klein, letter to the Planning Committee for the Women’s
Emergency Conference on the New Reproductive Technologies, 21
June 1984, emphasis hers: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01/02.
19. The public announcement of Rowland’s resignation broke just after she
returned from Women’s Worlds. In a letter sent to Hanmer on 10 June
1984, Rowland writes ‘I’ve finally taken a stand! And it’s incredible –
over 30 radio interviews and 4 national television shows – and a debate
with a doctor on the Monash team!’ The doctor was Alan Trounson,
emphasis hers: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01.
20. FINNRET, addendum to undated press release in response to the
Warnock report: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01.
21. In a letter giving advice to the others on handling media appearances,
written just after her arrival in Exeter, Rowland notes that ‘The hardest
thing is if stress is placed on the status of the embryo, which is danger-
ous ground for us. I kept making the point that I was pro-choice with
 Notes 117

respect to abortion … The point is that the State is responsible for

creating life outside the womb at an increasing rate with no community
discussion.’ Robyn Rowland, memo to Corea, Klein, Hanmer and
Raymond, 14 August 1984: FAN/JH/FIN 02/03.
22. Minutes, FINNRET meeting, 15 June 1984: FAN/JH/FIN 01/03.
23. Robyn Rowland, letter to ‘Lund PC’, 24 November 1984: FAN/JH/
FIN 02/03.
24. Renate Klein, letter to Hanmer, Rowland, Raymond and Corea, 14
April 1985: FAN/JH/FIN 02/03.
25. Rowland, letter of 24 November 1984.
26. Later narratives written by the fertility doctors about the ‘early days’ are
rather eye-opening on this account. For example, Howard Jones (1995,
37) recalls his wife, Georgeanna, a gynaecologist, having a ‘lively’ discus-
sion with Edwards about his use of gonadotropin being ‘far too high’.
27. Minutes of All Women Against Reproductive Engineering (AWARE)
meeting, 16 June 1984. The name AWARE was briefly used by some
members of British FINRRET: FAN/JH/FIN 01/01.
28. Hansard (Commons), 23 November 1984, column 560. Mulkay (1997,
90–94) makes the interesting observation that, in fact, women on both
sides of the debate were arguing from a standpoint of women speaking
on behalf of women, rather than from their professional qualifications,
even when these were parliamentarians.
29. Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interviewed in Leeds on 19 Feb 2010 (interview 2).
30. FINNRET, invitation and questionnaire for applicants for the
Emergency Conference: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/02/02.
31. Gena Corea, letter to Lund conference committee, 3 June 1984, FAN/
JH/FIN 03/01/02/03.
32. Jalna Hanmer and Renate Klein for the organising committee, letter to
all participants, undated (c. March 1984): FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/02/02.
33. Lene Koch, Denmark, interviewed by phone on 11 September 2011.
34. Renate Klein, introductory remarks by the organising committee,
Women’s ‘Emergency’ Conference on the New Reproductive
Technologies, 3–8 July 1985, Vällinge (Lund), Sweden (henceforth
Sweden conference): FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/02/02. The documentation
circulated post-conference may also be found at http://www.finrrage.
org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Finrrage_Conference_Lund_
Sweden_1985.pdf. Where later versions of these papers appear in the
published proceedings, Made to Order (Spallone and Steinberg 1987b),
118 3 Expansion

or in other journals, I have cited these rather than the circulated

versions.
35. Cassette tape made by Renate Klein and Gena Corea, c. 10 July 1985,
given to the author by Rowland.
36. Collected country reports, Sweden conference: FAN/JH/FIN
03/01/02/02.
37. Alison Solomon, Israel report: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/02/02. Jewish lin-
eage is derived solely from the mother.
38. Satoko Nagaoki, Japan report written collectively by Soshiren: FAN/
JH/FIN 03/01/02/02.
39. Sarah Jansen and Helga Satzinger, West Germany report: FAN/JH/
FIN 03/01/02/02.
40. In the circulated version, an extract from Jornal de Brasil on 18 October
1982 attributes this comment to the president of the Brazilian Society
for the Advancement of Science: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/02/02.
41. In Australia, this is the equivalent of a UK Master’s degree, with a post-
graduate year of coursework and a 20,000 word dissertation.
42. Christine Crowe, Australia, interviewed in Sydney, 17 September
2010. In her interview she also notes that she was told to write up only
the eight who had chosen IVF because her supervisor did not think the
others were interesting.
43. Rowland had also found that infertility appeared to be more psycho-
logically devastating when it was the male partner, hence the practice of
secrecy in AID.
44. The version presented at Lund is nearly identical to that published in
Made to Order. Both of these differ slightly from the article in the
Tribune (Corea and Ince 1985).
45. ‘Chemical’ is a slight rise in recorded hormones over the first 48 hours,
with no further evidence of pregnancy. ‘Clinical’ is any pregnancy car-
ried for at least eight weeks, regardless of outcome.
46. There is still considerable flexibility in the reporting of ‘success’.
Monash continues to advertise clinical pregnancy per blastocyst
transfer, claiming a 52% success rate for women under 30, and 18%
between 40 and 44 from July 2013 to June 2015 (Monash IVF 2017),
despite having been warned by the Australian Competition and
Consumer Commission that this was misleading as many clinical
pregnancies miscarry (Medew 2016). Bourn Hall advertises a 40%
clinical pregnancy rate for IVF in women below 38 and 26% above
 Notes 119

(Bourn Hall 2017); however, according to the HFEA (2017), pre-

dicted success for live birth per cycle started at Bourn Hall in 2014
averaged 34.5% and 12%.
47. Maria Mies, Germany, interviewed in Cologne on 12 April 2011.
48. Hanmer, interview 3 (5 May 2010).
49. However, as Rebecca Albury noted when discussing her participation
in this research, there would also be women like herself who were on
the mailing list because they had attended one of the conferences, but
did not necessarily identify as FINRRAGE affiliates (Personal commu-
nication, 2 September 2010).
50. Sarah Jansen and Helga Satzinger, West Germany report: FAN/JH/
FIN 03/01/02/02.
51. As summarised in the published versions of the country reports, this
was interpreted to mean that it would in fact be allowed (Spallone and
Steinberg 1987a).
52. Helga Satzinger, Germany, interviewed in London on 16 December
2010.
53. [Journal of Feminist Theory and Practice]. The German title of the
Congress was Frauen Gegen Gen- und Reproduktionstechnik (see
Brockskothen et al. 1986 for the collected papers).
54. Mies, interview, ibid.
55. Satzinger, interview, ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. [Red Zora, Revolutionary Cells]. Rote Zora took its name from a chil-
dren’s story, Rote Zora und ihre Bande [The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle,
in its English version], about a little girl who leads a band of parentless
children in World War II Croatia (Kläber 1967).
58. Jansen and Satzinger, West Germany report.
59. From the English version available at http://www.freilassung.de/otherl/
arm/rzora84.htm.
60. Satzinger, personal communication, 25 June 2017.
61. Satzinger, interview, ibid.
62. Discussed in more detail below.
63. Similar dynamics existed in Japan, where population policy was and
remains a matter of intense state pressure on women to reproduce in
order to preserve the Japanese race (Kano 2016, 98; Norgren 2001).
The Japanese group Soshiren had emerged in 1982 to lead a broad
coalition against removal of the ‘economic reasons’ clause of the 1948
120 3 Expansion

Eugenic Protection Law, which effectively circumvents an 1880 law

making abortion a criminal offence. This had to be balanced carefully,
however, as Soshiren was also against the other use of the law, which—
as it sounds—was mainly enacted to prevent disabled children from
being born (see also Kusano and Kawasaki 1983; Yukako 2008).
64. Erika Feyerabend, Germany, interviewed in Essen on 9 April 2011.
65. In their dissenting report, Senators Crowley and Zakharov agreed that
the language of the Bill was sufficiently unclear that such fears were
justified (Australia 1985, 79). The Bill was ultimately never debated.
An overview of Australia’s subsequent ‘patchwork’ of regulation can be
found in Szoke (2003).
66. Lariane Fonseca, Australia, interviewed by phone on 6 August 2010.
See also Fonseca, announcement of the National Feminist Network,
undated, c. September 1984, and Fonseca, letter to Rowland, undated
c. November 1984: FAN/JH/FIN 02/04/01. In the latter, Fonseca
includes a note from the person she had asked to copy tapes of Rowland’s
talk for the network to distribute, refusing on the grounds that he was
horrified by the content and ‘too many people have already been emo-
tionally crippled by so-called “freedom fighters” such as the woman
speaking on your tape.’
67. “Liberation or Loss? Collected conference papers”, 1986, unpublished.
Archived at Jessie Street National Women’s Library, Sydney: JSNWL
Q174.25 NAT.
68. Near the end of 1983, Burton and two other patients had successfully
sued the government of Victoria to lift the moratorium on egg dona-
tion which had been imposed after the Waller paper on donor gametes.
Their argument rested on the accusation that this was sex discrimina-
tion since sperm donation was legal (Machin 2008, 113).
69. See also the conference report by Rosemary West (1986) in The Age, 14
May.
70. Barbara Burton, workshop report in Conference papers at Jessie Street,
as above.
71. A subsequent report issued by the West Australian government, which
sparked another round of public controversy over Medicare funding of
IVF, estimated the cost to the health system of a baby born through
IVF at AUD 42,927—45 times the cost of a naturally conceived child
(see summary of news coverage in de Wit and Corea 1989, 71–72).
 Notes 121

72. Monash was also circulating articles through its press cuttings service
with headlines such as ‘US calls on our in vitro experience’: FAN/JH/
FIN 09/05.
73. Infopack 4: FAN/JH/FIN 06/04. Ultimately, when the licence was
approved, IVF Australia was restricted to procedures which were legal
in Victoria, regardless of where they were carried out.
74. Rebecca Albury, who was invited to be on the committee, notes that the
Minister of Health had a particularly well-informed view on ‘what kinds
of expertise needs to be included that was previously excluded. And he
included.’ Albury, interviewed in Wollongong on 20 September 2010.
75. Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interviewed in Leeds on 17 January 2008 (inter-
view 1).
76. Margaret Krannich and Annette Görlich, GRAEL/Belgium, inter-
viewed together via Skype on 5 June 2010.
77. Görlich, interview, ibid.
78. Minutes, Feminist International Hearing on Genetic and Reproductive
Technologies, European Parliament, Brussels, 6–7 March 1986: FAN/
JH/FIN 03/01/03.
79. My use of the term ‘conceptive’ comes from my interview with Jyotsna
Agnihotri Gupta, although I have since noticed it appears frequently in
literature written by women from India and other parts of the South.
80. Krannich, interview, ibid.
81. Renate Klein, Australia, interviewed with Rowland in Geelong on 24
June 2010 (interview 2 of 3).
82. Aurelia Weikert, Austria, interviewed via Skype on 11 August 2010.
Weikert and Riegler, both still undergraduates at the time, had attended
the Groningen panel because they were already interested in NRT, and
through that became the Austrian national contacts. They had a group
of about half a dozen women who met weekly in Vienna, part of a small
national network.
83. [Women’s Health Association].
84. Minutes, Brussels strategy meeting, 8 March 1986: FAN/JH/FIN
03/01/03.
85. This meeting, organised in Brussels in 1976 by Diana Russell and
Nicole Van de Ven, covered everything from medical crimes to rape to
abuse of lesbians and spawned the first Take Back the Night March
(Russell and Van de Ven 1976).
86. Minutes, Brussels strategy meeting.
122 3 Expansion

87. Wagner later sent a letter to Klein thanking her for sending him her
‘outstanding’ Exploitation of a Desire, and enclosed the draft of his
highly critical WHO report on IVF for early circulation to FINRRAGE
members. He also mentions giving a plenary address at the sixth World
Congress on IVF, which created ‘quite a storm’ and being ‘delighted’
that Corea was also there to offer support (letter with attached draft ‘Is
IVF Appropriate?’, 24 April 1989: FAN/JH/FIN 05/03/01).
88. I use the term here after Haas to describe the network of experts—some
with scientific credentials, some not—upon which international pol-
icy-makers rely to provide the knowledge basis for their decisions.
According to Haas, what makes an epistemic community is a shared set
of value-laden (as well as causal) beliefs and methods of validation
which create ‘a set of common practices associated with a set of prob-
lems to which their professional competence is directed, presumably
out of the conviction that human welfare will be enhanced as a conse-
quence’ (1992, 3). This is a formulation which suggests that there is
also a discernible cognitive praxis amongst epistemic communities, and
conversely, that FINRRAGE could also be thought of as a kind of epis-
temic community, albeit one without the power to intervene directly in
policy-making.
89. Conference programme, Primera Conferencia Feminista Europea Sobre
Tecnologias Reproductivas e Ingenieria Genetica [First European Feminist
Conference Against Reproductive and Genetic Engineering], Mallorca,
Spain, 11–15 October 1986: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/04.
90. Chris Ewing and Deborah Steinberg, letter to all FINRRAGE national
contacts, 30 October 1986: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/04.
91. Margret Krannich and Annette Görlich, letter to all participants and
‘Open questions which came up during the Mallorca conference’, 8
November 1986: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/05. As the Women’s Bureau of
GRAEL had its offices inside the European Parliament building, the
option of acting within existing institutions may have seemed more
useful to Krannich and Görlich (particularly after the successful
Feminist Hearing) than it did to others who were more distant from
their own political structures.
92. ‘Issues in’ would be added by the publisher in the third year to clarify
that it was not a science journal. IRAGE is discussed in more detail in
Chap. 5.
93. Minutes from Rage/from Berlin conference 6.88, author uncertain,
probably Patricia Spallone: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/05.
 Notes 123

94. A further letter from Corea and an interview with Raymond also
appeared in issue 11.
95. In German, Frauen Gegen Gen- und Reproduktionstechnologie. The
organisers were Gen-Archiv (Essen), Frauenzentrum (Bochum),
Frauengesundheitszentrum (Frankfurt) and Beiträge zur Feministischen
Theorie und Praxis (Köln).
96. Plenary address by Women’s Centre, Bochum in 2nd Bundesweiter
Kongress, Frauen Gegen Gen- und Reproduktionstechnologie Reader
(unpaginated collection of photocopied documents, English version):
FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/05. The full proceedings were later published in
German (Bradish et al. 1989).
97. Since membership in a clandestine organisation is still a criminal
offence in Germany, no names were offered during my interviews, and
I deliberately did not ask.
98. Erika Feyerabend, Germany, interviewed in Essen on 10 April 2010
(interview 2 of 2).
99. Pat Spallone on behalf of FINRRAGE Britain, letter to Amnesty
International, 28 June 1988: FAN/JH/FIN 02/04/02.
100. A charge levied in the absence of evidence of specific action.
101. See Die Früchte des Zorns, Prozeß gegen Ingrid Strobl [The case against
Ingrid Strobl] (ID-Archiv 1993). Available in English at http://www.
freilassung.de/div/texte/rz/zorn/Zorn01.htm
102. Feyerabend, interview, ibid. Feyerabend also appeared in a documentary
short which centred on Corinna Kawaters, who received a suspended sen-
tence for membership in Rote Zora (Ressler 2000). A short extract is avail-
able at http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a03/lang_en/art_ressler_en.htm.
103. Genarchiv Essen, ‘Thoughts on the critique of science and technology’,
Congress Reader, ibid.
104. Vibhuti Patel, ‘Sex determination and Sex-preselection tests in India –
Recent techniques for femicide’, Congress Reader, ibid.
105. Various workshop listings, Congress Reader, ibid.
106. Women’s Centre, Bochum, ‘Open concept on self-determination’,
Congress Reader, ibid.
107. Isel Rivero (UN NGO Affairs Officer), letter to Jalna Hanmer, 21 Sep
1988, and attached notes by Jalna Hanmer: FAN/JH/FIN 03/04/01.
108. Women’s Declarations on Reproductive and Genetic Engineering, pam-
phlet prepared by UBINIG for the 2004 World Social Forum, donated
to the researcher by Farida Akhter.
124 3 Expansion

109. The first ‘official’ IVF baby in India had been born in 1986 (Kumar 1997),
and first private IVF clinic was about to open (Jaslok Hospital 2006).
110. See FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/06, also conference proceedings published as
Declaration of Comilla (Akhter et al. 1991).
111. In FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/06. Mies does not appear to have otherwise
published this paper in English.
112. Farida Akhter, Bangladesh, interviewed in Ottawa on 7 July 2011
(interview 2).
113. Minutes, FINRRAGE International Meeting, Comilla 26–27 March
1989: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/06.
114. Letter, Farida Akhter to Jalna Hanmer, 10 March 1988: FAN/JH/FIN
07/07.2.
115. UBINIG at this time was developing a theory of preserving biodiversity
in lifestyles, as well as knowledge systems and farming techniques,
which has now become a major movement in Bangladesh. Pamphlets
for Nayakrishi Andolon, donated to researcher by Akhter: FAN/JH/
FIN 13/02 (see also UBINIG 2015).
116. Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta, India/Netherlands, interviewed by phone on
13 September 2011.
117. Christine Crowe, Australia, interviewed in Sydney, 17 September 2010.
118. Aurelia Weikert, Austria, interviewed via Skype on 11 August 2010.
119. Penny Bainbridge, Britain, interviewed in Leeds on 19 July 2011.
120. Also held at BARD on 10 May 1990: FAN/FINDE G.1.6.

References
Akhter, F. (1995). Resisting Norplant: Women’s Struggle in Bangladesh against
Coercion and Violence. Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana.
Akhter, F. (2005). Depopulating Bangladesh: Essays on the Politics of Fertility (3rd
ed.). Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana.
Akhter, A., van Berkel, W. & Ahmad, N. (Eds.) (1991). Declaration of Comilla:
Proceedings of FINRRAGE-UBINIG International Conference, 19–25 March
1989. Dhaka: UBINIG.
Albury, R.  M. (1999). The Politics of Reproduction: Beyond the Slogans. St
Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Australia (1985). Human Embryo Experimentation in Australia. Senate Select
Committee on the Human Embryo Experimentation Bill 1985. Canberra:
Australian Government Publishing Service.
 References 125

Autonomedia. (1989). A Herstory of the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora: Armed
Resistance in West Germany. Spunk Library: The Anarchist Archive. http://
www.spunk.org/texts/groups/anm/sp000268.txt. Accessed 21 Oct 17.
Benda, E. (1985). Bericht Der Arbeitsgruppe: In-Vitro-Fertilisation, Genomanalyse
Und Gentherapie [Report of the Working Group: In Vitro Fertilization,
Genome Analysis and Gene Therapy]. Bonn: Bundesminister der Justiz und
Bundesminister fur Forschung und Technologie.
Berer, M. (1986). Breeding Conspiracies: Feminism and the New Reproductive
Technologies. Trouble and Strife, 9, 29–35.
Bhanot, N. (1991). The Bhopal Disaster and Update. In F.  Akhter, W. van
Berkel and N.  Ahmad (Eds.),  Declaration of Comilla:  Proceedings of
FINRRAGE-UBINIG International Conference 1989 (pp. 112-117). Dhaka:
UBINIG
Bourn Hall. (2017). Pregnancy Rates. Bourn Hall Clinic. https://www.bourn-
hall.co.uk/pregnancy-rates/. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Bradish, P. (1987). From Genetic Counseling and Genetic Analysis, to Genetic
Ideal and Genetic Fate. In P.  Spallone & D.  L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to
Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 94–101). Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
Bradish, P., Feyerabend, E., & Winkler, U. (1989). Frauen Gegen Gen- Und
Reproduktionstechnologien. Beitraege zum 2. bundesweiten Kongreß in
Frankfurt, 28–30 Oct 1988. München: Verlag Frauenoffensive.
Brockskothen, M., Hehr, I., Kühn, R., & Meyer, U. (Eds.). (1986). Frauen
Gegen Gentechnik Und Reproduktionstechnik: Dokumentation Zum Kongreß
Vom 19. – 21. 4. 1985 in Bonn. Köln: Kölner Volksblatt Verlags.
Bullard, L. (1987). Killing Us Softly: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Genetic
Engineering. In P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth
of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 110–119). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Bunch, C., Carrillo, R., & Guinée, I. (1985). Feminist Perspectives Report of
the Feminist Perspectives Working Group to the Closing Plenary. Women’s
Studies International Forum, 8(4), 243–247.
Burton, B. (1986). The Need for Reproductive Control and Self-Determination
for Infertile Women. In Liberation or Loss? Women Act on the New Reproductive
Technologies. Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education, Australian
National University.
Cohen, B.  D. (1979, September 28). Test Tube Baby Experiment at Norfolk
School; Doctors Set to Implant Human Embryo. The Washington Post, p. 1,
Section A1.
126 3 Expansion

Cohen, J., Simons, R. F., Fehilly, C. B., Fishel, S. B., Edwards, R. G., Hewitt, J.,
Rowland, G.  F., Steptoe, P.  C., & Webster, J.  M. (1985). Birth After
Replacement of Hatching Blastocyst Cryopreserved at Expanded Blastocyst
Stage. The Lancet, 325(8429), 647–647.
Cohen, J., Trounson, A., Dawson, K., Jones, H., Hazekamp, J., Nygren, K.-G.,
& Hamberger, L. (2005). The Early Days of IVF Outside the UK. Human
Reproduction Update, 11(5), 439–460.
Corea, G., & Ince, S. (1985, July 3). IVF a Game for Losers at Half of US
Clinics. Medical Tribune, pp. 12–13.
Corea, G., & Ince, S. (1987). Report of a Survey of IVF Clinics in the USA. In
P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive
and Genetic Progress (pp. 133–145). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Crowe, C. (1987). ‘Women Want It’: In Vitro Fertilization and Women’s
Motivations for Participation. In P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made
to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 84–93). Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
Davis, K. (2007). The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels
Across Borders. Durham: Duke University Press.
de Wit, C., & Corea, G. (1989). Current Developments and Issues: A Summary.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 2(1), 63–90.
Degener, T. (1990). Female Self-Determination Between Feminist Claims and
“Voluntary” Eugenics, Between “Rights” and Ethics. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(2), 87–100.
Dickey, R. P. (1986). The Medical Status of the Embryo. Loyola Law Review, 32,
317–336.
Edwards, R. G. (1981). Test-Tube Babies, 1981. Nature, 293(5830), 253–256.
Edwards, R., & Steptoe, P. (1980). A Matter of Life: The Sensational Story of the
World’s First Test-Tube Baby. London: Sphere Books Ltd.
Edwards, R. G., & Steptoe, P. C. (1983). Current Status of In-Vitro Fertilisation
and Implantation of Human Embryos. The Lancet, 322(8362), 1265–1269.
European Parliament. (1989). Resolution of 16 March 1989 on Artificial
Insemination ‘In Vivo’ and ‘In Vitro’; Resolution of 16 March 1989 on the Ethical
and Legal Problems of Genetic Engineering (Doc. A2–372/88). Official Journal
C 96, 17.4.89, pp. 165–173.
Fabricant, D. (1990). International Law Revisited: Davis Vs Davis and the Need
for Coherent Policy on the Status of the Embryo. Connecticut Journal of
International Law, 6, 173–207.
 References 127

Family Law Council. (1985). Creating Children: A Uniform Approach to the Law
and Practice of Reproductive Technology in Australia. Canberra: Australian
Government Publishing Service.
FINRRAGE. (1987). Statement from Third World Women of the FINRRAGE
Conference. In P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The
Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (p.  213). Oxford: Pergamon
Press.
Forum Against Sex Determination and Sex Pre-Selection. (1991). The Campaign
Against Sex Determination and Sex Pre-Selection in India – Our Experiences.
In F.  Akhter, W. van Berkel, & N.  Ahmad (Eds.), Declaration of Comilla:
Proceedings of FINRRAGE-UBINIG International Conference 1989 (pp. 156–
164). Dhaka: UBINIG.
Freeman, J.  (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Berkeley Journal of
Sociology, 17, 151–165.
Gen-Archiv. (1988). Police Raid on Gene Archive – News from West Germany.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 1(1), 103–105.
Gillon, R. (1984). Britain: The Public Gets Involved. The Hastings Center Report,
14(6), 16–17.
Haas, P.  M. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International
Policy Coordination. International Organization, 46(1), 1–35.
Harvard Law Review Association. (1989). Developments in the Law: Medical
Technology and the Law. Harvard Law Review, 103, 1519–1976.
Henry, A. (1984). Population Control: No  – Women Decide Tribunal
Internacional De La Mujer Y Reunion Sobre Los Derechos Reproductivos.
Off Our Backs, 14(9), 2–7.
Hepburn, L. (1992). Ova-Dose?: Australian Women and the New Reproductive
Technology. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
HFEA. (2017). Success Rates  – Bourn Hall Clinic.  Human Fertilization &
Embryology Authority.  http://guide.hfea.gov.uk/guide/SuccessRate.aspx.
Accessed 5 May 2017.
Holmes, H. B., & Hoskins, B. (1985). Prenatal and Preconception Sex Choice
Technologies: A Path to Femicide? In G. Corea, R. Klein, J. Hanmer, H. B.
Holmes, B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond, R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher
(Eds.), Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women
(pp. 15–29). London: Hutchinson.
ID-Archiv. (1993). Die Früchte Des Zorns: Texte Und Materialien Zur Geschichte
Der Revolutionären Zellen Und Der Roten Zora [Grapes of Wrath: Texts and
Materials on the History of the Revolutionary Cells and Red Zora]. Berliner
128 3 Expansion

Bündnis für Freilassung/Berlin Alliance for Liberation. http://www.freilas-

sung.de/div/texte/rz/zorn/Zorn01.htm. Accessed 3 Nov 2016.
Jansen, S. (1987). Resistance and Beyond: Conceiving a Feminist Science. In
P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive
and Genetic Progress (pp. 209–210). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Jaslok Hospital. (2006). About Dr. Firuza Parikh. Jaslok Hospital. http://www.
ivfclinicindia.com/ABOUT%20DR%20FIRUZA%20PARIKH/M__8.
Accessed 19 Sept 2017.
Jones, H. W. (1995). The Norfolk Experience: How IVF Came to the United
States. In A. T. Alberda, R. A. Gan, & H. M. Vemer (Eds.), Pioneers in In
Vitro Fertilization: The Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Oss, the Netherlands,
November 5, 1993 (pp. 25–43). New York: Parthenon.
Kano, A. (2016). Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love
and Labour. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Kaupen-Hass, H. (1988). Experimental Obstetrics and National Socialism: The
Conceptual Basis of Reproductive Technology Today. (Issues in) Reproductive and
Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 1(2), 127–132.
Kläber, K. (1967). The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle. New York: Doubleday.
Klein, R. (1989). German Women Say ‘No’ to Reproductive and Genetic
Technologies. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 2(1), 91–98.
Koval, R. (1986). What Price the Scale of Reproductive Technology? Paper
given at Liberation or Loss? Women Act on the New Reproductive Technologies,
Australian National University, 9–11 May 1986. Canberra: Centre for
Continuing Education.
Kumar, T.  C. (1997). Architect of India’s First Test Tube Baby: Dr Subhas
Mukerji. Current Science, 72(7), 526–531.
Kusano, I., & Kawasaki, K. (1983). Japanese Women Challenge Anti-Abortion
Law. Japan-Asia Quarterly, 15(1), 10–15.
Laws, S. (1985). Power and the Right to Choose – Amsterdam 1984. Trouble
and Strife, 5, 34–42.
Lewis, J., & Cannell, F. (1986). The Politics of Motherhood in the 1980s:
Warnock, Gillick and Feminists. Journal of Law and Society, 13(3), 321–342.
Loveland, K. (2017). Feminism Against Neoliberalism: Theorising Biopolitics
in Germany, 1978–1993. Gender & History, 29(1), 67–86.
Machin, L. (2008). The Social and Ethical Context of Embryo Donation. PhD,
School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds.
Maiguashca, B. (2001). Contemporary Social Movements and the Making of World
Politics. PhD, International Relations, London School of Economics and
Political Science.
 References 129

Martin, C. (1986, June 24). A New and Fertile Field for Investment. Bulletin
(Australia), pp. 6–10.
Medew, J. (2016, November 15). Monash IVF Publishing Potentially Misleading
Success Rates. The Age (Victoria). http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/
monash-ivf-publishing-potentially-misleading-success-rates-20161115-
gspz84.html. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Merrick, J. (1990). The Case of Baby M. In D. Bartels, R. Priester, D. Vawter,
& A.  Caplan (Eds.), Beyond Baby M: Ethical Issues in New Reproductive
Technologies (pp. 183–200). Clifton: Humana Press.
Mies, M. (1989). What Unites, What Divides Women from the South and from
the North in the Field of Reproductive Technologies. In F.  Akhter, W. van
Berkel and N. Ahmad (Eds.), Declaration of Comilla: Proceedings of FINRRAGE-
UBINIG International Conference 1989 (pp. 33–44). Dhaka: UBINIG.
Mies, M. (2010). The Village and the World. Melbourne: Spinifex.
Minden, S. (1987). Patriarchal Designs: The Genetic Engineering of Human
Embryos. In P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth
of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 102–109). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Monash IVF. (2017). Our Success Rates. Monash IVF Australia. http://monashivf.
com/why-monash/our-success-rates/. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Mulkay, M. J. (1997). The Embryo Research Debate: Science and the Politics of
Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Murdolo, A. (1996). Warmth and Unity with All Women?: Historicising Racism
in the Australian Women’s Movement. Feminist Review, 52, 69–86.
Napier, L. (1986). Aims of the Workshop ‘Infertility and Feminists’. Paper given
at  Liberation or Loss? Women Act on the New Reproductive Technologies,
Australian National University, 9–11 May 1986. Canberra: Centre for
Continuing Education.
Norgren, C. (2001). Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in
Postwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
NPSU, & FSA. (1985). In Vitro Fertilization Pregnancies Australia and New
Zealand 1979–1984. Sydney: National Perinatal Statistics Unit and Fertility
Society of Australia.
Ramsey, J. (1986). Liberation or Loss? Women Act on the New Reproductive
Technologies, Canberra, 9–11 May 1986 [Report]. Australian Feminist
Studies, 3(Summer), 121–128.
Reis, A.  R. G. (1987). IVF in Brazil: The Story Told by the Newspapers. In
P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive
and Genetic Progress (pp. 120–132). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
130 3 Expansion

Ressler, O. (2000). Die Rote Zora. Art-e-fact. http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a03/lang_

en/art_ressler_en.htm. Accessed 30 Apr 2015.
Rethmann, P. (2006). On Militancy, Sort Of. Cultural Critique, 62, 67–91.
Richardt, N. (2003). A Comparative Analysis of the Embryological Research
Debate in Great Britain and Germany. Social Politics: International Studies in
Gender, State & Society, 10(1), 86–128.
Robertson, J. A. (2004). Reproductive Technology in Germany and the United
States: An Essay in Comparative Law and Bioethics. Columbia Journal of
Transnational Law, 43(1), 189–227.
Rote Zora. (1984, June). Resistance Is Possible: Interview with Two Members of
Rote Zora. EMMA. http://www.freilassung.de/otherl/arm/rzora84.htm.
Accessed 21 Oct 2016.
Rote Zora. (1993). Mili’s Tanz Auf Dem Eis: Von Pirouetten, Schleifen, Einbrüchen,
Doppelten Saltos Und Dem Versuch, Boden Unter Die Füsse Zu Kriegen [Mili’s
Dance on the Ice: Of Spins, Loops, Dips, Double Somersaults and the
Attempt to Get Some Ground under Your Feet]. Berliner Bündnis für
Freilassung/Berlin Alliance for Liberation. http://www.freilassung.de/div/
texte/rz/milis/milis1.htm. Accessed 3 Nov 2016.
Rowbotham, S., & McCrindle, J.  (1986). More Than Just a Memory: Some
Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike,
1984–85. Feminist Review, 23, 109–124.
Rowland, R. (1984). Reproductive Technology [Recording]. Melbourne:
Educational Media Services, Deakin University.
Rowland, R. (1986). Choice or Control? Women and Our Relationship to New
Reproductive Technologies. Paper given at Liberation or Loss? Women Act on
the New Reproductive Technologies, Australian National University, 9–11 May
1986. Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education.
Rowland, R. (1987). Facts, Not Fantasy Visions (Letters). Trouble and Strife, 10,
3–5.
Rowland, R., & Klein, R. (1990). Radical Feminism: Critique and Construct.
In S. Gunew (Ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct (pp. 271–303).
London: Routledge.
Russell, D. E. H., & Van de Ven, N. (1976). Crimes Against Women: Proceedings
of the International Tribunal. Brussels: Les-Femmes Publishing.
Sarojini, N.  B., Chakraborty, S., Venkatachalam, D., Bhattacharya, S.,
Kapilashrami, A., & De, R. (2006). Women’s Right to Health. New Delhi:
National Human Rights Commission (India). http://www.rwi.lu.se/nhridb/
asia/india/womens.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2016.
 References 131

Satzinger, H., & Spallone, P. (1988). Frauen in Auseinandersetszung Mit Gen-

Und Fortpflanzungstechnologien (Women Responding to Genetic and
Reproductive Technologies): A Seminar Held 17–19 June 1988, Berlin.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 1(3), 313–315.
Schleiermacher, S. (1990). Racial Hygiene and Deliberate Parenthood: Two
Sides of Demographer Hans Harmsen’s Population Policy. (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 3(3), 201–210.
Segal, L. (1983). The Heat in the Kitchen. In S. Hall & M. Jacques (Eds.), The
Politics of Thatcherism (pp. 207–215). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Spain. (1986). Report of the General Secretariat, Special Commission for the Study
of Human In Vitro Fertilization and Artificial Insemination. Congress of
Deputies. Madrid: The Commission.
Spallone, P. (1987). Reproductive Technology and the State: The Warnock
Report and Its Clones. In P.  Spallone & D.  L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to
Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 166–183). Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
Spallone, P., & Steinberg, D. L. (1987a). International Report. In P. Spallone &
D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic
Progress. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Spallone, P., & Steinberg, D. L. (Eds.). (1987b). Made to Order: The Myth of
Reproductive and Genetic Progress. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Spar, D. (2006). The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the
Commerce of Conception. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Steinberg, D. (1987). Selective Breeding and Social Engineering: Discriminatory
Policies of Access to Artificial Insemination by Donor in Great Britain. In
P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive
and Genetic Progress (pp. 184–189). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Szoke, H. (2003). Australia – A Federated Structure of Statutory Regulation of
Art. In J. Gunning & H. Szoke (Eds.), The Regulation of Assisted Reproductive
Technology (pp. 75–94). Hampshire: Ashgate.
Templeton, A., Van Look, P., Lumsden, M. A., Angell, R., Aitken, J., Duncan,
A. W., & Baird, D. T. (1984). The Recovery of Preovulatory Oocytes Using
a Fixed Schedule of Ovulation Induction and Follicle Aspiration. BJOG: An
International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 91(2), 148–154.
UBINIG. (1991). ‘The Price of Norplant Is Tk.2000! You Cannot Remove It.’
Clients Are Refused Removal in Norplant Trial in Bangladesh. (Issues in)
132 3 Expansion

Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist

Analysis, 4(1), 45–46.
UBINIG. (2015). About Nayakrishi Andolon. Policy Research for Development
Alternative. http://ubinig.org/index.php/nayakrishidetails/showAerticle/2/8.
Accessed 28 Aug 2017.
Varela, M. J., & Stolcke, V. (1989). The New Spanish Law: A Model for Europe?
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 2(3), 233–238.
Varma, R., & Varma, D. (2005). The Bhopal Disaster of 1984. Bulletin of
Science, Technology & Society, 25(1), 37–45.
Walters, L.  R. (1987). Ethics and New Reproductive Technologies: An
International Review of Committee Statements. The Hastings Center Report,
17(3), 3–9.
Walz, K. (1980, October 15). Woman to Bear Son of Single Man. The Associated
Press.
Wan, V. (1989). The Australian Venture Capital Market. Journal of Small Business
Management, 27(3), 75–78.
Warnock, M. (1985). A Question of Life: The Warnock Report on Human
Fertilisation and Embryology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Waugh, J. (1986, May 9). Breeding Money. Business Review Weekly (Australia),
pp. 52–62.
West, R. (1986, May 14). A Growing Sense That We Are No Longer Safe. The
Age (Melbourne).
Winkler, U. (1988). New U.S. Know-How in Frankfurt: A ‘Surrogate Mother’
Agency. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 1(2), 205–207.
Wood, C., Leeton, J., Mc Talbot, J., & Trounson, A. O. (1981). Technique for
Collecting Mature Human Oocytes for In Vitro Fertilization. BJOG: An
International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 88(7), 756–760.
Yukako, O. (2008). Gender, Reproductive Rights, and Technology. In J. Chen
(Ed.), Another Japan Is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship
Education (pp. 225–229). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
 4
Abeyance

The international perspective I think is very important, and this is something

which will stay with me…I mean the world was different than today, it was
not as globalised, this was an open door for acting internationally that was
really very interesting and eye opening for such young women as we were.
Erika Feyerabend, Germany, interview 1

Abeyance of a social movement is a difficult process to pin down to a

starting point. Organisations which either do not have a single issue, or
which are able to quickly identify another concrete goal which would
appeal to the same constituents are more likely to survive between waves
of mass activism. According to Taylor (2007), such organisations go
through a particular process which requires that at least some part of the
original group remains committed, in some form of organisation stable
enough to preserve the movement’s culture, until a resurgence of activism
around the issue will provide the movement with new blood. In this final
instalment in the story of action and reflection, I will consider how
FINRRAGE attempted to adapt its knowledge practices throughout the

© The Author(s) 2017 133

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_4
134 4 Abeyance

1990s in order to preserve its specific cognitive praxis as the context of

feminism globally began to change.

FINRRAGE Post-Comilla
While the breakup of the British group marks a significant change in the
network’s structure, the other major change in 1989 was the movement
of the international coordination to Germany. This had been planned for
some time, as Renate Klein, sponsored by Robyn Rowland, had in 1987
been awarded a Georgina Sweet postdoctoral fellowship at Deakin
University to pursue research with women who had undergone IVF. Klein
was now permanently in Australia, while Deborah Lynn Steinberg, who
had taken over as international coordinator, was finishing her PhD and
had asked to be replaced. The move, therefore, was not the direct result
of the conflict at Comilla, although with the research archive and the role
of international coordinator already slated to move to Germany, the
British members may have felt that disbanding their own group would
not endanger the functioning of the international network, which does
not seem to have been anyone’s desire.
At this time, the German women had affiliates and groups in Köln,
Berlin, Frankfurt, Essen and Hamburg, who met on the average every two
months. Seven women from these groups now formed the International
Co-ordinating Group (ICG), along with Linda Wilkens, who had been
the national contact for the Netherlands since Groningen. As a first order
of business, the new ICG called a European meeting in Boldern,
Switzerland, from 11 to 14 October 1990, hosted by women from the
Swiss groups Antigena and Nogerete, to discuss the direction of the net-
work and begin planning for the upcoming third international confer-
ence, to be held in Rio in 1991.

Boldern 1990: Europe Regroups

Boldern was not an outward-facing conference, but rather concentrated

on the internal workings of the network; thus, the main focus of the
strategy discussion centred on the problems which had arisen at Comilla.
 FINRRAGE Post-Comilla 135

This was somewhat disconcerting for the new women, who had not been
there, and reflects one of the inbuilt difficulties of a worldwide network
which met face-to-face only infrequently, as there was no other time such
matters could be discussed. As the Iron Curtain had fallen in 1989,
women from Poland, East Germany and Hungary were able to attend a
FINRRAGE meeting for the first time, but for them, the key reproduc-
tive issue was the rolling back of access to abortion, which had been legal
in the first trimester under the former socialist governments.1 These
women all felt that long-standing hatred of the state meant that people in
their country were ‘not ready for this kind of sophisticated debate’ about
NRT, a technology which no one really understood and which was still
hardly used, when the right to abortion was under threat from the new
regimes.2
For those such as Lene Koch, who had been with the network since
Lund, however, the question of conflict resolution was an issue which
now urgently needed resolution:

How do we solve conflicts along democratic lines? When you have a net-
work it’s very difficult. I mean everybody can throw herself out as a leading
person because you don’t have an organisation and a hierarchy. That is a
good tradition from the feminist movement, but that also means that some
people can use their resources, their strength, their intelligence to carry
through decisions that are perhaps not democratically carried through…
this really is the major problem because I think FINRRAGE cannot have a
position on anything. I think we agree on intentions and analysis and
understandings of particular technologies. But the discussion on prenatal
diagnosis [at Comilla] clearly shows that even though most of us agree on
the basic analysis that this is a eugenic technology with great danger for
women, many disagree on the practical applications … we have an analysis
on prenatal diagnosis but we don’t have a position on it “yes” or “no”.3

The points raised here are all important aspects of the network’s ways
of warranting its knowledge. First, as discussed in the previous chapter,
there is the question of implicit, often unacknowledged, power which is
likely to accrue to the founder group of any organisation, however
non-hierarchical its structure (Freeman 1972). The desire to remain non-
hierarchical, however, meant that up until this point there had been a
136 4 Abeyance

tendency to avoid developing the protocols which would be necessary to

negotiate a collective group-level position on specific technologies across
diverse cultures. Instead, there had been a tacit reliance on the declaration
from Lund as a kind of border beyond which only those who agreed in
principle—who were ‘like-minded’—would want to pass. It does not set
out specifics, and in fact this had been seen as a strength, allowing the
network’s analysis to develop through empirical research and collective
debate, what Mies called her ‘postulate of action then reflection’,4 or the-
orising from experience, which was the methodology for producing femi-
nist knowledge that most of the women shared. The distinction that
Koch makes between analytic tools and political positions describes the
central problem of applying theory derived from individual experience to
political practice, particularly in the absence of procedures for negotiat-
ing a consensus position.
At the same time, most of the women I interviewed considered ‘the
FINRRAGE position’ of radical no to be an organisational property of
FINRRAGE International, rather than their local FINRRAGE group, let
alone a political position taken by every individual in the network.
Viewing this through the lens of underlying consciousnesses may help
explain why some of the women I interviewed seemed to feel quite com-
fortable using the term ‘the FINRRAGE position’, while others, like Pat
Spallone, disagreed with its very existence:

Even if some people thought there was a position, there never was. And I
mean there were debates about that, as I recall…and probably the outside
world thought there was A position. But that never was the case…It cer-
tainly didn’t mean acceptance, obviously full acceptance wasn’t going to be
the option. … [but] there were other women who were saying ‘I think we
should be making a critical stance on this, but I don’t know about the “at
all” business’ … we never had a hands up, ‘Is everybody saying that all
in vitro fertilisation should be ended now?’ …You know, the word wasn’t
opposition, the word was resistance.5

Visualised this way, the tensions which began to appear in Comilla

seem to have revealed not so much the limits of that comfortable overlap
between liberatory and alternative conscience, but the importance of an
egalitarian consciousness within FINRRAGE’s cognitive space in terms
 FINRRAGE Post-Comilla 137

of governing control over the network’s message. If any woman could call
herself a member of FINRRAGE, then any of her positions were effec-
tively FINRRAGE positions. However, at some point—and this is true
in all movements—as more information is gathered and more partici-
pants bring their own situated knowledges into the mix, raising conscious
in new ways, anomalies in the movement’s formative cosmology will
begin to (re)appear.
In other words, what Koch and Spallone appear to be questioning is
the network’s entire cognitive praxis, its underlying world view and
organisational dimensions, as well as its analysis of specific technologies,
as the argument at Comilla had thrown open the question of what range
of positions could be expressed as a FINRRAGE (not an individual) posi-
tion and how that should be determined. What ‘the FINRRAGE posi-
tion’ actually was, however, was unclear. For some and certainly to
outsiders it was quite staunchly resistant, but within the network itself a
diversity of approaches and viewpoints had up until then always been
tacitly acknowledged (Franklin 2011, 18). According to Erika Feyerabend:

Maybe it depends on which period of time we are talking about. I think in

the beginning there was no border, everyone was longing for information
because there were the first big headlines in the newspaper about reproduc-
tive babies. And that was always a space in between horror and fascination.
And because there was a feminist movement, it was more horror. … But
the discussion changes from horror to ‘is it really okay to say no to all this
technology, because if women want it and this is something like a solution
to a personal problem, are we allowed to say no?’ … I mean I wouldn’t say
this radical no, or this myth of radical no, I don’t know, this was not the
problem. The problem is after a while everything has been discussed and
the women know which kind of argument has to be developed. … I think
it’s the way movements are, you reach the top and then it goes down. I
don’t think it has so much to do with this special kind of so-called radical
no.6

Feyerabend’s analysis suggests a kind of organic rhythm in which, once

all the possibilities have been explored, a movement loses its intellectual
impetus and requires something new—a new event or technology or
theory—against which it can evaluate what is already known, and thus get
138 4 Abeyance

the conversation going again. To some extent, this had been the reason for
holding the international meeting in Bangladesh and bringing the Western
women to the global South—to see first-hand the conditions in which
‘choices’ about contraception were really made. However, the new women
that joined FINRRAGE from the Comilla meeting would also be evaluat-
ing the network’s arguments against their own knowledge and experience,
and so would need to know what it stood for in a field in which other
well-known organisations had a very different agenda. There were also
now a number of European networks engaged in ecological and social
justice campaigns against agricultural genetic engineering, the human
genome project, environmental illness, and other issues with which
FINRRAGE as an international network could become involved, both as
support and to get their own knowledge claims into the activist arena
beyond the women’s movement. This seems to have been a strategy which
some of the women wanted to pursue, but others did not want to align
themselves with groups which allowed men, or whose ultimate agenda
might run contrary to FINRRAGE’s assertion in the conference declara-
tions from both Comilla and Lund that the ‘technological fix’ should not
be used to solve social problems. Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis, who would
be co-organising the next conference, considered this a problem which
needed urgent action before the women met again in Rio as many of the
women who were now intensely involved in the network had not been
present in Sweden and were not necessarily in agreement with all of the
declarations, or with some of the language used.7 The real problem was
that there was no mechanism for resolving differences in either political
position or political strategy between the various individuals and groups:

In Bangladesh other women or other networks were always asking us:

What is the position of FINRRAGE regarded to…And I came up answer-
ing: I have an information packet. I think this is one level of the problem.
I think we have to decide finally to have not dogma but some minimal
points because one thing is to resist something, another thing is to be ‘for’
something.8

Reis’s statement reflects another key point of tension after Comilla. If

some people were no longer comfortable representing FINRRAGE
because they didn’t know what range of positions beyond the ‘radical no’
 FINRRAGE Post-Comilla 139

the international network did in fact support, this would mean that they
would cease to speak publicly as FINRRAGE and the network would
effectively become invisible. To be for something, to advocate a particular
solution beyond a general ‘stop’, however, would require that the network
transform its cognitive praxis completely, setting up some kind of struc-
ture to agree on an official position on each group of technologies and
adopting strategies of advocacy and lobbying rather than simply generat-
ing and sharing knowledge for women to use as they saw fit.
Another illustration of this problem can be seen in the planning ses-
sion at Boldern for an upcoming contra-conference in Paris at the end of
June 1991, where the annual meetings of the European Society of Human
Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) and the World Congress on
IVF were both scheduled to take place. While everyone at the planning
session was enthusiastic about the idea of mounting a formal conference
to directly challenge the IVF establishment on its own turf (or at least
next door), there were fears that labelling it a FINRRAGE conference
would limit the participation of scientists, doctors, and policy-makers as
both speakers and audience—in other words, would alienate qualified
experts and those with the power to carry out political decisions.9 It was
therefore agreed that the FINRRAGE women would still give papers and
organise a round-table debate, but it would not be billed as a FINRRAGE
event. The 2-day conference, Éprouvette l’éprouvée [Test tube under test],
took place on 28–29 June 1991, organised officially by Francoise Laborie
and others at Groupe de recherche et d’evaluation des pratiques médicales
(GREPM),10 with the support of the Women’s Rights Junior Ministry
(France) and the Greens in the European Parliament. The conference
mainly concentrated on IVF and in addition to a number of FINRRAGE
women, included French doctors and psychoanalysts, and Marsden
Wagner of the WHO. Summarising the conference, Anne Waldschmidt
(of German FINRRAGE) noted that while she was impressed with the
detailed work which informed the criticisms, the conference had made
clear that there were certain ‘open sores’ which kept coming up and that
‘objectors must persevere in laying their fingers on the sore spots’
(Waldschmidt, 77).
France was one of the countries which had a national contact, but no
real FINRRAGE group. Louise Vandelac notes that when she was
140 4 Abeyance

studying in Paris in the mid-1980s, there was a loose intellectual network

amongst women researching the topic (led by the women at GREPM)
but their work was strongly influenced by the Francophone feminist
emphasis on psychoanalysis, a literature which was not particularly well
known by Anglophone feminists at the time. While there was a good
relationship between the women in GREPM and FINRRAGE
International, according to Vandelac the GREPM women did not really
think of themselves as FINRRAGE France,11 and in 1990 Laborie noted
on an internal survey asking who FINRRAGE was in contact with in her
country that ‘except for myself, I see nobody…’, a factor which would
also have complicated the idea of branding the 1991 conference as a
FINRRAGE event.12
The same could be said of countries such as Brazil and Belgium, which
also had no FINRRAGE or aligned groups, only women acting as
national contacts (although they also often had access to high-level politi-
cal resources because of where they were employed). While these women
could call upon the international network’s reputation and collective
expertise, the ‘radical no’, as Feyerabend termed it, was not always a
reflection of their own analysis and had to be carefully negotiated in those
spaces (although Reis, as well as Görlich and Krannich, seem to have
been largely supported by their organisations). By this time, to claim
oneself as FINRRAGE was to implicitly claim a position which might be
more resistant than desired; however, not to claim oneself as a member of
an internationally known group of feminists was to stand alone against
what could be very strong, very public and at times very personally
directed opposition. Aurelia Weikert and Johanna Riegler, for example,
were sued (fortunately unsuccessfully) by one of the doctors at the
Institute for Reproductive Endocrinology and IVF in Vienna for damag-
ing his reputation after they wrote up an interview with a woman who
had sold her eggs at the clinic (Riegler and Weikert 1988).13 Rowland
also found herself constantly being pitted against fertility doctors and
infertile women in media appearances and was once forced by a Melbourne
newspaper to publish an apology for an interview she had given, after one
of the IVF doctors threatened to sue.14
Overall, what was becoming inescapably apparent was that the
organisational dimension of the network, in which anyone could claim
 FINRRAGE Post-Comilla 141

membership and use the name FINRRAGE to take whatever form of

resistance made sense in their context, was coming under increasing
tension in a network which had grown so broadly international and had
a method of communication which was largely a one-way dissemina-
tion of information through the infopacks. Whereas knowledge could
be collectively produced and a technology-by-technology position
negotiated to consensus (or at least to amicable agreement to differ) in
a small local meeting, the international conferences were too sporadic,
and the participants were not always the same people, so that friction
would be largely unavoidable in the absence of an organisational meth-
odology for negotiating a middle ground. This would become particu-
larly challenging as preparations for the Rio conference got underway.

Rio 1991: The Third FINRRAGE International

Conference

The third, last, longest and largest of the international FINRRAGE con-
ferences, Women, Procreation, and Environment, took place in Rio
from 30 September to 7 October 1991, with a FINRRAGE working
meeting following from the 8th to the 10th. The conference was funded
by a grant of DM 900,000 disbursed by a new German feminist organ-
isation, FrauenAnstiftung,15 which had been recently funded through the
Green Party,16 and was organised by Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis, who
had been the Brazilian contact since Lund, and Thais Corral. Trained as
a doctor, Reis worked in the women’s health programme of the Brazilian
Health Ministry, which had allowed her to travel to the Women’s
International Tribunal and Meeting on Reproductive Rights in
Amsterdam in 1984, where she had attended the workshop hosted by the
women from FINNRET. As Reis tells it, this was her radicalisation-
through-knowledge moment:

I was in this international tribunal and there was a workshop on high tech
reproduction, and I said to myself, what’s that? I’ve never heard about
something like that…I had this medical education, so I had this vision, in
five minutes I saw the whole thing, my God, this is the beginning, the
Brave New World is here. Because I knew that technology could reach
142 4 Abeyance

these things, but I didn’t know that it was so far [along] … I came back and
I began to speak about this, I was completely taken by the issue, and I
thought it was just a tremendous revolution, and I said it’s the concept of
the human that’s at stake. And I spoke and spoke and spoke to all my
friends and all the time I was speaking about this, they said you’re crazy,
this is not real, this is not happening, it’s exaggerated etc … [Sweden] was
great because for me to release all these things I was thinking alone, when
I arrived I met all these incredible women and they showed me all the
books they had already published … for me it was a very moving thing,
very strong.17

Reis never had a formal group, and although her professional work was
often about safety of contraceptive technologies, there did not seem to be any
local NGOs in Brazil who were interested in the kind of work FINRRAGE
was doing. Because her work allowed her to travel, Reis had been able to attend
the FINRRAGE meetings and to give talks on the situation in Brazil, but she
was also, because of her position in the Ministry, extremely well-suited to
bring FINRRAGE’s knowledge back to be used for policy-making in her
own country:

You know I think it’s amazing how things happen in the diffusion of
knowledge … When I came back from Sweden from the FINRRAGE con-
ference I made a report because every international trip you did, you’re
supposed to do a report to the health ministry. And I did a long report
telling everything about those issues and the implications, and I made a
résumé of the conference, and I managed to organise a committee in the
health ministry, the Human Reproductive Rights Studies Commission
(CEDRH), to deal with all these issues on reproductive rights, and it was a
very important committee. … At all of the meetings I distributed some
materials to them to read to be informed about the subject, it was repro-
ductive clinics, sterilisation methods, abortion, population counts, popula-
tion control, all these issues were on the agenda of this committee. And, of
course, the first subject was Norplant ….18

The committee Reis formed included government ministers, the

Federal Medical Council, congresswomen and women’s rights groups,
who were tasked with evaluating a study of Norplant being carried out by
the University of Campinas. The evaluation reports showed a number of
 FINRRAGE Post-Comilla 143

contradictions and methodological problems, in particular lack of proper

consent, a number of worrying side effects, and an unauthorised enlarge-
ment of the numbers of women enrolled and forms of Norplant used.
The report challenged not only the ethics of experimentation on women’s
bodies but the claimed scientific purpose of the university’s research,
which ultimately appeared to be about efficient distribution and user
compliance, not whether Norplant was a healthier alternative to contra-
ceptives currently being distributed by the state, as the research protocols
stated (Reis 1990). Much to the surprise of the scientists, who thought it
was proving to be a ‘consummate technology’, in January 1986, based on
CEDRH’s report, the National Medications Division withdrew their
authorisation and halted the trial (Pimentel et al. 2017, 48).
In 1989 Reis brought Corral, a local journalist who had been writing
about these issues, to Comilla, where they agreed to organise the next
international conference in Rio. Although the  FrauenAnstiftung grant
was initially meant to fund a number of groups in Latin America, the
IGC quickly realised that this was unworkable.19 Instead, the money was
given to Rede de Defesa da Espécie Humana (REDEH), the organisation
Reis had created with Graça Ohana, Giselle Israel and Solange Dacach at
the annual meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of
Science in 1986, in order to launch what became a successful campaign
against testing a new contraceptive vaccine.20 In addition to paying for six
full-time staff for 26 months to organise the conference, the grant was
also meant to establish a permanent regional office in Latin America, the
only time FINRRAGE ever had funding on this level. However, in terms
of travel and accommodation for the conference itself, because the money
had originated with the German Ministry of Development, it could only
be used to fund 40 participants, most of whom had to be from Latin
America. This presented difficulties as many of the European and North
American women could not, in fact, afford to fly to Rio, including some
who had been invited to present plenary speeches.21 In addition, the con-
ference had had to be shifted from its originally intended date, so it was
now taking place at the start of the autumn term, which meant that many
of the academics could not attend.
Overall, organising the conference proved to be enormously stressful,
both for Reis and for the IGC. Originally meant to introduce discussion
144 4 Abeyance

about reproductive and genetic technology into Latin America, ulti-

mately everything was reshaped to focus on ecology and to draft a state-
ment to present to Earth Summit, a major UN conference on the
environment and economic development set to take place in Rio in June
the following year.22 Environmentalists were already gearing up for a
massive campaign calling for population reduction on ecological grounds,
which would then shape preparations for the United Nations International
Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) set to take place in
Cairo in September 1994, and there was a perceived need for a counter-
discourse which focused on economic exploitation of the environment by
the richer West. The talks at the FINRRAGE conference therefore largely
shifted to women’s basic health needs, resistance to coercive population
control measures and other ways of sharing women’s knowledge besides
panels and presentations, such as dance, film and radio.23 The Alto de Boa
Vista Vision Statement (contained in Corral 1992), which asked for ‘a
transformation beyond equality’, was not a consensus of the whole con-
ference, but was signed by just the small group of women who had drafted
it. This was a great disappointment to Reis, who felt that the environ-
mental focus had overshadowed what she had wanted the conference to
accomplish.24
For the women of the ICG, the meeting was also difficult. Increasingly,
the work of maintaining the international network’s internal communi-
cations, as well as the responsibility for making decisions, was falling to
this group as the visible centre of FINRRAGE, but one without a man-
date or the time and money necessary to actually function as a decision-
making body.25 A significant time was therefore set aside at the strategy
meeting in Rio  to confront the continuing questions about structure,
allocation of work, funding, and writing position papers, for which
there was an increasing demand by other organisations. A suggestion to
form working groups coordinated by various women across the network
according to their own areas of expertise had been agreed at Comilla,
but this had largely not happened and several of the women who had
volunteered to lead them seemed to have disappeared. The ICG itself
was now down to four very overworked members, leading one to com-
plain that the network was becoming ‘a monster that auffressen women’
(sic).26 On a number of levels, the question of professionalising through
 FINRRAGE Post-Comilla 145

seeking NGO status had become critical—not only would this deter-
mine whether FINRRAGE would be represented at the NGO forum at
Cairo but also whether it could continue at all, as it clearly could no
longer survive on volunteer labour.27 At the same time, there was friction
within German feminism about whether it was acceptable to hire one
person for an organisation while everyone else worked as volunteers
(Mies 2010).
A plan for structural reorganisation did emerge from this meeting. It
was agreed that national groups could write papers and create actions
under the name of FINRRAGE where their position was one which had
already been discussed in the international meetings. Both the declara-
tion from Sweden and the more recent and very comprehensive
Declaration of Comilla, which had now been professionally printed as a
four-page fold-over pamphlet that could be widely circulated, could serve
as documentation of the international network’s position. On an organ-
isational level, although there was still no agreement about paid positions
or NGO status, it was agreed that the network was now so large and so
diverse that a formal, decentralised structure was indeed needed. It was
decided that regional coordination groups would be created in Australia,
Asia and Latin America to take some of the burden off the ICG, particu-
larly with regard to the expense of distributing the infopacks which were
still the network’s primary means of communication and which tended
to be sent out regardless of the recipient’s ability to pay. The women in
the ICG would continue as the European regional coordinating group
when the international coordination moved to another part of the world
and an advisory board would be created which would include the new
ICG and one woman from each regional coordinating group. Reports
would be submitted on a yearly basis by each national contact, to con-
tinue the job of monitoring international developments in years where
there were no large conferences. The next major conference was set for
Australia in 1993.28
Although the minutes of the FINRRAGE strategy meetings seemed
to end on a positive note, with some long-standing issues finally
addressed and a concrete plan for the future in place, very little actually
went as planned. The yearly reports were never written, nor were the
position papers, apart from one on anti-pregnancy vaccines and one on
146 4 Abeyance

the chemical abortifacient RU 486, which were eventually circulated

through infopack 15/16 in 1992. Although REDEH continued, it was
not along the lines originally envisaged by the FrauenAnstiftung grant
and, exhausted by the entire experience, Reis left the feminist movement
entirely for several years.29 This also left Brazil without a national contact
and Latin America as a whole without a regional coordinating group as
a replacement could not be found.30 While the Southern network, led by
UBINIG and Akhter, would continue to work on population control
through the run-up activities for Cairo, the European part of the net-
work now began to drift into abeyance.
Some of this drift was certainly due to the internal problems which
began to come to a head in Comilla, causing the dissolution of the
highly productive British group, and to the inability to move the inter-
national organisation to a more permanent office in Rio as planned.
However, much more appears to have been determined by external
events, in particular, life-cycle changes in the women who had once been
the most involved, which left them with significantly less free time or
money to travel. Those who had been PhD students had by now submit-
ted their theses and moved into the early stages of academic careers. This
meant that some vital internal publications, such as FINRRAGE News, a
quarterly compendium of scientific abstracts which since Lund had been
compiled by the Swedish national contact, environmental scientist
Cindy de Wit, could no longer be produced. Many who had once been
able to earn a living and still have time for activism now had children or
elderly parents to care for, or more demanding jobs. Some had divorced
or lost a partner while others simply found themselves struggling to make
ends meet in cities where survival was becoming increasingly expensive,
and as with feminism as a whole, younger women did not seem inter-
ested in taking the work forward. Hanmer was largely concentrating on
her work on violence against women, and Raymond and Corea (although
still active with the National  Coalition Against Surrogacy they had
started with Jeremy Rivkin in the United States in 1987) had never really
been involved in the day-to-day coordination of the network after
Sweden, nor had there ever been an American FINRRAGE chapter.
Louise Vandelac, now contact for Francophone Canada, had to bow out
when she was invited onto the Canadian Royal Commission on New
 FINRRAGE Post-Comilla 147

Reproductive Technologies, and had not been able to find a replace-

ment.31 Annette Burfoot, who was also on the Commission, was still
national contact for Anglophone Canada, and there were several women
she worked with from time to time, but there had never been a perma-
nent group.32 The Australian network became largely dormant after its
national coordinator, Christine Ewing (who had taken over from Lariane
Fonseca in 1988), moved to the United States in 1992, although there
was still a group in Melbourne working with Klein and Rowland, who
continued to be active until she was diagnosed with breast cancer and
burnout in 1996, forcing her to withdraw from activist work.33 Led by
Klein, FINRRAGE Australia produced a newsletter from 1995 until
2000, but could not take on the work of organising a major international
conference, particularly as funding for women’s organisations overall was
becoming problematic in Australia with a neo-liberal government in
power (Maddison and Martin 2010) and most of the women would not
otherwise be able to afford the flight.
Ultimately, there was neither the money nor the organisational capac-
ity for another big international conference, nor for the Tribunal of
Medical Crimes Against Women which had first been suggested in
Brussels in 1986 and which the network had again agreed to pursue at
Boldern in 1990. By 1994, although the infopacks were still circulating,
it was clear there would be no further European events. Personal life was
overtaking all four members of the ICG, and funding opportunities had
dried up as German organisations began to concentrate on the problems
created by unification.34 Even if the question of becoming an employer
could be resolved, there was no longer any money to hire anyone on a
long-term basis. At the same time, what was once a reasonable amount
of circulation-worthy material from both scientific and social science
journals had now become a deluge, which made selecting material for
the infopacks, as well as the expense of mailing them to a much larger
list of recipients, impossible to manage.35 In December 1997, the ICG
sent a formal letter to all the national contacts, asking for suggestions
for continuing FINRRAGE and stating that if no offers were forthcom-
ing, the group would disband and the international network would be
considered dissolved.36 No response to this final letter appears to have
been received.
148 4 Abeyance

FINRRAGE Goes South/East

While the European part of the network was meeting in Boldern, the
Southern network which had been built up after Comilla was now
beginning to consolidate itself. India had a number of women and
women’s health organisations which had always been in contact with
FINRRAGE and which were aligned with Akhter’s own political con-
sciousness of resistance to the population policy establishment. Like
Bangladesh, which had a history of forced sterilisation, India’s relation-
ship with population policy had also been problematic. Initially the
architect of the slogan ‘development is the best contraceptive’ as a chal-
lenge to the idea that its growing population was an obstacle to eco-
nomic growth (Simon-Kumar 2006), in 1976, during the political
‘Emergency’ declared by Indira Gandhi, this stance came to an end
with a mass forced sterilisation programme led by her son, Sanjay,
which relied on enthusiastic mobilisation of the bureaucracy at all levels
(Gwatkin 1979). Numerous reports of brute enforcement of male ster-
ilisation at the hands of the police began to circulate, including at least
one incident where all the men in an entire village, even teenagers and
the elderly, were rounded up and sterilised (ibid., 46). The policy was
estimated to have caused approximately 1800 deaths post-sterilisation,
not including villagers and government officials who died in instances
of rioting, before Gandhi lifted the Emergency and was subsequently
removed from office in the next election. Since then, sterilisation cam-
paigns in India have been almost entirely focused on women,37 bolster-
ing the general antipathy towards female children, while at the same
time new technologies such as portable ultrasound meant that scanning
with abortion of female foetuses was now being offered by mobile prac-
titioners in rural areas.
Coming into the FINRRAGE network through the second German
Congress in 1988, Vibhuti Patel, from the Forum Against Oppression of
Women (Bombay), noted that:

… what I liked about FINRRAGE is the sensitivity to different cultures.

None of the FINRRAGE members would say that our campaign [against
amniocentesis for sex selection] was anti-abortion. They understood that
 FINRRAGE Goes South/East 149

we were talking about the violence against women and we saw pre-birth
elimination of the girl child as a part of the legacy in the whole of South
Asia over the past 5,000 years where female infanticide never raised an
eyebrow. It was just normal fact. We all grew up hearing stories about how
which uncle killed which girl child in which manner. So, it is that culture
of femicide. We have to see this reproductive technology in this context,
that it is marginalising the most marginalised. So, that political under-
standing we all had and we were on the same wavelength, for sensitivity,
sensibility and political understanding.38

As a member of the Shakti Collective in Bombay, Patel had also helped

publish a collection of papers from a workshop, ‘Feminist Perspective on
Women and Health: Reproduction in India’, convened precisely for the
purpose of developing a women’s health movement not dictated by
Western understandings, but responsive to the particular contexts of
India (Bhate et al. 1987). Using a methodology similar to Hanmer’s early
work, Patel’s (1987, 73) close reading of Indian medical papers showed
that many Indian doctors believed the use of amniocentesis for sex selec-
tion was an effective method of birth control, as it meant fewer females
overall would be born. Similarly, in the preface of a 75-page dossier of
news clippings compiled and published after Comilla, Lakshmi Lingam
had noted that there was a ‘slow importing of NRTs which are whipping
up strong patriarchal anti-women attitudes by predominantly viewing
women as “mothers” and “objects” for experimentation’ (Lingam 1990,
9). One of these excerpts quoted Dr. Anand Kumar, then India’s leading
IVF doctor, as saying that one of the ‘many opportunities’ IVF provided
was learning ‘how to induce infertility in fertile couples as a means to
family planning’ (Times of India, 13 August 1997, in Lingam 1990, 3,
emphasis mine).39
Overall, however, despite the strong emphasis on connecting technol-
ogies for confirming the status of a pregnancy with those for preventing
and creating it, the Indian women’s movement does not appear to have
taken up IVF as an issue at this time. Surveying a number of women from
different grassroots Indian organisations 15 years later, Sama, an autono-
mous women’s health research group in Delhi, found that many of the
activists still did not feel that conceptive technologies like IVF were an
150 4 Abeyance

appropriate site for intervention as they affected only a small, rich, urban
sector of the population and could not be used without consent, whereas
contraceptives affected 90% of the population and were frequently forced
upon women without information or agreement (Sama 2006).40 Politics
within the global women’s health movement were also moving towards
the opposite stance, towards seeing NRT as allowing women to take con-
trol of their lives and overcome the circumstances they had been dealt,
whether this was extreme poverty or the inability to have a child. The
Women’s Global Network on Reproductive Rights (WGNRR) had now
grown from the 1984 Amsterdam conference into an umbrella network
of organisations, networks and individuals and had also gone through a
period of struggle over its ‘position’ in the late 1980s, before establishing
itself as a donor-funded NGO with self-determination as its ‘basic
cornerstone’(WGNRR 2014).41 It was precisely this framing of repro-
ductive ‘rights’ which Akhter had sought to problematise at the opening
plenary in Comilla in 1989, by emphasising that FINRRAGE had a ‘dis-
tinctive philosophical position’ and that the conference had a ‘transfor-
mative’ intent (see Akhter 2005, 67–74).
In May 1990, an UBINIG-FINRRAGE regional follow-up meeting
was held at BARD in Comilla, in the same agricultural college where the
international conference had taken place the year before. By this time,
Bangladesh had a new FINRRAGE-affiliated network, Protiroadh/
Resistance Network (Against Abuse of Contraceptives on Women’s
Bodies), which had been established after the 1989 conference.42
Conducting an ad hoc survey of the women present for the second meet-
ing Khabar (newsletters circulated during the conference), Sabera Qureshi
wrote that the most common form of contraception being used by the
women who had answered the survey and were sexually active was the
‘natural’ (i.e. any form of non-mechanical and non-hormonal) method,
which seemed to be working reasonably well; 9 of the 12 users had two
or fewer children, although in comments one of the women did note that
it required a ‘very good understanding based on love and affection
between partners’ in order to be reliable.43 Later in the day, there was a
plenary discussion with a woman who was involved in teaching the sci-
ence of the natural method to village women, the worry being that
women who were illiterate and not conscious of their own biological
 FINRRAGE Goes South/East 151

processes would not be able to use it properly. A note on the ensuing

discussion showed that it began ‘in an intense tone’ in which one partici-
pant called it nonsense, while another claimed it was ‘concretely sound
like any science based on empirical observation and understanding of the
biology of women’, an interesting reversal of the usual suspicion of sci-
ence in matters of controlling reproduction.44 Akhter argued that it was
important to research the kinds of non-technological methods women
had been using for centuries, methods which relied upon knowledge of
the body and of local herbs, to understand how they worked (if they did)
and to teach other women to use those methods as a matter of ‘increased
choice’, especially for those who had already had adverse reactions to
hormonal preparations or IUDs and were looking for something else.
The Khabar suggested that generally the intensity of the discussion was
received positively, raising new issues to explore together. In particular,
natural methods appear to have emerged at this conference as a new form
of resistance, of liberating family planning decisions from control by the
state and returning them to a matter of women’s embodied knowledge
(albeit in a form that would require the willing participation of her male
partner, a condition not always easy to meet).
The regional meeting made clear that FINRRAGE activity was now
shifting to the global South as preparations for the ICPD, which would
take place in Cairo in September 1994, got underway. Cairo represented
a change in that there would be a more active participation of NGOs at
the ICPD and in preparation for it, including a number of women’s
groups which had developed during the 1975–1985 UN Decade for
Women. FINRRAGE-UBINIG began by planning its strategies for the
next International Women and Health Meeting (IWHM) in Manila,
Philippines in November, where they would be one of five networks
organising thematic sets of workshops, along with WGNRR, International
Women’s Health Coalition, Catholics for a Free Choice and the
Philippines Organising Committee Coalition, which was comprised of
six national women’s organisations. In her address to the conference,
Akhter argued that by extending the concept of ‘reproductive rights’ to
cover all of women’s health and social needs, feminists were effectively
reducing women to their reproductive organs in their own discourse; it
was therefore unsurprising that the mainstream population establishment
152 4 Abeyance

was now using the term to describe their population reduction pro-
grammes, in much the same way as the positive aspects of birth control
had been appropriated by the eugenics movement in the 1930s.45 The
long and detailed report on the Manila conference subsequently pub-
lished in IRAGE shows quite clearly that on the topic of reproductive
technology—both contraceptive and conceptive—the women’s move-
ment was becoming irretrievably divided, with ‘two important ideologi-
cally driven themes emerging’, one based on concepts of choice, autonomy
and self-determination and the other on ‘resistance to patriarchally-
defined solutions …. and [promoting] the personal-political responsibil-
ity of women to each other’ (Salomone 1991, 82). The author of the
conference report, a social worker affiliated with FINRRAGE who was
helping to draft surrogacy legislation in Western Australia, further noted
that nowhere was this division more apparent than in gestational surro-
gacy, in which one woman’s socially constructed ‘need’ to have a child
subjected another woman to a risky procedure which reduced her to ‘sub-
human, without legal or social rights’ (ibid., 85). The Resolutions from
the IWHM meeting agree with the claim that women have a human
right to health and well-being, but problematise the ‘choices’ and ‘solu-
tions’ offered by patriarchy as ‘perpetuating conditions of oppression and
maintain[ing] the status quo’, and ends with a firm declaration that
women are ‘not separate from our bodies, our bodies are not property’ to
sell (IWHM 1991).
WGNRR, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era
(DAWN), and a number of other NGOs fearful of an alliance at the
ICPD between religious groups, including the Vatican, and feminists
who were ‘justifiably critical of demographically driven population poli-
cies’ (Antrobus 2004, 97) now began to develop a declaration on feminist
population policy under the umbrella of the Women’s Voices ‘94 Alliance.
Although touted as a unified statement, other organisations such as the
Filipino women’s alliance Gabriela, which had helped organise the
IWHM and was active in both the WGNRR and FINRRAGE networks,
also felt that WGNRR was now moving too far into mainstream popula-
tion discourse, and did not agree that a feminist population policy was
possible (Maiguashca 2001, 150). UBINIG proposed an alternative con-
gress to develop a counter-document, so that these groups could also
 FINRRAGE Goes South/East 153

be represented at Cairo and challenge the claim that the Women’s Alliance
represented the entire global women’s movement.

Bangladesh 1993: Problematising “Population”

In December 1993, FINRRAGE-UBINIG organised an International

Symposium of People’s Perspectives on “Population” along with two
Indian organisations (Research Foundation for Science and Ecology and
the People’s Health Network) and the Third World Network from
Malaysia, which was attended by 65 women from 25 countries.46 The
quotes around Population were deliberate, to make it clear that the word
itself was being problematised, the argument being that there was no
such thing, there were only people (UBINIG 1993a, 32). The purpose of
the Symposium was to develop the argument that the entire concept of
‘population’ was inherently anti-feminist as it supported a notion of state
control of women’s procreative capacity in the name of economic growth,
and to create documentation in support of that claim. To facilitate this,
in August 1993 UBINIG began to publish a magazine, also called People’s
Perspectives on ‘Population’, that provided a forum in which to ‘bring for-
ward a critical stream’ in the run-up to Cairo and a way of disseminating
information from and about the official PrepComms to those who might
not have access (UBINIG 1993b, 1). The magazine, which will be dis-
cussed in more detail in Chap. 5, was edited by Farhad Mazhar and car-
ried original work by prominent feminists from the South who supported
FINRRAGE’s position, such as Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira, Vandana
Shiva and Malini Karkal, as well as reprints of pertinent articles and sum-
maries of official reports. It was issued monthly until May 1994.
Unlike the 1990 meeting at Comilla, which according to the atten-
dance list appears to have been entirely women from what were now being
referred to as LACAAP countries (Latin America, Caribbean, Asia, Africa
and Pacific), several other long-standing members of FINRRAGE—
Satoko Nagaoki, Renate Klein, Annette Burfoot, Maria Mies and Gena
Corea—did attend the 1993 Symposium.47 The main thrust of the discus-
sions was strongly influenced by a liberatory consciousness which insisted
that women’s rights and women’s health needs—including but not limited
154 4 Abeyance

to reproductive functions—had to be addressed on their own merits and

not as part of promoting the West’s interests in capitalist models of eco-
nomic growth (Symposium 1993). The fact that two seemingly separate
frameworks—trade liberalisation and population policy—were being
developed simultaneously was problematised by other organisations such
as DAWN as well (see Antrobus 2004, 96–100), but in a manner which
suggested technological neutrality, rather than seeing contraceptive tech-
nology as the mechanism through which these goals were joined together.
Aware of the circulating critique that they were aligned with religious
fundamentalists, the ‘Declaration of the People’s Perspectives on
“Population” Symposium’ states boldly that ‘[o]ur resistance to popula-
tion-control policies must never be confused with the opposition of the
religious and political right to the same policies’ (Symposium 1993, 29).
The Declaration also rejected the use of all long-acting contraceptives,
amniocentesis, sex predetermination and IVF on the grounds of health,
stressed the economic deprivations being caused by the World Bank’s
structural adjustment programmes and Western demands for access to
developing markets under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), and argued that over-population was much less a cause of envi-
ronmental degradation than the extractive industries which supplied the
over-consumption of the North. The document goes on to conclude that:

We note with special concern the situation of indigenous peoples in vari-

ous countries who are subjected to coercive methods of fertility control in
order to appropriate their land, their commons, their culture. Their tradi-
tional family planning and health practices are discarded in favor of mod-
ern technology and practices that result in their extermination …We must
reveal the underlying aims being set for the ICPD, which include the myth
that the population growth of the South is the problem, while obscuring
over-consumption and the wasteful lifestyle of the rich and the elites of the
world. (Symposium 1993, 31)

Akhter’s activities in this arena were all undertaken under the dual
banner of FINRRAGE-UBINIG, which to some extent ameliorated the
problem of FINRRAGE not being officially recognised as an NGO, and
helped keep the name of the network on the global stage. For the internal
workings of the network, however, the inability to reach a decision about
 FINRRAGE Goes South/East 155

NGO status was now counter-productive, as it meant there was neither

money nor access for others to attend meetings as representatives of
FINRRAGE. Early in 1994, the IGC wrote:

FINRRAGE takes a clear standpoint against all forms of population con-

trol policies and rejects that people are seen as numbers, demographic
objects and targets of economic calculation … in Comilla women pointed
out that there is ‘no single road to Cairo’ and we can not pretend to expect
a non-existing unity … There is a boom of prep-meetings and conferences
before the Cairo conference. Sometimes we feel affected by the conference
fever and think that the ICG should be present in each of these meetings
as well. But that just isn’t possible: a lack of time and money … therefore
we ask the women who attend these meetings to deliver us reports on the
meetings and to present our FINRRAGE position as strong as you can.48

Ultimately, having taken their first action within the global women’s
movement when a small group of delegates from the newly named
FINRRAGE attended the NGO forum of the Nairobi conference which
ended the UN Decade for Women in 1985, the Cairo ICPD almost 10
years later appears to have been the last time FINRRAGE was able to act
as an international network within this arena. The ‘Women’s Declaration
on Population Policies’ (IWHC 1993) composed by the International
Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC) at the second PrepCom meeting in
May 1993 was now circulating through the global women’s movement
for review. In the launch issue of People’s Perspectives, the Swiss FINRRAGE
group Antigena strongly criticised the Declaration as presenting main-
stream population policy as an ‘unquestionable necessity that just needs a
little feminising’ and presented a point-by-point rebuttal to its precepts
(Antigena 1993, 20). Writing after the Cairo conference, Renate Klein
(1994) noted that there had been another meeting to finalise the
Declaration in Mexico in July, organised by the Latin American and
Caribbean Women’s Health Network and funded by a number of main-
stream population policy organisations, including the Ford Foundation,
the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, the World Bank, the
Population Council and USAID. The proceedings from this meeting had
then been nicely printed and widely circulated as the definitive feminist
position. To counter this idea, as part of the NGO Forum at
156 4 Abeyance

Cairo, UBINIG, along with a number of other organisations including

the Asian Women Human Rights Council and Terra Femina (Brazil)
organised an ‘International Public Hearing on Crimes Against Women
Related to Population Policies’, in which women were able to give testi-
mony of their experiences with the contraceptives used in population
control (AWHRC 1994).
Cairo has generally been portrayed as a successful consensus in which
the involvement of women’s groups swayed the process towards an
acknowledgement of women’s needs for education and opportunities as
well as safe, effective contraception, while accepting the dominant dis-
course that stressed the need for population control as a matter of plan-
etary survival. Less discussed, at least at first, was the attached economic
agenda of neo-liberal reform, in which two-thirds of the money spent on
reproductive health would have to be paid by the country itself through
borrowing, or what Akhter referred to as a policy in which ‘we have to
pay to kill ourselves’ (Klein 1994).
There was also now evidence that interest in the potential of private IVF
clinics for generating economic growth was starting to appear within the
development community itself. For example, a letter circulated through
the infopacks in 1989 shows that the Agency for Integrated Development-
Bangladesh, an NGO which at the time was working with forest commu-
nities to protect them from wild animals, wrote to the British government’s
Overseas Development Administration asking for funding to start an IVF
centre in Dhaka, which it predicted would be self-reliant within a year,
based upon a projected success rate of 100%.49 Although this proposal was
obviously unsuccessful, it shows that over a decade before the first IVF
child was even born in Bangladesh, some individuals were already con-
vinced that there was huge money-making potential for a private fertility
industry in one of the poorest countries in the world.50

FINRRAGE in Abeyance
Feminism worldwide was already in a transitional period when
FINRRAGE emerged in the mid-1980s, at the end of the UN Decade
for Women. In general, while there was still considerable feminist activity
 FINRRAGE in Abeyance 157

in Western countries throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there were fewer
street-level manifestations, fewer women-only spaces, and grassroots
publications often struggled to survive. Formerly autonomous opposi-
tional groups were now becoming providers of services for women,
funded by neo-liberal governments eager to privatise the welfare state
(Radford 1995; see also Loveland 2017). This period also saw the
transformation of women’s studies into gender studies (Robinson and
Richardson 1996; Hemmings 2006) and the mainstreaming of gender as
a category of analysis in policy-making at the international level, particu-
larly obvious in the transition from the 1970s configuration of ‘women
IN development’, which concentrated on adding women to development
policy, to the 1990s’ concept of ‘gender AND development’, which con-
sidered the impact of policy on men and women in specific cultural con-
texts, as well as criticising the gendered nature of the policy process itself
(Pearson and Jackson 1998). Some feminists even began to argue that the
women’s movement had entered a ‘post-feminist’ phase (Robinson and
Richardson 1996; Whelehan 1995) in which politics was less important
than personal expression and pursuit of the lifestyle choices that the
women’s liberation movement had earned (Curthoys 1997). Women
who came of age in the last decade of the century might speak and act in
many ways that were recognisably feminist, but fewer and fewer—par-
ticularly inside the academy—seemed to want to identify themselves as
such (Amsler 2014).
All of the processes outlined above are what have been referred to as
signs that a movement is entering an ‘abeyance’ period in which certain
organisations which survive tend to harden and contract to their most
loyal members in the hopes of preserving their epistemological project
until a new wave of activism begins (Taylor 2007). For this reason,
Bagguley (2002) suggests that more formal organisations may function
better as abeyance structures than networks, which are more reliant on
retaining individual actors. According to the cognitive praxis model, this
contraction may even be interpreted as evidence of the movement’s suc-
cess, as oppositional forms of consciousness are no longer needed when
the movement has opened up space for its interests inside established
institutions. However, Eyerman and Jamison’s model really only describes
the success of the egalitarian consciousness in bridging the border between
158 4 Abeyance

oppositional and normative spaces, much as Taylor’s considers mainly

organisational survival. Instead, I would suggest that abeyance can also be
seen as a process of preserving the more ‘radical flank’ (Sawyers and
Meyer 1999’, in Bagguley 2002, 173) of a movement, holding open the
liberatory and alternative spaces within a dwindling movement field.
Looking more closely at the case of FINRRAGE certainly suggests that
while the network appears to have taken on some of the characteristics of
a movement in abeyance in the 1990s—becoming less visible, looking
inward for ‘purity’ and picking over internal divisions (ibid., 174)—its
resistance to professionalisation means that in other ways it did not.
Additionally, the part of feminism in which FINRRAGE is most strongly
embedded—the women’s health movement—was not moving into abey-
ance, although it was undergoing a profound cognitive change. For
example, while donor funding for the WGNRR appears to have dried up
entirely between 1987 and 1990 (WGNRR 2012), it resurged as the
network adopted its present focus on self-determination and coalesced
around preparing the Action Plan for Cairo (Maiguashca 2001, 149).
The foundational project of the women’s health movement, Our Bodies,
Ourselves, also struggled with problems of finance, diversity and profes-
sionalisation as it sought to revise the US text in 1997, which resulted in
resignation of the entire staff, even as the book was being eagerly trans-
lated and adapted elsewhere, often for the first time (Davis 2007).
The identity of FINRRAGE as a network seems to have been con-
structed as resistance not only to technologies of reproductive and genetic
engineering, but also to the general trend towards professionalisation of
activism in corporate-style structures, with a hierarchy of leadership, and
headquarters and local branches. Raymond, comparing FINRRAGE
with her present organisation, the Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women (CATW), which has a funding base and offices around the
world, agrees that FINRRAGE was indeed trying to preserve a form of
politics which had its roots in the women’s liberation movement and
which became progressively more difficult to maintain:

FINRRAGE was organised much more in what I like to refer to as the old
style of political activism. You did it on a nickel and a dime. We didn’t get
invited to a lot of the key places where our perspectives would be represented
 FINRRAGE in Abeyance 159

… And you know, I was all part of that as well, but one of the things I
became convinced of, which was certainly an evolution in my own think-
ing, but in order to be a real activist in the 1990s and the 21st century, you
have to have an institutional impact. And that means you really have to
slog through some of the institutional settings in which you’d prefer not to
be. There are many sympathetic groups out there, who you might not iden-
tify with in other circumstances, but who you can utilise to get your per-
spective out there and to get legislation passed. … I know I for one have
been much more successful at that in the prostitution and sex trafficking
realm than I was in the reproductive technologies realm.51

This appears to be a key point of difference between individual and

organisational expertise. Independently, many of the women would be
considered expert knowers through their professional credentials,
through invitations to prestigious speaking engagements and media
appearances, and through their publications. However, during a time of
increasing professionalisation of activism overall, a grassroots organisa-
tion which did not have a permanent office, a properly designed let-
terhead and relatively attractive informational materials would have a
much harder time being taken seriously by the policy community than
those which did, all else about their politics being equal. This may help
explain why FINRRAGE as an organisation remained largely on the
margins of the epistemic community which was developing around the
ethical, legal and social implications of reproductive technologies, even
as some of its individual members were successfully carving out spaces
for critical feminist positions within it. This will be discussed in further
detail in Part 2.
However, equally important is the sense conveyed by all of the women
interviewed—even those who had left the network in disappointment or
anger—that this had been some of their best work and that they had
indeed achieved significant impact. Some of this was achieved through
advocacy or being invited to sit on one of the many national committees
convened to consider ethical and legal guidelines and legislation, particu-
larly during the mid-to-late 1980s, when FINRRAGE was at its most
visible. In addition to being asked to speak to state committees, Rowland
was invited to join the Family Law Council, which produced a set of
160 4 Abeyance

recommendations for clarifying the legal status of children born through

NRT at Commonwealth level (Family Law Council 1985), and several
women from FINRRAGE Australia—Rowland, Lariane Fonseca and
Ramona Koval—are listed as having given written and oral testimony
before the Senate Select Committee on Human Embryo Experimentation
in 1985 (Australia 1985). Louise Vandelac, the Francophone contact in
Montreal, and Annette Burfoot, a postgraduate who was part of British
FINRRAGE and returned to Toronto after obtaining her PhD in 1989,
were both invited to join the Royal Commission on New Reproductive
Technologies. This was a massive undertaking including discussion with
at least 15,000 individual Canadians, obtained through a variety of
mechanisms such as interviews, questionnaires and focus groups, which
was finally published as Proceed With Care (Canada 1994). The report
recommended banning surrogacy and the sale of gametes, and required
the licensing of clinics by a body similar to the UK’s HFEA. According to
Burfoot:

Who I was, and the result of my contact with FINRRAGE certainly fed
into that report. I was critical of the technologies, I argued that there were
health concerns, that there were other implications, social implications of
what was going on. I’m not saying I was responsible for the report, but my
voice in a very very small place is there. And if you read the report, there is
a lot of concern for women.52

Likewise, in Germany, the professional connection between individual

FINRRAGE women and the Green Party meant that FINRRAGE’s
arguments did inform the debate in the Bundestag (Richardt 2003),
particularly through MP Erika Hickel, who herself gave an address at the
second German Congress in 1988. However, this was not necessarily
unproblematic. As Erika Feyerabend, a member of the ICG, argued dur-
ing the strategy meetings in Boldern:

I think the price for being in the public debate without having an organiza-
tion like a political party is that women from FINRRAGE are not always
arguing in the common sense of FINRRAGE … For me this is politically a
bigger problem … Even if they don’t use the name FINRRAGE, they form
the public picture of our network. What we need are deeper discussions
 FINRRAGE in Abeyance 161

and more disputes or fights to find out which picture we want to have and
which positions could be presented as FINRRAGE positions … such posi-
tions are no[t] dogmas or the result of a fight over who has the authority in
our network, but a part of a learning process among us all.53

In Feyerabend’s formulation, while the praxis of negotiating positions

was the real work of the network, the process itself needed purpose. This
would seem to be a key difference between producing social knowledge
about an issue, and producing knowledge in order to ground a politically
actionable belief system in evidence. In Australia, for example, the knowl-
edge generated by FINRRAGE had achieved a level of credibility which,
while not stopping IVF, had contributed to significant changes in the way
it was practised. For Rowland, one of the few FINRRAGE women who
strongly believed in agitating for legislation from within the system, this
was only a partial success, as regulations have continued to loosen since
1984. For her, the issue of real importance was not so much stopping IVF
as changing the experience of the women who did choose to use it:

The other thing that we really made an impact with, was the impact on
women who are in infertility programmes. I mean they were treated like
shit at the beginning. They’re not now, I mean they’re still taking the drugs
we think are bad and all the rest of it. But they’re treated a whole lot better,
and there are support systems in place.54

Others in Australia have also credited FINRRAGE with creating sig-

nificant change in policy and practice. Speaking to another researcher
who conducted a more comprehensive set of interviews amongst the
various interested parties in Victoria in the early 1990s, a member of the
Victorian Standing Review and Advisory Committee on Infertility
(VSRACI) agreed that she had been ‘affected and influenced’ by
FINRRAGE and had supported the issues raised by the group in her
work with the Committee (Woll 1992, 25). The Victorian Minister for
Health, Caroline Hogg, mentioned Exploitation of a Desire, Klein’s
monograph about the experiences of women on IVF programmes writ-
ten during her postdoctoral fellowship at Deakin, as ‘some of
FINRRAGE’s most effective work’ (ibid., 29). Nicholas Tonti-Filippini,
162 4 Abeyance

who appeared on many panels with FINRRAGE members over the

years, credited the various feminist voices with shifting his focus from
the moral status of the embryo to the ‘intrusion’ of IVF on women
(ibid., 29), and though Ian Johnston, head of the RWH team which had
produced Candice Reed, considered FINRRAGE ‘a nuisance’ because
of their success in exposing the clinical practice of IVF to public scru-
tiny, Woll also reports that several practitioners in her study agreed that
their renewed interest in natural cycle IVF was ‘very much because of
the fuss the feminists were making about superovulation’ (ibid., 31).
Woll also noted that where respondents who were fertility professionals
had accused FINRRAGE of not having their medical facts correct, none
could actually point to an instance where they were wrong (ibid., 33).
Although such scrutiny was uncomfortable for most of the doctors, Jan
Aitken, an IVF counsellor at QVMC who had been to the Liberation or
Loss? Conference, admitted that ‘their sort of loudness…may in fact
improve systems here’ (ibid., 32). Overall, there seemed to be a general
consensus amongst Woll’s respondents that FINRRAGE had made
three key issues visible (whether they were happy with that fact or not):
lack of counselling for infertility overall, misleading success rates and
inattention to the emotional and physical difficulties women experi-
enced when going through IVF. Although a stated goal of FINRRAGE
may have been to stop IVF, even Renate Klein admits that they were
‘never naïve enough to think that we could really actually stop it’.55
What they had realistically hoped to do was reshape the debate by bring-
ing knowledge about the practice, experience and larger significance of
IVF from the woman’s point of view into the public sphere and, through
making the technicalities of the experience clear, hopefully influence
women not to use it.
Overall, FINRRAGE’s apparent influence in Australia appears to have
been enabled by a political configuration in which feminist voices were
routinely taken into account on a range of issues, including on commit-
tees such as Waller. According to Sarah Ferber, it also appears to have
been a matter of it being exactly the right time:

Everything was on in Victoria because of Waller, because the law was just
coming in and it was going to be the first in the world, so there were public
 FINRRAGE in Abeyance 163

forums and it always struck me as interesting that [a well-known male

member of the VSRACI] said in a public meeting that women, that femi-
nists were ‘quite properly’ concerned about the effects of IVF on women.56

However, even in Australia, where self-identified radical feminists were

embedded in the institutions of the state, and where individuals such as
Klein and Rowland had developed a significant media presence, other
FINRRAGE women, such as Christine Crowe, did still perceive the
group as having been too far outside the system to have any real effect:

I think it did have some influence in the beginning, definitely. I think it

made the scientists, the doctors more alert and they had to respond to
those charges. But I think it didn’t work as a long term strategy … we were
working outside the political structures of the state … I think there could
have been another strategy going on at the same time to actually change
the institutions, through, for example, the use of feminist lawyers like
Jocelynne Scutt.57 So, I think a dual or a multi-pronged strategy may have
been more successful.58

Thinking of a movement’s success as institutionalising its cognitive

praxis, however, shows that there were other routes by which FINRRAGE
was able to exert influence, not necessarily through the IVF clinic or the
political institutions of the state but through the activities of some of its
members who were able to merge their FINRRAGE work with profes-
sional interests outside the academic setting and—as a form of conscien-
ceness which does not fade with participation—continue to feed that
knowledge directly into their practice. As Marilyn Crawshaw, a social
worker, notes:

… my sort of critical thinking about the use of the technologies has contin-
ued, and so has my activism within the assisted conception world, in the late
1980s as a founder member of the British Infertility Counselling Association,
you know I remain active within that. I became a member of the British
Association of Social Worker’s Project Group on Assisted Reproduction
(PROGAR) which I now chair, a multi-agency group. How much
FINRRAGE shaped that and how much it doesn’t is quite difficult to sepa-
rate out. … PROGAR always had as its two key aims what an ethical approach
164 4 Abeyance

to providing services to individuals and couples facing fertility difficulties

might be. … And the second aim of PROGAR was always to consider the
rights of donor-conceived people. You know, what the lifelong consequences
would be, taking this approach. So it was a logical place to go really for trying
to influence the professional context as well as the policy context.59

However, one of the difficulties of an epistemology of ‘knowledge

derived from women’s experience for women’s empowerment’ is that all
the members of a given identity category do not have the same experi-
ences, nor do they agree on what will be empowering for their lives. In
the particular case of IVF, the counter-claim that ‘women want it’ was
doubly powerful since the dominant narrative(s) already worked to
reinforce motherhood as a woman’s highest aspiration, creating an
impression of ‘feminists against women’60 when group-level harm was
juxtaposed against an individual woman’s desire for a child. The ‘femi-
nist response’ to NRT was never a singular, coherent analytic stance;
where a feminist position on a particular technology entered the public
debate at all, it could suggest anything from prohibition, protective
regulation or laissez-faire freedom of choice. The parallels to long-
standing arguments over a woman’s right to sell her body for sex did
not go unnoticed, particularly as some of  the FINRRAGE women
were also involved in anti-pornography and anti-prostitution cam-
paigns. What FINRRAGE was able to do, according to Rebecca Albury,
was push the boundaries within which feminist voices, including those
which were not always oppositional, such as her own, could debate dif-
ferent aspects of the technologies without polarising between absolute
no and absolute yes, as had been largely the case in England:

I think [FINRRAGE] probably formulated often enough and wrote sub-

missions that were taken seriously. They didn’t necessarily get their way, but
I think that it was a part of the mix in a way that it might not have been
without them. That they opened a space for conversation.61

It is this cognitive space that is perhaps the legacy of the network, still
populated by newer organisations such as Sama or the Centre for Bioethics
and Culture, which campaigns against the use of women’s eggs for science
 Conclusion to Part 1 165

and more recently against commercial surrogacy.62 Although technically

in abeyance since the IGC dissolved in 1997, in many ways FINRRAGE
continues to exist, and continues to respond to current developments.
Klein and a small group in Melbourne launched an online archive and
mailing list in 2009, and have continued to submit to committees under
the name of FINRRAGE Australia as opportunities arise.63 Several women
pointed to their own sense of continued personal connection, of friend-
ships maintained and academic and activist pathways crossed:

You know there were several ways or paths I hear again and again about
women I know from FINRRAGE and I think, that’s interesting oh where
is she working now and what is she working on now, and so on…. I mean
who or what was FINRRAGE? It was a network, and well, what are the
characteristics of a network? If you ask me like that I don’t know whether I
would say there was a network called FINRRAGE or there is a network
called FINRRAGE.64

Similarly, Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta, who works with several women’s

groups in India and was part of the small FINRRAGE group in the
Netherlands, also conceives of FINRRAGE as a mostly dormant, but
still-existing network of women she sees from time to time.65 The repre-
sentative women from Soshiren (Satoko Nagaoki), Finrrage-no-kai
(Azumi Tsuge) and UBINIG (Farida Akhter) all still consider themselves
and their organisations to be part of International FINRRAGE (although
Nagaoki jokes about receiving no more packets).66 Just as any woman
who felt herself to be a member of FINRRAGE could declare herself so,
perhaps it can also be argued that as long as some of the participants still
feel that FINRRAGE exists, it does.

Conclusion to Part 1
The aims of the FINRRAGE network as set out in press releases, flyers,
declarations, and internal and external documents are almost entirely
knowledge-based: to monitor developments in NRT, to assess their
implications for women, to analyse the relationship between science,
166 4 Abeyance

technology and society, and to raise public awareness of these concerns

through creating an international movement for feminist  resistance.
While FINRRAGE was not successful in stopping the fertility industry,
if looked at from the perspective of cognitive praxis, the women do appear
to have created a space for an oppositional feminist analysis which ques-
tioned the scientific basis of claims to efficacy, safety and rates of success,
interrogated social discourses around motherhood, and linked promo-
tion of fertility ‘treatment’ in the richer nations to promotion of fertility
control in poorer ones. They also helped open up the actual experience of
undergoing IVF to public scrutiny, highlighting the need for effective
independent counselling on issues around infertility and better treatment
of women on the programmes.
In the introduction to this book, I suggested that movements exhibit
different kinds of oppositional political consciousnesses, and that devel-
oping these is an inherent part of partaking in any collective political
action. I have further suggested that there are at least three forms of
oppositional consciousness which exist in variable, overlapping relation-
ship to each other, depending upon the specific movement, organisation
or individual, and that these should be thought of as cognitive meta-
frames which guide the development of a group’s knowledge practices,
rather than corresponding to fixed political ideologies. Broadly speaking,
a liberatory consciousness seeks to appropriate control wielded by the
dominant group; an egalitarian consciousness seeks a more equal share of
control, whereas an alternative consciousness argues against any form of
control.
Although the conference at Amherst was a key event leading up to
the formation of the network, it combined both normative and oppo-
sitional responses. The conference itself was largely academic, not
designed to launch a grassroots response, and although it too ended
with declarations and recommendations, these were of a largely pro-
fessional nature. The more liberatory space required for an activist
response did not begin to shape itself there, but was created through
the interpersonal connections which formed between what Jalna
Hanmer referred to as ‘like-minded women’—those whose underlying
consciousness, formed in the women’s liberation movement, sought to
problematise the use of technology as a tool of domination which
 Conclusion to Part 1 167

perpetuated male control of women’s bodies and lives. By sharing and

creating knowledge about NRT through Test Tube Women, they were
able to codify that resistance into a shape which could mobilise other
women in the right setting, an opportunity they took at Women’s
Worlds in Groningen in 1984. From that, a loose network emerged.
However, FINRRAGE itself did not really codify until the ‘Emergency’
conference in Sweden in the summer of 1985, where the addition of
women with a strongly alternative consciousness changed the shape of
the cognitive space of the network, and its purpose, from monitoring
to using knowledge creation as a form of resistance. This liberatory-
alternative space was further refined and shaped through research,
rather than protest, and through periods of intensive knowledge
exchange at the international meetings, as the centre from which
FINRRAGE women could disseminate that knowledge to other parts
of the global women’s movement.
By 1989, different parts of the network had begun to emerge as
thought-leaders in one area or another. As key initiating topics for
FINRRAGE, sex selection and population policy had remained at the
centre of the network’s knowledge interests, driven by women from
Bangladesh, India and Brazil—countries which, in the 1980s, were
emerging from periods of extreme political turmoil and had been experi-
encing the outcome of aid money tied directly to population reduction.
Along with countries which focused on technologies for sex determina-
tion, Japan and Germany both had a strong focus on the other use of
these ‘technologies of confirmation’ (McDonald 2007) and in alliance
with disability activists in those countries were a formative part of broad
civil society coalitions campaigning against prenatal and pre-implantation
diagnosis on the grounds of eugenics.
Loyalty and affection for the group is also an important part of the
formation of collective identity (Polletta and Jasper 2001) and these three
chapters also illuminate some of the ways interpersonal relationships
which form during periods of intense movement activity may become the
basis of a new action because of a simple desire to do something produc-
tive together. Raymond has argued that while it is certainly possible to do
politics with those for whom one holds no affection, political activity
which ‘proceeds from a shared affection, vision and spirit [can have] a
168 4 Abeyance

more expansive political effect’ (Raymond 1986, 8). This is not to suggest
that political action with close friends is unproblematic, but as these three
chapters show, close friendships do appear to have played a significant part
in both the formation and maintenance of the international FINRRAGE
network. However, it is also clear that the problems which came to a head
at Comilla had been contested parts of FINRRAGE’s cognitive praxis
from the start. This was exacerbated by an organisational structure in
which there was no forum where such things could be discussed as a net-
work apart from the international meetings, where it would inevitably
involve other women in a complicated negotiation to which they, having
not been part of the network before, would have little to contribute. A
great fear was that this would be so alienating that new women would
walk away from the meetings feeling they had no place, and so time
enough to work things through was never really allocated. Indeed, some
of the long-standing members did eventually walk away, although attri-
tion was more often due to changes in life circumstances than fundamen-
tal disagreement with the analytic stance. Moreover, examination of these
tensions shows that the trajectory of FINRRAGE appears on many levels
to be a reflection of arguments which were taking place across global femi-
nism as a whole during this time. In particular, the tensions between grass-
roots and professional organisational forms, and between egalitarian
discourses in which technology was a neutral tool to which women should
have unfettered access and liberatory-alternative discourses which prob-
lematised the political economy through which science and technology
was developed as serving male desire to dominate and control, could be
seen in other feminist organisations and networks as well.
To return to the cognitive praxis paradigm, successful professionalisa-
tion of the movement’s underlying cosmology would be a positive affir-
mation of its effectiveness. FINRRAGE’s refusal to professionalise may
be seen as a failure which led to its dissolution in Europe, or it may be
seen as contributing to the preservation of its organisational integrity as a
much smaller network which could remain autonomous and responsive
to the different forms of feminism evolving in the global South.
FINRRAGE, therefore, may also be understood as a microcosm of the
global history of feminism in general, including the fact that by manag-
ing to retain some form of public identity and lines of communication
 Notes 169

between many of the women, it has preserved some portion of that

liberatory-alternative cognitive space through the activities that continue
to be carried out in the name of the network in Australia, in the far East,
in South Asia, in online fora and websites, and even on Facebook.67
However, there are also some ways in which FINRRAGE was always
and already professionalised through the intense participations of aca-
demics in the network. Seen in its international dimension, although it
could not stop the institutionalisation of IVF, FINRRAGE does seem to
have widened the space of discourse around NRT within academia,
within feminism, within public discourse and in the policy arena, in that
sense succeeding in their aim of legitimising women as expert knowers
whose voices needed to be heard regardless of the credentials they held.
In Part 2, I will further explore these ideas, first through an examination
of the network’s textual output and then through returning to the cogni-
tive praxis paradigm as a way of teasing apart the many elements of what
might be called ‘the FINRRAGE position’.

Notes
1. Transcript of strategy meeting “new countries”, Boldern, 11 October
1990: FAN/FINDE 03/G.1.
2. The first Polish IVF baby was born in 1987 and the first in Hungary in
1989. Like many other ex-socialist countries, Hungary is now a major
destination for cross-border reproductive services (Knoll 2012).
3. Lene Koch, Denmark. Transcript of strategy meeting “Clearinghouse”
(sic), Boldern, 11 October 1990, p. 2: FAN/FINDE 03/G.1.
4. Maria Mies, Germany, interviewed in Cologne on 12 April 2011.
5. Patricia Spallone, Britain, interviewed via phone on 8 September 2011.
6. Erika Feyerabend, Germany, interviewed in Essen on 10 April
2011 (interview 2 of 2).
7. Reis, “Clearinghouse” transcript, p. 6.
8. Reis, “Clearinghouse” transcript, pp. 4–5.
9. Various speakers, transcript of strategy meeting “alternative conference”,
Boldern, 11 October 1990, p. 2: FAN/FINDE 03/G.1.
10. [Research Group for the Evaluation of Medical Practices].
11. Louise Vandelac, France/Francophone Canada, interviewed in Montreal
on 22 October 2015.
170 4 Abeyance

12. Survey of national contacts circulated by ICG in 1990, ‘Who needs

FINRRAGE and for what?’: FAN/FINDE 01/03.
13. Aurelia Weikert, Austria, interviewed via Skype on 11 August 2010.
14. Robyn Rowland, personal communication, 11 June 2017.
15. The name is a play on anstifter, so loosely translates to Women
Troublemakers.
16. Erika Feyerabend, Germany, interviewed in Essen on 9 April 2011
(interview 1 of 2).
17. Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis, Brazil, interviewed in Sao Paulo on 7
March 2015.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Reis, personal communication, 4 July 2017. In English, the name is
Network for Defence of the Human Species. After Rio, Corral changed
REDEH to mean Rede de Desenvolvimento Humano [Human
Development Network] and took the organisation in a direction more in
line with mainstream population policy. See http://www.redeh.org.br/.
21. ICG, Letter to Ana Reis, Rita Arditti, Jalna Hanmer, Renate Klein and
Janice Raymond, 2 June 1991: FAN/FINDE 02/02.
22. Formally, the UN Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED).
23. Program, “Women, Procreation and Environment”, 30 Sep  – 6 Oct:
FAN/FINDE 02/02.
24. Reis, interview, ibid. The statement was signed by Rosiska Darcy de
Oliveira (Brazil), Corinne Kumar de Souza (India), Ute Winkler
(Germany), Martha Rans (Canada), Christine Ewing (Australia) and
Corral, Reis, Akhter and Mies.
25. ICG, letter to Linda Bullard and Francoise Laborie, 7 July 1991: FAN/
FINDE 01/02.
26. Minutes, FINRRAGE strategy meeting, 7 October 1991, p.  5: FAN/
FINDE 02/02. The term means ‘gobbles up’.
27. ICG, letter to all national contacts, undated, c. early July 1991, see also
item VII of the document ‘Material for Working Meeting’, 30 September
1991: FAN/FINDE 02/02.
28. Minutes, FINRRAGE strategy meeting, 7 October 1991: FAN/FINDE
02/02.
29. Reis, interview, ibid.
30. Letter, ICG to REDEH, 29 February 1992: FAN/FINDE 02/01.
31. Vandelac, interview, ibid.
 Notes 171

32. Annette Burfoot, Britain/Canada, interviewed via Skype on 19 May

2010.
33. Robyn Rowland, Australia, interviewed in Geelong on 24 June 2010
(interview 1).
34. ICG, letter to NCs, 24 February 1994: FAN/FINDE 02/01 (circulated
with infopack on population policy).
35. A questionnaire about use of the infopacks sent in 1990 placed the cost
of these at 120DM per year.
36. ICG, letter to NCs, 15 December 1997: FAN/FINDE 01/03.
37. And are no less dangerous or coercive. See http://america.aljazeera.com/
articles/2014/11/14/women-india-sterilization.html, https://www.the
guardian.com/world/2014/nov/12/india-sterilisation-deaths-women-
forced-camps-relatives
38. Vibhuti Patel, India, interviewed via Skype on 12 April 2017.
39. In a later paper published in the Indian Council of Medical Research
Bulletin, another ‘pioneer’ would write that the expenditure of public
money on developing IVF was justified because it would make it easier
to sterilise people if they thought they could still have more children if
their existing ones died (Puri et al. 2000 in Srinivasan 2010).
40. Sama itself is now one of the most active women’s health research organ-
isations worldwide, perhaps best known for their research into sex selec-
tion and Indian surrogacy services, regulations for which have been
under development by the Indian Medical Research Council since 2008
(for discussion of this, see Palattiyil et al. 2010). A range of their reports
can be found at http://www.samawomenshealth.in (accessed May 2017).
41. See also Maiguashca (2001) for an examination of the knowledge prac-
tices of that network.
42. FINRRAGE-UBINIG Regional Meeting Khabar, Bulletin No 1, 10
May 1990, p. 2: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/09.
43. FINRRAGE-UBINIG Regional Meeting Khabar, Bulletin No 2, 11
May 1990, p. 2: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/09.
44. Ibid, p. 9. Malini Karkal wrote a response for the same Khabar discussing
the same research, which showed that in fact rural women already under-
stood precisely how this worked in animals in terms of trying to breed
them successfully, and therefore had very little trouble learning how to
predict their own ovulation.
45. Reprinted in Depopulating Bangladesh (Akhter 2005, 89–100). See also
her plenary speech to the 1989 FINRRAGE conference in the same vol-
ume, pp. 67–74.
172 4 Abeyance

46. ICG, letter to network 24 February, 1994: FAN/FINDE 01/02.

47. International Symposium participants list: FAN/FINDE 02/02.
48. ICG, letter to network 24 February, 1994: FAN/FINDE 01/02.
49. N. A. Khan (Agency for Integrated Development-Bangladesh), letter to
F. Duby (Overseas Development Administration), 29 July 1989: FAN/
JH/FIN 07/07.
50. The eventual ‘pioneer’ in Bangladesh was a gynaecologist who invested
all her money in opening the first private facility in 1999, related in press
accounts as a triumph of local determination to master a technology she
did not know how to use, in a country with so little interest and expertise
that she had to draft her paediatrician husband into become her embry-
ologist (Salahuddin 2003). The clinic’s first babies were triplets, born in
2001.
51. Janice Raymond, USA, interviewed by phone on 21 July 2011.
52. Annette Burfoot, Britain/Canada, interviewed via Skype on 19 May
2010.
53. Erika Feyerabend, Germany. Transcript of strategy meeting
“Clearinghouse”, Boldern, 11 October 1990, p. 6: FAN/FINDE 03/G.1.
54. Robyn Rowland, interview 1 (24 June 2010).
55. Renate Klein, interview 3 (28 June 2010).
56. Sarah Ferber, Australia, interviewed in Wollongong on 20 September
2010.
57. A well-known jurist, Scutt wrote a legal column for IRAGE and was edi-
tor of The Baby Machine (Scutt 1990).
58. Christine Crowe, Australia, interviewed in Sydney on 17 September
2010.
59. Marilyn Crawshaw, Britain, interviewed by phone on 12 September
2011. PROGAR has actively campaigned for the removal of donor ano-
nymity, and from 2004 to 2012, until it was unfortunately de-funded by
the UK government, Crawshaw was also an advisor to UK DonorLink,
a programme which used DNA matching to help donor children find
their siblings (see Crawshaw and Marshall 2008).
60. Sarah Franklin, Britain, interviewed in London on 15 December 2011.
61. Rebecca Albury, Australia, interviewed in Wollongong on 20 September
2010.
62. The legacy website of Hands Off Our Ovaries, a 2006 campaign of resis-
tance to the call from scientists for women to donate eggs for stem cell
research, is still available at http://www.handsoffourovaries.com/mani-
 References 173

festo.htm. Stop Surrogacy Now is an ongoing (as of June 2017) interna-

tional campaign against commercial surrogacy. See http://www.
stopsurrogacynow.com/the-statement (2015). FINRRAGE Australia
was part of the organising coalition for both campaigns, and Klein has
recently published on the topic (Klein 2017).
63. A full list of all FINRRAGE-Australia submissions up to 2009 is available
at http://www.finrrage.org (accessed 1 May 2017). In 2015 Klein took
part in a Round Table on Surrogacy organised by the Australian House of
Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs,
and made a formal submission as FINRRAGE to the Parliamentary Inquiry
into Surrogacy in February 2016 (Unpublished documents, supplied to
the author by Klein).
64. Aurelia Weikert, Austria, interviewed via Skype on 11 August 2010.
65. Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta, India, interviewed by phone on 13 September
2011.
66. Satoko Nagaoki, Soshiren/Japan, interviewed in Tokyo (with translation
by Chiaki Hayashi) on 26 August 2010.
67. As of May 2017, an active group of 154 followers could be found at
https://www.facebook.com/finrrage.

References
Akhter, F. (2005). Depopulating Bangladesh: Essays on the Politics of Fertility (3rd
ed.). Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana.
Amsler, S. (2014, March 9). For Feminist Consciousness in the Academy.
Politics and Culture. http://politicsandculture.org/2014/03/09/for-feminist-
consciousness-in-the-academy. Accessed 1 May 2017.
Antigena. (1993). A Criticism of Women’s Voices ‘94. People’s Perspectives on
“Population”, 1, 20–21.
Antrobus, P. (2004). The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies.
London: Zed.
Australia (1985). Human Embryo Experimentation in Australia. Senate Select
Committee on the Human Embryo Experimentation Bill 1985. Canberra:
Australian Government Publishing Service.
AWHRC. (1994). Report on International Public Hearing on Crimes Against
Women Related to Population Policies, Cairo, Egypt, September, 1994. Manila:
Asian Women Human Rights Council.
174 4 Abeyance

Bagguley, P. (2002). Contemporary British Feminism: A Social Movement in

Abeyance? Social Movement Studies, 1(2), 169–185.
Bhate, K., Menon, L., Gupte, M., Savara, M., Daswani, M., Prakash, P.,
Kashyap, R., & Patel, V. (1987). In Search of Our Bodies: A Feminist View on
Woman, Health and Reproduction in India. Bombay: Shakti.
Canada. (1994). Proceed with Care: Final Report of the Royal Commission on New
Reproductive Technologies. Ottawa: The Commission.
Corral, T. (1992). Conference Report “Women, Procreation and Environment”,
Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, 30 September–7 October 1991. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(2), 207–209.
Crawshaw, M., & Marshall, L. (2008). Practice Experiences of Running UK
Donorlink, a Voluntary Information Exchange Register for Adults Related
through Donor Conception. Human Fertility, 11(4), 231–237.
Curthoys, J. (1997). Feminist Amnesia: The Wake of Women’s Liberation. London:
Routledge.
Davis, K. (2007). The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels
Across Borders. Durham: Duke University Press.
Family Law Council. (1985). Creating Children: A Uniform Approach to the Law
and Practice of Reproductive Technology in Australia. Canberra: Australian
Government Publishing Service.
Franklin, S. (2011). A Feminist Transatlantic Education. In K.  Davis &
M. Evans (Eds.), Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism as Travelling Theory.
Burlington: Ashgate.
Freeman, J.  (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Berkeley Journal of
Sociology, 17, 151–165.
Gwatkin, D. R. (1979). Political Will and Family Planning: The Implications of
India’s Emergency Experience. Population and Development Review, 5(1),
29–59.
Hands Off Our Ovaries. (2006). Manifesto. http://handsoffourovaries.com/
manifesto.htm. Accessed 16 July 2017.
Hemmings, C. (2006). The Life and Times of Academic Feminism. In K. Davis,
M.  Evans, & J.  Lorber (Eds.), Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies
(pp. 13–34). London: Sage.
IWHC. (1993). International Women’s Health Coalition – Women’s Declaration
on Population Policies. Development in Practice, 3(2), 116–121.
IWHM. (1991). Feminist Framework on Reproductive Technology Declaration
(Resolution of the 6th International Meeting on Women and Health,
Manila). (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 4(1), 75–76.
 References 175

Klein, R. (1994). Reflections on Cairo: Empowerment Rhetoric – But Who Will Pay
the Price? http://www.finrrage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Reflections_
on_Cairo_Renate_Klein.pdf. Accessed 29 Apr 2017.
Klein, R. (2017). Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation. Mission Beach: Spinifex
Press.
Knoll, E. M. (2012). Reproducing Hungarians: Reflections on Fuzzy Boundaries
in Reproductive Border Crossing. In M. Knecht, M. Klotz, & S. Beck (Eds.),
Reproductive Technologies as Global Form: Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices
and Transnational Encounters (pp.  255–282). Frankfurt-on-Main: Campus
Verlag GmbH.
Lingam, L. (1990). New Reproductive Technologies in India: A Print Media
Analysis. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 3(1), 13–21.
Loveland, K. (2017). Feminism Against Neoliberalism: Theorising Biopolitics
in Germany, 1978–1993. Gender & History, 29(1), 67–86.
Maddison, S., & Martin, G. (2010). Introduction to “Surviving Neoliberalism:
The Persistence of Australian Social Movements”. Social Movement Studies:
Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 9(2), 101–120.
Maiguashca, B. (2001). Contemporary Social Movements and the Making of World
Politics. PhD, International Relations, London School of Economics and
Political Science.
McDonald, L. (2007). Disarticulating Bellies: A Reproductive Glance. Cultural
Review, 13(1), 187–207.
Mies, M. (2010). The Village and the World. Melbourne: Spinifex.
Palattiyil, G., Blyth, E., Sidhva, D., & Balakrishnan, G. (2010). Globalization
and Cross-Border Reproductive Services: Ethical Implications of Surrogacy
in India for Social Work. International Social Work, 53(5), 685–699.
Patel, V. (1987). Campaign Against Amniocentesis. In K.  Bhate, L.  Menon,
M. Gupte, M. Savara, M. Daswani, P. Prakash, R. Kashyap, & V. Patel (Eds.),
In Search of Our Bodies: A Feminist View on Woman, Health and Reproduction
in India (pp. 70–74). Bombay: Shakti Collective.
Pearson, R., & Jackson, C. (1998). Interrogating Development: Feminism,
Gender and Policy. In C. Jackson & R. Pearson (Eds.), Feminist Visions of
Development: Gender, Analysis and Policy (pp. 1–16). London: Routledge.
Pimentel, A. C., Jannotti, C. B., Gaudenzi, P., & Teixeira, L. A. (2017). The
Brief Life of Norplant(R) in Brazil: Controversies and Reassemblages Between
Science, Society and State. Ciencia & Saude Coletiva, 22(1), 43–52.
Polletta, F., & Jasper, J. M. (2001). Collective Identity and Social Movements.
Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 283–305.
176 4 Abeyance

Radford, J. (1995). Rights of Women – Twenty Years of Feminist Activism. In

G. Griffin (Ed.), Feminist Activism in the 1990s (pp. 51–64). London: Taylor
& Francis.
Raymond, J.  (1986). A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female
Affection. London: The Women’s Press.
Reis, A. R. G. (1990). Norplant in Brazil: Implantation Strategy in the Guise of
Scientific Research. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 3(2), 111–118.
Richardt, N. (2003). A Comparative Analysis of the Embryological Research
Debate in Great Britain and Germany. Social Politics: International Studies in
Gender, State & Society, 10(1), 86–128.
Riegler, J., & Weikert, A. (1988). Product Egg: Egg Selling in an Austrian IVF
Clinic. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 1(3), 221–224.
Robinson, V., & Richardson, D. (1996). Repackaging Women and Feminism.
In D.  Bell & R.  Klein (Eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed
(pp. 179–187). Melbourne: Spinifex.
Salahuddin, T. (2003, October 19). IVF in Bangladesh: Ray of Hope for Infertile
Couple. The Daily Star, Web Edition Vol 4 (144).  http://www.thedailystar.
net/2003/10/19/d31019610198.htm. Accessed 13 November 2016.
Salomone, J.  (1991). Report on the 6th International Women and Health
Meeting, November 3–9 1990, Manila, Philippines. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 4(1),
77–85.
Sama. (2006). ART and Women: Assistance in Reproduction or Subjugation? New
Delhi: Sama Resource Group for Women and Health. http://www.samawo-
menshealth.in/arts-and-women-assistance-in-reproduction-or-subjugation.
Accessed 16 July 2017.
Scutt, J. A. (Ed.). (1990). The Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the
Commercialisation of Motherhood. London: Merlin Press.
Simon-Kumar, R. (2006). ‘Marketing’ Reproduction? Ideology and Population
Policy in India. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Srinivasan, S. (2010). Introduction. In S. Srinivasan (Ed.), Making Babies: Birth
Markets and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in India (pp. x–xli). New Delhi:
Zubaan.
Stop Surrogacy Now. (2015). The Statement. Stop Surrogacy Now. http://www.
stopsurrogacynow.com/the-statement/. Accessed 3 Jun 2017.
Symposium. (1993). Declaration of the People’s Perspectives on “Population”
Symposium. People’s Perspectives on “Population”, 4&5, 28–31.
 References 177

Taylor, V. (2007). Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in

Abeyance. In J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds.), Social Movements: Critical
Concepts in Sociology, Vol II (pp. 337–359). London: Routledge.
UBINIG. (1993a). Comments on Population Discussions at UNCED ‘92.
People’s Perspectives on “Population”, 1, 30–32.
UBINIG. (1993b). From the Editor’s Desk. People’s Perspectives on “Population”,
1, 1.
WGNRR. (2012). Funders. Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights.
http://www.wgnrr.org/funders. Accessed 26 May 2012.
WGNRR. (2014). History. Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights.
http://wgnrr.org/who-we-are/history/. Accessed 26 May 2017.
Whelehan, I. (1995). Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to “Post-
Feminism”. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Woll, L. (1992). The Effect of Feminist Opposition to Reproductive Technology:
A Case Study in Victoria, Australia. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic
Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(1), 21–38.
 Part II
Studying It Up:
The ‘FINRRAGE Position’ as a
Cognitive Praxis
 5
Demonstration in Publication

FINRRAGE really did make an intellectual contribution, it was not just

making a noise. So I think our main thing was the intellectual part of it, the
analysis, the scientific part of it. That’s why FINRRAGE will never die. It
may go on hibernation, it may go on maybe we need life support. Some
saline, you know? But I think it will never die. It will never die.
Farida Akhter, UBINIG-Bangladesh, interview 2

The Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and

Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) is generally spoken of as a product of
a specific time. Thompson (2001, 53), for example, refers to infertility as
‘the perfect feminist text’, classifying the writings into a structuralist
phase 1 in which, according to her, the needs of the infertile were sub-
sumed beneath the attempt to create an anti-patriarchal critique, and an
‘increasingly sensitive’ phase 2  in which post-structuralism ‘liberated
feminist thinking on the problem of infertility’ (ibid., 62). These periods
she, along with most feminist theorists, correlates loosely to second- and
third-wave feminism.

© The Author(s) 2017 181

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_5
182 5 Demonstration in Publication

However, Hemmings (2005, 115–116) has argued against construct-

ing the history of Western feminism as a narrative of unity, diversity and
disintegration, with each corresponding to certain decades. Such
orderings suggest that there is/was/should be a correct endpoint towards
which feminism must strive, or to which it must return. Rather, she
argues, what should be traced is the contribution feminist theorists make
to other feminist theorists through:

… stressing the links rather than the discontinuities between different the-
oretical frameworks, as a way of challenging the linear ‘displacement’ of
one approach by another…to suggest a way of imagining the feminist past
somewhat differently  – as a series of ongoing contests and relationships
rather than a process of imagined linear displacement. (ibid., 131)

It is with this idea of feminist approaches to reproductive and genetic

engineering representing a plethora of interrelated struggles, ideas, theo-
ries and relationships, rather than specific, historically fixed ‘positions’,
that I have tried to approach the story of FINRRAGE. The use of ‘con-
sciousness’, rather than ideological categories, has been a part of that
approach, which acknowledges first that the designations of liberal, social-
ist and radical feminist do not always make much sense outside the Anglo-
American context in which they arose, and second, that they have often
ignored the ways in which feminist approaches which consider science and
technology to be non-neutral and socially constructed differ from those
which consider technology itself to be a neutral tool. Taken in its entirety,
FINRRAGE International also does not represent a movement from the
‘West to the rest’ (Hall 1992 in Davis 2007); the ‘rest’, as Part 1 has shown,
was always present. It was there in the Groningen panel, which focused
directly on the differential effect of technologies such as ultrasound and
amniocentesis when deployed through cultures which held women in low
social status, insisting that such implications made them an issue Western
feminism could not ignore. And it was certainly there from the meeting in
Sweden where the network’s cognitive praxis was reshaped from simply
gathering knowledge to creating knowledge for the purpose of resistance,
in part due to the urging of women like Ana Reis and Farida Akhter, who
saw the situation in their own countries as acutely, deathly urgent.
 5 Demonstration in Publication 183

Still, thinking of feminist writing on NRT as a phase 1 marked by the

temporal period between 1984 and 1991 and a phase 2 thereafter, as
Thompson suggests, is tempting. These dates also correspond with the
period between Groningen and Rio, and thus to FINRRAGE’s periods of
emergence/expansion and abeyance. However, there are two reasons why
this does not seem a particularly useful way of understanding the intellec-
tual contribution of FINRRAGE to feminist knowledge on NRT. The first
is that many of its members in the 1980s were an important part of estab-
lishing NRT as a field of academic enquiry in the 1990s through their
postgraduate and subsequent  research; moreover, it tends to reinforce a
limited account of the first few books as the sum total of FINRRAGE’s
position. The second is that it is not strange that more, and more complex,
viewpoints emerge in a field of enquiry as more data is collected, particu-
larly as a problem starts to be analysed through different disciplinary per-
spectives. Emerging academic fields, in fact, appear to go through similar
intellectual phases to emerging movements: there is an ontological period
of identification, problem definition and boundary-setting, followed by a
period of epistemological development, after which multiple perspectives
and central dilemmas start to become more clearly defined and more
deeply interrogated (Frickel and Gross 2005). The more nuanced perspec-
tive Thompson points to is not so much an artefact of the introduction of
post-structuralism into feminist theory (as I will show below, for some of
the women it was already part of their approach even in the early days of
FINRRAGE), but of the widening scope of inquiry and voices that would
be expected as a field expands. Perhaps more essential to an understanding
of feminist writing on NRT is examination of the writer’s relationship to
the constructivist perspectives simultaneously  developing within science
and technology studies (STS) and how this has informed FINRRAGE’s
overall response. As Annette Burfoot has noted, this is one of the things
that was both intellectually attractive and unique about FINRRAGE:

This was way before STS had really taken off, before people were really
doing this kind of work, like getting inside the science and reporting from
there. Before that sociology of science was really more like historians or
sociologists approaching science from within their discipline. And so this is
very new stuff.1
184 5 Demonstration in Publication

Whelan, quoting from Keller (Whelan 2001, 539), suggests that ear-
lier analyses are ‘supplemented (rather than replaced) with later feminist
work’. What also changed over the time in which FINRRAGE was
active was the position of women in those same institutions which had
made it difficult for women’s voices to be heard in the 1980s—politics,
academia, medicine, science—as well as institutional ideas about
informed consent and the rules by which human beings and human tis-
sue could be used for biomedical research. All of this contributes to the
way some of this work now reads in retrospect, making its place in his-
tory important to acknowledge, and in fact points to a need to re-eval-
uate it not so much for what it says about a particular feminist position,
but in light of where the technologies have gone since the works were
written. STS now has a sub-stream of work on reproductive technolo-
gies which, as I hope to show below, also owes something to the feminist
approach to NRT which FINRRAGE helped legitimise, and which can
be seen as one means by which their cognitive praxis was indeed
institutionalised.

The FINRRAGE Canon

According to Eyerman and Jamison, ‘cognitive praxis’ describes the ‘cre-
ation, articulation, formulation of new thoughts and ideas’ which define
a movement through the shape of its organisation, its knowledge inter-
ests, and the spaces and tensions which it produced (1991, 55). It allows
us to make sense of social movements by ‘reading’ them as texts, a par-
ticularly useful framework for a movement which literally did produce a
tremendous amount of text. In this chapter, I will use these texts to con-
sider the ways in which the concerns of the network helped to create new
knowledge which went beyond merely creating a feminist analysis of the
technologies themselves, but also contributed to broader discussions
about their moral, social or legal impact, and the practices and culture of
biomedical science. Additionally, while it is true that a small handful of
books have been the most visible legacy of FINRRAGE, what I hope to
show is that this is only a partial perspective. What could be called the
FINRRAGE canon—the books, chapters, journals, articles, theses,
 The FINRRAGE Canon 185

conference papers and vast array of informal writing which the network
produced in as many languages as it had speakers—would, in a compre-
hensive bibliography, number hundreds of entries, well beyond the scope
of what can be conveyed here. As it is not possible to cover all of it, par-
ticularly as much of it is written in languages other than English, I will
confine the following discussion to what I would consider to be key
works which were strongly influenced by the writer’s participation in the
network. For similar reasons of space and scope, I have not necessarily
attempted to situate this body of work within the overall context of femi-
nist scholarship on reproductive and genetic engineering, except in the
broadest of terms, as there are a number of overviews from the period in
question which already do so very well (in addition to Thompson, see
also Warren 1988; Franklin and McNeil 1988; Sandelowski 1990;
Donchin 1996). Rather than consider the connections between the work
of FINRRAGE writers and this wider context, I would instead like to
consider how these works are connected to each other and to the broader
task of developing evidence upon which resistance could be based.

Foundational Texts

Eyerman and Jamison point to the importance of a foundational text which

clarifies and publicises a problem in a way which facilitates a collective form
of redress. According to them, it is the text that precedes the movement, as
second-wave feminism is often said to have been kicked off by Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) or the environmental movement by
Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1962). However, the book which pre-
cedes the formation of FINNRET at Groningen, Test Tube Women:
What Future for Motherhood? (Arditti et al. 1984) is a survey of responses to
different elements of reproductive control; it provides a multiplicity of
voices, but not necessarily a coherent argument. It would, therefore, seem
not to qualify as a foundational text. However, as discussed at more length
in Chap. 2, it did provide something of a moral shock to both its editors
and its contemporary readers, and it was the first publication aimed at the
general public which dealt with the topic from a woman-centred perspec-
tive. It was also the vehicle through which the right group of women’s
186 5 Demonstration in Publication

movement intellectuals found each other, women who had the necessary
reputation and intellectual interests, a compatible underlying political con-
sciousness, and above all, the desire and capacity to do something together,
which resulted in the emergence of FINNRET at Women’s Worlds in 1984.
It was also the vehicle through which many of the women found their way
into the network—as Ana Reis described it, meeting the women who had
written Test Tube Women in Sweden was like ‘meeting your bibliography’.2
Conversely, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial 
Insemination to Artificial Wombs (Corea 1985a), as a piece of research car-
ried out by a single writer rather than a mix of voices, provides the founda-
tional evidence basis not only for FINRRAGE but, I would argue, for
feminist engagement with NRT as a whole.3 Love it or hate it, as the first
truly comprehensive treatise on the subject, anyone writing about NRT
from a feminist perspective, particularly during the period of epistemologi-
cal expansion, would have to engage with its arguments, whether as evi-
dence or to refute them (see, e.g. Birke 1986; Stanworth 1987; Cohen and
Taub 1989), and it continues to be cited for both purposes (see, e.g.
Petchesky 2004; Pande 2016; Loveland 2017).4 Unfortunately, because it
is The Mother Machine which is most often referred to as the exemplar of
the FINRRAGE position, whether positively or negatively received, it has
had the effect of reducing the entirety of the network’s vast output to a
single, deliberately provocative volume. Corea, in fact, remembers that the
book was not a particular success in America; it was only after it was trans-
lated into German that it picked up a much wider audience:

I think one of the obstacles was this naivety among many women, and in
general in the US, there was a kind of naivety that too readily accepted the
medical explanation for what was going on here. Which did not exist in
Germany. It was really strong in Germany, and I did a lot more activism in
Germany because they invited me a lot, so I was there a lot and I spoke
German. So, I was there a lot. But they had the Nazi past and the whole
Lebensborn movement, and they immediately saw what was going on here,
this great potential for controlling who would be allowed to be born on the
earth, and they knew it had been done before, that effort to control. A lot
of the women in my generation were the daughters from parents who had
been Nazis or had at least lived in that time, and they felt an enormous
 The FINRRAGE Canon 187

responsibility to do something about it, so that passion and that clear-

headedness I think, and that sense of something so huge being at stake, the
potential for such grievous harm to be done in the world, they felt a great
passion for it. That passion was absent in the US.5

While it cannot be said, therefore, that The Mother Machine was the
direct spark for FINRRAGE, as it was not published until after the
FINNRET network emerged at Women’s Worlds in Groningen in 1984,
it was a rich source of data for the nascent network, and remained a pri-
mary text. Thus, Eyerman’s and Jamison’s (1991, 102–3) claim that the
foundational text must be produced before the movement can emerge
may not be entirely correct, particularly as all movements build on earlier
cycles of action. What may be more important is the way the text explains
the illustrating technoscientific event—in this case, the decades of medi-
cal experimentation which had led up to the birth of Louise Brown—and
its ability to bring the interests of those earlier cycles, in this case, feminist
engagement with the medical establishment’s treatment of women which
dates back to Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Collective
1973), forward to connect with that event. At the same time, unlike the
books written by Friedan and Carson, it cannot really be said that The
Mother Machine launched anything of a similar size, power and longevity
as the women’s and environmental movements. Indeed, apart from the
loose network maintained by FINRRAGE it may be hard to see feminist
resistance to NRT as a coherent movement at all.6

Writing the Resistance

As discussed in Chap. 2, Jalna Hanmer had begun writing about what the

scientists themselves were predicting for IVF before Louise Brown was
born, and the idea of gathering knowledge in order to mount a feminist
resistance is already evident in some of the papers from the Amherst con-
ference in 1979. Since that time, Corea had been presenting parts of her
research. The central arguments of The Mother Machine were known within
the group who presented the Death of the Female? panel before it was pub-
lished, and in that sense it could be considered as the match to Test Tube
188 5 Demonstration in Publication

Women’s petrol, reflected in the decision to change the name and emphasis
of the network from mere study to resistance at the ‘Emergency Conference’
in Lund. However, while The Mother Machine may be said to be intellectu-
ally foundational and the Groningen proceedings were published (as Man-
Made Women:  How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women, Corea
et al. 1985), it is not until the publication of Made to Order: The Myth
of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (Spallone and Steinberg 1987), the pro-
ceedings of the Emergency Conference in Sweden discussed in Chap. 3,
that FINRRAGE’s project of demonstration in publication as a network
begins. Several of these papers were also published in Women’s Studies
International Forum (WSIF), a peer-reviewed journal where Klein and
Rowland were both editors, which is specifically aimed at activist academ-
ics in women’s studies departments. Corea’s paper on the ‘reproductive
brothel’ was published first, laying out certain ideas from the forthcoming
book, notably using scientific literature to describe in some detail the way
technologies for embryo transfer were being used for breeding animals in
conditions where less valuable females were seen as machines for efficient
production of superior breeds. Again, drawing from speculation by scien-
tists and social commentators that human reproduction could be handled
in a similar way—for example, as an ‘undemanding career’ for women who
enjoyed pregnancy and watching TV, or by ‘pleasant’ Mexican-American
girls who would do the work cheaply (Packard 1979  in Corea 1985b,
301)—Corea’s conclusion was that once embryo transfer between women
was perfected so that the genes of the surrogate no longer mattered, brokers
would seek to use ‘less valuable’ Third World women to gestate babies for
wealthy Westerners in much the same way.7
Five other papers from Lund were collected by Klein, who was the
European Editor of WSIF, into a special issue which appeared a few
months later. These papers included Crowe’s (1985) groundbreaking work
on women who chose to undergo IVF (a field at this point largely led by
Carl Wood’s and Alan Trounson’s team in Melbourne) which revealed
some of the normative assumptions about the role of women in pronatal-
ist Australian society that were influencing women’s decisions; Mies’
(1985) sharp questioning of the purpose of ‘all this’; Minden’s (1985)
exploration of the dangerous intersections between the American right-to-
life movement’s demand for legal personhood for the foetus and the
 The FINRRAGE Canon 189

scientific aim of embryonic gene therapy; and Rowland’s (1985) close

reading of scientific papers advocating perfect control of reproduction as
a reason for developing cloning, embryonic engineering and ectogenesis.
Other papers from Lund which appeared as chapters in Made to Order
explored the pharmaceutical and military applications of genetic engi-
neering (Bullard 1987); the growth of a new industry around genetic test-
ing, shaping a new profession of genetic counsellor (Bradish 1987); and
an analysis of committee papers to date, in which Spallone (1987) con-
cluded that whatever the specific laws governing the technologies might
eventually be, there was general agreement on the acceptability of using
women’s bodies to further The Family and science as institutions. Overall,
the entire shape of the network’s future knowledge interests, its focus on
the four key areas of conception, contraception, what McDonald (2007)
has called technologies of confirmation (prenatal and preimplantation
diagnosis) and genetic engineering are represented in this volume.
In addition to Test Tube Women and the published conference proceed-
ings, there were several other anthologies edited by network members.
Reconstructing Babylon: Women and Technology, a selection of mainly con-
tributions from Raymond and Corea, was edited by Patricia Hynes
(1989) as the first publication of a new Institute on Women and
Technology the three had launched together in 1987. Hynes, an environ-
mentalist who had been at the Emergency Conference, had given a paper
in Sweden which proposed a concrete solution for regulation of IVF
using the model of the US Environmental Protection Agency (1987)
which was referred to as a governance model in papers written by several
of the other women in this time, although FINRRAGE never pursued
this as a formal goal. The book argues that IVF should be considered by
public policy as biomedical research, not ‘treatment’, as it was rarely suc-
cessful and was not actually aimed at treating the root causes of infertility.
The book also presents several chapters on commercial surrogacy, an issue
which was at that point highly publicised, having been brought dramati-
cally into the American consciousness by the story of Mary Beth
Whitehead, who had gone on the run rather than give her newborn child
to its contracted father and had ended that journey with the police pull-
ing the child from her arms in a motel parking lot in Florida (see Corea
1989; Raymond 1989).8
190 5 Demonstration in Publication

Overall, by the late 1980s, there were enough women (and the occa-
sional man) willing to either speak to researchers or write first-hand
accounts of coming to terms with infertility, undergoing IVF or giving up
biological children in surrogacy arrangements, that Klein was able to put
together another international anthology, Infertility: Women Speak Out
About Their Experiences of Reproductive Medicine (Klein 1989a). Introducing
it, Klein stresses an analytic position which relied on reversing some of the
more positive claims being made for IVF; in particular that it was not a
‘miracle cure’, but a ‘failed technology’ in which 90% of the women who
began a cycle would end it without a child (ibid., 1), and that the simplis-
tic way in which discussion was approached belied the ‘often long and
extremely painful journeys’ (ibid., 2) which women undertook. The
anthology was a mixture of first-person and told-to narratives, discussing
women’s experiences with infertility, IVF and as commercial surrogates,
including a chapter multiply authored by a group of women who had
made global headlines for refusing to give up their genetically related chil-
dren and were now actively campaigning to end the practice.9 Another
section looks at infertility counselling, but from the point of view of
women such as Alison Solomon (who had been the Israeli national con-
tact since Lund), Lindsay Napier and Ann Pappert, who were themselves
infertile and had tried various treatments before coming to acceptance.
These women argued strongly for the important contribution infertile
women could make to resistance to NRT if they felt supported, framing
this as way of returning to them a control over their lives which they felt
had been usurped by the technologies (see also Solomon 1988). Unusually,
the book also included an account from a man, the husband of one of the
female authors, who wrote of the agony of being relegated by the doctors
to the sidelines, where he could only watch what the woman he loved had
to endure. Humm argued that men ‘needed to add their own witness to
the testimony provided by women’ and resist the ‘unrelenting insensitiv-
ity of medical procedure’ which reduced the infertile couple to ‘a test site
for pioneering and risky therapies’ and ‘a provider of sperm’ (Humm
1989, 55–56). The book ends with a broad overview of the technologies
and a comprehensive glossary, both written by Klein.
While Infertility  is in some ways a companion to Test Tube Women, in
other ways it also breaks new ground. Rather than collecting and narrating
the stories of others, as Klein (1989b) had done in her short monograph
 The FINRRAGE Canon 191

The Exploitation of a Desire:  Women’s experiences with in vitro fertilisation

(quotes from which also appear on the section dividers in Infertility), the
book is an act of liberatory resistance in two ways: first, it takes control of
the narrative of IVF back from its practitioners by opening a space in
which women could speak directly to the public and raise consciousness
not only about their own embodied experience with assisted reproduc-
tion, but about how their decisions were influenced in subtle ways by
societal customs and expectations, such as giving a childless woman a baby
to hold ‘for luck’ (Solomon 1989). Second, many of the stories directly
called for resistance to the silence which other feminists could impose on
infertile women, and instead celebrating the possibilities for finding alter-
natives together (Napier 1989). In Japan, these stories led directly to the
formation of the still-existing infertility self-help group Finrrage-no-kai
(Friends of FINRRAGE), when hundreds of women wrote to Soshiren to
share their own experiences after the group translated the book into
Japanese.10
A further anthology, and one which appears to be lesser known, The
Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the Commercialisation of
Motherhood (Scutt 1990), specifically interrogates the leadership position
that certain Australian clinics held in the global assisted reproduction
industry at this time. This collection, which included a foreword by
Hanmer and articles by Crowe, Corea and Klein, was edited by Jocelynne
Scutt, a legal scholar who had been an integral part of reforming rape law
in Australia in the 1970s; its focus tends more towards the macro, ques-
tioning the underlying motivations for developing the technologies and
in particular seeking to embed IVF within Australia’s political and eco-
nomic aspirations. In two key chapters, Scutt and colleagues consider the
importance of sheep breeding and commercial techniques for animal hus-
bandry to Australia’s economy as the lens through which transfer of those
same technologies to women should be understood (Brown et al. 1990),
while Ramona Koval (1990) narrows the focus specifically to the secretive
attempt by Monash University to monetise its world leadership in IVF
through opening a for-profit clinic in the United States funded by venture
capital, which led to a major public relations disaster for the university.
In addition to the collections, there are three further single-authored
texts which reflect the differences in approach to governance of reproduc-
tive technologies in Australia, the United States and the UK. The first
192 5 Demonstration in Publication

book which falls into this group was written by Patricia Spallone, whose
interest in NRT had begun while studying for an MA in Women’s Studies
at the University of York, which she chose as a change of pace from her
normal job as a research biochemist. Her research grew during the course
of her FINRRAGE work until it finally became a book, Beyond Conception: 
The New Politics of Reproduction (Spallone 1989), and eventually formed
the basis of her PhD.11 The book begins and ends with a discussion of her
time in FINRRAGE, noting that her contribution was part of ‘a larger
process of women’s political learning’ aimed at ‘breaking the silence of the
laboratories’ and making medical scientists accountable to women (ibid.,
3). In reviewing the medical research through the lens of her professional
expertise, Spallone noted that experimentation in IVF was increasing,
not decreasing, and that the hormonal protocols in particular were con-
tinually being reshaped not towards lower toxicity and fewer side effects
but towards more intervention in different processes—part of the contin-
ued search for absolute control over the woman’s cycle so that ovulation
could be precisely timed to occur during normal working hours. Spallone
argues that as ever more efficient control over natural processes is the key
aim of science, shaping the woman’s cycle to the doctor’s convenience was
neither surprising nor commonly noticed. Regarding protestations that
regulation would inhibit ‘scientific freedom’, she speaks from her own
experience writing scientific grants in noting that:

A scientist who depends on funding bodies to pursue expensive, high-tech

research is hardly ‘free’. In fact, the principle of ‘scientific freedom’ is not
about intellectual freedom but about political power: the power of science
in society, who controls science, and what science controls. (ibid., 106)

Grappling directly with the use/abuse argument, Spallone argues that

technology cannot be separated from its social context and if science consid-
ered women to be active subjects, it is quite likely that the kinds of experi-
ments that were required for human IVF to become viable would either not
have taken place or would have had to be done in a completely different
way.12 Like many of the FINRRAGE women, Spallone also problematises
the liberal assertion that women own their own bodies and are therefore free
to exercise their ‘right’ to sell or purchase gametes and gestational services.
 The FINRRAGE Canon 193

Concluding with a call for resistance as a matter of taking control of the

questions to be asked, she draws interesting parallels between genetic engi-
neering and nuclear research, both of which have benefits tempered by the
possibility of severe harm and a dual use as a ‘weapon of gigantic power’
(Snow 1939 in Spallone 1989, 188), both of which are often defended by
the argument that someone will certainly develop that weapon, so it would
be better if it’s us. These were ideas she would return to just a few years later
in Generation Games: Genetic Engineering and the Future for Our Lives (1992,
5), which draws extensively on her background in basic research to argue
that the development of techniques for the industrialisation of life were, in
fact, ‘at loggerheads with progressive social development’.
Rowland’s book, Living Laboratories:  Women and Reproductive
Technologies (1992), which she began writing after Sweden, draws strong
linkages between the commodification of reproduction and the commod-
ification of all else in Australian life, a phenomenon which had by this
time begun to erode the power of the uniquely Australian ‘femocracy’
(Sawer 2007) discussed in Chap. 2. Rowland’s book continues Corea’s and
Hanmer’s close reading of medical papers, illuminating the questionable
ways by which doctors tended to refer to their women patients and argu-
ing that the question should not be about what gives a woman more
choice, but about what gives her more control (ibid., 285). Rowland also
problematises the power the IVF doctors were able to wield not only over
the women in their care but over the state through their repeated ultima-
tum that, should their research be restricted by law, they would emigrate,
taking Australia’s status as world leader with them (ibid., 229). In her final
chapter on ‘resistance’, she argues for ‘a society in which there is fulfilment
for individuals, balanced with a reciprocal responsibility to the social
group’ (Rowland 1992, 302). Like Hanmer, Rowland stresses that there is
no way for women to separate technology from the purpose for which it
is truly intended and that while IVF does sometimes give children to the
childless, this is merely a by-product, the smokescreen for a research pro-
gramme which is really about using human embryos to create whole new
industries capable of harnessing the productivity of ‘life itself ’. Resistance
in her framing was not so much about outright rejection or vilification of
women who did want to try IVF, but to make visible evidence that the
industry preferred to have hidden, such as the emotional, physical and
194 5 Demonstration in Publication

mental strain of going through a procedure which still had an extremely

low rate of success, and to foment activism for preventative health care
and legal governance of reproductive science. While acknowledging that
legislative efforts were too often embryo-centred rather than woman-cen-
tred, Rowland argued that feminists needed to create a public voice not
only to make heard a feminist perspective where none existed but also to
make these concerns visible to the wider community, as consultation invi-
tations were often issued to the public at large.
The challenge of responding to liberal rights-based arguments was per-
haps the most obvious in the United States, where free-market libertarian-
ism and women’s campaigns for equality had fused into a configuration
which Janice Raymond, in her own book Women as Wombs: Reproductive
Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom (1993), characterised as a
kind of reproductive fundamentalism in which all demands for reproduc-
tive consumption must be met as a matter of free exercise of constitutionally
guaranteed ‘procreative liberty’ (ibid., 76–77). Raymond notes that while
liberal men had strongly supported women’s fight for access to contracep-
tion and abortion, they had also vehemently opposed women’s fights against
pornography and prostitution; in other words, their position was consis-
tently predicated on what would make women more readily available for
sex. As with use of procreative technology, or the more complicated case of
entering surrogacy arrangements, much depended on a contradictory for-
mulation of ‘consent’ which denied the constraints within which women’s
choices to participate were made, while simultaneously blaming them when
such choices led to unfortunate consequences. Raymond takes the argu-
ment one step further, framing the global circulation of eggs, embryos,
surrogates and foetal tissue through the lens of trafficking, noting that there
was already some evidence that poorer women were now being trafficked
for the purposes of reproduction. It was not, she argued, necessarily that the
same international networks which procured women for the sex trade, or
children for adoption, or organs for transplant were now being used for
third-party reproduction (although she also noted this was possible), but
rather that reproductive trafficking was inevitable given the widespread
poverty which created such networks in the first place.13 Rather than regu-
late, which transfers brokerage functions to the state and is thus more likely
to promote than control the industry, Raymond concludes by arguing for
 The FINRRAGE Canon 195

abolition of both prostitution and reproductive technologies on the grounds

that they ‘violate women’s bodily integrity’ (ibid., 208).
If there is a phase 1 aspect to all of these books, I would argue that it is
not so much a quality of the analysis put forward, but of the presentation.
Epistemologically, they are theory drawn from women’s lives (albeit often
a limited sampling), and as such they are shaped by the topics and the
respondents chosen—Infertility, for example, did not include stories from
women who had finished their IVF treatment with a child—leaving them
open to accusations of framing women as victims, rather than active
agents seeking to control their lives (see Fine and Asch 1985). Despite
drawing from individual experience, they also tend to approach women as
a social class, which leaves them open to charges of essentialism. However,
an argument can also be made that at this, the ontological phase of what
was effectively a collective knowledge project (in which the women shared
their findings, their ideas and their manuscripts with each other before
publication), a class-level analysis might be required in order to better
understand the nature of the technologies in question. There is some
validity in the claim that procreative technologies would affect all women
in some way, in their capacity to reframe basic social relationships as well
as in their capacity to create new spaces in the labour market and new uses
for women’s bodily material. It was not difficult to foresee that both third-
party procreation and research involving human embryos would require
increasing participation of women who are fertile, as the fertility market
expanded and science continued to develop new branches of research
predicated on access to human embryos. Even for feminists supportive of
these goals, given the potential for harm through the process of egg
retrieval—or even outright coercion (see Tsuge and Hong 2011)—it is
still worth asking Rowland’s basic question: where do the eggs come from?14
The other qualities these books share is that they all take an interna-
tional approach, whether through the collection of authors assembled in
the edited volumes or through the material presented, echoing
FINRRAGE’s concerted efforts to document their four topic areas on a
global scale, and to contextual the differences as a way of understanding
how the social and the technological interacted. Constructed largely on
the macro level, it is thus inevitable that some flattening occurs, but the
strength of a class-level analysis is that it allowed connections to be drawn
196 5 Demonstration in Publication

which suggested, for example, that technologies of confirmation

(McDonald 2007) aimed at verifying whether a child is fit to be born
would constitute a reifying of disability as unworthy life almost anywhere
it was deployed, but would also construct possession of two X
chromosomes as a kind of social disability equally unworthy of life and
therefore equally subject to pragmatic elimination in a context where the
intrinsic value of women was extremely low. While the polemical quality
varies, all are aimed at the general public, and all frame knowledge as an
act of resistance. Apart from Women as Wombs, each also ends with an
overview of FINRRAGE activities to date and an explicit call to engage,
not necessarily by joining FINRRAGE itself, but by reading, writing,
speaking, learning, teaching and protesting with others locally, by hold-
ing practitioners to account and ‘demanding the right as individuals and
communities to say “no”’ (Spallone 1989, 191).

Epistemological Explorations

At the same time, FINRRAGE women were also publishing work aimed at

an academic audience, particularly through the international group of PhD
students, who were often developing whole new areas of scholarship
because the work they wanted to do was not intelligible to the disciplines
in which they had been trained. Sarah Franklin, for example, had originally
begun her PhD at New York University, but was told a feminist analysis of
IVF was ‘insufficiently anthropological’, even though, as she argues, ‘the
whole history of anthropology is about these debates, about the family, kin-
ship, conception, maternity’.15 Instead of changing topic, Franklin moved
to Britain to finish her PhD in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies at the University of Birmingham, carrying out ethnographic work
in the city’s three IVF clinics. The result, eventually published as Embodied
Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (1997), examined repro-
ductive technologies from a variety of perspectives, including a feminist
analysis, but remained strongly rooted in the ongoing disciplinary debate
about the neutrality of anthropology, and of science itself:

I wanted to understand what women thought about going through that

process and why they were doing it. I wanted to understand in a more
 The FINRRAGE Canon 197

classic anthropological sense what happened to the idea of conception

when it gets made technologically explicit in a dish. What does it mean to
talk about the facts of life when they’re no longer natural or even conven-
tionally biological but literally constructs in a dish? What does that mean
that the facts of life are being culturally constructed? … I was very excited
when I heard about FINRRAGE, because I thought fantastic, there’s a
whole feminist network that’s interested in these issues. I didn’t know any-
body else who was working on these issues at all.16

Franklin thus became part of a tightly knit group of postgraduates

who, although from different disciplines, seem to have had a strong
shared influence from feminist contributors to science and technology
studies (STS), which was at the time just finding its feet as an interdisci-
plinary field.17 Franklin’s supervisor, Maureen McNeil, herself a feminist
and an STS scholar, encouraged Franklin to submit a paper to the British
Sociological Association’s 1987 conference, which McNeil was organis-
ing. The subsequent panel included fellow PhD students and British
FINRRAGE members Annette Burfoot, Deborah Steinberg (also at the
Centre for Cultural Studies and whom Franklin credits with her intro-
duction to FINRRAGE in 1986), and Christine Crowe (Australia), who
was on a postgraduate research fellowship in the UK. These papers were
later published as part of an edited volume, New Reproductive Technologies
(McNeil et al. 1990). In a short foreword to the book, the editors note
that by relying upon empirical analysis of subjective experience rather
than the abstract principles of law and ethics which had so far dominated
discussions of IVF, the panel had reflected in ‘a particularly intense way’
the concerns of the conference, where:

… a number of fundamental conceptual debates recurred: what are the

boundaries between nature and society, between for example, biology and
social relations, between the ‘given’ and the culturally constructed?…why
do certain technologies absorb the energies of scientists and engineers and
not others, and how are those technologies shaped by the societies that
spawn them? (ibid., ix)18

Crowe’s chapter grapples directly with this question, examining in

some detail the career of IVF ‘pioneer’ Robert Edwards. Before the late
198 5 Demonstration in Publication

1980s, very little had been published for the general reader apart from
Steptoe’s and Edward’s (1980) book on the years of research which had
eventually led to the birth of Louise Brown. Reading between the lines of
this and his other scientific papers painted a clear and somewhat disturb-
ing picture of the kinds of experiments which Edwards, a mouse biolo-
gist, had performed on female ‘volunteers’ as he tried to understand the
precise mechanisms of human reproduction. He had, for example, tried
collecting sperm from women’s cervixes directly after intercourse or
inserting sperm-filled receptacles into their uteri overnight, which he
removed the next day to see if the sperm had matured (Edwards and
Steptoe 1980, discussed in Crowe 1990). Moving to an overview of the
Warnock report and subsequent bills (UK legislation was at that point
still under debate), Crowe concludes that the practices and discourses
which initially legitimated embryo experimentation could still be seen in
the parliamentary legislation which had ultimately been shaped to
respond to the goals of the researchers rather than the women with whom
the practitioners now professed concern. Similarly, Burfoot (1990) notes
that having used a citational analysis to document the new field of repro-
ductive technologies which grew from Edwards’ research; there was ‘vir-
tually no regard’ for the health of the women involved in any of this
work. Steinberg (1990) also used a close reading of the medical literature
to conclude that the processes and administration of IVF worked to
simultaneously erase and recombine women within an oppressive power
relationship which limited reproductive agency to a matter of consumer-
ist choice governed by the research prerogatives of the practitioners.
Finally, Franklin (1990), shifting the focus to the vernacular, closely
examined the kinds of stories being told about women’s choices and
desires in the media coverage of IVF, and the ways in which this recon-
structed the desire for motherhood into a desperate feminine need.
However, as well as the topic of IVF not always being a clear fit into
traditional disciplines, neither was there always a place for feminist analy-
sis in some of the spaces for STS. According to Annette Burfoot:

I thought I was going to a unit where there was a gender and technology
sub-unit and there was not, so I had no support. I was one of the few
people doing what I was doing … my friends [in my unit] were not doing
 The FINRRAGE Canon 199

anything like what I was doing. They were doing classical innovation stud-
ies, doing science policy…. the meetings with the FINRRAGE folks were
useful, it was almost like a support group. We could share ideas, and talk
about what we were doing.19

Burfoot’s thesis, The Politics Of Innovation: The Discovery, Dissemination

And Regulation Of In Vitro Fertilisation In Britain (1989), approached IVF
from the perspective of diffusion of innovation, beginning with a critical,
STS-inspired examination of Mary O’Brien’s theory of reproductive con-
sciousness, which explains power relations as arising from the male need
to ensure an uncertain historical continuity. Burfoot’s is one of the first
studies of the economic organisation of an IVF clinic, leading to the con-
clusion that a search for prestige and profit was more likely to drive inno-
vation in the field than any real sensitivity towards the ‘plight’ of the
infertile. IVF, she notes, was like the centre of a spoked wheel which fed
into a number of different areas such as animal husbandry, genetic research
and genetic engineering, echoing one generally agreed FINRRAGE posi-
tion, which was that IVF was not just about making babies.20
Drawing from Harding, who argues that standpoint epistemologies
contain both the tendency towards essentialisation and the tools to com-
bat it (Harding 1991, quoted in Steinberg 1997, 5) Deborah Lynn
Steinberg’s PhD research, which forms the basis of her monograph Bodies
in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics, uses a deconstructive close
reading of medical and scientific discourses (including interviews with
practitioners) to understand how eugenic sensibilities were being encoded
into the technology and practices of IVF. Steinberg argues for adding axes
of analysis to gender, including disability as well as race, class and hetero-
sexism, to combine into an ‘anti-oppressive feminist standpoint’ (ibid.,
17) which might avoid essentialist reductionism yet still retain a commit-
ment to creating knowledge for social change. Power relations are thus
illuminated, as well as the struggle for authorial voice over the meaning
of IVF, potentially allowing a different set of questions than ‘should we or
shouldn’t we’ to be asked.
Other women in the postgraduate cohort produced theses in Dutch,
German, Danish, French and Spanish, again, often the first to do so in
their country. Aurelia Weikert, who came into the network while an
200 5 Demonstration in Publication

undergraduate studying for her diplôme in Vienna, was the first social
anthropologist to study IVF in Austria. Weikert credits Franklin with
giving her the belief that IVF was an acceptable topic for anthropology,
but it was mainly because she had already published a book on a local
women’s congress on NRT (Weikert et al. 1987)—to which she and her
colleague, Johanna Riegler, had invited Gena Corea, which subsequently
led to their becoming the Austrian national contacts for FINRRAGE—
that her potential supervisor agreed to consider it an acceptable topic.21
Lene Koch, inspired at Lund by Christine Crowe’s work, also began a
PhD investigating women’s experiences with IVF in Denmark:

I interviewed the first fourteen women in Denmark who applied for IVF
and got it … the first to get this under finance by the state. I found that it
was a really, really rough experience for all of them. A really low percentage
of success … So I took it upon myself to produce the view of one party,
namely the users, the women. That became my PhD.22

Even before this group had begun to publish widely, therefore, it is

possible to see not only the influence of FINRRAGE on their work, but
the influence of their work on the broader field of discussion about
NRT. Mulkay (1997), for example, draws on work from Corea and Klein,
but also Spallone, Koch and Crowe, in his study of the embryo research
debate in Britain. Lee and Morgan (2001, 34–36), in their study of the
development of Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
(HFEA), also draw on the work of the same authors, not purely as an
example of feminist response but for the insights into the experience of
IVF their research produced. It was for this reason, the ability to dissemi-
nate beyond the network itself at a time when it was extremely difficult
to get work from a feminist perspective into established academic jour-
nals, that the original group decided to follow the women’s studies model
and create their own journal for the issues they wanted to explore.

IRAGE and Other Journals

In the mid-1980s, there were still few publication opportunities for femi-
nist academics outside their own journals. Because the founder group was
 The FINRRAGE Canon 201

in a professional position to apply for funding, one strategy for creating

more opportunities for ‘like-minded’ women to get into print—particu-
larly those who normally would not be published in academic journals,
such as journalists or activists working in the area of infertility counsel-
ling—was to start their own academic journal. In December of 1986,
Corea, Hanmer, Klein, Raymond and Rowland received a $15,000 grant
from the Skaggs Foundation (who had also funded the Sweden confer-
ence) to start (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (IRAGE),
which Klein offered to an editor at Pergamon, whom she knew as they also
published WSIF.23 The journal’s first issue was published in March 1988,
and it continued to appear three times yearly for 5 years. Envisioned as
their own project, separate from the international network and therefore
under their own control,24 the group did draw exclusively from the women
they knew through FINRRAGE to create the editorial advisory board and
select editors. With Hanmer as managing editor and Spallone as assistant
editor, the regional editors were Akhter (Asia), Rowland (Australia), Klein
(Europe), and Arditti and Corea (sharing North America). The advisory
board included 15 FINRRAGE women representing 15 different coun-
tries, most of whom had been national contacts since Lund.
IRAGE gave the network a publication outlet for the knowledge-
building which went on at its own conferences, but also allowed a wider
circulation of scholarly papers by FINRRAGE women who were not able
to attend the international meetings. This included, for example, research
on the practice of IVF in Australia (Rutnam 1991) or the Netherlands
(Kirejczyk 1990) or of the use of oral contraceptives in Japan (Uno 1992).
Klein and Rowland (1988) published a review of the research evidence
on the negative effects of clomiphene citrate, at that point one of the
most widely used drugs for superovulation in IVF, showing not only that
this was being administered at much higher levels than recommended,
but that the scientists’ own papers showed their claims for its safety were
untrue. The journal also allowed those who normally published only in
their own language, such as the disability rights activists Theresia Degener
(1990) and Anne Waldschmidt (1992a, b), both of whom were well-
known within FINRRAGE Germany, to be published in English transla-
tion. Having simultaneously an activist and a scholarly mandate, the
journal was deliberately fashioned to blur the lines between formal and
202 5 Demonstration in Publication

informal research (see, e.g. Akhter 1988; Holmes 1989; Lippman 1992;
Munro 1991), and included essays about embodied experience, for
example, Elizabeth Kane’s speech to the National Women’s Studies
Association about her ‘awakening’ to her own exploitation as the first
legal surrogate in the United States (1989), and even the occasional work
of fiction (O’Brien 1990; Malpede 1991). Although the work had to be
written to an academic standard, papers submitted to IRAGE were not
reviewed blind, and if necessary, the editorial staff was more than willing
to coach non-academics through the process of revision. The journal also
carried book reviews and published a column called ‘At Issue’, which was
an essay on a pressing question, written for several years by Janice
Raymond and later by Jocelynne Scutt; and a section on current scientific
developments which was an outgrowth of the informal newsletter edited
by Cindy de Wit that had been circulated through the infopacks since
1985. It carried news and updates of events such as the raid on Gen-
Archiv in Essen (1988) or the successful protests in Germany against the
arrival of surrogacy broker Noel Keane in Frankfurt (Winkler 1988), and
against the speaking invitation issued by Dortmund and other universi-
ties to a noted utilitarian bioethicist from Monash University who
claimed that it was legitimate to kill the severely handicapped (Feyerabend
1989). Although it can be considered as a publication outlet for
FINRRAGE, the journal did also publish work from like-minded women
who were not FINRRAGE members, on a range of topics from legal
reform (Roach 1989), use of Depo-Provera in countries such as Jamaica
(Parsons 1990) and the normalisation of ultrasound in prenatal care
(Schei 1992).
IRAGE also published reports of conferences, both those organised by
FINRRAGE or where there was a FINRRAGE presence, and those held
by the fertility industry itself, in order to keep abreast of new develop-
ments and continue the project of examining the way scientists spoke of
the technologies when they were amongst their own. Burfoot (1988), for
example, in her report of the third annual meeting of the prestigious
European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE),
noted that the word ‘woman’ was rarely mentioned in the framing of
research questions, but rather it was the embryo which was regarded as
the independent being. German FINRRAGE member Barbara Orland
 The FINRRAGE Canon 203

(1993) similarly reported on the rise of a new profession in Germany,

that of prenatal physician (i.e. separate from the neonatal specialists who
could only deal with the newly born), through an increasing number of
techniques which attempted to breach the ‘barrier’ of the woman’s body
and treat the foetus—framed as the patient—while still in utero. Taken
as a whole, it is possible to read the contents of IRAGE as an indicator of
the breadth of knowledge interests of the network, and the range of argu-
ments FINRRAGE actually did support.
IRAGE was not the only periodical which members of the network
created. Terra Femina, an English-language journal published jointly by
REDEH and Institute for Cultural Action (IDAC) once yearly for 3 years
in Brazil, was one of the outcomes of the Rio conference, partly funded
by the remains of the  FrauenAnstiftung grant. Edited by Thais Corral
and the Brazilian ecofeminist Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira, its three issues
helped bring Brazilian writers to a wider audience, and also included
articles by Carolyn Merchant, Vandana Shiva, Loes Keyser and Maria
Mies. Concluding the first issue with the Alto de Boa  Vista Vision
Statement statement drafted by Oliveira, Mies, Corral, Akhter, Reis and
others at the Rio conference, which explicitly problematises technologi-
cal progress based on male-defined ideas of egotism, competition and
displays of power, it calls for a solution beyond feminist demands for
equality, one in which both men and women assume responsibility for
the ‘care and preservation of everyday life’ (Corral 1992, 96).
Just prior to the People’s Perspectives on ‘Population’ conference in 1993,
UBINIG also created a small monthly magazine of the same name, meant
to provide a platform specifically for writing on the issue of population
policy in the run-up to the UN International Conference on Population
and Development (ICPD) which would take place in Cairo the following
year. Edited by Akhter and Farhad Mazhar, from a perspective that empha-
sised over-consumption, neo-colonialism and neo-liberal economic policy
as the cause of Third World poverty, not overpopulation, it devoted an
intense scrutiny to the activities of the preparatory committees
(PrepComms) for Cairo and offered an oppositional analysis of the official
documents circulating amongst the various bodies that would be repre-
sented at the UN conference. The magazine published ten issues, including
articles by less well-known FINRRAGE-affiliated women such as Vimal
204 5 Demonstration in Publication

Balasubrahmanyam, Malini Karkal and Satoko Nagaoki, as well as high-

lighting the work of the Resistance Network Against Abuse of Contraceptives
on Women’s Bodies, an activist companion to UBINIG which was now
leading a local campaign against further use of Norplant as the country’s
stock was due to expire. UBINIG also established its own publishing house
during this period, Narigrantha Prabartana, which has now evolved into a
women’s resource centre and bookstore. It publishes research and fiction,
and has collected Akhter’s keynotes and other writings in  Resisting
Norplant (1995) and Depopulating Bangladesh (2005), as well as reprinting
material originally published by Spinifex Press, an independent feminist
press run by Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne, in a format which can be
priced for the South Asian area. One of its first publications was a critical
report on RU 486, a chemical abortion pill used together with prostaglan-
din for early abortions up to 49  days, written by Klein, Raymond and
Lynette Dumble, another member of FINRRAGE Australia (1991). In the
foreword to this edition, Akhter notes the importance of being able to
publish it in Dhaka, as the population control establishment which was
promoting the pill had neglected to understand that it would not be
administered by a doctor, but—as with all medicines in Bangladesh, even
antibiotics—would be purchased over-the-counter and used without any
understanding of, or capacity to mitigate, the well-noted side effects. It was
therefore important to get the book, which was an extensive discussion of
the technical details in layman’s language, into the hands of policy-makers
who were in the process of deciding if and how RU 486 should be used.
What all of this activity shows is the centrality of ‘demonstration in pub-
lication’ to the network’s cognitive praxis. Eyerman and Jamison (1991,
101) claim that it requires socially legitimated intellectuals—either aca-
demics or writers known as public intellectuals—to lay the groundwork for
the emergence of a movement. They also (ibid., 106) argue that one of the
hallmarks of ‘new’ social movements is that all activists are movement intel-
lectuals in some form at some times. All the women who regularly attended
the international meetings and were known to other affiliates outside their
country would certainly qualify as ‘movement intellectuals’ in FINRRAGE,
focused as they were on tactics which could be called—drawing from the
interviews—‘studying it up’ and ‘demonstration in publication’.25 The
result of this was an organisation whose main strategy was very clearly
 Movement Intellectuals and Expertise 205

focused on intellectual pursuits, even in the smallest local meetings; in this

sense it could even be argued that all of the women who took part in
FINRRAGE activities were movement intellectuals all of the time.
Whereas social movement theory (SMT) considers ‘knowledge’ to be
largely interpretative (Kurzman 2008) or symbolic (Melucci 1985),
examining FINRRAGE suggests that this is only a small part of what
some activists do. As shown above, activists may be seen to employ
knowledge-producing strategies which are analogous in many ways to
those used by science, particularly if seen through Kuhn’s (1996) formu-
lation: there is a textual canon which is used as the basis from which the
movement’s knowledge is built; evidence-gathering measures are guided
by an epistemology (shaped by an underlying cosmology or world view)
which serves as a framework for interpretation of evidence, the products
of which are continually (con)tested and (re)validated through meetings,
talks and other public speech acts and documented in manifestos, decla-
rations, pamphlets and so on, on a continuum extending all the way to
published (even peer-reviewed) articles, papers and books. While Eyerman
and Jamison assign a specific role of ‘movement intellectuals’ to those
who produce these forms of documentation (as opposed to, say, those
who produce minutes of meetings), it is not always clear how these move-
ment intellectuals stand in relation to qualified experts on the one side
and the so-called lay public on the other. Therefore, before looking
directly at ‘the FINRRAGE position’ as a reflection of the network’s over-
all cognitive praxis, it is worth a closer examination of the different kinds
of expertise the FINRRAGE women displayed.

Movement Intellectuals and Expertise

Eyerman and Jamison (1991, 61) consider their own epistemology as
social, after Fuller (2002), and encourage interrogation of the social and
political forces surrounding the production of scientific knowledge, but
they do not actually follow Fuller as far as his formulation of facticity
being a matter of the credibility of the knower. However, as noted in
Part 1, developing epistemic authority was crucial to FINRRAGE on
an organisational level, as it made possible everything else—funding,
206 5 Demonstration in Publication

publication, speaking engagements, appearances in the media and

before lawmakers, invitations to sit on government committees, as well
as credibility when trying to communicate their knowledge.
Collins and Evans (2007) suggest a framework within which different
forms of knowledge may be distinguished on a continuum, beginning
with that which can be encapsulated on a beer mat, to knowledge derived
from popular literature, to studying primary sources, to sustained
interaction with practitioners, to contributing to the science itself. These
same categories can be applied to the different forms of knowledge move-
ment intellectuals develop. Arksey (1994) further suggests an extension
of Collins’ core-set, or those with contributory knowledge, to those pos-
sessing a form of knowledge—embodied—which may have its own eso-
teric language and culture which is as inaccessible to outsiders as science
is to the lay actor. In her example, because they hold embodied specialist
expertise, medical patients are frequently more able than general practi-
tioners to talk to medical specialists in their own language. While this
resembles Collins’ and Evans’ (2004) formulation of the ‘interactional
expert’—someone who, through immersion with the core-set of scien-
tists, has acquired tacit and primary source knowledge to the extent that
they can speak to the group in their own language (but do not actually
acquire the technical skills to carry out the science)—it is not quite simi-
lar. It is likely more useful in this context to think of Jasanoff’s (1995 in
2003, 159) formulation of expertise as ‘contingently produced within the
very context of disputation’, meaning each category is relational to the
others, and to the knowledge interests of the specific movement. Thus,
‘qualified’ in this sense would refer only to formal qualifications in the
movement’s topics, not simply qualifications held.
Analysis of the written output, the archival documents and the inter-
views suggest that the women in FINRRAGE had several distinct forms
of expertise. The first set would be those very few who had been trained
to do the science involved, who were likely to be aware of new develop-
ments and internal controversies in the field, and able to evaluate its
research. In FINRRAGE, these would be women who had been trained
in molecular biology, genetics or reproductive science. For example,
Paula Bradish of the ICG was a molecular biologist, and gave poolside
tutorials on genetics every night in Mallorca, as well as more formal
 Movement Intellectuals and Expertise 207

genetics lectures at the international meetings. She brought esoteric

knowledge of genetic engineering and its potential applications into the
group’s collective knowledge base.
Others had a more generalised scientific expertise, having worked as
natural scientists or as medics, but not in the topic areas. Because they
were able to draw on their background to help decode both the science
and the culture of science for the other women, they were extremely
important to the knowledge project of the network. Some, like Ana Reis,
had both medical training and experience in policy circles as a member of
the Brazilian Ministry of Health, which—combined with her FINRRAGE
work—helped her to stop the diffusion of Norplant in Brazil. Satoko
Nagaoki of Soshiren was a developmental biologist studying sea urchins,
which made her quickly in demand to explain reproductive technologies
to other Japanese feminists after the first child was born there in 1983.
Chris Ewing, who ran the Australian network in the early 1990s, worked
as an immunologist during her time in FINRRAGE, while Renate Klein,
Helga Satzinger and a number of others had been trained as biologists
and had worked in laboratories before growing disenchanted with their
work. Patricia Spallone, a biochemist, is remembered for explaining the
significance of culturing embryos as tissue. She also created a glossary of
terms for the women to use, which was also printed, along with extensive
bibliographies, in Beyond Conception (Spallone 1989, 196–203). Cynthia
de Wit, an environmental scientist, translated a range of scientific papers
into ordinary language for circulation in the infopacks as FINRRAGE
News and later as a column in IRAGE, on reproductive matters from
infant health to technological conception and on genetic engineering of
animals, crops and human tissue. As they had the tacit knowledge which
comes from immersion in scientific culture (Collins and Evans 2007),
but also the linguistic skill to translate complex esoteric knowledge into
usable information, both groups provided an invaluable resource for
women who would use that knowledge to inform their own work, but
did not necessarily want to develop the expertise to read the scientific and
medical literature directly.
The other scientific category where formal qualifications would directly
inform the knowledge project of the network were the social scientists;
‘qualified’ in this sense refers to formal training which leads to the
208 5 Demonstration in Publication

production of knowledge through empirical research (as opposed to law,

the arts or the humanities). As noted above, because of the timing of
FINRRAGE, many of the women in this group were doing groundbreak-
ing work, making important contributions to formal social scientific
knowledge. Some, such as Christine Crowe and Lene Koch, had carried
out the first studies of women going through IVF. Jyotsna  Agnihotra
Gupta and Annette Burfoot had also carried out interviews with fertility
specialists, while Sarah Franklin, whose PhD had been an ethnographic
study of an IVF clinic, had immersive experience from spending time
embedded within the culture of the fertility industry and like Rowland
could speak its language to its practitioners without intermediary transla-
tion—something very close to what Collins and Evans refer to as interac-
tional expertise.
Other women in the network approached their work through their
qualified expertise in the humanities or law, or had in other ways devel-
oped very high levels of primary source knowledge; they were also inter-
preters of the science, producing new analyses, understandings and ideas,
but did not produce new empirical evidence themselves. This category
would include philosophers, bioethicists and medical ethicists such as
Janice Raymond, legal scholars like Jocelynne Scutt and journalists like
Gena Corea. Sarah Ferber, professionally a medievalist, used her training
as a historian to develop her knowledge through a close reading of scien-
tific papers, and also became known for her work as a bioethicist.
Following Arksey, there is also a category of women who had specialist
knowledge derived from direct, embodied experience, as IVF patients,
infertile women, or users of long-acting contraceptives. Azumi Tsuge, for
example, has undergone fertility treatment and runs an infertility support
group (although she was also a social scientist who did empirical research
with women undergoing IVF and prenatal testing, showing that some
women could occupy more than one category.) There are also forms of
experiential knowledge which would fit into this category when derived
from close, repeated encounters with multiple embodied knowers, for
example, women such as Marilyn Crawshaw who have been involved in
counselling or social work in the field.
More generally, there was also a very large group of women who, like
Maria Mies, wrote papers or gave lectures on the movement’s topics,
 Movement Intellectuals and Expertise 209

but without relying upon primary source data or embodied experience.

In FINRRAGE, this category might also include activists who worked
in the broad field of women’s health, such as Lariane Fonseca and
Leonor Taboada, or in development organisations like Farida Akhter.
Others, such as Vibhuti Patel, might rely on analysis of statistical data,
but did not collect it themselves.
The final group still demonstrates more than what would normally
be thought of as lay expertise or in Collins’ and Evans’ periodic table,
popular understanding; although women in this group were not neces-
sarily less formally qualified than any the others, it tended to be in
unrelated fields. Materials utilised and produced by this group were
most likely to be written for a broad general audience, and their profes-
sional expertise was often utilised in organisational ways. Margret
Krannich and Annette Görlich, for example, who organised the
Feminist Hearing in Brussels, had both studied political science and
were employed as scientific assistants by a foundation linked to the
European Green Party, and Penny Bainbridge worked at a women’s
health centre. All three felt that reading literature such as The Mother
Machine had provided them with an acceptable level of knowledge for
engaging with their groups. However, Penny Bainbridge also became
the first lay person to agree to vice-chair an NHS ethics committee,
because her time in FINRRAGE had helped her feel confident enough
to consider her expertise to have equal status, despite the committee
mainly being made up of medics and academics.26
Overall, although some of the women were more visible than others,
both within and outside the network, none of these categories by them-
selves signified an elite status of ‘movement intellectual’ who does not do
the boring day-to-day work. Hanmer, who largely ceased publishing on
the topic as the network grew, has said that she felt the others were doing
what was needed intellectually and she was very happy to take on a more
organisational role.27 Women from all of these groups gave oral testimony
before political bodies or consultation committees, sat on ethics and med-
ical committees, and were invited to give speeches and presentations to
civic groups, or media interviews, or had their expertise otherwise vali-
dated by external invitations to speak. The category of ‘beer-mat’ knowl-
edge as articulated by Collins and Evans did not really exist within the
210 5 Demonstration in Publication

network and may possibly not be relevant to sustained activism at all—

while it might take very little factual knowledge to mobilise someone to
protest, it seems unlikely that anyone would continue to engage in activ-
ism around an issue without at least a popular understanding of the
problem articulated by the movement in order to make a reasoned judg-
ment as to whether its analysis appears justified and its underlying con-
sciousness resonates with already existing ways of seeing the world.
Women either entered FINRRAGE precisely because they knew little and
wanted to learn more, or were already self-educating when FINRRAGE
crossed their path. Imagined over time, patterns of movement into (or out
of ) different categories may also be seen, which helps to trace the ways in
which knowledge diffused out of the network. Erika Feyerabend, for
example, returned to university to take an MA in science studies to under-
pin a shift from social work into science journalism as a direct result of the
knowledge interests she developed in FINRRAGE. Lene Koch, who came
to Lund almost on a whim, went back and obtained a doctoral research
grant to study the first group of women to have state-supported IVF and
subsequently became a standing member of the Danish Council of Ethics.
Patricia Spallone actually did so much research during her time in
FINRRAGE that she wrote a book, Beyond Conception, which—encour-
aged by the other women—she used as the basis for a PhD rather than the
other way around. However, while many of the women followed their
activist interest into new degrees or areas of research, either during their
time in the network or after, this did not necessarily mean they left the
cognitive space of FINRRAGE—Feyerabend, for example, remained part
of the ICG until it disbanded and is still running Gen-Archiv. What my
interviews also made clear was that whatever the qualifications they held
or the professions they followed, all of the women self-identified as activ-
ists in context of FINRRAGE.
Overall, the broad range of topics and positions in the writing, and the
range of professional and intellectual expertise brought into the network
and developed within it show that, taken as a whole, there was a great
deal of diversity within FINRRAGE’s cognitive space, although the bor-
der could at times be defended quite vigorously to distinguish it from the
‘rights as self-determination’ discourses which became dominant in the
women’s health field in the 1990s. However, it must be also noted that
 Notes 211

studying and publishing have always been important tactics for feminism
as a whole. What is unusual in FINRRAGE is the intensity and exclusiv-
ity with which these were used as a strategy of resistance, the particular
range of topics explored, and the specific connections which were drawn
between technologies to make more (and more perfect) children in richer
countries and technologies to guarantee fewer children in poorer parts of
the world. However, it also brings up the possibility that one of the rea-
sons FINRRAGE did not catch on widely with grassroots feminists may
indeed have been because of the perceived technical complexity of the
subject matter and the academic quality of the network’s strategy, not
necessarily because of its resistant stance.

Notes
1. Annette Burfoot, Britain/Canada, interviewed via Skype on 19 May
2010.
2. Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis, Brazil, interviewed in Sao Paolo, 7 March
2015.
3. Lublin (1998, 63), writing her history of the network, refers to both of
these as FINRRAGE’s ‘virtual “bibles”’, which is not incorrect.
4. As of May 2017, The Mother Machine is listed on Google Scholar as hav-
ing been cited 1004 times.
5. Gena Corea, USA, interviewed via Skype on 14 April 2017. Lebensborn
refers to the Nazi programme which sought to increase the birth rate of
children who were state-validated as ‘racially valuable’. Often born of
unmarried women impregnated by SS soldiers, an unknown number of
children were also taken from other countries and sent to Germany for
adoption.
6. In addition to UBINIG’s continued work in the population policy arena
and the loose network of South Asian groups it maintains, there have been
international campaigns against contraceptives such as Depo-Provera,
Norplant and Net-en, and against RU-486 in which FINRRAGE played
a part. More recently, FINRRAGE Australia has also helped to organise
campaigns against egg donation for science (See Hands Off Our Ovaries
at handsoffourovaries.com), and commercial surrogacy (www.stopsurro-
gacynow.com). However, I am not certain that the participants in these
212 5 Demonstration in Publication

various campaigns, although often the same people and organisations,

consider themselves to be a distinct anti-NRT movement.
7. While Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta considered the prediction ‘prophetic’
(interview, 13 September 2011), some aspects of Corea’s predictions
have not materialised—for example, that poorer women would be steril-
ised before being used as breeders. Pande’s (2016) ethnographic work
with ‘womb-mothers’ in India is an excellent examination of the real
surrogacy industry, highlighting the complexities and paradoxes of a
reproductive labour market in a country which otherwise goes to exten-
sive lengths to keep women from breeding.
8. Ultimately, the New Jersey Supreme Court overruled a lower court deci-
sion that the contract was enforceable, on the grounds that New Jersey
law prohibited the sale of a child (Merrick 1990). Whitehead’s parental
rights were eventually restored, but as her daughter had been living with
the father for several years by that time, reversing custody was deemed
not to be in the best interests of the child.
9. The group included Elizabeth Kane, Mary Beth Whitehead, Alejandra
Munoz, Patricia Foster and Nancy Barrass. Apart from Munoz, a
Mexican woman who had been brought to the United States by family
members for the express purpose of carrying their child, all had been
contracted by wealthier strangers. All lost their custody battles to the
commissioning fathers, although Whitehead and Munoz were granted
visitation rights. Foster, Munoz and Whitehead also appeared as speakers
at the launch of the National Coalition Against Surrogacy in 1987,
which was covered by the cable news channel C-SPAN (and is still avail-
able at https://www.c-span.org/video/?57586-1/surrogate-mothers).
10. Satoko Nagaoki, Soshiren/Japan, interviewed in Tokyo on 26 August,
2010 and Azumi Tsuge, Finrrage-no-kai/Japan, interviewed on 28
August 2010. Nagaoki also notes that their prior translation of Test Tube
Women did not meet with anything near the same response.
11. Patricia Spallone, Britain, interviewed by phone on 8 September 2011.
12. Edwards (1980 in Spallone, 95) writes that in animal surrogacy, the rou-
tine procedure was to ‘discard’ the egg donor (i.e. kill the animal) once it
had served its function. Spallone notes that all the other elements of the
procedure remained the same in embryo transfer between women (one
could also argue that the donor is in effect still ‘discarded’ as there is no
follow-up after egg retrieval.)
13. Based on her initial research for Women as Wombs, Raymond went on to
found the Coalition Against Trafficking of Women (CATW), which has
 Notes 213

helped to uncover trafficking of babies of prostitutes, as well as women

for the sex trade. Of doing this research she has said that ‘it is like work-
ing against nothing else that I have experienced. The industry has friends
in high places…’ (Raymond 2013, x).
14. In her overview of FINRRAGE’s work, Klein (2008) notes that Edwards
was now warning that the hormone drugs used for superovulation were
damaging more than half the eggs, and studies showed higher rates of
medical problems in IVF children, yet with rare exceptions there were
still no long-term follow-ups on the women who had taken the drugs.
15. Sarah Franklin, Britain, interviewed in London on 15 December 2011.
16. Ibid.
17. David Edge, who around this time was setting up the first British science
studies unit at Edinburgh, described it as a desk with no books and no
curriculum (Edge 1995).
18. Although not a member of FINRRAGE herself, McNeil also draws
upon a number of works by FINRRAGE women in her introductory
chapter, noting the shortcomings of an analysis based on rights, which
too often obscured the kinds of social relations which governed pursuit
of such rights.
19. Annette Burfoot, Britain/Canada, interviewed via Skype on 19 May
2010.
20. Ibid.
21. Aurelia Weikert, Austria, interviewed via Skype on 11 August 2010.
The book was Schöne neue Männerwelt: Beiträge zu Gen-und
Fortpflanzungstechnologien [Brave new world of men: Contributions to
gene and reproduction technologies] (Weikert et al. 1987).
22. Lene Koch, Denmark, interviewed by phone on 11 September 2011.
Koch’s paper on the difficulties feminists and women using IVF were
having hearing each other’s arguments is one of the most cited papers
from IRAGE (Koch 1990).
23. Renate Klein, letter to Phyllis Hall at Pergamon, 11 December 1986:
FAN/JH/FIN 07/07.
24. Janice Raymond, letter to Corea, Hanmer, Klein and Rowland, 8
February 1987: FAN/JH/FIN 02/04/01.
25. Respectively, Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interview 1 (17 January 2008) and
Annette Burfoot, Canada, interview on 19 May 2010.
26. Penny Bainbridge, Britain, interviewed in Leeds on 19 July 2011.
27. Jalna Hanmer, Britain, interviewed in Leeds 5 May 2010 (interview 3).
214 5 Demonstration in Publication

References
Akhter, F. (1988). The State of Contraceptive Technology in Bangladesh. (Issues
in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 1(2), 153–158.
Akhter, F. (1995). Resisting Norplant: Women’s Struggle in Bangladesh Against
Coercion and Violence. Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana.
Akhter, F. (2005). Depopulating Bangladesh: Essays on the Politics of Fertility (3rd
ed.). Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana.
Arditti, R., Klein, R., & Minden, S. (Eds.). (1984). Test-Tube Women: What
Future for Motherhood? London: Pandora Press.
Arksey, H. (1994). Expert and Lay Participation in the Construction of Medical
Knowledge. Sociology of Health & Illness, 16(4), 448–468.
Birke, L. (1986). Women, Feminism and Biology: The Feminist Challenge.
Brighton: Harvester.
Boston Women’s Health Collective. (1973). Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Bradish, P. (1987). From Genetic Counseling and Genetic Analysis, to Genetic
Ideal and Genetic Fate. In P.  Spallone & D.  L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to
Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 94–101). Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
Brown, M., Fielden, K., & Scutt, J. A. (1990). New Frontiers or Old Recycled?
New Reproductive Technologies as Primary Industry. In J. A. Scutt (Ed.), The
Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the Commercialisation of
Motherhood (pp. 77–107). London: Merlin Press.
Bullard, L. (1987). Killing Us Softly: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Genetic
Engineering. In P.  Spallone & D.  L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The
Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 110–119). Oxford: Pergamon
Press.
Burfoot, A. (1988). A Review of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the European
Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 1(1),
107–112.
Burfoot, A. (1989). The Politics of Innovation: The Discovery, Dissemination and
Regulation of In Vitro Fertilization in Britain. PhD, Science Policy Research
Unit, University of Sussex.
Burfoot, A. (1990). The Normalisation of a New Reproductive Technology. In
M. McNeil, I. Varcoe, & S. Yearley (Eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies
(pp. 58–73). Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
 References 215

Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Cohen, S., & Taub, N. (Eds.). (1989). Reproductive Laws for the 1990s. Clifton:
Humana Press.
Collins, H. M., & Evans, R. (2007). Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Corea, G. (1985a). The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial
Insemination to Artificial Wombs. New York: Harper & Row.
Corea, G. (1985b). The Reproductive Brothel. In G. Corea, R. Klein, J. Hanmer,
H.  B. Holmes, B.  Hoskins, M.  Kishwar, J.  Raymond, R.  Rowland, &
R. Steinbacher (Eds.), Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies
Affect Women (pp. 38–51). London: Hutchinson.
Corea, G. (1989). Industrial Experimentation on “Surrogate” Mothers. In
H.  Patricia Hynes (Ed.), Reconstructing Babylon: Women and Technology
(pp. 155–159). London: Earthscan.
Corea, G., Klein, R., Hanmer, J., Holmes, H.  B., Hoskins, B., Kishwar, M.,
Raymond, J., Rowland, R., & Steinbacher, R. (Eds.). (1985). Man-Made
Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women. London: Hutchinson.
Corral, T. (1992). Eco 92 Through Women’s Eyes. Terra Femina, 1, 92–97.
Crowe, C. (1985). ‘Women Want It’: In-Vitro Fertilization and Women's
Motivations for Participation. Women’s Studies International Forum, 8(6),
547–552.
Crowe, C. (1990). Whose Mind over Whose Matter? Women, In Vitro
Fertilisation and the Development of Scientific Knowledge. In M. McNeil,
I. Varcoe, & S. Yearley (Eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies (pp. 27–57).
Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
Davis, K. (2007). The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels
Across Borders. Durham: Duke University Press.
Degener, T. (1990). Female Self-Determination Between Feminist Claims and
“Voluntary” Eugenics, Between “Rights” and Ethics. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(2),
87–100.
Donchin, A. (1996). Feminist Critiques of New Fertility Technologies:
Implications for Social Policy. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 21(5),
475–498.
Edge, D. (1995). Reinventing the Wheel. In S. Jasanoff, G. Markle, J. Petersen,
& T. Pinch (Eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (pp. 3–23).
Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Edwards, R., & Steptoe, P. (1980). A Matter of Life: The Sensational Story of the
World’s First Test-Tube Baby. London: Sphere Books Ltd.
216 5 Demonstration in Publication

Eyerman, R., & Jamison, A. (1991). Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach.

Cambridge: Polity Press.
Feyerabend, E. (1989). Euthanasia in the Age of Genetic Engineering. (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 2(3), 247–249.
Fine, M., & Asch, A. (1985). Review: Who Owns the Womb? The Women’s
Review of Books, 2(8), 8–10.
Franklin, S. (1990). Deconstructing ‘Desperateness’: The Social Construction of
Infertility in Popular Representations of New Reproductive Technologies. In
M. McNeil, I. Varcoe, & S. Yearley (Eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies
(pp. 200–229). Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
Franklin, S. (1997). Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception.
London: Routledge.
Franklin, S., & McNeil, M. (1988). Reproductive Futures: Recent Literature
and Current Feminist Debates on Reproductive Technologies. Feminist
Studies, 14(3), 545–560.
Frickel, S., & Gross, N. (2005). A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual
Movements. American Sociological Review, 70(2), 204.
Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Fuller, S. (2002). Social Epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hemmings, C. (2005). Telling Feminist Stories. Feminist Theory, 6(2), 115–139.
Holmes, H.  B. (1989). Hepatitis: Yet Another Risk of In Vitro Fertilization.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 2(1), 29–37.
Humm, P. (1989). Waiting for a Child. In R.  Klein (Ed.), Infertility: Women
Speak Out About Their Experience of Reproductive Medicine (pp.  51–58).
London: Pandora Press.
Hynes, H. P. (1987). A Paradigm for Regulation of the Biomedical Industry:
Environmental Protection in the United States. In P.  Spallone & D.  L.
Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress
(pp. 190–205). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Hynes, H.  P. (Ed.). (1989). Reconstructing Babylon: Women and Technology.
London: Earthscan.
Kirejczyk, M. (1990). A Question of Meaning? Controversies About the New
Reproductive Technologies in the Netherlands. (Issues in) Reproductive and
Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(1), 23–33.
Klein, R. (Ed.). (1989a). Infertility: Women Speak Out About Their Experience of
Reproductive Medicine. London: Pandora Press.
 References 217

Klein, R. (1989b). The Exploitation of a Desire: Women’s Experiences with in Vitro

Fertilisation. Geelong: Women’s Studies Summer Institute, Deakin University.
Klein, R. (2008). From Test-Tube Women to Bodies Without Women. Women’s
Studies International Forum, 31(3), 157–175.
Klein, R., & Rowland, R. (1988). Women as Test-Sites for Fertility Drugs:
Clomiphene Citrate and Hormonal Cocktails. (Issues in) Reproductive and
Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 1(3),
251–274.
Koch, L. (1990). IVF – An Irrational Choice? (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic
Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(3), 235–242.
Koval, R. (1990). The Commercialisation of Reproductive Technology. In J. A.
Scutt (Ed.), The Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the
Commercialisation of Motherhood (pp. 108–134). London: Merlin Press.
Kuhn, T.  S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions  (3rd ed.). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kurzman, C. (2008). Meaning Making in Social Movements. Anthropological
Quarterly, 81(1), 17–58.
Lee, R., & Morgan, D. (2001). Human Fertilization and Embryology: Regulating
the Reproductive Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lippman, A. (1992). Mother Matters: A Fresh Look at Prenatal Genetic Testing.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 5(2), 141–154.
Loveland, K. (2017). Feminism Against Neoliberalism: Theorising Biopolitics
in Germany, 1978–1993. Gender & History, 29(1), 67–86.
Lublin, N. (1998). Pandora’s Box : Feminism Confronts Reproductive Technology.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Malpede, K. (1991). Notes on the Writing and Reception of the Stage Play
‘Better People’. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 4(2), 93–107.
McDonald, L. (2007). Disarticulating Bellies: A Reproductive Glance. Cultural
Review, 13(1), 187–207.
McNeil, M., Varcoe, I., & Yearley, S. (Eds.). (1990). The New Reproductive
Technologies. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
Melucci, A. (1985). The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements.
Social Research, 789–816.
Merrick, J. (1990). The Case of Baby M. In D. Bartels, R. Priester, D. Vawter,
& A.  Caplan (Eds.), Beyond Baby M: Ethical Issues in New Reproductive
Technologies (pp. 183–200). Clifton: Humana Press.
218 5 Demonstration in Publication

Mies, M. (1985). ‘Why Do We Need All This?’ A Call against Genetic

Engineering and Reproductive Technology. Women’s Studies International
Forum, 8(6), 553–560.
Minden, S. (1985). Patriarchal Designs: The Genetic Engineering of Human
Embryos. Women’s Studies International Forum, 8(6), 561–565.
Mulkay, M. J. (1997). The Embryo Research Debate: Science and the Politics of
Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Munro, K. (1991). The Aftermath of the Cervical Cancer Inquiry in New
Zealand: An Antipodal Aberration or Universal Struggle? (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 4(1), 31–39.
Napier, L. (1989). The Barren Desert Flourishes in Many Ways: From
Infertility to in-Fertility. In R.  Klein (Ed.), Infertility: Women Speak Out
About Their Experience of Reproductive Medicine (pp.  188–197). London:
Pandora Press.
O’Brien, M. (1990). Elly. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering:
Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(2), 137–142.
Pande, A. (2016). Global Reproductive Inequalities, Neo-Eugenics and
Commercial Surrogacy in India. Current Sociology, 64(2), 244–258.
Parsons, C. D. F. (1990). Drugs, Science and Ethics: Lessons from the Depo-
Provera Story. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 3(2), 101–110.
Petchesky, R. P. (2004). Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics
of Reproduction. In B. Bennett (Ed.), Abortion (pp. 263–292). Abingdon:
Routledge.
Raymond, J.  (1989). In the Matter of Baby M: Judged and Rejudged. In
H.  Patricia Hynes (Ed.), Reconstructing Babylon: Women and Technology
(pp. 103–113). London: Earthscan.
Raymond, J.  G. (1993). Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the
Battle over Women’s Freedom. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Raymond, J.  (2013). Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths About
Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade. Washington, DC: Potomac Books.
Roach, S. (1989). New Reproductive Technologies and Legal Reform. (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 2(1), 11–27.
Rowland, R. (1985). A Child at Any Price?: An Overview of Issues in the Use of
the New Reproductive Technologies, and the Threat to Women. Women’s
Studies International Forum, 8(6), 539–546.
 References 219

Rowland, R. (1992). Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technologies.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rutnam, R. (1991). IVF in Australia: Towards a Feminist Technology
Assessment. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 4(2), 93–107.
Sandelowski, M. (1990). Fault Lines: Infertility and Imperiled Sisterhood.
Feminist Studies, 16(1), 33–51.
Sawer, M. (2007). Australia: The Fall of the Femocrat. In J.  Outshoorn &
J. Kantola (Eds.), Changing State Feminism (pp. 20–40). London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Schei, B. (1992). The Routine Use of Ultrasound in Antenatal Care: Is There a
Hidden Agenda? (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 5(1), 13–20.
Scutt, J. A. (Ed.). (1990). The Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the
Commercialisation of Motherhood. London: Merlin Press.
Solomon, A. (1988). Integrating Infertility Crisis Counselling into Feminist
Practice. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 1(1), 41–49.
Solomon, A. (1989). Infertility as Crisis: Coping, Surviving – And Thriving. In
R.  Klein (Ed.), Infertility: Women Speak Out About Their Experience of
Reproductive Medicine (pp. 169–187). London: Pandora Press.
Spallone, P. (1987). Reproductive Technology and the State: The Warnock
Report and Its Clones. In P.  Spallone & D.  L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to
Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 166–183). Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
Spallone, P. (1989). Beyond Conception: The New Politics of Reproduction. Granby:
Bergin & Garvey Publishers.
Spallone, P. (1992). Generation Games: Genetic Engineering and the Future for
Our Lives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Spallone, P., & Steinberg, D.  L. (Eds.). (1987). Made to Order: The Myth of
Reproductive and Genetic Progress. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Stanworth, M.  D. (1987). Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and
Medicine. Cambridge: Polity.
Steinberg, D.  L. (1990). The Depersonalisation of Women Through the
Administration of ‘In Vitro Fertilisation’. In M.  McNeil, I.  Varcoe, &
S.  Yearley (Eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies (pp.  74–122).
Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
Steinberg, D.  L. (1997). Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
220 5 Demonstration in Publication

Thompson, C. (2001). Fertile Ground: Feminists Theorise Infertility. In M. C.

Inhorn & F. van Balen (Eds.), Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on
Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies (pp.  52–78). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Tsuge, A., & Hong, H. (2011). Reconsidering Ethical Issues About “Voluntary
Egg Donors” in Hwang’s Case in Global Context. New Genetics and Society,
30(3), 241–252.
Uno, S. (1992). The Oral Contraceptive Pill in Japan. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(3),
253–256.
Waldschmidt, A. (1992a). “Éprouvette L'éprouvée” or “Test Tube Under Test,”
an International Conference to Critically Assess Reproductive Engineering,
Paris 28–29 June 1991. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering:
Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(1), 75–77.
Waldschmidt, A. (1992b). Against Selection of Human Life: People with
Disabilities Oppose Genetic Counselling. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic
Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(2), 155–167.
Warren, M.  A. (1988). IVF and Women’s Interests: An Analysis of Feminist
Concerns. Bioethics, 2(1), 37–57.
Weikert, A., Riegler, J., & Trallori, L. (1987). Schöne Neue Männerwelt: Beiträge
Zu Gen-Und Fortpflanzungstechnologien. Wein: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik.
Whelan, E. (2001). Politics by Other Means: Feminism and Mainstream Science
Studies. The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie,
26(4), 535–581.
Winkler, U. (1988). New U.S. Know-How in Frankfurt: A ‘Surrogate Mother’
Agency. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 1(2), 205–207.
 6
Knowledge as Resistance

I guess for me the FINRRAGE position would be the political stance

opposing genetic and reproductive technologies. And it would be
an activist movement to both raise awareness and analyse the
relationship between science and technology and women and the
feminist movement…I think it was more than just a resistance.
Lariane Fonseca, Australia

Theorists studying collective behaviour as this field was emerging in the

1960s were largely functionalists who considered collective action as a
threat to an otherwise well-ordered society. Focusing their studies on an
individual, psychological level, they suggested that movements appeared
when a significant number of people were experiencing psychological
strain due to some kind of rapid social change (Blumer 1969) which
produced a form of cognitive dissonance when reality conflicted with
expectation (Geshwender 1968, quoted in Gurney and Tierney 1982).
There was, however, a counter-argument that strain is always present, as
is the failure of expectation, and that this did not explain sustained
collective action. Smelser (1962, 8), shifting to a more societal focus,

© The Author(s) 2017 221

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_6
222 6 Knowledge as Resistance

defined movement emergence as a ‘value added’ process in which sys-

temic strain causes a generalised belief to circulate that X is to blame for
a social problem, and if Y is done, the problem will be solved. If some
form of illustrating event appears (or can be made to appear) while this
circulation is building, then that belief could be mobilised as the basis for
a collective response.
In Smelser’s model, however, belief was considered to be hysterical,
hostile or wish-fulfilling, and therefore could provide only a ‘clumsy or
primitive’ form of analysis (Smelser 1962 in Crossley 2002, 47).
According to Eyerman and Jamison (1991, 56), who drew on Smelser’s
value-added model, strain and dissonance must be present as a motivat-
ing factor, but not every strain significant enough to produce a societal
cognitive dissonance will produce a sustained social movement (as opposed
to a demonstration, riot or other singular action). For a movement to
emerge, they argued, there must be a pre-existing tension, but also indi-
viduals already placed to take up the issue when it becomes visible through
the illustrating event. These individuals then use the event to translate
theory into action, which opens a cognitive space for the movement’s
new ideas. Thus, knowledge creation is key to the ability of social move-
ments to ‘raise consciousness’ about an issue, in the hope of permanently
changing the way a society thinks, feels and acts.
However, as discussed in the introduction to this book, ‘knowledge’
has little ontological stability in social movement theory  (SMT). For
Kurzman (2008), it is about meaning. For Ingalsbee (1996), it is a pro-
cess of making invisible issues visible through symbolic demonstration.
Casas-Cortes, Osterweil and Powell (2008) have a broad definition
encompassing everything from negotiations between activists, scientists
and policy-makers to organisational experiments in non-hierarchical forms
of democracy, to exercises in self-reflexivity. What all of these approaches
have in common is that they tend to view ‘knowledge’ in social move-
ments as either informal data-gathering or as generated through interper-
sonal exchange, leaving knowledge-making through the generation of
methodologically collected empirical evidence outside the movement
space. Eyreman and Jamison touched upon this idea in their argument
that structure, tactics and strategy—the key concerns of the then-domi-
nant SMT  paradigm of resource mobilisation theory (RMT)—needed
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 223

to be united with questions about how movements produce social change.
In this concluding chapter, I will discuss what taking this approach has
revealed about knowledge as resistance—the cognitive praxis of
FINRRAGE.

Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited

Since all knowledge has a context, it is worth pausing for a moment to
examine the context in which the cognitive praxis paradigm itself
emerged. In the 1970s, RMT was a largely American field which, while
still structuralist in orientation, had reframed social movements as a nec-
essary component of democratic societies rather than an aberration to be
avoided (McCarthy and Zald 1977). Where the collective behaviourists
had considered individual motivations, RMT examined the way organ-
isations mobilised collective action. As its theorists tended to be former
student activists who were now members of the academy, RMT framed
activists as rational actors weighing the costs and benefits of participa-
tion, and sought a greater understanding of why people engaged in pro-
test when they could reap the benefits without the costs. Eyerman and
Jamison, both student activists in 1960s America, forged their academic
careers in Sweden, and were thus by their own admission more influ-
enced by critical Marxism than they might have been had they remained
within the American academy. This allowed them to incorporate ideas
about the social construction of knowledge which were shifting European
thinking in the 1980s, although at times without critically examining
their own values and assumptions. Following Habermas, they suggested
that social movement actors negotiate the translation of scientific theory
into the social realm by testing its precepts against empirical problems,
so that the success of a social movement lies in its ability to transform
esoteric science into a practical way of life (1991, 73). In their primary
example, they investigate the way that systems theory, or the scientific
elaboration of the world as an interconnected ecosystem, became opera-
tionalised as the underlying belief system—the ‘cosmology’ (ibid., 68)—
of the environmental movement because of its ability to demonstrate the
connections between human economic activity and environmental
224 6 Knowledge as Resistance

degradation. In their theory of social change, the spread of this belief

opens up funding for new scientific research, new economic opportuni-
ties for the manufacture and sale of more environmentally friendly tech-
nology and new political spaces—for example, the creation of Green
parties. Eventually, systems ecology becomes a normalised ‘conscious-
ness’ and the movement’s knowledge interests can be pursued through
these new institutional channels, eliminating the necessity for street-
level protest. As movements are by this definition transient—their pur-
pose is to move—depletion of the mass elements of the environmental
movement is in fact a marker of its success at instilling an ecological
consciousness in policy and research, as well as in the lifestyle choices of
the general population.
However, this initial iteration of the cognitive praxis paradigm may be
an artefact of its time. First, constructivist approaches to science were still
relatively new and highly contested ideas in the 1980s, and even today
social movement studies and science and technology studies do not have
a great deal of scholarly cross-population. American sociology of science
also developed along a different trajectory than the sociology of scientific
knowledge (SSK) did in Europe. Sociology of science descends largely
from the work of Robert Merton (1973), whose research set out to clarify
the institutionalised norms by which science was able to produce verifi-
able knowledge. These were communism (meaning here the free circula-
tion of findings as common property of the community), universalism
(what is true for one case is true for all), disinterestedness (freedom from
personal bias or gain) and organised scepticism (the basis of peer review).
Work within this tradition may consider the influence of society on fund-
ing and science policy, but the actual process of creating scientific
knowledge is still a ‘black box’ (Whitley 1972, quoted in Knorr-Cetina
1983, 154) into which outsiders are not allowed to peer. Merton’s pri-
mary interest was in establishing sociology itself as a credible science,
through incorporation of the same normative paradigm of disinterested,
unbiased observation that governed the natural sciences, in the hope of
conferring the same authority upon sociological knowledge (Shapin
1995). Challenges to the epistemology of science, therefore, were ‘threats
to the firmament of civilization’ (Gieryn 1999, 25) which (in an unin-
tended echo of the collective behaviourist approach) needed to be ruth-
lessly suppressed.
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 225

Therefore, it is not really surprising that ‘science’ itself remained a

black box in the cognitive praxis paradigm, despite its authors’ claim to
understand scientific knowledge as socially produced in the manner
Kuhn describes. ‘Science’ in their paradigm appears to correspond to
Popper’s episteme, or ‘justified true belief ’, which requires that an obser-
vation be neutral, reproducible and falsifiable. Value statements can
express belief, but because they are unprovable and unfalsifiable, they
cannot be considered to be true—only through repeated attempts to fal-
sify a fact can we make a claim for truth. All else is doxa, or belief in the
way Smelser formulated it: either based on morals and faith (requiring no
evidence) or opinion (requiring no method of testing evidence for truth).
Kuhn (1996, 111–12), however, argued that even scientific knowledge
was social, ‘determined jointly by the environment and the particular
normal-scientific tradition that the student has been trained to pursue’.
Facts were not Out There possessing an inherent truth, but were consti-
tuted by agreement amongst scientists as to which theory had the greatest
probability to be true, based on the available evidence at the time.
Scientific revolutions occurred when anomalies in an accepted theory
could no longer be ignored. Eventually, a new paradigm which claims to
solve these unaddressed problems would emerge and should this new
paradigm prove, through rigorous testing, to provide a better explana-
tion, a new scientific truth will have been born.
In suggesting that ‘truth’ was a matter of what one had been trained to
believe was true, Kuhn created his own paradigm shift, opening the
‘black box’ to show how science was, even in the laboratory, even under
the microscope, socially produced. This formed the basis of European
SSK, which claims that neither science nor scientists stand apart from
the context in which their knowledge is produced. Kuhn’s theory of
change can also be applied to paradigm shifts in the social sciences—
European new social movement theory, for example, is said to have
emerged from the inability of Marxist theory to account for the middle-
class constituency of the mass movements of the 1960s (Habermas
1981). Eyerman and Jamison (1991, 61) consider their own epistemol-
ogy as social, following Kuhn, arguing that the study of social move-
ments was key to interrogation of the social and political forces
surrounding the production of scientific knowledge. Thus, they saw the
226 6 Knowledge as Resistance

cognitive praxis paradigm as both a contribution to sociology of science

and as a direct argument against the ‘instrumental bias’ of RMT, ‘read[ing]
social movements as producers of knowledge, not as rational operators in
a world of competing movement industries’ (ibid., 55) through the
texts—the ideas, actions and organisational forms as well as the actual
documents—they leave behind.
In more recent years, Jamison has gone on to apply his paradigm to
climate change movements, but his reduction of these to either ‘green
business’ or ‘sceptic’ models suggests that he is not able to think beyond
a movement’s relationship to the market, so that the grassroots, low-
impact, direct action, anti-market organisations of the climate justice
movement are set aside as having not yet ‘articulate[d] a coherent sense of
climate identity or common purpose’ (Jamison 2010, 812). Instead, he
suggests that what the green and sceptic models embody is a battle
between Mertonian and constructivist cosmologies of science. However,
although Jamison characterises science as socially mediated through the
praxis of the movement, he still does not seem to go so far as to consider
scientific facts to be socially produced. In this sense, the epistemological
underpinning of the cognitive praxis paradigm itself seems much closer
to Goldman (1999), who argues that groups can be knowing agents, and
that knowledge, while socially constructed, must have some material,
universal component outside the experience of the knower in order to be
true.
Returning to FINRRAGE, the model of oppositional consciousness
proposed in the introduction is meant to ameliorate this tendency to
exclude organisations which adopt liberatory or alternative modes of
thinking from the movement space, and allows them to be approached as
epistemologies. Grasswick and Webb (2002) argue that feminist episte-
mologies, though they may differ in terms of their relationship to the
material world and in the ways of knowing they validate, are all still social
epistemologies aimed at producing verifiable knowledge. Reading the
‘text’ of FINRRAGE through the cognitive praxis paradigm shows that
even those who appeared to be the most distrustful of science as an insti-
tution were still aware of the need to present evidence rationally, that is to
say in a logical, preferably empirically validated argument. In this sense,
FINRRAGE’s cognitive praxis—its ‘position’ as a network within a
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 227

broader movement field—can also be read as its epistemologies, as ‘his-

torical justificatory strategies [and] culturally specific modes of construct-
ing and exploiting cultural meanings in support of new kinds of knowledge
claims’ (Harding 1986, 141) aimed at  carving out a particular kind of
oppositional consciousness within feminism’s cognitive space. Thus, in
addition to creating a collective internal identity and knowledge base, con-
sciousness-raising is an essential process for communicating the move-
ments’ belief system to outsiders, raising public awareness in order to
restructure the discourse around an issue, and produce what Oliver and
Johnston (2000) have called a ‘diffuse collectivity’ of convinced individuals
who will make shifts in thinking and behaviour, and may be mobilised for
specific actions even if they do not join the movement itself. While
FINRRAGE did not use consciousness-raising in precisely the same per-
sonalised manner as the WLM (apart from the Japanese group Finrrage-
no-kai, which is structured as a network of local self-help groups for infertile
women),1 this form of sourcing, sharing, and warranting knowledge by
comparison to lived experience in small group discussions, and raising
public consciousness around the issues through outward-facing demon-
stration (in publication) was still a key tactic. This raises the question of
how ‘consciousness’ itself is theorised by social movement scholars.
In Mansbridge’s (2001) model, there are three types of social movements,
with ‘oppositional’ consciousness describing only liberation movements.
Equality movements are seen as issue-specific, borrowing the symbols of the
larger liberation movement without necessarily creating an oppositional
consciousness. Social responsibility movements address problems such as
peace and the environment which are shared by all, regardless of social iden-
tity, although they may impact more heavily upon oppressed groups.2 These
categories may be persuasive on the surface, but there are a number of
problems with Mansbridge’s model, the first being that ‘oppressed group’ is
assumed to be a natural category, and as such, is a singular interpretation of
social identity which assumes a singular consciousness. This ignores the
possibility that oppressed groups may also demonstrate hegemonic forms of
oppression such as homophobia, classism or racism (see Gorelick 1998 on
some implications for feminism), or that a biological boundary will inevita-
bly become a site of contest, as has been the case for transgendered and
mixed-race people. Since it is actually through such boundary disputes that
228 6 Knowledge as Resistance

knowledge about the conditions in which the category came to exist is pro-
duced, the category itself is better theorised as constructed and negotiable,
rather than natural, bounded, fixed and inescapable (Nathanson 2005).
The second problem is that this theory of political consciousness does not
explain why, having achieved cognitive liberation from the idea that their
oppression is natural, some members of the category advocate revolution,
some separatism, and some a strategy of pursuing equality through existing
institutions. Looked at more closely, Mansbridge’s model really only
describes two forms of consciousness, an oppositional one based on biologi-
cal identity and another applicable to anything else. The difference she out-
lines between liberation and equality movements thus appears to be largely
strategic, not cognitive, as both rely upon self-identification as a member of
an oppressed group as a prerequisite to acting for change.
However, what is interesting about Mansbridge’s model is that it
appears to argue for an epistemological basis for activism which can be
investigated. I have suggested that the political consciousness which
Mansbridge is trying to describe would perhaps be better understood
as conscienceness, in the sense that it seems to incorporate an innate
sense of what constitutes righteous action with a heightened awareness
of how an issue is embedded in a complex web of social processes. Rule
(2004, 49) has noted that as late as the seventeenth century, ‘conscien-
ceness’ often stood for both awareness of self and moral action, while
Goodhart (2005, 133), noting that both are still called conscience in
French, defines conscienceness as ‘an awareness in which what we
should or should not do is coextant (and coterminous) with awareness
itself ’. Calver et al. (2005), expanding on its use in early nineteenth-
century forest management, have used the term to connect conscious
awareness of the social and natural value of the forest to a responsibil-
ity to safeguard its condition when used for development purposes. In
all of these definitions, conscienceness is the combination of raised
consciousness and a moral imperative towards particular kinds of
action, a general and transferable cognitive meta-frame through which
all the other elements of a movement’s knowledge are processed in
order to create a permanent change in the way an individual sees and
acts in the world. Considering different forms of consciousness through
the prism of how they relate to control may help clarify the category of
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 229

‘cosmological’ in cognitive praxis: broadly speaking, the liberatory

consciousness seeks to take control back from the dominant group, an
egalitarian consciousness seeks a more equal share of control, and an
alternative consciousness argues against any form of control at all.
Thus, rather than a singular political position of radical no, the cogni-
tive praxis of FINRRAGE reflects the complex interplay of these dif-
ferent forms of political conscienceness, which can be investigated as a
particular cognitive space within the broad range of oppositional femi-
nist thought. In this chapter, I will use the three dimensions of the
cognitive praxis paradigm—cosmological, organisational and techno-
logical—to more closely examine these claims.

Cosmological Dimensions

In Part 1, I have tried to show how the women brought their own knowl-
edge interests into the network. While concentrating on the originators
of the network in exploring the context of emergence, in one way or
another all of the women in my study had already been theorising about
and/or were directly engaged in resisting the many ways in which wom-
en’s lives and bodies were controlled by institutions shaped by men.
While learning about different aspects of NRT may have provoked their
resistance to the technologies themselves, no one I spoke to became a
feminist purely from learning about NRT. Their identity as feminists had
already been shaped by the context in which their original oppositional
consciousness had emerged, often described as a kind of moral awaken-
ing. Corea, for example, has said that:

I was a journalist when the women’s movement re-emerged. And so, I was
not a feminist at the beginning. But I took the charges that feminists were
making nationally and I investigated them as a reporter locally. So, it took
about 12 minutes for me to become a feminist, basically.3

Earlier, I have referred to this as radicalisation through knowledge,

which may be an abrupt inadvertent awakening as here, or as Klein
described the formation of her resistance to NRT, a process more gradu-
ally arrived at through deliberate knowledge-seeking. While the stories
230 6 Knowledge as Resistance

all differ, what they hold in common is that all of the women had been
through a process of cognitive liberation (McAdam 1996) in which they
had recognised themselves as part of a class of people experiencing
oppression because of the biological category to which they belonged,
not because of their individual qualities. This newly awakened opposi-
tional consciousness not only begins to seek new facts and new ideas but
also to re-examine all received knowledge. If done collectively en masse,
this process will facilitate transfer of control over what counts as justified
true belief away from the dominant group by appropriating the capacity
to warrant knowledge according to these new terms. Although the term
‘consciousness-raising’ was used within the WLM as ordinary parlance
for being made aware of the normally invisible implications of an issue,
it also describes a form of non-hierarchical practice in which knowledge
was developed through discussion of anecdotal as well as formal evi-
dence, requiring new mechanisms for warranting that knowledge through
mutual negotiation of the meaning of individual experience. In the
words of Kathie Sarachild (1978, 145), a founder of one of the first
WLM groups:

Everything we have to know, have to prove, we can get from the realities of
our own lives … in the end the group decided to raise its consciousness by
studying women’s lives by topics like childhood, jobs, motherhood, etc.
We’d do any outside reading we wanted to and thought was important. But
our starting point for discussion, as well as our test of the accuracy of what
any of the books said, would be the actual experience we had in these areas
… The kind of actions the groups should engage in, at this point, we
decided—acting upon an idea of Carol Hanisch, another woman in the
group—would be consciousness-raising actions … actions brought to the
public for the specific purpose of challenging old ideas and raising new
ones, the very same issues of feminism we were studying ourselves.4

In a similar manner, the origin story of Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS)

is told as the result of a workshop on ‘Control of our Bodies’ offered at a
women’s conference in 1969 (Pincus 2002), where the women found
they all harboured ‘frustration and anger toward the medical maze in
general, and toward those doctors who were condescending, paternalistic,
judgmental, and uninformative in particular’ (Norsigian et al. 1999, 1).
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 231

This became a consciousness-raising group, which eventually produced

a grassroots teaching manual, which became the iconic publication
which is generally credited with launching the women’s health move-
ment (Boston Women’s Health Collective 1973). According to Davis,
the OBOS origin story takes on a ‘heroic character’ so that the women
of the collective:

…emerge as resourceful heroines who surreptitiously entered medical

libraries to look for information and refused to be intimidated by medical
texts…The appeal of this story resides in the fact that they, as ordinary
women  – that is, women without medical training  – were able to see
through the discourse of one of the most powerful institutions in the
United States and unmask it as ‘unscientific.’ This was more than a simple
questioning of the authority of medical knowledge. It paved the way for
any woman to believe that she, too, could criticize dominant forms of
knowledge. (Davis 2007, 96–97, emphasis hers)

As Davis describes it, these kinds of organisational origin stories provide

a narrative starting point from which the collective identity of a social
movement can be constructed in a way which casts the founder group as
having a mandate for action, and a continued authority claim through par-
ticipation at the foundational event. Within the group who were instru-
mental in arguing for the name change from on NRT to resistance in
Sweden, all but Akhter also identify the practices underpinning their epis-
temology as ‘radical’ feminism, as do many (but not all) of the other women
to whom I spoke. However, one of the reasons I sought to avoid using this
term is that the concept clearly had different political meanings and mani-
festations for each beyond the quite general ‘change from the root’. Rowland,
coming from the femocratic context of Australia, where radical feminists
deliberately sought to advance their projects through becoming politicians
and civil servants, did consider the state a useful site of intervention and
frequently articulated an egalitarian demand to transfer a share of control
over IVF back to society through legislation. She was distinctly more
convinced that this would produce results than Klein, who preferred
working in the more liberatory spaces of autonomous women’s
organisations (paradoxically, it is Klein who has gone on submitting to
official governmental consultations as FINRRAGE, long after Rowland’s
232 6 Knowledge as Resistance

health forced her to withdraw from both academia and activism).5 Corea
and Raymond, coming from a context in which NRT was a free-market
business from the start, also saw legislation as the primary means of pro-
tecting women from increasing commodification in a demand-driven
market, possibly because within the US context regulation has generally
been seen as the best means of curbing corporate excess.6 Although their
political consciousness towards the medical establishment was liberatory,
focused on transferring control away from doctors and back to women,
they did accept opportunities to give testimony as expert witnesses to
state congresses and even foreign legislatures. Hanmer, Mies and Akhter,
however, were all strongly committed to acting outside political institu-
tions; both Hanmer and Mies had been active in the early shelter move-
ment, in which women had taken control of protecting other women
from violent male partners  in the absence of state support. Mies and
Akhter also displayed the most distinctly alternative consciousness with
regard to technological control of nature in general and, in addition to
their FINRRAGE activities, have both worked to preserve local knowl-
edge and traditional forms of agricultural and economic activity.7
To a large extent, then, it was the pre-existing political conscious-
nesses of these seven women (Akhter, Corea, Hanmer, Klein, Mies,
Raymond and Rowland) which reshaped FINRRAGE’s strategy from
monitoring to resistance, codifying the cognitive space which had been
tentatively opened by FINNRET into a blend of the alternative and a
more liberatory consciousness which was reflective of pre-existing fem-
inist efforts, such as OBOS, to take back control of women’s embodied
knowledge from the medical establishment. As previously discussed in
Chap. 5, books like Test Tube Women (Arditti et  al. 1984) and The
Mother Machine (Corea 1985) would have played a central role in both
shaping that space and creating an invitation to enter into it, to have
one’s consciousness raised. ‘Like-minded’ women, therefore, did not
necessarily mean only those who had taken a position of ‘radical no’,
but any woman whose personal political conscienceness fit into the
particular liberatory-alternative space which FINRRAGE occupied,
and who had an interest in engaging in the collective generation of
knowledge about these topics. In the various organisations and cam-
paigns in which most of the women had previously been (or were still)
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 233

active, ‘patriarchy’ was already the necessary other against which the
struggle was shaped, and ‘knowledge’ was that which had been tested for
truth against their own lives and the lives of other women, a liberatory
process of reinterpreting two of the basic precepts of Mertonian sci-
ence—the free circulation of findings as common property of the com-
munity and organised sceptical peer review—to their advance their own
knowledge interests. While the radical no to NRT was not necessarily a
political position shared by all, there is some evidence that a tactical posi-
tion formed from those two basic precepts was indeed shared by all, and
can also be thought of as part of the underlying cosmology of what is
called ‘the FINRRAGE position’.
Another important part of the cosmology, therefore, were the changing
fortunes of women’s studies. Women’s studies departments represent the
professionalisation of knowledge originally developed through the libera-
tory processes of consciousness-raising groups (Sheridan 1990), which was
clearly an extremely important context for the emergence of FINRRAGE.
In the absence of fertility doctors and scientists (unlikely to join a move-
ment opposing their own work), FINRRAGE would need women with
the institutional means to access the medical and scientific literature and
the expertise to decode it, who had had the time and space to develop an
oppositional consciousness, and were experienced in using scholarship
itself as a form of resistance. It is therefore likely no accident that of the
original group, four (Hanmer, Klein, Rowland and Raymond) were wom-
en’s studies academics committed to its preservation as an autonomous
field of inquiry, and the underlying consciousness they brought to
FINRRAGE was very much about taking control of the sourcing and war-
ranting of knowledge, and questioning the very precepts upon which dis-
ciplinary scholarship had been founded. However, many of the others
also identified as women’s studies scholars even when they were based in
traditional departments. Sarah Franklin had gone into anthropology
because it wasn’t possible to do a PhD in women’s studies when she began,
and Maria Mies had called her research ‘family sociology’, as there was no
other way to describe it in Germany at the time. A number of the women
trained in science had also left their fields to pursue their interests through
women’s studies programmes: Satoko Nagaoki gave up developmental
biology and became an assistant professor of women’s studies and STS;
234 6 Knowledge as Resistance

Christine Ewing, who ran the Australian network for several years, was an
immunologist who went on to do a women’s studies MA; as did Pat
Spallone, who had originally been a biochemist. Marilyn Crawshaw had
taken a break from her job as a social worker to enrol on a women’s stud-
ies course at Bradford, where she met Hanmer, Rowland and Klein, who
came to give a seminar on reproductive technology just after starting
FINRRAGE, while Lene Koch had been head of the women’s studies
unit at the University of Copenhagen when she saw a flyer advertising the
Sweden meeting and decided to go.
It would, in that sense, matter greatly that many of the academics at
the Sweden meeting had been part of the struggle to establish women’s
studies programmes in the United States, across Europe, in India and
Japan, and remained committed to the idea of a ‘safe space’ in which they
could develop their own women-centred ways of producing and validating
knowledge (Bowles and Klein 1983). The question of whether or not to
engage in institutional structures was therefore more complex than one of
mere efficacy, but also of organisational identity. It might be said, in this
formulation, that the original group were as determined to maintain
FINRRAGE as part of the autonomous women’s movement, as they were
determined to maintain the autonomous women’s movement through
maintaining a distinct ‘position’ for FINRRAGE.
Two further cosmological dimensions are important to acknowledge.
One was the context of development, which for the Southern women was
a lived experience as well as something they may have studied (Akhter
and Patel, for example, both have advanced degrees in development eco-
nomics). It is also a context in which women’s organisations did not
always identify as feminist and patriarchy was experienced on a very dif-
ferent level. Liberatory consciousness in this context had a much closer
association to the decolonisation struggles which had taken place within
living memory. Therefore, ‘liberation’ was still cognitively aligned with tak-
ing control back from an extrinsic, imposed power—now seen as being
exerted not by a single foreign coloniser but by the supranational institu-
tions of globalisation. Particularly for the South Asian women, and particu-
larly because of the context of femicide, the egalitarian demand for women
to be seen as equally valuable is in fact a much more radical position than in
the West. Individual liberation was also not valued in the same manner, as
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 235

the smallest social unit was often seen to be the family, within whose rela-
tions ‘autonomy’—as Gupta noted above—has a very different context.
The final dimension would be what I will broadly term constructivist
science studies. Differences in this aspect of FINRRAGE’s cosmology
over time are best approached, as in Chap. 5, through examining
FINRRAGE’s written output, particularly its academic publications.
While Eyerman and Jamison suggest that movements are how theory is
translated into social action, the epistemology of women’s studies as artic-
ulated by Maria Mies is the opposite—action then reflection, theory
derived from lived experience. In the earlier years of creating knowledge
more collectively, through anthologies, discussion groups and interna-
tional meetings, resistance to dominant discourses was developed by
drawing upon work from the feminist biologists who had used their own
experience to question the theoretical underpinnings of scientific knowl-
edge production. However, as can be seen by the publications of the
younger academics, these women were often also drawing their theory
from the new discipline of science and technology studies, from post-
modern feminism or from male post-structuralists such as Michel
Foucault, which took a different, more mutually constitutive approach to
relationships of power and control. In the illustration of FINRRAGE’s
cognitive space shown in Chap. 1, there was room for these kinds of
analyses, particularly within the space in which all possibilities overlap
and the axis of control can shift as different dynamics are made visible,
but they were not central to the network’s cognitive praxis. It is even pos-
sible that an argument could be made that as the alternative conscious-
ness came to dominate more of FINRRAGE’s cognitive space after
Comilla, the space for all possibilities had all but disappeared.

Organisational Form

For STS, whose dominant questions revolve around the ways in which
science and society are co-produced, social movements do occupy a space
within the literature on scientific controversies, but in a manner which
can be ontologically ill-defined. For example, the chapter on social move-
ments in the third Handbook of STS begins with a definitional statement
236 6 Knowledge as Resistance

that separates the object ‘social movements’ from other collective forma-
tions such as networks, single-issue campaigns, advocacy, interest groups,
or any other ‘elite-based reforms or campaigns’ (Hess et al. 2007, 474).
However, they then go on to discuss breast cancer advocacy as part of the
health social movements field, and a single Internet-based communica-
tions network as a movement in its own right. To borrow from Hess
himself, what their own paper illustrates is an ‘object conflict’ (Hess
2007), or an unresolved definitional struggle over what kinds of collec-
tive action the term ‘social movement’ actually describes. Perhaps this has
been a consequence of a generalised increase in professionalisation since
the field of social movement studies emerged, so that at the organisa-
tional level it is no longer so easy to separate what is or is not part of a
movement field. Single-issue campaigns are almost always embedded in a
larger movement (Mansbridge 2001), while—as the porous border in the
illustration in Chap. 1 indicates—advocacy, lobbying and non-profit or
charitable organisations sometimes represent professionalised entities
through which actors still see themselves as expressing an activist identity
(Andrews and Edwards 2004).
When movements are conceived as networks (Castells 2000), it is clear
that individuals may be active in both grassroots and formal organisa-
tions, in more than one movement, or—as increasingly became the case
in the women’s movement—have found ways to continue their activism
through their professional work (Clegg 1996). Additionally, not all move-
ment organisations use protest repertoires (Tarrow 1994), particularly in
the field of health-based social movements, which are frequently a col-
laborative effort between patient-activists and qualified experts (see, e.g.
Levin and Idler 1983; Rogers and Pilgrim 1991; Braun 2003). Echoes of
all of these formulations can be seen in FINRRAGE which, when taken
on an international level, included organisations such as UBINIG,
women whose feminism was expressed as academics, lawyers, health
workers, journalists and artists, women who lobbied state and federal
governments or appeared as expert witnesses, women who organised
international campaigns and demonstrations (particularly around
Norplant and anti-pregnancy vaccines) and women who were active in
multiple organisations and on multiple levels between formal and grass-
roots. While Eyerman and Jamison state that the cognitive praxis
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 237

paradigm is only meant to produce a macro-level analysis of a whole

movement over time, it also  works very well at the meso-level when
applied to a distributed network like FINRRAGE, which was comprised
of individuals, grassroots groups, other networks and some formal
organisations.
In this book, I have so far been particularly concerned with illuminat-
ing the ways in which activists generate evidence-based knowledge—
whether scientific/academic, embodied or experiential. However, the
norms of participation within which activist discussion happens is also
considered by some theorists to be a form of knowledge practice in and
of itself (Casas-Cortes et al. 2008; Maiguashca 2005). Considered as an
organisational form, ‘the FINRRAGE position’ was that feminist activ-
ism should take place in autonomous grassroots groups based around the
non-hierarchical structures developed in the women’s liberation move-
ment. The regional and international meetings provided the main oppor-
tunities through which women came to think of themselves as part of the
network (usually indicated by signing up for the mailing list), and strate-
gies for expansion concentrated on identifying ‘like-minded’ women—
those whose oppositional consciousness and belief in technology as
shaped by society  would fit comfortably into the existing cognitive
space—rather than trying to convince large numbers of women to join.
Members, referred to as ‘affiliates’ by some, were usually individual
women representing themselves or local organisations; only a few groups
(or ‘chapters’) actually called themselves FINRRAGE. There was no limit
on the time one could be a national contact, and in many countries the
national contact remained the same person who had taken on the role at
Lund throughout the life of the network. However, the title of national
or international contact was not meant to confer any particular power, it
was simply the person or group who was responsible for liaising with
local women and collecting information to be sent for distribution by the
international coordinator. The international coordinator’s main responsi-
bility was to gather the documents sent by the various national contacts
and at large affiliates into ‘infopacks’ of approximately 150–200 pages
which were distributed back to network members every 3–4 months; in
lieu of dues, women were asked to pay for receiving the packets. However,
because they were the communications lifeline of the organisation,
238 6 Knowledge as Resistance

containing organisational letters, newsletters, reports of local conferences

and campaigns, as well as research papers and news clippings, they were
generally sent to whomever signed up for the mailing list, whether or not
they could pay.
This again points to the academy as an essential part of the cognitive
praxis of FINRRAGE, not only for its intellectual output, but for its
organisational sustenance. While the women themselves were not all aca-
demics, access by some to academic publishers, to phones, faxes, photo-
copiers, paper and postage, to grants which could be used for travel,
research or to fund conferences—all of these helped to build the organ-
isational infrastructure of the network for everyone. FINRRAGE, in the
words of the first Australian network coordinator, Lariane Fonseca, essentially
‘ran on good will and university photocopiers’.8 While institutionalisa-
tion was largely rejected through its choice not to seek NGO status, its
access to the academy and the network’s focus on knowledge generation
suggests that it was always institutionalised in some sense, and that the
changing fortunes of women’s studies may have had an effect on the abil-
ity of the European part of the network (in which I include Australia)
to sustain and renew itself over time. 
As noted in Chap. 1, without formal membership lists it is difficult to
estimate the exact number of women in the network at any given time,
but as a rough estimate, the network had national contacts in 26 coun-
tries after Sweden and 37 after Comilla,9 and women from at least 50
countries were involved in the meetings in Bangladesh and Brazil in the
1990s. Multi-city networks existed at times in Australia, England, Spain,
Germany, and India, whereas in Austria, Switzerland and Japan there
might be women from several different activist groups concentrated in a
single city who worked together under the name of FINRRAGE.  In
addition, the structureless format could hide the fact that some
FINRRAGE chapters were just one woman, some were small groups like
Stichting Rhea in the Netherlands, whereas others were large pre-existing
organisations, such as UBINIG, or networks such as the Non-Aligned
Women’s Movement of Greece, through which FINRRAGE infopacks
might be re-distributed to a wide and mostly unknown audience. The
national contact for Peru, Carmen Meza Ingar, for example, reported on
a 1990 survey taken by the ICG that 115 individuals and 32 women’s
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 239

groups in her country had contact with FINRRAGE through her

Association for Peruvian Women in Legal Careers, and that she was in
communication with other national contacts in Chile, Ecuador, Costa
Rica, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Dominica, Argentina and Paraguay; in other
words, a Spanish-language regional network which appears to have iden-
tified as FINRRAGE, but about which the archival documents yield very
little information.10 Other communications were localised, based upon
the access women had to the media and to publishing venues, and their
capacity and interest in organising national and local meetings. The praxis
of these local FINRRAGE groups was generally oriented towards study
and discussion mixed with sociality, which had much to do with the
development of enduring friendship networks amongst the women
involved. Sarah Franklin, a member of the British group, described it as:

…a model of feminist education. Each one was like a teach-in, everybody

would bring stuff, everyone would bring their perspectives, everyone had
their own expertise that had been honed in both their professional and
their political life which for all of us would overlap a fair amount anyway.
I wouldn’t say there were any particular leaders in those discussions at all, I
would say that they were very strikingly egalitarian…11

To a large extent, this form of knowledge generation may be consid-

ered a legacy from the early WLM, reflecting the consciousness-raising
process of informal mutual education, albeit amongst a group in which
many of the women also had some form of contributory knowledge and
were formally engaged, if not with the science itself, then with the study
of its social, legal or ethical aspects. Franklin—who left the organisation
after Comilla—also differentiates the style of the local group from meet-
ings of the international network, which in her view could be ‘quite hier-
archical’.12 It is possible that within the larger meetings, where there
would always be a host of new faces, there was more of a feeling that the
identity of the network as ‘resistance’ needed to be more vigorously
defended than in local groups, where everyone’s individual position was
known, and a localised collective praxis had had much more time in
which to form. As noted in Chap. 3, there also did exist an unacknowl-
edged structure of leadership based upon being part of the international
240 6 Knowledge as Resistance

group who were able to journey to meetings, take part in strategy sessions
and form face-to-face friendships with women from other countries,
although there would always be a disadvantage to those who were not
native or good secondary speakers of English. Louise Vandelac, for example,
points to the lack of English amongst the French women and the lack of
French amongst the others as one of the reasons there never really was a
FINRRAGE France.13 However, the many languages and cultures repre-
sented were very much a crucial part of FINRRAGE’s identity as an organ-
isation and also part of the pleasure of being in it. As Ana Reis put it:

…sometimes I was so tired at the end of the day to speak English, so many
accents… I sat with Farida, and I used to speak Portuguese and she
answered me in Bengali, and we knew exactly what we were talking about.
It was wonderful.14

These large international meetings and conferences, discussed in

Chaps. 3 and 4, also  provided the real focal point for the network to
exchange knowledge, to speak as an organisation and to bring media
attention to the issues in geographical areas where it was felt that women’s
perspectives were generally silenced. However, both activism and aca-
demia were subject to the withdrawal of funding from the entire range of
activities promoting oppositional women’s interests and autonomous
spaces in the 1990s (Pereira 2008), and once the academic support struc-
tures began to disappear, as Chap. 4 shows, the network proved itself to
have become too big and too diverse for the more practice/activist-
oriented women in the ICG to be able to keep it going as volunteers. It is
also possible that, as the big international meetings were apparently no
longer possible to organise after the run-up to Cairo, the network was no
longer generating knowledge, but was simply distributing information
and had therefore lost its purpose.

Technological Topics

Beginning initially from concern about the use of technologies designed for

verifying the health of a foetus to instead determine its sex for the pur-
poses of abortion, the network’s technical topics fell into four broad
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 241

areas—conceptive technologies, contraception, prenatal and preim-

plantation diagnosis and genetic engineering. As discussed in Chap. 2,
the main impetus for forming an activist network around NRT was that
in all streams of the IVF debate—the medical/scientific, the moral/reli-
gious, the ethical/legal/social and the political—women’s voices were
not being heard. However, it was immediately obvious that in order to
understand what the technical aspects revealed about the context in
which they had been developed, it would be necessary not just to
demand access to knowledge the fertility industry would prefer to keep
to itself, but to create knowledge, as no one else seemed interested in
the questions the women wanted to ask. In particular, it was as neces-
sary to investigate how women understood their own participation in
NRT as it would be to investigate practitioner claims that there was no
evidence of harm—a claim which implied that evidence had been col-
lected, when very often there was no research at all.
To ‘study it up’, therefore, was not just a matter of achieving technical
understanding or making visible the practices and predictions of some of
the more prominent scientists—although this played an important
part—but about gathering data showing how the technologies were
already being used to exert a new kind of control over women’s bodies
and, through that, their lives. The Mother Machine (Corea 1985), as the
first comprehensive attempt to set out the historical development of
reproductive technology from a woman-centred view, helped to codify
those topics  as well as the particular analyses that FINRRAGE would
initially pursue. These were:

1. That both conceptive and contraceptive technologies were being

developed through experimentation on women’s bodies, with little
regard for their present or future health, or that of their children;
2. That these were two sides of the same inherently eugenic coin: encour-
aging the ‘right’ women to have more children while ‘encouraging’
poor ones to have fewer;
3. That as an industry IVF opened the way to commodification of wom-
en’s bodies and body parts and to a factory approach in human repro-
duction complete with methods of product improvement and quality
control;
242 6 Knowledge as Resistance

4. That it increased social control over women, valorising certain kinds

of motherhood as fulfilling a woman’s ‘true destiny’, while simultane-
ously denying the maternal links of gestational surrogates, generally
poorer women who were simultaneously reified as ‘naturally’ prolific
breeders who needed to limit the number of their children;
5. That IVF actually reduced women’s choices through social pressures
which made it difficult to refuse ‘treatment’ or to stop once started;
6. That IVF was a gateway technology which would lead not only to
ever more inventive technologies of procreation, extended to larger
and larger ‘markets’, but would also become the basis of technolo-
gies of violence, such as biowarfare, when combined with genetic
engineering.

In terms of technological conception, these points illustrate well the

outlines of the cognitive space which the early FINNRET network was
able to open, and the kinds of arguments for collective resistance which
FINRRAGE later produced. The particular configuration of liberatory,
alternative and egalitarian oppositional consciousness which the women
had brought with them shaped (and to some extent also limited) a range
of responses that tended towards the argument that reproduction should
not be controlled by science in this manner, and which would come to
define the network within the broader field.
For example, the liberatory consciousness expressed itself through efforts
to free women from social pressures to become mothers even when they
could not or did not want to have children, bolstered by the somewhat
more egalitarian project of trying to pry open the black box of the fertility
industry’s scientific and technical knowledge and lay it out clearly for any
woman to examine. Broadly overlapping that liberatory space was the
alternative consciousness from which the panel at Groningen had emerged,
which strongly protested the use of any kind of ‘technology of confirma-
tion’ (McDonald 2007) such as prenatal and preimplantation genetic diag-
nosis, as the qualities of a child were not matters which should be subjected
to control. In terms of contraception, the alternative consciousness can
be clearly seen in the response to long-acting contraceptives and anti-
pregnancy vaccines, forms of contraception which are engineered so
 Cognitive Praxis: Paradigm Revisited 243

that they cannot be self-administered or removed by the woman herself,

and thus can never be brought under women’s control. The alternative
consciousness would also resist the linking of economic investment to the
provision of contraceptive devices, which was seen as giving richer coun-
tries control over the number of children a woman in the developing
world was allowed to have.
As consciousness about the collective effect of prenatal diagnosis on
disabled people was being raised through FINRRAGE women who were
also active in the disability movement, a particularly strong alternative
conscience which considered it a form of eugenic cleansing emerged,
largely led by the women from Germany. This would inevitably be chal-
lenged by the liberatory support for a woman’s basic right to control her
fertility by choosing abortion for any reason which made sense for her
life. Whereas for the most part these two consciousnesses worked well
together at problematising different aspects of the same technology (in
particular changes in its use and meaning as it travelled to different coun-
tries), the dilemma of the women in Bhopal would produce a distinctly
different response depending upon which consciousness dominated in
the individual. What this revealed, however, was not a problem unique to
FINRRAGE, nor even the encroachment of the discourses of choice,
autonomy and self-determination which many of the women opposed.
Rather, the question of whether prenatal diagnosis was acceptable in cases
such as Bhopal exemplifies one of the insoluble contradictions between
group-level analyses and individual lives which are produced by NRT. As
Sarah Franklin (2013, 190), looking back at her time in FINRRAGE, has
more recently noted, we should expect to continue to feel uncomfortable
about the issues raised and the tensions produced by these technologies,
as this is ‘one of the surest signs that an important ethical and political
problem is nearby’. Considering the ‘FINRRAGE position’ as something
more complex than just a radical no, but instead as a cognitive praxis
describing the unique combination of underlying consciencenesses, tech-
nological focus, and organisational strategies for creating knowledge for
resistance, which gave the network its unique character within the wom-
en’s health movement, may  also help to contextualise and re-integrate
some of its insights into feminist thinking on the topics today.
244 6 Knowledge as Resistance

Conclusion to Part 2
While social movements are able to ask questions about who gets to
determine which facts are The Facts (or in some cases, why there are no
facts), it is clear that they themselves must also provide some form of
evidence for their claims if they wish to create enough authority to be
heard, and the more technologically based the issue the movement seeks
to problematise, the more this will be the case. Because their status as
knowledge-producers is often relatively low vis-à-vis other actors in the
public sphere, activist knowledge-claims are easily open to dismissal by
accepted ‘experts’, in much the same way as Smelser (1962, 85) dismissed
movement belief as ‘hysterical’ action emanating from anxiety (a formu-
lation any feminist knows all too well). Those studying health-based
social movements note that there has often been a conceptual separation
of these from other social movements, in part because even oppositional
health movements can include charitable research organisations and cre-
dentialed medical experts, which makes them difficult to study within
the models available to SMT (Brown et al. 2004, 64). Brown et al. fur-
ther argue that activists in these movements can become experts through
a wide range of tactics, from arming themselves with scientific and medi-
cal knowledge to counter the expertise of medics, to acquiring scientific
knowledge by working directly with them, thus obscuring the boundary
between expert and lay person, much as (Epstein 1996) observed in the
interactions between ACT UP and the clinicians they sought to influence
during double-blind trials for AZT.
However, while movement intellectuals are considered of paramount
importance in the cognitive praxis paradigm, movement expertise is dif-
ficult to consider through its three categories as it tends to place profes-
sional experts entirely outside the movement field. In FINRRAGE, not
only were the experts some of the most active members of the network,
but professional knowledge also had a great deal to do with the very
wide range of technological topics with which the network was able to
engage, and with the ability of the women to present themselves as hold-
ing credible knowledge. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified in the
furore that followed Robyn Rowland’s resignation from the QVMC eth-
ics committee, which points to the importance not just of professional
 Conclusion to Part 2 245

credentials, but of seeming to have relevant expertise. She was not an

IVF doctor, and therefore did not have technical expertise or a medical
degree. She did not hold direct embodied or experiential knowledge of
IVF—something which was anyway not discussed in public from the
point of view of the woman patient at that time, except to express her
‘desperation’ or her joy at its (rare) success (Hepburn 1992). However,
Rowland could claim to hold directly observed knowledge of the deci-
sion-making processes of the IVF doctors and had observed other eso-
teric aspects of their practice over the course of working with them for
almost 3 years.
This and other stories told by the women suggests that a more care-
fully nuanced conception of expertise in social movements is necessary,
one that is a reflection of the relationship between the knowledge inter-
ests of the movement and the science it addresses. This would allow
clearer differentiation between different kinds of movement intellectu-
als and their contribution to the movement’s cognitive praxis, focusing
on the relationship of their knowledge to the topic, rather than the mere
possession of formal credentials which may not be relevant to the move-
ment’s concerns. Because its formulation loses interest in what happens
to a movement after parts of it begin to professionalise, one of the limi-
tations of the cognitive praxis paradigm is that it is best suited for under-
standing the context of emergence and expansion. According to Eyerman
and Jamison, cognitive praxis is a process, and like all processes it takes
time to develop and be refined; they liken this to the discovery process
of a cycle of innovation, where certain ideas are selected from the ‘pool’
to be developed through applied research, allowing the best ones to be
brought to market and from there diffused into other innovations
(Eyerman and Jamison 1991, 57). Mechanistic and market-oriented, as
are most of their metaphors, the study of FINRRAGE also illustrates
that as a paradigm cognitive praxis itself is steeped in a rather normative
egalitarian consciousness that seems to conflate equal participation
in society with more equal inclusion in the market. This is possibly the
result of the formulation, derived from resource mobilisation theory,
of movements as ‘carriers of what has been called the project of moder-
nity’ (ibid., 150), which appears to exclude movements which actually
challenge modernity, or at least some of its precepts, particularly
246 6 Knowledge as Resistance

its championing of science as the value-free and neutral driver of benefi-

cial human progress. Rather than challenging the intrusion of techno-
logical control, as Habermas (1987) suggested social movements should,
their key purpose for Eyerman and Jamison seems to be to prepare the
way for new technologies to be used. The cognitive praxis paradigm in
fact reflects the intellectual tensions of its producers, between its roots in
neo-Marxian ideas of using science and technology to produce social
justice; and its paradoxical analysis that a movement’s ‘success’ is defined
only through its ability to pursue that justice as part of a capitalist econ-
omy. For this reason, the longer a movement goes on, the less the para-
digm has to reveal about those parts of it which resist professionalisation.
Therefore, as originally formulated, it does not function particularly well
in analysing movements which are inherently anti-market, or which call
upon a different knowledge system than Western science.
However, it is true that increasing professionalisation in general has led
to increased professionalisation of what would normally be seen as a
social movement field. For example, within the environmental move-
ment, large membership-supported organisations such as Greenpeace
and Friends of the Earth flourished and institutionalised during the
1980s, while activism in general was in decline (Rootes 2004, 627).
According to Blumer (1969, 114), this indicates a successful movement,
as it is precisely this sort of ‘residue’ which should be left when the time
of mass protest ends. Jamison (2003, 707–8) argues that professionalisa-
tion has created an environmental sector (emphasis mine) in which these
organisations, now often NGOs, are viewed as essentially ‘mainstream’
actors by the more radical, smaller groups, despite a shared repertoire for
tactics for disruptive direct action. While the global women’s movement
is not in general a direct action movement, a similar split seems to have
appeared between the smaller, more alternatively minded grassroots
groups dealing with women’s health and the larger, donor-funded organ-
isations which began to be seen as part of the mainstream population
policy community in the run-up to Cairo.
In the case of professionalisation within FINRRAGE, no single occupa-
tion was as widely represented throughout the network as social  science
academics, suggesting that despite considering themselves a grassroots
activist organisation, the network functioned much more like an academic
 Conclusion to Part 2 247

research network. This was less true as activities moved into the global
South, where the women were also highly educated, but also more likely
to be working within the NGO structure and/or in women’s health
organisations. Although they did generate much of the data used by net-
work to develop its knowledge around contraceptive testing and popula-
tion policy (and did publish this formally as well) their research was more
likely to be written up in an informal manner, in pamphlets, booklets and
other publications priced to be purchased and read by ordinary people. In
Europe and Australia, however, FINRRAGE was so closely tied to the
academy that it is possible the network would not have existed without it.
According to the conference programmes and other outward-facing
activities, however, the academics were not necessarily the leaders in
workshops, meetings or other activities aimed at educating the general
public. Although their professional credentials were often emphasised as
a tactic of legitimation, it was also part of the FINRRAGE position to
claim that all women were experts simply because they were women, so
that everyone who participated in the FINRRAGE conferences was
encouraged to speak, even when this caused the programme to extend
late into the night. While it is certain that there will inevitably still be
knowledge-hierarchies within the network that are not visible in the doc-
uments, and about which my respondents did speak, within the cognitive
praxis of FINRRAGE all the women were constructed as equally capable
of producing knowledge to contribute to the collective, whether it was
from their own anecdotal experience or from a sophisticated understand-
ing of the biomedical model of the body and how it would construct
gametes, embryos and uteri as isolated, exchangeable parts.
As the cognitive praxis paradigm seeks to examine how the epistemology
and the knowledge generated by the movement is pushed outward, its con-
clusion is that the movement gets ‘left behind’ by its now-professionalised
activists, pursuing careers and entrepreneurial opportunities in the new spaces
that have been carved out. To some extent, this was true of the academics,
although they were also in a sense always professionalised, as most were
already in established careers or already training to be academics when they
entered the network. However, the paradigm’s  intimation is that what is
left—what I will call, with apologies to Blumer, a ‘sticky residue’ of stub-
bornly autonomous organisations and individual activists who refuse to be
248 6 Knowledge as Resistance

(re)incorporated into the new mainstream—is not capable of continued

influence. The idea of ‘abeyance’ would instead suggest that in terms of hold-
ing open a cognitive space for continued exploration of the movement’s cos-
mology and technological topics, these individuals and organisations play a
vital function in passing knowledge from one activist wave to the next. It is
for this reason that I have preferred to think in terms of consciousnesses dem-
onstrating differing relationships to control, rather than fixed political posi-
tions, as these will continue to exist in varying relationships to each other,
overlapping and shifting over time, producing different, sometimes coherent
and sometimes incompatible cognitive praxes, but still providing spaces in
which people can explore oppositional ideas about the relationship between
society and the technologies we produce, and to create and share knowledge
in whichever ways make sense for a new time.

Final Words
What can politics actually do in these times of big, big powers, which aren’t
just dramas?…So, there is a success just to keep a voice up there in the
debate. (Helga Satzinger, Germany)

Considered superficially, FINRRAGE does not appear to have been

successful. Assisted reproduction has become a largely unregulated global
industry, estimated to be worth USD 21 billion by 2020 (Business Wire
2016). While people have been travelling for IVF since the very start—as
the Rios saga sadly showed—globalisation, the Internet and the demands
of the market have reconfigured what had once been a field of medicine
into part of the service economy, with firms now specialising in packaged
holidays to destinations with cheaper reproductive care (Gupta and
Richters 2008). Embryos, too, travel the world—for research, for adop-
tion, for sale. The Indian government’s promotion of the surrogacy indus-
try as a high-growth, high-profit area for international investment
(Palattiyil et al. 2010) is now being replicated elsewhere, even as India itself
is passing legislation to bar foreigners from using its surrogacy services in
part due to a host of governance problems, including children abandoned
or rendered stateless by competing national interests. Legal systems world-
wide are still grappling with parentage in cases of third-party reproduction,
 Final Words 249

with the scope and enforceability of surrogacy contracts and with the
demands of now-adult donor-conceived children for access to their bio-
logical information. Most countries still have no effective system of gov-
ernance  of NRT, and even when they do, it is simple enough to go
elsewhere. Research towards complete technological control of gestation
continues, with one group of scientists seeking to produce the ‘dream
machine [of ] an IVF lab-on-a-chip’, which will mix readily available
oocytes and sperm to produce perfect embryos (Meseguer et  al. 2012,
1285), while others are working on an artificial uterus—described as basi-
cally a ‘big sterile Ziploc bag with tubes coming out of it’ (Roy 2017)—
which has proven itself capable of sustaining a premature lamb. Meanwhile,
the rapid evolution of precision technologies for editing the embryonic
genome means that we will soon have the capacity to alter humanity itself,
and pass these changes on to future generations (Connor 2017).
In other words, the predictions which were dismissed 30 years ago by
some feminists as ‘science fiction [not] analysis of science’ (Berer 1986,
33) do not seem to have been very far off the mark after all. Meanwhile,
the women of FINRRAGE continue to read, to write and—in their own
ways, in their many countries—to resist. New critical voices continue to
emerge; it is actually only the more polemical language of ‘the FINRRAGE
position’—the ‘pharmacrats and technodocs’ (Corea 1985)—which
seems to have disappeared. The knowledge interests laid out in The Mother
Machine have now diffused far beyond a small group of oppositionally
minded feminists, while the  wider consequences of the quest to more
precisely control human reproduction  and the increased demand for
human ova as the basis for whole new industrial sectors and fields of
research should be taken seriously even by those who argue that repro-
ductive technology should be used to make babies for anyone who wishes,
however they wish.
This is not to argue that critical discussion of the new reproductive tech-
nologies would not have happened without this network, but rather that it
required a text, a context, and a group which considered the development
of woman-centred knowledge to be in and of itself a useful political action,
to create the opportunities which allowed a movement of resistance to
emerge. What I found most consistent through the course of my interviews
was the strength of feeling that FINRRAGE had indeed had an impact, and
250 6 Knowledge as Resistance

that for the most part it continued, not only as a cognitive praxis for
those still researching in the area, but as an actual and imagined net-
work. The criteria for abeyance may not be simply surviving as an organ-
isational remnant, but surviving as a still variously connected network of
‘like-minded women’ who feel that their specific cognitive praxis around
an issue is still valid, and their work is still ongoing. FINRRAGE, then,
can be read as a feminist story about women around the world embark-
ing on an epistemological project together—not always a harmonious
story, but one of, as Maria Mies has said, action and reflection. Whether
or not this space will enlarge again remains to be seen. Rather than a
narrative of loss or return, then, this is perhaps one of (re)iteration, of
(re)integration, of reculer pour mieux sauter, of drawing back to gather
energy to jump further.

Notes
1. According to the group’s founder, the Japanese word for their meetings
means ‘just get together and tell things that you experience’: Azumi
Tsuge, Finrrage-no-kai/Japan, interviewed in Tokyo on 28 August 2010.
2. According to Morris and Braine (2001), construction of a group identity
here may require ‘considerable education and persuasion’ as identifica-
tion is wholly a matter of choice; it seems that no particular underlying
consciousness is implied.
3. Gena Corea, USA, interviewed via Skype on 14 April 2017.
4. Hanisch is also credited as the originator of the rallying cry ‘the personal
is political’ (a reprint of which can be found in the same volume,
pp. 204–205).
5. The most recent being a submission to the 2016 Australian Parliamentary
Inquiry into Surrogacy (Klein 2017). Rowland (2015) still considers
herself to be engaged as an activist through her career as a poet; her latest
book, This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915, is a collection of
anti-war poems in English and Turkish translation. Personal communi-
cation, 13 June 2017.
6. One early FINRRAGE member, Patricia Hynes, even advocated a regu-
latory model for NRT based on the Environmental Protection Agency,
where she worked (Hynes 1987).
 References 251

7. See Mies (2010). Akhter launched ‘Nayakrishi Andolon’, a programme

to support biodiversity through a subsistence-farmer-led movement
which exchanges seeds and knowledge (Akhter 2015).
8. Lariane Fonseca, Australia, interviewed by phone on 6 August 2010.
9. FINRRAGE flyer, circa 1990: FAN/FINDE 01/03.
10. Survey of national contacts circulated by ICG in 1990, ‘Who needs
FINRRAGE and for what?’: FAN/FINDE 01/03.
11. Sarah Franklin, Britain. Interviewed in London on 15 December 2011.
12. Ibid.
13. Louise Vandelac, Canada, interviewed in Montreal on 22 October
2015.
14. Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis, Brazil, interviewed in Sao Paolo on 7
March 2015.

References
Akhter, F. (2015). Nayakrishi Andolon: Farmers Movement for Biodiversity
Conservation and Food Sovereignty. http://ubinig.org/index.php/home/show-
Aerticle/81. Accessed 7 Apr 2017.
Andrews, K.  T., & Edwards, B. (2004). Advocacy Organizations in the US
Political Process. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 479–506.
Arditti, R., Klein, R., & Minden, S. (Eds.). (1984). Test-Tube Women: What
Future for Motherhood? London: Pandora Press.
Berer, M. (1986). Breeding Conspiracies: Feminism and the New Reproductive
Technologies. Trouble and Strife, 9, 29–35.
Blumer, H. (1969). The Field of Collective Behaviour. In A. M. C. Lee (Ed.),
Principles of Sociology. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Boston Women’s Health Collective. (1973). Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Bowles, G., & Klein, R. (1983). Theories of Women’s Studies and the Autonomy/
Integration Debate. In G.  Bowles & R.  Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women’s
Studies (pp. 1–26). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Braun, S. (2003). The History of Breast Cancer Advocacy. The Breast Journal,
9(s2), S101–S103.
Brown, P., Zavestoski, S., McCormick, S., Mayer, B., Morello-Frosch, R., &
Altman, R. G. (2004). Embodied Health Movements: New Approaches to
Social Movements in Health. Sociology of Health & Illness, 26(1), 50–80.
252 6 Knowledge as Resistance

Business Wire. (2016). Global Fertility Services Market to Exceed USD 21 Billion
by 2020. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160420005059/
en/Global-Fertility-Services-Market-Exceed-USD-21. Accessed 4 Mar
2017.
Calver, M., Bigler-Cole, H., Bolton, G., Dargavel, J., Gaynor, A., Horwitz, P.,
Mills, J., & Wardell-Johnson, G. (2005). Why ‘a Forest Consiousness’? In
M. Calver et al. (Eds.), Proceedings 6th National Conference of the Australian
Forest History Society (pp. xvii–xxiii). Rotterdam: Millpress.
Casas-Cortes, M. I., Osterweil, M., & Powell, D. E. (2008). Blurring Boundaries:
Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements.
Anthropological Quarterly, 81(1), 17–58.
Castells, M. (2000). Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society.
The British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), 5–24.
Clegg, S. (1996). From the Women’s Movement to Feminisms. In C. Barker &
P.  T. Kennedy (Eds.), Studies in Protest and Collective Action (pp.  45–67).
London: Blackwell.
Corea, G. (1985). The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial
Insemination to Artificial Wombs. New York: Harper & Row.
Connor, S. (2017, July 26). First Human Embryos Edited in U.S. MIT Technology
Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608350/first-human-embryos-
edited-in-us. Accessed 21 Sept 2017.
Crossley, N. (2002). Making Sense of Social Movements. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Davis, K. (2007). The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels
Across Borders. Durham: Duke University Press.
Epstein, S. (1996). Impure Science: Aids, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Eyerman, R., & Jamison, A. (1991). Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Franklin, S. (2013). Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Gieryn, T. (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldman, A. (1999). Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Goodhart, S. (2005). Conscience, Conscience, Consciousness: Emmanual
Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Logic of Witness. In C.  Katz & L.  Trout
(Eds.), Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers
(pp. 132–152). Abingdon: Routledge.
 References 253

Gorelick, S. (1998). Contradictions of Feminist Methodology. In J.  Giele &

G. Elder (Eds.), Methods of Lifecourse Research: Qualitative and Quantitative
Approaches (pp. 23–45). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Grasswick, H.  E., & Webb, M.  O. (2002). Feminist Epistemology as Social
Epistemology. Social Epistemology, 16(3), 185–196.
Gupta, J.  A., & Richters, A. (2008). Embodied Subjects and Fragmented
Objects: Women’s Bodies, Assisted Reproduction Technologies and the Right
to Self-Determination. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 5(4), 239–249.
Gurney, J.  N., & Tierney, K.  J. (1982). Relative Deprivation and Social
Movements: A Critical Look at Twenty Years of Theory and Research. The
Sociological Quarterly, 23(1), 33–47.
Habermas, J. (1981). New Social Movements. Telos, 49(4), 33–37.
Habermas, J.  (1987). Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and
Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Milton Keynes: Open
University Press.
Hepburn, L. (1992). Ova-Dose?: Australian Women and the New Reproductive
Technology. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Hess, D. J. (2007). What Is a Clean Bus? Object Conflicts in the Greening of
Urban Transit. Sustainability: Science, Practice & Policy, 3(1), 45–58.
Hess, D.  J., Breyman, S., Campbell, N., & Martin, B. (2007). Science,
Technology and Social Movements. In E.  J. Hackett, O.  Amsterdamska,
M.  Lynch, & J.  Wajcman (Eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology
Studies (3rd ed., pp. 473–498). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hynes, H. P. (1987). A Paradigm for Regulation of the Biomedical Industry:
Environmental Protection in the United States. In P.  Spallone & D.  L.
Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress
(pp. 190–205). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Ingalsbee, T. (1996). Earth First! Activism: Ecological Postmodern Praxis in
Radical Environmentalist Identities. Sociological Perspectives, 39(2),
263–276.
Jamison, A. (2003). The Making of Green Knowledge: The Contribution from
Activism. Futures, 35(7), 703–716.
Jamison, A. (2010). Climate Change Knowledge and Social Movement Theory.
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(6), 811–823.
Klein, R. (2017). Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation. Mission Beach: Spinifex
Press.
Knorr-Cetina, K. (1983). New Developments in Science Studies: The
Ethnographic Challenge. The Canadian Journal of Sociology, 8(2), 153–177.
254 6 Knowledge as Resistance

Kuhn, T.  S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions  (3rd ed.). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kurzman, C. (2008). Meaning Making in Social Movements. Anthropological
Quarterly, 81(1), 17–58.
Levin, L. S., & Idler, E. L. (1983). Self-Care in Health. Annual Review of Public
Health, 4(1), 181–201.
Maiguashca, B. (2005). Theorizing Knowledge from Women’s Political Practices.
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7(2), 207–232.
Mansbridge, J. J. (2001). The Making of Oppositional Consciousness. In J. J.
Mansbridge & A.  Morris (Eds.), Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective
Roots of Social Protest (pp. 1–19). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McAdam, D. (1996). The Framing Function of Movement Tactics: Strategic
Dramaturgy in the American Civil Rights Movement. In D. McAdam, J. D.
McCarthy, & M.  N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Social
Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural
Framings (pp. 338–355). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCarthy, J.  D., & Zald, M.  N. (1977). Resource Mobilization and Social
Movements: A Partial Theory. The American Journal of Sociology, 82(6),
1212–1241.
McDonald, L. (2007). Disarticulating Bellies: A Reproductive Glance. Cultural
Review, 13(1), 187–207.
Merton, R. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical
Investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Meseguer, M., Kruhne, U., & Laursen, S. (2012). Full In Vitro Fertilization
Laboratory Mechanization: Toward Robotic Assisted Reproduction? Fertility
and Sterility, 97(6), 1277–1286.
Mies, M. (2010). The Village and the World. Melbourne: Spinifex.
Morris, A., & Braine, N. (2001). Social Movements and Oppositional
Consciousness. In J.  J. Mansbridge & A.  Morris (Eds.), Oppositional
Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (pp.  20–37). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Nathanson, J. (2005). Framing Feminism: The Impact of Collective Action Frames
on the Second Wave Women’s Movement. Paper given at the Annual Meeting of
the International Communication Association, New York, May 26–30, 2005.
Norsigian, J., Diskin, V., Doress-Worters, P., Pincus, J., Sanford, W., & Swenson,
N. (1999). The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and Our Bodies,
Ourselves: A Brief History and Reflection. http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/
history/impact-and-influence/bwhbc-and-our-bodies-ourselves-a-brief-
history-and-reflection. Accessed 22 Mar 2017.
 References 255

Oliver, P., & Johnston, H. (2000). What a Good Idea! Frames and Ideologies in
Social Movement Research. Mobilization, 5, 37–54.
Palattiyil, G., Blyth, E., Sidhva, D., & Balakrishnan, G. (2010). Globalization
and Cross-Border Reproductive Services: Ethical Implications of Surrogacy
in India for Social Work. International Social Work, 53(5), 685–699.
Pereira, M. d. M. (2008). The Epistemic Status of Women’s, Gender, Feminist
Studies: Notes for Analysis. In B. Waaldijk, M. Peters, & E. van der Tuin
(Eds.), The Making of European Women’s Studies Vol VIII (pp.  145–156).
Utrecht: ATHENA/Universiteit Utrecht.
Pincus, J. (2002). How a Group of Friends Transformed Women’s Health. http://
womensenews.org/story/commentary/020313/how-group-friends-trans-
formed-womens-health. Accessed 30 Aug 2017.
Rogers, A., & Pilgrim, D. (1991). ‘Pulling Down Churches’: Accounting for the
British Mental Health Users’ Movement. Sociology of Health & Illness, 13(2),
129–148.
Rootes, C. (2004). Environmental Movements. In D.  Snow, S.  Soule, &
H. Kriesi (Eds.), Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (pp. 608–640).
Oxford: Blackwell.
Rowland, R. (2015). This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Çanakkale  – İçli Dişli Bir
Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915. Melbourne: Five Islands Press.
Roy, J. (2017, April 28). Lamb Fetuses Can Now Grow in Artificial Wombs.
Will Humans Be Next? Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/science/
sciencenow/la-sci-sn-artificial-womb-premature-babies-20170428-story.
html. Accessed 5 Jul 2017.
Rule, P.  C. (2004). Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Sarachild, K. (1978). Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon. In Redstockings
(Ed.), Feminist Revolution: An Abridged Edition with Additional Writings
(pp. 144–150). New York: Random House.
Shapin, S. (1995). Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.
Annual Review of Sociology, 21(1), 289–321.
Sheridan, S. (1990). Feminist Knowledge, Women’s Liberation and Women’s
Studies. In S.  Gunew (Ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct
(pp. 36–55). London: Routledge.
Smelser, N.  J. (1962). Theory of Collective Behavior. London: Routledge &
Keegan Paul.
Tarrow, S. (1994). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics
(2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Appendix: The Women of FINRRAGE
Interviewed for This Book

Farida Akhter—UBINIG/National contact, Bangladesh, Asian editor,

IRAGE. Interviewed during Women’s Worlds 2011, University of Ottawa,
Canada on (1) 6 July 2011, (2) 7 July 2011.
Rebecca Albury—Australia, mailing list only. Interviewed at University of
Wollongong, NSW, Australia on 20 September 2010.
Penny Bainbridge—Britain. Interviewed at Cardigan Centre, Leeds, UK on 19
July 2011.
Annette Burfoot—Britain/National contact Canada, North American co-edi-
tor, IRAGE. Interviewed via Skype on 19 May 2010.
Gena Corea—USA, Editorial Advisory Board, IRAGE. Interviewed via Skype
on 14 April 2017.
Marilyn Crawshaw—Britain. Interviewed by phone on 12 September 2011.
Christine Crowe—Australia. Interviewed at University of Sydney, NSW,
Australia on 17 September 2010.
Sarah Ferber—Australia. Interviewed at University of Wollongong, NSW,
Australia on 20 September 2010.
Erika Feyerabend—Gen-Archiv/International Co-Ordinating Group, Germany.
Interviewed at home in Essen, Germany on (1) 9 April 2011, (2) 10 April
2011.
Lariane Fonseca—National contact, Australia. Editorial Advisory Board,
IRAGE. Interviewed by phone on 6 August 2010.

© The Author(s) 2017 257

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1
258 Appendix: The Women of FINRRAGE Interviewed for This Book

Sarah Franklin—Britain. Interviewed at London School of Economics, UK on

15 December 2011.
Annette Görlich—GRAEL/National contact, Belgium. Interviewed with
Margaret Krannich via Skype on 5 June 2010.
Jyotsna Agnihotra  Gupta—India/Netherlands. Interviewed by phone on 13
September 2011.
Jalna Hanmer—National Contact, Britain. Managing Editor, IRAGE. Interviewed
at Feminist Archive North, University of Leeds, UK on (1) 17 Jan 2008, (2)
19 February 2010, and at home in Leeds on (3) 5 May 2010.
Renate Klein—National contact, Australia. European editor, IRAGE. Interviewed
at home in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on (1) 23 June 2010, (3) 28 June
2010 and with Robyn Rowland in Geelong, Victoria on (2) 24 June 2010.
Lene Koch—National Contact, Denmark. Editorial Advisory Board,
IRAGE. Interviewed by phone on 11 September 2011.
Margret Krannich—GRAEL/National Contact, Belgium. Interviewed with
Annette Goerlich via Skype on 5 June 2010.
Maria Mies—Germany. Editorial Advisory Board, IRAGE. Interviewed at home
in Cologne, Germany on 12 April 2011.
Satoko Nagaoki—Soshiren/National Contact, Japan. Editorial Advisory Board,
IRAGE.  Interviewed in Soshiren office, Tokyo, Japan (with translation by
Chiaki Hayashi) on 26 August 2010.
Vibhuti Patel—Shakti Collective/FINRRAGE-India. Editorial Advisory Board,
IRAGE. Interviewed via Skype on 12 April 2017.
Janice Raymond—National Contact, USA.  Consulting Editor,
IRAGE. Interviewed by phone on 21 July 2011.
Ana Regina Gomes Dos Reis—National Contact, Brazil. Interviewed in Sao
Paulo on 7 March 2015.
Robyn Rowland—Australia. Australian Editor, IRAGE. Interviewed at home in
Geelong, Victoria, Australia on (1) 24 June 2010, (2) 24 June 2010 with
Renate Klein, (3) 25 June, 2010.
Helga Satzinger—Germany. Interviewed at Wellcome Trust  Centre for the
History of Medicine at University College London, London, UK on 16 Dec
2010.
Patricia Spallone—Britain. Interviewed by phone on 8 September 2011.
Azumi Tsuge—Finrrage-no-kai/Japan. Interviewed at University of Tokyo,
Japan on 28 August 2010.
 Appendix: The Women of FINRRAGE Interviewed for This Book 259

Louise Vandelac—France/Francophone Canada. Interviewed at Université du

Québec à Montréal on 22 October 2015.
Aurelia Weikert—National Contact, Austria. Interviewed by Skype on 11
August 2010.
 References

Acker, J., Barry, K., & Esseveld, J. (1983). Objectivity and Truth: Problems in
Doing Feminist Research. Women’s Studies International Forum, 6(4),
423–435.
Akhter, F. (1988). The State of Contraceptive Technology in Bangladesh. (Issues
in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 1(2), 153–158.
Akhter, F. (1995). Resisting Norplant: Women’s Struggle in Bangladesh Against
Coercion and Violence. Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana.
Akhter, F. (2005). Depopulating Bangladesh: Essays on the Politics of Fertility (3rd
ed.). Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana.
Akhter, F. (2015). Nayakrishi Andolon: Farmers Movement for Biodiversity
Conservation and Food Sovereignty. http://ubinig.org/index.php/home/show-
Aerticle/81. Accessed 7 Apr 2017.
Akhter, A., van Berkel, W. & Ahmad, N. (Eds.)  (1991). Declaration of Comilla:
Proceedings of FINRRAGE-UBINIG International Conference, 19–25 March
1989. Comilla: UBINIG.
Albury, R.  M. (1999). The Politics of Reproduction: Beyond the Slogans. St
Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Amsler, S. (2014, May 9). For Feminist Consciousness in the Academy. Politics
and Culture. http://politicsandculture.org/2014/03/09/for-feminist-con-
sciousness-in-the-academy. Accessed 1 May 2017.

© The Author(s) 2017 261

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1
262 References

Andrews, K.  T., & Edwards, B. (2004). Advocacy Organizations in the US

Political Process. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, 479–506.
Antigena. (1993). A Criticism of Women’s Voices ’94. People’s Perspectives on
“Population”, 1, 20–21.
Antrobus, P. (2004). The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies.
London: Zed.
Arditti, R., Klein, R., & Minden, S. (Eds.). (1984). Test-Tube Women: What
Future for Motherhood? London: Pandora Press.
Arksey, H. (1994). Expert and Lay Participation in the Construction of Medical
Knowledge. Sociology of Health & Illness, 16(4), 448–468.
Armitage, S., & Gluck, S. B. (2002). Reflections on Women’s Oral History: An
Exchange. In S. Armitage, P. Hart, & K. Weathermon (Eds.), Women’s Oral
History (pp. 3–22). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Australia. (1985). Human Embryo Experimentation in Australia. Senate Select
Committee on the Human Embryo Experimentation Bill 1985. Canberra:
Australian Government Publishing Service.
Autonomedia. (1989). A Herstory of the Revolutionary Cells and Rote Zora: Armed
Resistance in West Germany. Spunk Library: The Anarchist Archive. http://
www.spunk.org/texts/groups/anm/sp000268.txt. Accessed 21 Oct 17.
AWHRC. (1994). Report on International Public Hearing on Crimes Against
Women Related to Population Policies, Cairo, Egypt, September, 1994. Manila:
Asian Women Human Rights Council.
Bagguley, P. (2002). Contemporary British Feminism: A Social Movement in
Abeyance? Social Movement Studies, 1(2), 169–185.
Ballantyne, T. (1980, June 24). Day One in the Life of Candice. Sydney Morning
Herald, p. 1.
Benda, E. (1985). Bericht Der Arbeitsgruppe: In-Vitro-Fertilisation, Genomanalyse
Und Gentherapie [Report of the Working Group: In Vitro Fertilization,
Genome Analysis and Gene Therapy]. Bonn: Bundesminister der Justiz und
Bundesminister fur Forschung und Technologie.
Berer, M. (1986). Breeding Conspiracies: Feminism and the New Reproductive
Technologies. Trouble and Strife, 9, 29–35.
Berg, P. (2008). Meetings That Changed the World: Asilomar 1975: DNA
Modification Secured. Nature, 455(7211), 290–291.
Bhanot, N. (1991). The Bhopal Disaster and Update.  In F.  Akhter, W. van
Berkel and N.  Ahmad (Eds.),  Declaration of Comilla:  Proceedings of
FINRRAGE-UBINIG International Conference 1989 (pp. 112-117). Dhaka:
UBINIG
 References 263

Bharadwaj, A. (2016). The Indian IVF Saga: A Contested History. Reproductive

Biomedicine & Society Online, 2, 54–61.
Bhate, K., Menon, L., Gupte, M., Savara, M., Daswani, M., Prakash, P.,
Kashyap, R., & Patel, V. (1987). In Search of Our Bodies: A Feminist View on
Woman, Health and Reproduction in India. Bombay: Shakti.
Biggers, J.  D. (2012). IVF and Embryo Transfer: Historical Origin and
Development. Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 25(2), 118-127.
Birke, L. (1986). Women, Feminism and Biology: The Feminist Challenge.
Brighton: Harvester.
Birke, L., Himmelweit, S., & Vines, G. (1990). Tomorrow’s Child: Reproductive
Technologies in the 90s. London: Virago.
Bloor, D. (1976). Knowledge and Social Imagery (2nd Ed, 1991). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Blumer, H. (1969). The Field of Collective Behaviour. In A. M. C. Lee (Ed.),
Principles of Sociology. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Boston Women’s Health Collective. (1973). Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Bourn Hall. (2017). Pregnancy Rates. Bourn Hall Clinic. https://www.bourn-
hall.co.uk/pregnancy-rates/. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Bowles, G., & Klein, R. (1983a). Theories of Women’s Studies. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul.
Bowles, G., & Klein, R. (1983b). Theories of Women’s Studies and the
Autonomy/Integration Debate. In G. Bowles & R. Klein (Eds.), Theories of
Women’s Studies (pp. 1–26). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bradish, P. (1987). From Genetic Counseling and Genetic Analysis, to Genetic Ideal
and Genetic Fate. In P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The
Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 94–101). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Bradish, P., Feyerabend, E., & Winkler, U. (1989). Frauen Gegen Gen- Und
Reproduktionstechnologien. Beitraege zum 2. bundesweiten Kongreß in
Frankfurt, 28–30 Oct 1988, München: Verlag Frauenoffensive.
Brand Frank, Z. (2009). Google Baby. Israel/USA: Brandcom Productions/
HBO.
Brännström, M., Johannesson, L., Bokström, H., Kvarnström, N., Mölne, J.,
Dahm-Kähler, P., Enskog, A., Milenkovic, M., Ekberg, J., Diaz-Garcia, C.,
Gäbel, M., Hanafy, A., Hagberg, H., Olausson, M., & Nilsson, L. (2014).
Livebirth After Uterus Transplantation. The Lancet, 385(9968), 607–616.
Braun, S. (2003). The History of Breast Cancer Advocacy. The Breast Journal,
9(s2), S101–S103.
264 References

Brockskothen, M., Hehr, I., Kühn, R., & Meyer, U. (Eds.). (1986). Frauen
Gegen Gentechnik Und Reproduktionstechnik: Dokumentation Zum Kongreß
Vom 19. – 21. 4. 1985 in Bonn. Köln: Kölner Volksblatt Verlags.
Brown, S. (2005). ESHRE: The First 21 Years. Brussels: European Society of
Human Reproduction and Embryology. https://www.eshre.eu/~/media/
sitecore-files/About-ESHRE/The-first-21-years.pdf. Accessed 9 May 2011.
Brown, M., Fielden, K., & Scutt, J. A. (1990). New Frontiers or Old Recycled?
New Reproductive Technologies as Primary Industry. In J. A. Scutt (Ed.), The
Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the Commercialisation of
Motherhood (pp. 77–107). London: Merlin Press.
Brown, P., Zavestoski, S., McCormick, S., Mayer, B., Morello-Frosch, R., &
Altman, R. G. (2004). Embodied Health Movements: New Approaches to
Social Movements in Health. Sociology of Health & Illness, 26(1), 50–80.
Bullard, L. (1987). Killing Us Softly: Toward a Feminist Analysis of Genetic
Engineering. In P.  Spallone & D.  L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The
Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 110–119). Oxford: Pergamon
Press.
Bunch, C., Carrillo, R., & Guinée, I. (1985). Feminist Perspectives Report of
the Feminist Perspectives Working Group to the Closing Plenary. Women’s
Studies International Forum, 8(4), 243–247.
Burfoot, A. (1988). A Review of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the European
Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 1(1),
107–112.
Burfoot, A. (1989). The Politics of Innovation: The Discovery, Dissemination and
Regulation of In Vitro Fertilization in Britain. PhD, Science Policy Research
Unit, University of Sussex.
Burfoot, A. (1990). The Normalisation of a New Reproductive Technology. In
M. McNeil, I. Varcoe, & S. Yearley (Eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies
(pp. 58–73). Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
Burton, B. (1986). The Need for Reproductive Control and Self-Determination
for Infertile Women. In Liberation or Loss? Women Act on the New Reproductive
Technologies. Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education, Australian
National University.
Business Wire. (2016). Global Fertility Services Market to Exceed USD 21
Billion by 2020. Business Wire. http://www.businesswire.com/news/
home/20160420005059/en/Global-Fertility-Services-Market-Exceed-
USD-21. Accessed 4 Mar 2017.
 References 265

Bustillo, M., Buster, J.  E., Cohen, S.  W., Thorneycroft, I.  H., Simon, J.  A.,
Boyers, S. P., Marshall, J. R., Seed, R. W., Louw, J. A., & Seed, R. G. (1984).
Nonsurgical Ovum Transfer as a Treatment in Infertile Women. JAMA: The
Journal of the American Medical Association, 251(9), 1171–1173.
Calver, M., Bigler-Cole, H., Bolton, G., Dargavel, J., Gaynor, A., Horwitz, P.,
Mills, J., & Wardell-Johnson, G. (2005). Why ‘a Forest Consiousness’? In
M. Calver et al. (Eds.), Proceedings 6th National Conference of the Australian
Forest History Society (pp. xvii–xxiii). Millpress: Rotterdam.
Canada. (1994). Proceed with Care: Final Report of the Royal Commission on New
Reproductive Technologies. Ottawa: The Commission.
Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Casas-Cortes, M. I., Osterweil, M., & Powell, D. E. (2008). Blurring Boundaries:
Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements.
Anthropological Quarterly, 81(1), 17–58.
Castells, M. (2000). Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society.
The British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), 5–24.
Challoner, J.  (1999). The Baby Makers: The History of Artificial Conception.
London: Macmillan.
Clegg, S. (1996). From the Women’s Movement to Feminisms. In C. Barker &
P.  T. Kennedy (Eds.), Studies in Protest and Collective Action (pp.  45–67).
London: Blackwell.
Clemens, E.  S., & Hughes, M. (2002). Recovering Past Protest: Historical
Research on Social Movements. In B. Klandermans & S. Staggenborg (Eds.),
Methods of Social Movement Research (pp. 201–230). Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Cohen, B.  D. (1979, September 28). Test Tube Baby Experiment at Norfolk
School; Doctors Set to Implant Human Embryo. The Washington Post, p. 1,
Section A1.
Cohen, I. G., & Adashi, E. Y. (2013). Made-to-Order Embryos for Sale – A
Brave New World? New England Journal of Medicine, 368(26), 2517–2519.
Cohen, S., & Taub, N. (Eds.). (1989). Reproductive Laws for the 1990s. Clifton:
Humana Press.
Cohen, J., Simons, R. F., Fehilly, C. B., Fishel, S. B., Edwards, R. G., Hewitt, J.,
Rowland, G.  F., Steptoe, P.  C., & Webster, J.  M. (1985). Birth After
Replacement of Hatching Blastocyst Cryopreserved at Expanded Blastocyst
Stage. The Lancet, 325(8429), 647–647.
Cohen, J., Trounson, A., Dawson, K., Jones, H., Hazekamp, J., Nygren, K.-G.,
& Hamberger, L. (2005). The Early Days of IVF Outside the UK. Human
Reproduction Update, 11(5), 439–460.
266 References

Collins, H. (2004). Interactional Expertise as a Third Kind of Knowledge.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 3(2), 125–143.
Collins, H. M., & Evans, R. (2007). Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Hansard (Commons), 23 November 1984, column 560.
Connor, S. (2017, July 26). First Human Embryos Edited in U.S. MIT
Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608350/first-
human-embryos-edited-in-us. Accessed 21 Sept 2017.
Cook, J. A., & Fonow, M. M. (1986). Knowledge and Women’s Interests: Issues
of Epistemology and Methodology in Feminist Sociological Research.
Sociological Inquiry, 56(1), 2–29.
Corea, G. (1977). The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Mistreats
Women. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Corea, G. (1985a). The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial
Insemination to Artificial Wombs. New York: Harper & Row.
Corea, G. (1985b). The Reproductive Brothel. In G. Corea, R. Klein, J. Hanmer,
H.  B. Holmes, B.  Hoskins, M.  Kishwar, J.  Raymond, R.  Rowland, &
R. Steinbacher (Eds.), Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies
Affect Women (pp. 38–51). London: Hutchinson.
Corea, G. (1989). Industrial Experimentation on “Surrogate” Mothers. In
H.  Patricia Hynes (Ed.), Reconstructing Babylon: Women and Technology
(pp. 155–159). London: Earthscan.
Corea, G., & Ince, S. (1985, July 3). IVF a Game for Losers at Half of US
Clinics. Medical Tribune, pp. 12–13.
Corea, G., & Ince, S. (1987). Report of a Survey of IVF Clinics in the USA. In
P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive
and Genetic Progress (pp. 133–145). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Corea, G., Klein, R., Hanmer, J., Holmes, H. B., Hoskins, B., Kishwar, M.,
Raymond, J., Rowland, R., & Steinbacher, R. (Eds.). (1985). Man-Made
Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women. London:
Hutchinson.
Corral, T. (1992a). Conference Report “Women, Procreation and Environment”,
Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, 30 September–7 October 1991. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(2),
207–209.
Corral, T. (1992b). Eco 92 Through Women’s Eyes. Terra Femina, 1, 92–97.
Crawshaw, M., & Marshall, L. (2008). Practice Experiences of Running UK
Donorlink, a Voluntary Information Exchange Register for Adults Related
through Donor Conception. Human Fertility, 11(4), 231–237.
 References 267

Crossley, N. (2002). Making Sense of Social Movements. Buckingham: Open

University Press.
Crowe, C. (1985). ‘Women Want It’: In-Vitro Fertilization and Women's
Motivations for Participation. Women’s Studies International Forum, 8(6),
547–552.
Crowe, C. (1987). ‘Women Want It’: In Vitro Fertilization and Women’s
Motivations for Participation. In P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made
to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 84–93). Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
Crowe, C. (1990). Whose Mind over Whose Matter? Women, In Vitro
Fertilisation and the Development of Scientific Knowledge. In M. McNeil,
I. Varcoe, & S. Yearley (Eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies (pp. 27–57).
Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
Culpepper, E.  I. (1981). Uncovering Patriarchal Agendas and Exploring
Women-Oriented Values. In H.  B. Holmes, B.  B. Hoskins, & M.  Gross
(Eds.), The Custom-Made Child?: Women-Centered Perspectives (pp. 301–310).
Clifton: Humana Press.
Curthoys, J. (1997). Feminist Amnesia: The Wake of Women’s Liberation. London:
Routledge.
Davis, K. (2007). The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels
Across Borders. Durham: Duke University Press.
de Wit, C., & Corea, G. (1989). Current Developments and Issues: A Summary.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 2(1), 63–90.
Degener, T. (1990). Female Self-Determination Between Feminist Claims and
“Voluntary” Eugenics, Between “Rights” and Ethics. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(2),
87–100.
Della Porta, D. (1992). Life Histories in the Analysis of a Social Movement. In
M.  Diani & R.  Eyerman (Eds.), Studying Collective Action (pp.  168–193).
London: Sage.
DeVault, M. L. (1996). Talking Back to Sociology: Distinctive Contributions of
Feminist Methodology. Annual Review of Sociology, 22(1), 29–50.
Dickey, R. P. (1986). The Medical Status of the Embryo. Loyola Law Review, 32,
317–336.
Donchin, A. (1996). Feminist Critiques of New Fertility Technologies:
Implications for Social Policy. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 21(5),
475–498.
268 References

Doudna, J.  A., & Charpentier, E. (2014). The New Frontier of Genome
Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9. Science, 346(6213), 1258096.
Dworkin, A. (1983). Right-Wing Women. New York: Perigee Books.
Edge, D. (1995). Reinventing the Wheel. In S. Jasanoff, G. Markle, J. Petersen,
& T. Pinch (Eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (pp. 3–23).
Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Edwards, R. G. (1974). Fertilization of Human Eggs In Vitro: Morals, Ethics
and the Law. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 49(1), 3–26.
Edwards, R. G. (1981). Test-Tube Babies, 1981. Nature, 293(5830), 253–256.
Edwards, R. G. (2001). The Bumpy Road Human In Vitro Fertilization. Nature
Medicine, 7, 1091–1094.
Edwards, R.  G. (2005). An Introduction to Bourn Hall: The Biomedical
Background of Bourn Hall Clinic. In P. Brinsden (Ed.), Textbook of In Vitro
Fertilization and Assisted Reproduction: The Bourne Hall Guide to Clinical and
Laboratory Practice (pp. 1–8). Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.
Edwards, R., & Steptoe, P. (1980). A Matter of Life: The Sensational Story of the
World’s First Test-Tube Baby. London: Sphere Books Ltd.
Edwards, R. G., & Steptoe, P. C. (1983). Current Status of In-Vitro Fertilisation
and Implantation of Human Embryos. The Lancet, 322(8362), 1265–1269.
Edwards, R.  G., Donahue, R.  P., Baramki, T.  A., & Jones, H.  W. J.  (1966).
Preliminary Attempts to Fertilize Human Oocytes Matured In Vitro.
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 96(2), 192–200.
Elias, D. (1984, May 26). Waller Joins In Vitro Ethics Calls. The Age (Melbourne).
Elias, D., & McIntosh, P. (1984, June 19). Committee Was Warned of Embryo
Danger. The Age (Melbourne), p. 1.
Epstein, S. (1995). The Construction of Lay Expertise: Aids Activism and the
Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials. Science, Technology, &
Human Values, 20(4), 408–437.
Epstein, S. (1996). Impure Science: Aids, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Esteves, A. M. (2008). Processes of Knowledge Production in Social Movements
as Multi-Level Power Dynamics. Sociology Compass, 2(6), 1934–1953.
European Parliament. (1989). Resolution of 16 March 1989 on Artificial
Insemination ‘In Vivo’ and ‘In Vitro’; Resolution of 16 March 1989 on the Ethical
and Legal Problems of Genetic Engineering (Doc. A2–372/88). Official Journal
C 96, 17.4.89, pp. 165–173.
Eyerman, R., & Jamison, A. (1991). Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
 References 269

Fabricant, D. (1990). International Law Revisited: Davis Vs Davis and the Need
for Coherent Policy on the Status of the Embryo. Connecticut Journal of
International Law, 6, 173–207.
Family Law Council. (1985). Creating Children: A Uniform Approach to the Law
and Practice of Reproductive Technology in Australia. Canberra: Australian
Government Publishing Service.
Feyerabend, E. (1989). Euthanasia in the Age of Genetic Engineering. (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 2(3), 247–249.
Fine, M., & Asch, A. (1985). Review: Who Owns the Womb? The Women’s
Review of Books, 2(8), 8–10.
FINRRAGE. (1987). Statement from Third World Women of the FINRRAGE
Conference. In P.  Spallone & D.  L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The
Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (p. 213). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Firestone, S. (1979). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
London: The Women’s Press.
Fleming, A. T. (1980, July 20). New Frontiers in Conception. The New York
Times, sec. 6, p. 14.
Forum Against Sex Determination and Sex Pre-Selection. (1991). The Campaign
Against Sex Determination and Sex Pre-Selection in India – Our Experiences.
In F.  Akhter, W. van Berkel, & N.  Ahmad (Eds.), Declaration of Comilla:
Proceedings of FINRRAGE-UBINIG International Conference 1989 (pp. 156–
164). Dhaka: UBINIG.
Franklin, B. A. (1980, January 9). U.S. Clinic for Conception Outside Body
Approved. The New York Times, A14–A14.
Franklin, S. (1990). Deconstructing ‘Desperateness’: The Social Construction of
Infertility in Popular Representations of New Reproductive Technologies. In
M. McNeil, I. Varcoe, & S. Yearley (Eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies
(pp. 200–229). Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
Franklin, S. (1997). Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception.
London: Routledge.
Franklin, S. (2011). A Feminist Transatlantic Education. In K.  Davis &
M. Evans (Eds.), Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism as Travelling Theory.
Burlington: Ashgate.
Franklin, S. (2013). Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Franklin, S., & McNeil, M. (1988). Reproductive Futures: Recent Literature
and Current Feminist Debates on Reproductive Technologies. Feminist
Studies, 14(3), 545–560.
270 References

Freeman, J.  (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Berkeley Journal of

Sociology, 17, 151–165.
Frickel, S. (2004). Just Science? Organizing Scientist Activism in the US
Environmental Justice Movement. Science as Culture, 13(4), 449–469.
Frickel, S., & Gross, N. (2005). A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual
Movements. American Sociological Review, 70(2), 204.
Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Friedman, D., & McAdam, D. (1992). Collective Identity and Activism:
Networks, Choices and the Life of a Social Movement. In A. D. Morris &
C. M. C. Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (pp. 156–173).
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fuller, S. (2002). Social Epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gardner, R. L., & Johnson, M. H. (2011). Bob Edwards and the First Decade
of Reproductive Biomedicine Online. Reproductive Biomedicine Online,
22(2), 106–124.
Gen-Archiv. (1988). Police Raid on Gene Archive – News from West Germany.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 1(1), 103–105.
Gieryn, T. (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gillon, R. (1984). Britain: The Public Gets Involved. The Hastings Center Report,
14(6), 16–17.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Goldman, A. (1999). Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Goodhart, S. (2005). Conscience, Conscience, Consciousness: Emmanual
Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Logic of Witness. In C.  Katz & L.  Trout
(Eds.), Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers
(pp. 132–152). Abingdon: Routledge.
Gorelick, S. (1998). Contradictions of Feminist Methodology. In J.  Giele &
G. Elder (Eds.), Methods of Lifecourse Research: Qualitative and Quantitative
Approaches (pp. 23–45). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Gougon, D. (2008).  Explaining Inaction: Feminist Organizational Responses to
New Reproductive Technologies. PhD, Department of Political Science, Rutgers
University. 
Gould, H. (1986). The Bioethics of Playing God – An Interview with Robyn
Rowland. National Outlook, pp. 9–11.
Grasswick, H.  E., & Webb, M.  O. (2002). Feminist Epistemology as Social
Epistemology. Social Epistemology, 16(3), 185–196.
 References 271

Grossman, E. (1971, May). The Obsolescent Mother. The Atlantic Monthly, 227,
39–50. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1971/05/the-obsoles-
cent-mother/4201/. Accessed 22 Feb 2017.
Gunning, J., & English, V. (1993). Human In Vitro Fertilization: A Case Study
in the Regulation of Medical Innovation. Aldershot: Dartmouth.
Gupta, J.  A., & Richters, A. (2008). Embodied Subjects and Fragmented
Objects: Women’s Bodies, Assisted Reproduction Technologies and the Right
to Self-Determination. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 5(4), 239–249.
Gurney, J.  N., & Tierney, K.  J. (1982). Relative Deprivation and Social
Movements: A Critical Look at Twenty Years of Theory and Research. The
Sociological Quarterly, 23(1), 33–47.
Gwatkin, D. R. (1979). Political Will and Family Planning: The Implications of
India’s Emergency Experience. Population and Development Review, 5(1), 29–59.
Haas, P.  M. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International
Policy Coordination. International Organization, 46(1), 1–35.
Habermas, J. (1981). New Social Movements. Telos, 49(4), 33–37.
Habermas, J.  (1987). Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and
Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hands Off Our Ovaries. (2006b). Manifesto. http://handsoffourovaries.com/
manifesto.htm. Accessed 16 July 2017.
Hanmer, J. (1984). A Womb of One’s Own. In R. Arditti, R. Klein, & S. Minden
(Eds.), Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? (pp.  438–448).
London: Pandora Press.
Hanmer, J.  (1985). Transforming Consciousness: Women and the New
Reproductive Technologies. In G. Corea, R. Klein, J. Hanmer, H. B. Holmes,
B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond, R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher (Eds.),
Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women
(pp. 88–109). London: Hutchinson.
Hanmer, J., & Allen, P. (1980). Reproductive Engineering: The Final Solution?
In L. Birke, W. Faulkner, S. Best, D. Janson-Smith, & K. Overfield (Eds.),
Alice Through the Microscope: The Power of Science Over Women’s Lives
(pp. 208–292). London: Virago.
Hanmer, J., Powell-Jones, E., & Leonard, D. (1984). Who’s Holding the Test-
Tube? Trouble and Strife, 3, 44–53.
Haraway, D. J. (1996). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In E. F. Keller & H. E. Longino (Eds.),
Feminism and Science (pp. 249–263). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Milton Keynes: Open
University Press.
272 References

Harding, S., & O’Barr, J. F. (Eds.). (1987). Sex and Scientific Inquiry. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Harvard Law Review Association. (1989). Developments in the Law: Medical
Technology and the Law. Harvard Law Review, 103, 1519–1976.
Hecht, F., & Hecht, B. (1986). Book Reviews: Test Tube Women. American
Journal of Human Genetics, 38(2), 263–264.
Hemmings, C. (2005). Telling Feminist Stories. Feminist Theory, 6(2), 115–139.
Hemmings, C. (2006). The Life and Times of Academic Feminism. In K. Davis,
M.  Evans, & J.  Lorber (Eds.), Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies
(pp. 13–34). London: Sage.
Henry, A. (1984a). Fuckless Babies. Spare Rib, 144(July), 15–16.
Henry, A. (1984b). Population Control: No  – Women Decide. off our backs,
14(9), 2–4, 7.
Hepburn, L. (1992). Ova-Dose?: Australian Women and the New Reproductive
Technology. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Hess, D. J. (2007). What Is a Clean Bus? Object Conflicts in the Greening of
Urban Transit. Sustainability: Science, Practice & Policy, 3(1), 45–58.
Hess, D.  J. (2011). To Tell the Truth: On Scientific Counterpublics. Public
Understanding of Science, 20(5), 627–641.
Hess, D.  J., Breyman, S., Campbell, N., & Martin, B. (2007). Science,
Technology and Social Movements. In E.  J. Hackett, O.  Amsterdamska,
M.  Lynch, & J.  Wajcman (Eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology
Studies (3rd ed., pp. 473–498). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
HEW. (1979). Report and Conclusions: HEW Support of Research Involving
Human In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer, May 4. Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare. Bethesda: Ethics Advisory Board. http://
www.archive.org/details/hewsupportofrese02unit. Accessed 5 July 2017.
HFEA. (2016). Mitochondrial Replacement. Human Fertilization & Embryo
Authority. http://www.hfea.gov.uk/6896.html. Accessed 17 May 2017.
HFEA. (2017). Success Rates  – Bourn Hall Clinic. Human Fertilization &
Embryology Authority. http://guide.hfea.gov.uk/guide/SuccessRate.aspx.
Accessed 5 May 2017.
Holmes, H.  B. (1989). Hepatitis: Yet Another Risk of In Vitro Fertilization.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 2(1), 29–37.
Holmes, H. B., & Hoskins, B. (1985). Prenatal and Preconception Sex Choice
Technologies: A Path to Femicide? In G. Corea, R. Klein, J. Hanmer, H. B.
Holmes, B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond, R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher
(Eds.), Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women
(pp. 15–29). London: Hutchinson.
 References 273

Holmes, H.  B., Hoskins, B.  B., & Gross, M. (1980). Birth Control and
Controlling Birth: Women-Centered Perspectives. Clifton: Humana Press.
Holmes, H. B., Hoskins, B. B., & Gross, M. (1981). The Custom-Made Child?:
Women-Centered Perspectives. Clifton: Humana Press.
Hubbard, R. (1981). The Case against In Vitro Fertilization and Implantation.
In H.  B. Holmes, B.  B. Hoskins, & M.  Gross (Eds.), The Custom-Made
Child?: Women-Centered Perspectives (pp. 259–262). Clifton: Humana Press.
Humm, P. (1989). Waiting for a Child. In R.  Klein (Ed.), Infertility: Women
Speak Out About Their Experience of Reproductive Medicine (pp.  51–58).
London: Pandora Press.
Hynes, H. P. (1987). A Paradigm for Regulation of the Biomedical Industry:
Environmental Protection in the United States. In P.  Spallone & D.  L.
Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress
(pp. 190–205). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Hynes, H.  P. (Ed.). (1989). Reconstructing Babylon: Women and Technology.
London: Earthscan.
ID-Archiv. (1993). Die Früchte Des Zorns: Texte Und Materialien Zur Geschichte
Der Revolutionären Zellen Und Der Roten Zora [Grapes of Wrath: Texts and
Materials on the History of the Revolutionary Cells and Red Zora]. Berliner
Bündnis für Freilassung/Berlin Alliance for Liberation. http://www.freilas-
sung.de/div/texte/rz/zorn/Zorn01.htm. Accessed 3 Nov 2016.
Ingalsbee, T. (1996). Earth First! Activism: Ecological Postmodern Praxis in
Radical Environmentalist Identities. Sociological Perspectives, 39(2),
263–276.
IWHC. (1993). International Women’s Health Coalition – Women’s Declaration
on Population Policies. Development in Practice, 3(2), 116–121.
IWHM. (1991). Feminist Framework on Reproductive Technology Declaration
(Resolution of the 6th International Meeting on Women and Health,
Manila). (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 4(1), 75–76.
Jamison, A. (2003). The Making of Green Knowledge: The Contribution from
Activism. Futures, 35(7), 703–716.
Jamison, A. (2010). Climate Change Knowledge and Social Movement Theory.
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(6), 811–823.
Jansen, S. (1987). Resistance and Beyond: Conceiving a Feminist Science. In
P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive
and Genetic Progress (pp. 209–210). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Jasanoff, S. (2003). (No?) Accounting for Expertise. Science and Public Policy,
30(3), 157–162.
274 References

Jaslok Hospital. (2006). About Dr. Firuza Parikh. Jaslok Hospital. http://www.
ivfclinicindia.com/ABOUT%20DR%20FIRUZA%20PARIKH/M__8.
Accessed 19 Sept 2017.
Jasper, J. M., & Poulsen, J. D. (1995). Recruiting Strangers and Friends: Moral
Shocks and Social Networks in Animal Rights and Anti-Nuclear Protests.
Social Problems, 42(4), 493–512.
Johnson, M. (2011). Robert Edwards: The Path to IVF. Reproductive Biomedicine
Online, 23, 245–262.
Johnson, M.  H., Franklin, S.  B., Cottingham, M., & Hopwood, N. (2010).
Why the Medical Research Council Refused Robert Edwards and Patrick
Steptoe Support for Research on Human Conception in 1971. Human
Reproduction, 25(9), 2157–2174.
Jones, H. (1991). In the Beginning There Was Bob. Human Reproduction, 6(1),
5–7.
Jones, H. W. (1995). The Norfolk Experience: How IVF Came to the United
States. In A. T. Alberda, R. A. Gan, & H. M. Vemer (Eds.), Pioneers in In
Vitro Fertilization: The Proceedings of a Symposium Held in Oss, the Netherlands,
November 5, 1993 (pp. 25–43). New York: Parthenon.
Jones, H. W. (2003). IVF: Past and Future. Reproductive Biomedicine Online,
6(3), 375–381.
Kane, E. (1989). Surrogate Parenting: A Division of Families, Not a Creation.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 2(2), 105–110.
Kannegiesser, H. (1988). Conception in the Test Tube: The IVF Story, How
Australia Leads the World. South Melbourne: Macmillan.
Kano, A. (2016). Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love
and Labour. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Kaupen-Hass, H. (1988). Experimental Obstetrics and National Socialism: The
Conceptual Basis of Reproductive Technology Today. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 1(2),
127–132.
Keenan, M. (1971, September 15). Growing Point: Choose Your Child’s Sex.
The Times (London), p. 16.
Keller, E. F., & Longino, H. E. (Eds.). (1996). Feminism and Science. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kirejczyk, M. (1990). A Question of Meaning? Controversies About the New
Reproductive Technologies in the Netherlands. (Issues in) Reproductive and
Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(1), 23–33.
 References 275

Kishwar, M. (1985). The Continuing Deficit of Women in India and the Impact
of Amniocentesis. In G.  Corea, R.  Klein, J.  Hanmer, H.  B. Holmes,
B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond, R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher (Eds.),
Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women
(pp. 30–37). London: Hutchinson.
Kläber, K. (1967). The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle. New York: Doubleday.
Klein, R. (1983). How to Do What We Want to Do: Thoughts About Feminist
Methodology. In G. Bowles & R. Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women’s Studies
(pp. 88–104). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Klein, R. (1989a). German Women Say ‘No’ to Reproductive and Genetic
Technologies. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 2(1), 91–98.
Klein, R. (1989b). The Exploitation of a Desire: Women’s Experiences with in Vitro
Fertilisation. Geelong: Women’s Studies Summer Institute, Deakin University.
Klein, R. (Ed.). (1989b). Infertility: Women Speak Out About Their Experience of
Reproductive Medicine. London: Pandora Press.
Klein, R. (1994). Reflections on Cairo: Empowerment Rhetoric – But Who Will Pay
the Price?http://www.finrrage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Reflections_
on_Cairo_Renate_Klein.pdf. Accessed 29 Apr 2017.
Klein, R. (2008). From Test-Tube Women to Bodies Without Women. Women’s
Studies International Forum, 31(3), 157–175.
Klein, R. (2017). Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation. Mission Beach: Spinifex
Press.
Klein, R., & Rowland, R. (1988). Women as Test-Sites for Fertility Drugs:
Clomiphene Citrate and Hormonal Cocktails. (Issues in) Reproductive and
Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 1(3),
251–274.
Klein, R., Raymond, J. G., & Dumble, L. J. (1991). RU 486: Misconceptions,
Myths and Morals. Dhaka/North Melbourne: Narigrantha Prabartana/
Spinifex Press (2013).
Knoll, E. M. (2012). Reproducing Hungarians: Reflections on Fuzzy Boundaries
in Reproductive Border Crossing. In M. Knecht, M. Klotz, & S. Beck (Eds.),
Reproductive Technologies as Global Form: Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices
and Transnational Encounters (pp.  255–282). Frankfurt-on-Main: Campus
Verlag GmbH.
Knorr-Cetina, K. (1983). New Developments in Science Studies: The
Ethnographic Challenge. The Canadian Journal of Sociology, 8(2), 153–177.
Koch, L. (1990). IVF – An Irrational Choice? (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic
Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(3), 235–242.
276 References

Koval, R. (1986). What Price the Scale of Reproductive Technology? Paper given
at Liberation or Loss? Women Act on the New Reproductive Technologies, Australian
National University, 9–11 May 1986. Canberra: Centre for Continuing
Education.
Koval, R. (1990). The Commercialisation of Reproductive Technology. In J. A.
Scutt (Ed.), The Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the
Commercialisation of Motherhood (pp. 108–134). London: Merlin Press.
Kuhn, T.  S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions  (3rd ed.). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kumar, T.  C. (1997). Architect of India’s First Test Tube Baby: Dr Subhas
Mukerji. Current Science, 72(7), 526–531.
Kurzman, C. (2008). Meaning Making in Social Movements. Anthropological
Quarterly, 81(1), 17–58.
Kusano, I., & Kawasaki, K. (1983). Japanese Women Challenge Anti-Abortion
Law. Japan-Asia Quarterly, 15(1), 10–15.
Lasch, C. (1972). Birth, Death and Technology: The Limits of Cultural Laissez-
Faire. The Hastings Center Report, 2(3), 1–4.
Laws, S. (1985). Power and the Right to Choose – Amsterdam 1984. Trouble
and Strife, 5, 34–42.
Lee, R., & Morgan, D. (2001). Human Fertilization and Embryology: Regulating
the Reproductive Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leeton, J. (2004). The Early History of IVF in Australia and Its Contribution to
the World (1970–1990). Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics
and Gynaecology, 44(6), 495–501.
Levin, L. S., & Idler, E. L. (1983). Self-Care in Health. Annual Review of Public
Health, 4(1), 181–201.
Lewis, J., & Cannell, F. (1986). The Politics of Motherhood in the 1980s:
Warnock, Gillick and Feminists. Journal of Law and Society, 13(3), 321–342.
Lingam, L. (1990). New Reproductive Technologies in India: A Print Media
Analysis. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 3(1), 13–21.
Lippman, A. (1992). Mother Matters: A Fresh Look at Prenatal Genetic Testing.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 5(2), 141–154.
Lopata, A. (2010, June 23). 30th Anniversary of IVF in Australia. https://www.
mivf.com.au/new-developments-in-ivf/latest-news-on-ivf/30th-anniversary-
ivf-australia. Accessed 27 Sep 2017.
Lopata, A., Johnston, I.  W., Hoult, I.  J., & Speirs, A.  I. (1980). Pregnancy
Following Intrauterine Implantation of an Embryo Obtained by In Vitro
Fertilization of a Preovulatory Egg. Fertility and Sterility, 33(2), 117–120.
 References 277

Loveland, K. (2017). Feminism Against Neoliberalism: Theorising Biopolitics

in Germany, 1978–1993. Gender & History, 29(1), 67–86.
Lublin, N. (1998). Pandora’s Box: Feminism Confronts Reproductive Technology.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Machin, L. (2008). The Social and Ethical Context of Embryo Donation. PhD,
School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds.
Maddison, S., & Martin, G. (2010). Introduction to “Surviving Neoliberalism:
The Persistence of Australian Social Movements”. Social Movement Studies:
Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, 9(2), 101–120.
Maiguashca, B. (2001). Contemporary Social Movements and the Making of World
Politics. PhD, International Relations, London School of Economics and
Political Science.
Maiguashca, B. (2005). Theorizing Knowledge from Women’s Political Practices.
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 7(2), 207–232.
Malpede, K. (1991). Notes on the Writing and Reception of the Stage Play
‘Better People’. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 4(2), 93–107.
Mansbridge, J. J. (2001). The Making of Oppositional Consciousness. In J. J.
Mansbridge & A.  Morris (Eds.), Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective
Roots of Social Protest (pp. 1–19). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, C. (1986, June 24). A New and Fertile Field for Investment. Bulletin
(Australia), pp. 6–10.
Martin, B. (1998). Strategies for Dissenting Scientists. Journal of Scientific
Exploration, 12(4), 605–616.
Martinez-Alier, J., Healy, H., Temper, L., Walter, M., Rodriguez-Labajos, B.,
Gerber, J.-F., & Conde, M. (2011). Between Science and Activism: Learning
and Teaching Ecological Economics with Environmental Justice
Organisations. Local Environment, 16(1), 17–36.
McAdam, D. (1996). The Framing Function of Movement Tactics: Strategic
Dramaturgy in the American Civil Rights Movement. In D. McAdam, J. D.
McCarthy, & M.  N. Zald (Eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Social
Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural
Framings (pp. 338–355). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McBain, J. (2010). Children of a Fertile Revolution: IVF. Melbourne IVF. http://
www.mivf.com.au/ivf-latest-news/children-of-a-fertile-revolution-ivf.aspx.
Accessed 6 Jul 2017.
McCarthy, J.  D., & Zald, M.  N. (1977). Resource Mobilization and Social
Movements: A Partial Theory. The American Journal of Sociology, 82(6),
1212–1241.
278 References

McDonald, L. (2007). Disarticulating Bellies: A Reproductive Glance. Cultural

Review, 13(1), 187–207.
McKay, S. (1985). Test-Tube Women, What Future for Motherhood? (Book
Review). Sociology of Health & Illness, 7(2), 275–276.
McNeil, M., Varcoe, I., & Yearley, S. (Eds.). (1990). The New Reproductive
Technologies. Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
McNeill, S. (1978). Reproduction Workshop. Scarlet Women, 6(7), 3–6.
Medew, J. (2016, November 15). Monash IVF Publishing Potentially Misleading
Success Rates. The Age (Victoria). http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/monash-
ivf-publishing-potentially-misleading-success-rates-20161115-gspz84.html.
Accessed 5 May 2017.
Melucci, A. (1985). The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements.
Social Research, 789–816.
Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual
Needs in Contemporary Society. London: Century Hutchinson.
Merrick, J. (1990). The Case of Baby M. In D. Bartels, R. Priester, D. Vawter,
& A.  Caplan (Eds.), Beyond Baby M: Ethical Issues in New Reproductive
Technologies (pp. 183–200). Clifton: Humana Press.
Merton, R. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical
Investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Meseguer, M., Kruhne, U., & Laursen, S. (2012). Full In Vitro Fertilization
Laboratory Mechanization: Toward Robotic Assisted Reproduction? Fertility
and Sterility, 97(6), 1277–1286.
Mies, M. (1983). Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research. In G. Bowles
& R.  Klein (Eds.), Theories of Women’s Studies (pp.  117–139). London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mies, M. (1985). ‘Why Do We Need All This?’ A Call against Genetic
Engineering and Reproductive Technology. Women’s Studies International
Forum, 8(6), 553–560.
Mies, M. (1989). What Unites, What Divides Women from the South and from
the North in the Field of Reproductive Technologies. In F. Akhter, W. van
Berkel and N.  Ahmad (Eds.),  Declaration of Comilla: Proceedings of
FINRRAGE-UBINIG International Conference 1989  (pp. 33–44). Dhaka:
UBINIG.
Mies, M. (2010). The Village and the World. Melbourne: Spinifex.
Minden, S. (1985). Patriarchal Designs: The Genetic Engineering of Human
Embryos. Women’s Studies International Forum, 8(6), 561–565.
Minden, S. (1987). Patriarchal Designs: The Genetic Engineering of Human
Embryos. In P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth
of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 102–109). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
 References 279

Monash IVF. (2012). History of IVF. Monash IVF Australia. https://monashivf.

com/about-us/history. Accessed 22 Jan 2017.
Monash IVF. (2017). Our Success Rates. Monash IVF Australia. http://monashivf.
com/why-monash/our-success-rates/. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Mondale, N. (1987). Soft Cell. Channel Four, 11 Jan 1988. 23.00 hrs.
Morgan, S. (1984, May 18). Doctor Wants In-Vitro Babies Program Halted.
Sydney Morning Herald, p. 3.
Morris, A., & Braine, N. (2001). Social Movements and Oppositional
Consciousness. In J.  J. Mansbridge & A.  Morris (Eds.), Oppositional
Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (pp.  20–37). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Mulkay, M. J. (1997). The Embryo Research Debate: Science and the Politics of
Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Munro, K. (1991). The Aftermath of the Cervical Cancer Inquiry in New
Zealand: An Antipodal Aberration or Universal Struggle? (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 4(1), 31–39.
Murdolo, A. (1996). Warmth and Unity with All Women?: Historicising Racism
in the Australian Women’s Movement. Feminist Review, 52, 69–86.
Napier, L. (1986). Aims of the Workshop ‘Infertility and Feminists’. Paper given
at Liberation or Loss? Women Act on the New Reproductive Technologies, Australian
National University, 9–11 May 1986. Canberra: Centre for Continuing
Education.
Napier, L. (1989). The Barren Desert Flourishes in Many Ways: From Infertility
to in-Fertility. In R.  Klein (Ed.), Infertility: Women Speak Out About Their
Experience of Reproductive Medicine (pp. 188–197). London: Pandora Press.
NASM. (2017). Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance.
National Academies of Science and Medicine. Washington, DC: National
Academies Press. https://www.nap.edu/read/24623. Accessed 14 Mar 2017
Nathanson, J. (2005). Framing Feminism: The Impact of Collective Action Frames
on the Second Wave Women’s Movement. Paper given at the Annual Meeting of
the International Communication Association, New  York, May 26–30,
2005.
National Right to Life. 2012. National Right to Life. (2012). How the Nation’s
Largest and Most Effective Pro-Life Group Began.  http://nrlc.org/archive/
Factsheets/FS01_NRLCToday.pdf. Accessed 20 Mar 2017.
NHMRC. (1985). Embryo Donation by Uterine Flushing: Interim Report on
Ethical Considerations. National Health and Medical Research Council.
Canberra: Australian Government Pub. Service.
280 References

Norgren, C. (2001). Abortion before Birth Control: The Politics of Reproduction in

Postwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Norsigian, J., Diskin, V., Doress-Worters, P., Pincus, J., Sanford, W., & Swenson,
N. (1999). The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and Our Bodies,
Ourselves: A Brief History and Reflection. http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/
history/impact-and-influence/bwhbc-and-our-bodies-ourselves-a-brief-his-
tory-and-reflection. Accessed 22 Mar 2017.
NPSU, & FSA. (1985). In Vitro Fertilization Pregnancies Australia and New
Zealand 1979–1984. Sydney: National Perinatal Statistics Unit and Fertility
Society of Australia.
O’Brien, M. (1990). Elly. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering:
Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 3(2), 137–142.
Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms. In
H. Roberts (Ed.), Doing Feminist Research (pp. 30–61). London: Routledge.
Oliver, P., & Johnston, H. (2000). What a Good Idea! Frames and Ideologies in
Social Movement Research. Mobilization, 5, 37–54.
Palattiyil, G., Blyth, E., Sidhva, D., & Balakrishnan, G. (2010). Globalization
and Cross-Border Reproductive Services: Ethical Implications of Surrogacy
in India for Social Work. International Social Work, 53(5), 685–699.
Pande, A. (2016). Global Reproductive Inequalities, Neo-Eugenics and
Commercial Surrogacy in India. Current Sociology, 64(2), 244–258.
Parsons, C. D. F. (1990). Drugs, Science and Ethics: Lessons from the Depo-
Provera Story. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 3(2), 101–110.
Patel, V. (1987). Campaign Against Amniocentesis. In K.  Bhate, L.  Menon,
M. Gupte, M. Savara, M. Daswani, P. Prakash, R. Kashyap, & V. Patel (Eds.),
In Search of Our Bodies: A Feminist View on Woman, Health and Reproduction
in India (pp. 70–74). Bombay: Shakti Collective.
Pearson, R., & Jackson, C. (1998). Interrogating Development: Feminism,
Gender and Policy. In C. Jackson & R. Pearson (Eds.), Feminist Visions of
Development: Gender, Analysis and Policy (pp. 1–16). London: Routledge.
Pereira, M. d. M. (2008). The Epistemic Status of Women’s, Gender, Feminist
Studies: Notes for Analysis. In B. Waaldijk, M. Peters, & E. van der Tuin
(Eds.), The Making of European Women’s Studies Vol VIII (pp.  145–156).
Utrecht: ATHENA/Universiteit Utrecht.
Petchesky, R. P. (2004). Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics
of Reproduction. In B. Bennett (Ed.), Abortion (pp. 263–292). Abingdon:
Routledge.
 References 281

Pfeffer, N. (1985). Not So New Technologies. Trouble and Strife, 5, 46–50.

Pimentel, A. C., Jannotti, C. B., Gaudenzi, P., & Teixeira, L. A. (2017). The
Brief Life of Norplant(R) in Brazil: Controversies and Reassemblages Between
Science, Society and State. Ciencia & Saude Coletiva, 22(1), 43–52.
Pincus, J. (2002). How a Group of Friends Transformed Women’s Health. http://
womensenews.org/story/commentary/020313/how-group-friends-trans-
formed-womens-health. Accessed 30 Aug 2017.
Platt, J.  (1981). Evidence and Proof in Documentary Research 1: Some
Specific Problems of Documentary Research. The Sociological Review, 29(1),
31–51.
Polletta, F., & Jasper, J. M. (2001). Collective Identity and Social Movements.
Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 283–305.
Postgate, J. (1995). Eugenics Returns. Biologist, 42(2), 96.
Radford, J. (1995). Rights of Women – Twenty Years of Feminist Activism. In
G. Griffin (Ed.), Feminist Activism in the 1990s (pp. 51–64). London: Taylor
& Francis.
Ramsey, J. (1986). Liberation or Loss? Women Act on the New Reproductive
Technologies, Canberra, 9–11 May 1986 [Report]. Australian Feminist
Studies, 3(Summer), 121–128.
Raymond, J.  (1984). Feminist Ethics, Ecology and Vision. In R.  Arditti,
R. Klein, & S. Minden (Eds.), Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood?
(pp. 427–437). London: Pandora Press.
Raymond, J.  (1986). A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female
Affection. London: The Women’s Press.
Raymond, J.  (1989). In the Matter of Baby M: Judged and Rejudged. In
H.  Patricia Hynes (Ed.), Reconstructing Babylon: Women and Technology
(pp. 103–113). London: Earthscan.
Raymond, J.  G. (1993). Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the
Battle over Women’s Freedom. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Raymond, J.  (2013). Not a Choice, Not a Job: Exposing the Myths About
Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade. Washington, DC: Potomac Books.
RCOG. (1983). Report of the RCOG Ethics Committee on In Vitro Fertilization
and Embryo Replacement or Transfer. Royal College of Obstetricians and
Gynaecologists. London: Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
Reis, A.  R. G. (1987). IVF in Brazil: The Story Told by the Newspapers. In
P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive
and Genetic Progress (pp. 120–132). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
282 References

Reis, A. R. G. (1990). Norplant in Brazil: Implantation Strategy in the Guise of

Scientific Research. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 3(2), 111–118.
Ressler, O. (2000). Die Rote Zora. Art-e-fact. http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a03/lang_
en/art_ressler_en.htm. Accessed 30 Apr 2015.
Rethmann, P. (2006). On Militancy, Sort Of. Cultural Critique, 62, 67–91.
Richardt, N. (2003). A Comparative Analysis of the Embryological Research
Debate in Great Britain and Germany. Social Politics: International Studies in
Gender, State & Society, 10(1), 86–128.
Riegler, J., & Weikert, A. (1988). Product Egg: Egg Selling in an Austrian IVF
Clinic. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 1(3), 221–224.
Riessman, C. K. (1987). When Gender Is Not Enough: Women Interviewing
Women. Gender & Society, 1(2), 172–207.
Roach, S. (1989). New Reproductive Technologies and Legal Reform. (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 2(1), 11–27.
Robertson, J. A. (2004). Reproductive Technology in Germany and the United
States: An Essay in Comparative Law and Bioethics. Columbia Journal of
Transnational Law, 43(1), 189–227.
Robinson, V., & Richardson, D. (1996). Repackaging Women and Feminism.
In D.  Bell & R.  Klein (Eds.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed
(pp. 179–187). Melbourne: Spinifex.
Rogers, A., & Pilgrim, D. (1991). ‘Pulling Down Churches’: Accounting for the
British Mental Health Users’ Movement. Sociology of Health & Illness, 13(2),
129–148.
Rootes, C. (2004). Environmental Movements. In D.  Snow, S.  Soule, &
H. Kriesi (Eds.), Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (pp. 608–640).
Oxford: Blackwell.
Rose, H., & Hanmer, J. (1976). Women’s Liberation, Reproduction, and the
Technological Fix. In D. L. Barker & S. Allen (Eds.), Sexual Divisions and
Society: Process and Change (pp. 199–223). London: Tavistock.
Rose, H. (1987). Hand, Brain and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the
Natural Sciences. In S. Harding & J. O’Barr (Eds.), Sex and Scientific Enquiry
(pp. 265–282). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rote Zora. (1984, June). Resistance Is Possible: Interview with Two Members of
Rote Zora. EMMA. http://www.freilassung.de/otherl/arm/rzora84.htm.
Accessed 21 Oct 2016.
 References 283

Rote Zora. (1993). Mili’s Tanz Auf Dem Eis: Von Pirouetten, Schleifen, Einbrüchen,
Doppelten Saltos Und Dem Versuch, Boden Unter Die Füsse Zu Kriegen [Mili’s
Dance on the Ice: Of Spins, Loops, Dips, Double Somersaults and the
Attempt to Get Some Ground under Your Feet]. Berliner Bündnis für
Freilassung/Berlin Alliance for Liberation. http://www.freilassung.de/div/
texte/rz/milis/milis1.htm. Accessed 3 Nov 2016.
Rowbotham, S., & McCrindle, J.  (1986). More Than Just a Memory: Some
Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike,
1984–85. Feminist Review, 23, 109–124.
Rowland, R. (1982). An Exploratory Study of the Childfree Lifestyle. The
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 18(1), 17–30.
Rowland, R. (1983). Attitudes and Opinions of Donors on an Artificial
Insemination by Donor (Aid) Programme. Clinical Reproduction and Fertility,
2(4), 249–259.
Rowland, R. (1984a). Reproductive Technologies: The Final Solution to the
Woman Question? In R. Arditti, R. Klein, & S. Minden (Eds.), Test-Tube
Women: What Future for Motherhood? (pp. 356–369). London: Pandora Press.
Rowland, R. (1984b). Reproductive Technology [Recording]. Melbourne:
Educational Media Services, Deakin University.
Rowland, R. (1985a). A Child at Any Price?: An Overview of Issues in the Use
of the New Reproductive Technologies, and the Threat to Women. Women’s
Studies International Forum, 8(6), 539–546.
Rowland, R. (1985b). Motherhood, Patriarchal Power, Alienation and the Issue
of ‘Choice’ in Sex Preselection. In G.  Corea, R.  Klein, J.  Hanmer, H.  B.
Holmes, B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond, R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher
(Eds.), Man-Made Women: How Reproductive Technologies Affect Women
(pp. 74–87). London: Hutchinson.
Rowland, R. (1985c). The Social and Psychological Consequences of Secrecy in
Artificial Insemination by Donor (AID) Programmes. Social Science &
Medicine, 21(4), 391–396.
Rowland, R. (1986). Choice or Control? Women and Our Relationship to New
Reproductive Technologies. Paper given at Liberation or Loss? Women Act on
the New Reproductive Technologies, Australian National University, 9–11 May
1986. Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education.
Rowland, R. (1987). Facts, Not Fantasy Visions (Letters). Trouble and Strife, 10,
3–5.
Rowland, R. (1992). Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technologies.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
284 References

Rowland, R. (2015). This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Çanakkale  – İçli Dişli Bir

Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915. Melbourne: Five Islands Press.
Rowland, R., & Klein, R. (1990). Radical Feminism: Critique and Construct.
In S. Gunew (Ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct (pp. 271–303).
London: Routledge.
Rowland, R., & Ruffin, C. (1983). Community Attitudes to Artificial
Insemination by Husband or Donor, In Vitro Fertilization, and Adoption.
Clinical Reproduction and Fertility, 2(3), 195–206.
Roy, J. (2017, April 28). Lamb Fetuses Can Now Grow in Artificial Wombs.
Will Humans Be Next? Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/science/
sciencenow/la-sci-sn-artificial-womb-premature-babies-20170428-story.
html. Accessed 5 Jul 2017.
Rule, P.  C. (2004). Coleridge and Newman: The Centrality of Conscience.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Russell, D. E. H., & Van de Ven, N. (1976). Crimes Against Women: Proceedings
of the International Tribunal. Brussels: Les-Femmes Publishing.
Rutnam, R. (1991). IVF in Australia: Towards a Feminist Technology
Assessment. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 4(2), 93–107.
Safir, M. (2005). How It All Began: The Founding of Women’s Worlds Congress
and International Network. Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress on
Women, Seoul, Korea, June 19th–24th.
Salahuddin, T. (2003, October 19). IVF in Bangladesh: Ray of Hope for Infertile
Couple. The Daily Star, Web Edition Vol 4 (144).  http://www.thedailystar.
net/2003/10/19/d31019610198.htm. Accessed 13 November 2016.
Salomone, J.  (1991). Report on the 6th International Women and Health
Meeting, November 3–9 1990, Manila, Philippines. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 4(1), 77–85.
Sama. (2006). Art and Women: Assistance in Reproduction or Subjugation? New
Delhi: Sama Resource Group for Women and Health. http://www.samawo-
menshealth.in/arts-and-women-assistance-in-reproduction-or-subjugation.
Accessed 16 July 2017.
Sandelowski, M. (1990). Fault Lines: Infertility and Imperiled Sisterhood.
Feminist Studies, 16(1), 33–51.
Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the Oppressed. Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press.
Sarachild, K. (1978). Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon. In Redstockings
(Ed.), Feminist Revolution: An Abridged Edition with Additional Writings
(pp. 144–150). New York: Random House.
 References 285

Sarojini, N.  B., Chakraborty, S., Venkatachalam, D., Bhattacharya, S.,

Kapilashrami, A., & De, R. (2006). Women’s Right to Health. National
Human Rights Commission (India): New Delhi. http://www.rwi.lu.se/
nhridb/asia/india/womens.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2016.
Satzinger, H., & Spallone, P. (1988). Frauen in Auseinandersetszung Mit Gen-
Und Fortpflanzungstechnologien (Women Responding to Genetic and
Reproductive Technologies): A Seminar Held 17–19 June 1988, Berlin.
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 1(3), 313–315.
Sawer, M. (2007). Australia: The Fall of the Femocrat. In J. Outshoorn & J. Kantola
(Eds.), Changing State Feminism (pp. 20–40). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schauble, J.  (1984, June 18). Dilemma over Orphaned Embryos. Sydney
Morning Herald, p. 3.
Schei, B. (1992). The Routine Use of Ultrasound in Antenatal Care: Is There a
Hidden Agenda? (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 5(1), 13–20.
Schleiermacher, S. (1990). Racial Hygiene and Deliberate Parenthood: Two
Sides of Demographer Hans Harmsen’s Population Policy. (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 3(3), 201–210.
Scutt, J. A. (Ed.). (1990). The Baby Machine: Reproductive Technology and the
Commercialisation of Motherhood. London: Merlin Press.
Segal, L. (1983). The Heat in the Kitchen. In S. Hall & M. Jacques (Eds.), The
Politics of Thatcherism (pp. 207–215). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Shapin, S. (1995). Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.
Annual Review of Sociology, 21(1), 289–321.
Sheridan, S. (1990). Feminist Knowledge, Women’s Liberation and Women’s
Studies. In S.  Gunew (Ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct
(pp. 36–55). London: Routledge.
Simon-Kumar, R. (2006). ‘Marketing’ Reproduction? Ideology and Population
Policy in India. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Smelser, N.  J. (1962). Theory of Collective Behavior. London: Routledge &
Keegan Paul.
Snow, D., Burke Rochford, E., Worden, S., & Benford, R. (1986). Frame
Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.
American Sociological Review, 51(4), 464–481.
Solomon, A. (1988). Integrating Infertility Crisis Counselling into Feminist
Practice. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 1(1), 41–49.
286 References

Solomon, A. (1989). Infertility as Crisis: Coping, Surviving – And Thriving. In

R.  Klein (Ed.), Infertility: Women Speak Out About Their Experience of
Reproductive Medicine (pp. 169–187). London: Pandora Press.
Spain. (1986). Report of the General Secretariat, Special Commission for the Study
of Human In Vitro Fertilization and Artificial Insemination.  Congress of
Deputies. Madrid: The Commission.
Spallone, P. (1987). Reproductive Technology and the State: The Warnock Report
and Its Clones. In P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth
of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (pp. 166–183). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Spallone, P. (1989). Beyond Conception: The New Politics of Reproduction. Granby:
Bergin & Garvey Publishers.
Spallone, P. (1992). Generation Games: Genetic Engineering and the Future for
Our Lives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Spallone, P., & Steinberg, D. L. (1987a). International Report. In P. Spallone &
D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic
Progress. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Spallone, P., & Steinberg, D. L. (Eds.). (1987b). Made to Order: The Myth of
Reproductive and Genetic Progress. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Spar, D. (2006). The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the
Commerce of Conception. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Srinivasan, S. (2010). Introduction. In S. Srinivasan (Ed.), Making Babies: Birth
Markets and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in India (pp. x–xli). New Delhi:
Zubaan.
Stanley, L., & Wise, S. (1990). Method, Methodology and Epistemology in
Feminist Research Processes. In L.  Stanley (Ed.), Feminist Praxis: Research,
Theory, and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology (pp. 20–60). London: Routledge.
Stanworth, M.  D. (1987). Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and
Medicine. Cambridge: Polity.
Steinbacher, R. (1985). Sex Choice: Survival and Sisterhood. In G.  Corea,
R. Klein, J. Hanmer, H. B. Holmes, B. Hoskins, M. Kishwar, J. Raymond,
R. Rowland, & R. Steinbacher (Eds.), Man-Made Women: How Reproductive
Technologies Affect Women (pp. 52–64). London: Hutchinson.
Steinberg, D. (1987). Selective Breeding and Social Engineering: Discriminatory
Policies of Access to Artificial Insemination by Donor in Great Britain. In
P. Spallone & D. L. Steinberg (Eds.), Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive
and Genetic Progress (pp. 184–189). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Steinberg, D.  L. (1990). The Depersonalisation of Women Through the
Administration of ‘In Vitro Fertilisation’. In M.  McNeil, I.  Varcoe, &
S.  Yearley (Eds.), The New Reproductive Technologies (pp.  74–122).
Houndmills: The Macmillan Press.
 References 287

Steinberg, D.  L. (1997). Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics.

Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Steptoe, P.  C. (1968). Laparoscopy and Ovulation. The Lancet, 292(7574),
913–913.
Steptoe, P. C., & Edwards, R. G. (1970). Laparoscopic Recovery of Preovulatory
Human Oocytes After Priming of Ovaries with Gonadotrophins. The Lancet,
295(7649), 683–689.
Steptoe, P.  C., Edwards, R.  G., & Purdy, J.  M. (1980). Clinical Aspects of
Pregnancies Established with Cleaving Embryos Grown In Vitro. BJOG: An
International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 87(9), 757–768.
Stop Surrogacy Now. (2015). The Statement. Stop Surrogacy Now. http://www.
stopsurrogacynow.com/the-statement/. Accessed 3 Jun 2017.
Sydney Morning Herald. (1984, June 19). Orphan Embryos Face Uncertain
Legal Future. Sydney Morning Herald, p. 3.
Symposium. (1993). Declaration of the People’s Perspectives on “Population”
Symposium. People’s Perspectives on “Population”, 4&5, 28–31.
Szoke, H. (2003). Australia – A Federated Structure of Statutory Regulation of
Art. In J. Gunning & H. Szoke (Eds.), The Regulation of Assisted Reproductive
Technology (pp. 75–94). Hampshire: Ashgate.
Tarrow, S. (1994). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics
(2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, V. (2007). Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in
Abeyance. In J. Goodwin & J. M. Jasper (Eds.), Social Movements: Critical
Concepts in Sociology, Vol II (pp. 337–359). London: Routledge.
Templeton, A., Van Look, P., Lumsden, M. A., Angell, R., Aitken, J., Duncan,
A. W., & Baird, D. T. (1984). The Recovery of Preovulatory Oocytes Using
a Fixed Schedule of Ovulation Induction and Follicle Aspiration. BJOG: An
International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 91(2), 148–154.
The Economist. (1979, February 3). Test-Tube Babies: Doing What Comes
Naturally – Almost. The Economist, p. 88.
The Times. (1971, March 5). Scientists Develop Baby Sex Tests. The Times
(London), p. 1.
Thompson, C. (2001). Fertile Ground: Feminists Theorise Infertility. In M. C.
Inhorn & F. van Balen (Eds.), Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on
Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies (pp.  52–78). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Trounson, A.  O., Leeton, J.  F., Wood, C., Webb, J., & Wood, J.  (1981).
Pregnancies in Humans by Fertilization In Vitro and Embryo Transfer in the
Controlled Ovulatory Cycle. Science, 212(4495), 681–682.
288 References

Tsuge, A., & Hong, H. (2011). Reconsidering Ethical Issues About “Voluntary
Egg Donors” in Hwang’s Case in Global Context. New Genetics and Society,
30(3), 241–252.
UBINIG. (1991). ‘The Price of Norplant Is Tk.2000! You Cannot Remove It.’
Clients Are Refused Removal in Norplant Trial in Bangladesh. (Issues in)
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist
Analysis, 4(1), 45–46.
UBINIG. (1993a). Comments on Population Discussions at UNCED ‘92.
People’s Perspectives on “Population”, 1, 30–32.
UBINIG. (1993b). From the Editor’s Desk. People’s Perspectives on “Population”,
1, 1.
UBINIG. (2015). About Nayakrishi Andolon. Policy Research for Development
Alternative. http://ubinig.org/index.php/nayakrishidetails/showAerticle/2/8.
Accessed 28 Aug 2017.
Uno, S. (1992). The Oral Contraceptive Pill in Japan. (Issues in) Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(3),
253–256.
Varela, M. J., & Stolcke, V. (1989). The New Spanish Law: A Model for Europe?
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of International
Feminist Analysis, 2(3), 233–238.
Varma, R., & Varma, D. (2005). The Bhopal Disaster of 1984. Bulletin of
Science, Technology & Society, 25(1), 37–45.
Veitch, A. (1984, September 5). Orphan Embryos Adoption Plea by Doctor.
The Guardian, p. 6.
Victoria (Committee to Consider the Social, Ethical, Legal Issues Arising from
In Vitro Fertilization). (1982). Interim Report. Melbourne: Victorian
Government Printing Office.
Victoria (Committee to Consider the Social, Ethical, Legal Issues Arising from
In Vitro Fertilization). (1983). Report on Donor Gametes in IVF. Melbourne:
Victorian Government Printing Office.
Victoria (Committee to Consider the Social, Ethical and Legal Issues Arising
from In Vitro Fertilization). (1984). Report on the Disposition of Embryos
Produced by In Vitro Fertilization. Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing
Office.
Waldschmidt, A. (1992a). “Éprouvette L'éprouvée” or “Test Tube Under Test,”
an International Conference to Critically Assess Reproductive Engineering,
Paris 28–29 June 1991. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering:
Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(1), 75–77.
 References 289

Waldschmidt, A. (1992b). Against Selection of Human Life: People with

Disabilities Oppose Genetic Counselling. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic
Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(2), 155–167.
Walters, L.  R. (1987). Ethics and New Reproductive Technologies: An
International Review of Committee Statements. The Hastings Center Report,
17(3), 3–9.
Walz, K. (1980, October 15). Woman to Bear Son of Single Man. The Associated
Press.
Wan, V. (1989). The Australian Venture Capital Market. Journal of Small Business
Management, 27(3), 75–78.
Warnock, M. (1985). A Question of Life: The Warnock Report on Human
Fertilisation and Embryology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Warren, M.  A. (1988). IVF and Women’s Interests: An Analysis of Feminist
Concerns. Bioethics, 2(1), 37–57.
Watson, J. (1971, May). Moving Toward the Clonal Man. The Atlantic Monthly,
227. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1971/05/moving-
toward-the-clonal-man/5435/. Accessed 22 Feb 2016.
Waugh, J. (1986, May 9). Breeding Money. Business Review Weekly (Australia),
pp. 52–62.
Weikert, A., Riegler, J., & Trallori, L. (1987). Schöne Neue Männerwelt: Beiträge
Zu Gen-Und Fortpflanzungstechnologien. Wein: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik.
West, R. (1984, May 18). IVF Researcher Quits over ‘Reprehensible Techniques’.
The Age (Melbourne), pp. 1–2.
West, R. (1986, May 14). A Growing Sense That We Are No Longer Safe. The
Age (Melbourne).
WGNRR. (2012). Funders. Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights.
http://www.wgnrr.org/funders. Accessed 26 May 2012.
WGNRR. (2014). History. Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights.
http://wgnrr.org/who-we-are/history/. Accessed 26 May 2017.
Whelan, E. (2001). Politics by Other Means: Feminism and Mainstream Science
Studies. The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie,
26(4), 535–581.
Whelehan, I. (1995). Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to “Post-
Feminism”. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Whitlock, F. (1984, May 25). Test-Tube ‘Miracle Workers’ Attacked. The
Australian.
Whittier, N. (1990). Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s
Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
290 References

Winkler, U. (1988). New U.S. Know-How in Frankfurt: A ‘Surrogate Mother’

Agency. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist Analysis, 1(2), 205–207.
Woll, L. (1992). The Effect of Feminist Opposition to Reproductive Technology:
A Case Study in Victoria, Australia. (Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic
Engineering: Journal of International Feminist Analysis, 5(1), 21–38.
Wood, C., & Westmore, A. (1984). Test-Tube Conception. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall.
Wood, C., Leeton, J., Mc Talbot, J., & Trounson, A. O. (1981). Technique for
Collecting Mature Human Oocytes for In Vitro Fertilization. BJOG: An
International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 88(7), 756–760.
Woodhouse, E., Hess, D. J., Breyman, S., & Martin, B. (2002). Science Studies
and Activism: Possibilities and Problems for Reconstructivist Agendas. Social
Studies of Science, 32(2), 297–319.
Wynne, B. (1992). Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and
Public Uptake of Science. Public Understanding of Science, 1(3), 281–304.
Yukako, O. (2008). Gender, Reproductive Rights, and Technology. In J. Chen
(Ed.), Another Japan Is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship
Education (pp. 225–229). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Zarembo, A. (2012, November 19). An Ethics Debate over Embryos on the
Cheap. Los Angeles Times.  http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/19/local/
la-me-embryo-20121120. Accessed 17 May 2017.
 Index1

A Akhter, Farida
Abortion career of, 73–75, 115n2, 234,
and Bhopal, 110 251
as choice, 104, 243 at Comilla (1989), 108–112,
in Eastern Europe, 135 150
of female fetuses, 148, 240 at Comilla (1990), 150, 151,
as feminist topic, 41, 72, 77, 153
115n5, 142, 194 and FINRRAGE, 146, 165,
in Japan, 119n63 181–182, 209
pills for, 204 and IRAGE, 201–202
and protection of embryos, 37, and People’s Perspectives on
46, 78, 79, 94, 98, 101, ‘Population’, 154, 156, 203
103, 116n21 political consciousness of, 112,
ACT UP, 3, 12, 13, 244 148, 231, 232
Agency for Integrated Development- speeches and writings of, 74, 108,
Bangladesh, 156, 172n49 109, 112, 116n10, 151,
AID, see Artificial insemination by 170n24, 181, 202–204
donor Albury, Rebecca, 22n9, 53, 60n31,
Aitken, Jan, 162 95, 119n49, 121n74, 164

1
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2017 291

S. de Saille, Knowledge as Resistance,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1
292 Index
Alternative consciousness, see
Ingalsbee, Timothy;
Oppositional consciousness,
alternative
Alto de Boa Vista Vision Statement,
144, 203
See also FINRRAGE meetings,
Rio (1991)
America, see United States of
America (US)
Amherst (1979), 37–41, 54, 56, 57,
166, 187
Amniocentesis
and Bhopal, 110–111
campaigns against, 148
for sex selection in India, 54, 149
as topic in FINRRAGE, 41, 154,
182
Anschlag-relevante Themen, see
Gen-Archiv (Essen)
Antigena (Switzerland), 134, 155
Anti-pregnancy vaccines, 2, 106,
108, 236, 242
Arditti, Rita, 40, 41, 201
See also Test-Tube Women: What
future for motherhood? (eds.
Arditti, Klein, Minden)
Arksey, Hilary, 206, 208
Artificial conception, see In vitro
fertilisation (IVF)
Artificial insemination by donor
(AID), 48, 49, 52, 70, 84,
118n43
Artificial uterus, 249
Asche, Austin, see Family Law
Council (Australia)
Asian Women Human Rights
Council, 156
Asilomar, 38
Asociacion de Mujeres para la Salud
(Spain), 99
Association for Peruvian Women in
Legal Careers, 239
Australia
feminism in, 45, 50, 53, 91, 92,
120n66
FINRRAGE in, 8, 56, 82,
95–115, 133–147,
160–164, 168, 172n63,
204, 207, 211n6, 231, 234,
238, 250n5
IVF in, 29–31, 36, 46–53, 69,
76, 91–95, 118n46, 191,
193, 201
pronatalism in, 91, 92, 188
regulation of NRT in, 50, 51, 53,
60n31, 92, 103, 120n65,
120n68, 120n71, 250n5,
121n72–n74
Australian Parliamentary Inquiry
into Surrogacy, 250n5
Australia-New Zealand Association
for the Advancement of
Science (ANZAAS)
Congress, 50, 60n27
Austria, 37, 69, 96, 99, 121n82, 238
See also Weikert, Aurelia
Autonomy, 111, 112, 152, 235, 243
B
Baby Machine: Reproductive
technology and the
commercialisation of
motherhood, The (ed. Scutt),
172n57, 191
Bainbridge, Penny, 114, 124n118, 209
Balasubrahmanyam, Vimal, 203–204

Bangladesh
conditions in, 138, 156, 204
IVF in, 171n50
Norplant in, 74–75
population policy in, 109,
115n12, 148
women’s activism in, 75, 114,
123n115, 150, 167, 238
See also Akhter, Farida; UBINIG
Bangladesh Academy for Rural
Development, 109, 150
Barrass, Nancy, 212n9
Beitrage zur Feministischen Theorie
und Praxis, 87, 104,
119n53, 123n95
Belgium, see FINRRAGE meetings,
Brussels (1986)
Benda, Ernst, see Benda Commission
Benda Commission, 86, 87, 91
Beyond Conception: The new politics of
reproduction (Spallone),
192, 207, 210
See also Spallone, Patricia (Pat)
Bhanot, Nalini, 110
Bhopal gas leak, 109–111, 243
Birth control, see Population
control
Bodies in Glass: Genetics, eugenics,
embryo ethics (Steinberg),
42, 199
See also Steinberg, Deborah Lynn
Bourn Hall, 31, 44, 118n46
Bradish, Paula, 83, 189, 206
Brazil
population policy in, 106, 142,
143, 167, 207
reports from, 81–83, 118n40
women’s activism in, 108,
140–142, 156, 203, 238
Index 293
See also FINRRAGE meetings,
Rio (1991); Reis, Ana
Regina Gomes dos
Brazilian Ministry of Health, 83, 207
Brazilian Society for the Advancement
of Science, 143
Britain
early feminist engagement with
NRT in, 8, 31–33, 35,
43–47, 53, 54
feminism in, 54, 76, 77
FINRRAGE in, 43–47, 56, 72,
73, 94, 95, 111, 134
IVF in, 29–32, 35
opposition to FINRRAGE in,
102–104
regulation of NRT in, 43, 94, 95,
200 (see also Human
Fertilization and Embryo
Authority (HFEA, UK);
Warnock Committee)
See also United Kingdom (UK)
British Association of Social Worker’s
Project Group on Assisted
Reproduction (PROGAR),
163, 172n59
British Sociological Association, 197
Brown, Lesley, 47
Brown, Louise, 29, 31, 32, 36, 40,
47, 58n1, 79, 187, 198
Bullard, Linda, 83, 189
Burfoot, Annette
and Canadian Royal Commission
on NRT, 147, 160
and FINRRAGE, 153, 160, 183
writings of, 100, 197–199, 202,
208
Burton, Barbara, 93, 120n68,
120n70
294 Index
C in social movements, 157, 163,
Cairo, see United Nations
International Conference on
Population and Development
(ICPD, Cairo 1994)
Cameron, Debbie, 43
Canadian Royal Commission on
New Reproductive
Technologies, 146, 147, 160
Carson, Rachel, 185, 187
Catholics for a Free Choice, 151
CEDRH, see Human Reproductive
Rights Studies Commission
(CEDRH, Brazil)
Centre for Bioethics and Culture
(US), 164
Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (Birmingham), 196
Choice
constraints on, 104, 107, 112,
113, 152, 194, 242, 243
versus control, 193–194
and NRT, 42–44, 91–93, 95, 97,
164, 198, 242
as a reproductive right, 114, 116,
151
in Southern context, 106, 112,
113, 138, 151
Cloning, 35, 189
Coalition Against Trafficking in
Women (US), 158, 212n13
Cognitive liberation, 15, 228, 230
Cognitive praxis
in epistemic communities,
121n88
of FINRRAGE, 17–19, 137, 139,
163, 165–169, 182, 184,
204, 205, 229–243, 247, 250
245
Cognitive praxis paradigm, 13–15,
157, 168, 169, 223–226,
244–247
Cognitive space
of feminism, 18, 114, 229
of FINRRAGE, 18, 19, 71, 97,
98, 136, 137, 164, 210,
235, 237, 242
for new ideas, 13, 222, 227
liberatory-alternative, 167, 168,
232
Collins, Harry, 206, 207
Committee to Consider the Social,
Ethical and Legal Issues
Arising from In Vitro
Fertilisation (Australia), see
Waller Committee
Conceptive technologies, see In vitro
fertilisation (IVF)
Conference on the New
Reproductive Technologies,
72, 77
Conscienceness, see Oppositional
consciousness
Consciousness raising
in FINRRAGE, 80, 227, 239
and identity politics, 17
in social movements, 89, 227
in the WLM, 19, 113, 227, 230,
231, 233, 239
See also Oppositional
consciousness
Constructivist science studies, see
Science and technology
studies (STS), and
FINRRAGE

Contraception
in developing countries, 72–74,
97, 115n12, 138, 142, 143,
150, 156
FINRRAGE research on, 108,
109, 112, 201, 208, 247
natural methods of, 150–151
and population policy, 102, 148,
154
resistance to, 109, 154, 211n6,
241–243
and state interests, 76, 152, 243
See also Population policy;
individual technologies
Control
exercising through NRT, 42, 150,
195
in FINRRAGE, 114, 137, 201
of knowledge, 12, 49, 232, 233
and male power, 44, 166, 168,
229, 235
of motherhood by the state, 76,
78, 151, 153, 186
of NRT debate by women, 44,
191, 193
over NRT via legislation, 91, 103,
194, 231
of own fertility by women, 32, 33,
103, 151, 193, 243
political consciousness and, 15,
17–19, 166, 228–230
of reproduction through
technology, 33, 86, 110,
151, 186, 189, 192, 249
of science and technology by
women, 103, 106
technology as, 42, 246
over women’s bodies through
NRT, 36, 43, 48, 72, 79,
80, 95, 110, 192, 241, 242
Index 295
women taking back, 39, 46, 73,
95, 190, 232, 234, 243
Corea, Gena
at Amherst (1979), 37–39
in Germany, 92, 186, 187
as journalist, 37, 208, 229
political consciousness of, 232
resistance to surrogacy, 146, 189,
212n7
speaking events, 78, 87, 92, 99,
121n87, 153, 200
in Sweden (1985), 82, 84,
117n35, 188
at Women’s Worlds (1984), 54–56
writings of, 40, 41, 84, 118n42,
186–189, 191, 241 (see also
books by title)
Corral, Thais, 141, 143, 170n20,
170n24, 203
Crawshaw, Marilyn, 163, 172n59,
208, 234
Crowe, Christine, 83, 84, 101,
118n42, 208
writings of, 188, 191, 197, 198,
200
Crowley, Rosemary, 60n31, 119n65
D
Dacach, Solange, 143
Danish Council of Ethics, 210
Daswani, Mona, 87
Davies, David, 78–79
Davis, Kathy, 17, 117, 158, 182, 231
Deakin University, 50, 78, 134, 161
Death of the Female? panel, see Women’s
Worlds (Groningen 1984)
Declaration of Comilla, 145
See also FINRRAGE meetings,
Comilla (1989)
296 Index
Degener, Theresia, 201
Denmark, 82, 200
See also Koch, Lene
Department of Health and Social
Security (DHSS, UK), 43,
59n14
Department of Health, Education
and Welfare (HEW, USA),
36, 46
Depo-Provera, 87, 202, 211n6
Depopulating Bangladesh (Akhter),
115n10, 171n45
Development Alternatives with
Women for a New Era
(DAWN), 152, 154
de Wit, Cynthia, 146, 202, 207
Disability
babies with, 91, 119n63
and Bhopal, 110
and Nazism, 90, 91, 107, 196
rights movements, 91, 107, 167,
201, 243
women and, 44, 82, 84, 88
See also Eugenics
Dixon, Bernard, 42, 59n12
Dumble, Lynette, 204
Dworkin, Andrea, 43, 55
E sanctity of, 71, 79, 91, 98
Earth Summit, see United Nations
Conference on
Environment and
Development (UNCED)
Edwards, Robert, 30, 31, 34, 35, 42,
47, 77, 79, 117n26, 197,
198, 212n12, 213n14
Eggs, see Human ova
Embodied Progress: A cultural account
of assisted conception
(Franklin), 196
Embryo Protection Law 1990
(Germany), 91
See also Germany, NRT in
Embryos
access to, 2, 35, 193, 195
disposition of surplus, 60n31, 79,
98
donation of, 51, 53, 70
engineering of, 2, 21n1, 21n4, 35,
189, 249
experimentation on, 46, 48, 71,
101, 106, 109, 198, 207
flushing of, 51–53
freezing of, 48, 50, 51, 58n1, 80
as global commodity, 2, 21n3,
194, 247, 248
and IVF, 31, 32, 35, 48, 70, 71,
200
moral obligation to, 86, 161, 162
as ‘orphans’, 51–52
personhood of, 46, 103, 202
regulation of research on, 43, 50,
60n31, 78, 79, 83, 86, 87,
91, 92, 94, 103, 104, 200
and right to abortion, 101,
116–117n21
transfer between women, 35, 55,
70, 188, 212n12
verifying health of, 2, 70
Environmental Protection Agency
(USA), 189, 250n6
Epistemic authority, 75, 105
Epistemic community, 122n88, 159
of NRT, 102, 107, 159

Epstein, Steven, see ACT UP
Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction
Technology: Analysis by
Women, see Amherst (1979)
Eugenics
and disability activism, 167, 243
and feminism, 101, 104, 110,
135, 152
in Germany, 82, 88, 89, 91, 107,
167, 243
in Japan, 82, 119–120n63, 167
science and, 34, 73, 199, 241
European Parliament, 98, 122n91,
139
See also FINRRAGE meetings,
Brussels (1986); Green
Alternative European Link
(GRAEL, Belgium)
European Society of Human
Reproduction and
Embryology (ESHRE), 139,
202
European Union Committee on
Legal Affairs and Citizen’s
Rights, 96
Evans, Robert, 206, 207
Ewing, Christine, 122n90, 147,
170n24, 207, 234
Expertise, 3, 4, 42, 52, 121n74,
172n50
in FINRRAGE, 9, 45, 81, 97,
140, 144, 192, 206–211,
233, 239, 245
forms of, 12, 38, 45, 159
interactional, 206, 208
in social movements, 5, 12, 205,
206, 244, 245
Experts
Index 297
all women as, 44, 247
communities of, 121
in FINRRAGE, 8, 97–100
male, 44, 45, 96
NRT as subject for, 40, 46,
59n22, 79
qualified, 139, 205, 236
and social movements, 3, 11, 205,
236, 244
Exploitation of a Desire: Women’s
experiences with in vitro
fertilisation, The (Klein),
121n87, 161, 190
See also Klein, Renate
Eyerman, Ron, 19, 20, 184, 185,
187, 204, 205, 223, 235,
236
See also Cognitive praxis paradigm
F
Family Law Council (Australia), 51,
92, 159, 160
Federal Medical Council (Brazil),
142
Femicide, 149, 234
Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan),
185
Feminism, 227, 230
and FINRRAGE women, 40, 77,
236
forms of, 16–18, 231, 235
global, 18, 134, 168
shifts in, 113, 114, 134, 145, 146,
156–158, 168, 182
waves of, 133, 181, 182, 185
See also Cognitive space, of
feminism; Feminist
298 Index
Feminist
activism, 2, 16, 156–158, 229,
231, 232, 237
critiques of science and
technology, 17, 165, 168,
197, 198, 221, 235
divisions over NRT, 90, 101–103,
106, 109, 135, 164, 191,
195, 213n22
diversity of, in FINRRAGE, 2, 73
engagement with NRT, 2, 3, 8,
31–58, 59n15, 77, 81, 95,
186, 187, 195, 211
epistemology, 11, 15, 226
oppositional consciousness,
16–18, 229
population policy, 151–153, 155
position on NRT, 69, 91, 92, 97,
101, 103, 135–137, 140,
164, 203, 243, 249
resistance to NRT, 79, 82–84, 88,
89, 91, 94, 95, 98, 103,
104, 187–196
scholarship, 4–6, 136, 159, 239
voices, 53, 95, 96, 161–164, 194
writing on NRT, 181–185,
196–200
See also Feminism
Feminist Hearing on Genetic and
Reproductive Technologies, see
FINRRAGE meetings,
Brussels (1986)
Feminist International Network on
New Reproductive
Technologies, see FINNRET
Feminist International Network of
Resistance to Reproductive
and Genetic Engineering,
see FINRRAGE
Ferber, Sarah, 162, 208
Feyerabend, Erika, 103, 106,
123n102, 133, 137, 140,
160, 161, 202, 210
FINNRET
becomes FINRRAGE, 80, 85,
232
in Britain, 72, 76–80
cognitive space of, 71, 232, 242
emergence of, 8, 56, 71, 185–187
workshops at IWHM
(Amsterdam 1984), 72, 73,
141
FINRRAGE
in abeyance, 133, 134, 156–158,
164, 165, 249, 250
and the academy, 168, 196, 197,
207, 208, 233, 234, 247
aims of, 165, 189
and consciousness raising, 97, 227
effect of participation in, 160,
209, 210
foundational texts of, 185–187
importance of friendships in, 57,
114, 167, 239, 240
International Co-ordinating
Group (ICG) of, 134, 144,
145, 147, 155, 160, 206,
210, 238, 240
knowledge practices in, 101, 167,
205, 206, 210, 233
membership of, 22n9, 85,
119n49, 137, 140, 141
and NGO status, 102, 145, 154,
155, 238
origin story of, 39, 80–85, 114
organisational identity of, 114,
139–141, 144, 158, 159,
235–240

perceived impact of, 158–164,
169, 181, 184, 248
positions in, 103, 110, 112,
135–140, 145, 150, 153,
155, 160, 169, 182, 183,
186, 205
technological topics of, 167,
240–243
tensions in, 110, 111, 113, 114,
135–138, 167, 168
women in, 5–9, 57, 75, 76, 90,
97, 98, 103, 108, 138, 148,
149, 205, 210
writing by, 98, 147, 184–211,
213n18 (see also individual
books and authors)
FINRRAGE chapters, See individual
countries and women
FINRRAGE meetings
Berlin (1988), 102
Boldern (1990), 134–141, 147,
169n1, 169n3, 169n9,
172n53
Brussels (1986), 96–99, 102, 107,
147, 209
Comilla (1989), 108–114,
134–139, 143–146,
148–150, 167, 235, 238, 239
Comilla (1990), 150–153
Comilla (1993), 153, 154, 203
Mallorca (1986), 99–102, 206
Rio (1991), 141, 143–146,
170n20, 183
Sweden (1985), 80–86, 118n44,
188, 189, 193, 201, 234,
237, 238
cognitive praxis shaped by, 135,
136, 138, 166, 167, 182, 231
Declaration of Lund, 94, 136,
138, 145, 146
Index 299
meeting women at, 141, 142,
186
organisation of, 56, 78, 81, 99,
100
papers given at, 94, 95, 188,
189, 200 (see also Made to
Order: The myth of
reproductive and genetic
progress (Spallone and
Steinberg))
FINRRAGE News, 146, 207
Finrrage-no-kai, 165, 191, 212n10,
227, 250n2
See also Infertility, self-help groups
FINRRAGE-UBINIG International
Conference, see FINRRAGE
meetings, Comilla (1989)
FINRRAGE-UBINIG Regional
Meetings, see FINRRAGE
meetings, Comilla (1990)
Firestone, Shulamith, 33, 34, 42, 43
First European Feminist Conference on
Reproductive and Genetic
Technology, see FINRRAGE
meetings, Mallorca (1986)
Fonseca, Lariane, 92, 120n66, 147,
160, 209, 221, 238
Ford Foundation, 31, 60n32, 155
Forum Against Oppression of
Women (India), 148
Forum Against Sex Determination
and Sex Pre-Selection
(India), 110
Foster, Patricia, 212n9
France, 37, 69, 70, 82, 139, 140,
240
Franklin, Sarah, 100, 196, 197, 200,
233, 239
writings of, 137, 185, 198, 208,
243
300 Index
FrauenAnstiftung, 141, 143, 146, 203
Frazer, Elizabeth (Liz), 43, 73,
115–116n6
Friedan, Betty, 185, 187
Friends of FINRRAGE, see
Finrrage-no-kai
G 89–91, 105, 123n98, 167,
Gabriela, 152
Gametes, 1, 50, 60n31, 92, 120n68,
247
sale of, 21n3, 98, 160, 192
Gandhi, Indira, 148
Gandhi, Sanjay, 148
Gen-Archiv (Essen), 104–106, 202,
210
General Agreement of Tariff and
Trade, 154
Generation Games: Genetic
engineering and the future for
our lives (Spallone), 193
Genetic engineering
agricultural, 109, 138, 207
discussions in European
Parliament, 96, 98
feminist scholarship on, 182, 185
in Germany, 87–90, 105, 107
and military applications, 83,
189, 207, 242
resistance to, 32, 85, 158, 193,
241
Genetic testing and counselling, 189
Germany
Bonn Congress (1985), 87, 88,
96, 102, 104
FINRRAGE in, 7, 8, 82, 90, 134,
135, 201, 202, 238
Frankfurt Congress (1988),
102–108, 114, 160
Green Party in, 89–91, 160
and Nazi past, 89–91, 186, 211n5
NRT in, 37, 69, 86, 87, 91, 203
political landscape of, 88, 186,
187
resistance to eugenics in, 82,
243
Global reproductive rights
movements, see
Reproductive rights
Global South, 8, 138, 151, 168, 247
See also Latin America, Caribbean,
Asia, Africa and Pacific
(LACAAP) countries; Third
World
Global women’s movement, 153,
155, 167, 246
Goffman, Erving, 14, 16
Google Baby (film), 1
Görlich, Annette, 96, 101, 122n91,
140, 209
Green Alternative European Link
(GRAEL, Belgium), 96,
122n91
See also FINRRAGE meetings,
Brussels (1986)
Groningen (1984), see Women’s
Worlds (1984)
Grossman, Edward, 34, 36
See also Obsolescent Mother, The
(Grossman)
Groupe de recherche et d’evaluation
des pratiques médicales
(GREPM, France),
139–140

Gupta, Jyotsna Agnihotri, 72, 106,
112, 115n7, 121n79, 165,
208, 212n7, 234, 235
H damaged by superovulation,
Habermas, Jurgen, 3, 12, 14, 223,
225, 246
Hands Off Our Ovaries, 172n62,
211n6
Hanisch, Carol, 230, 250n4
Hanmer, Jalna
in Britain, 29, 41, 43–45, 77, 78
emergence of FINNRET, 54–56,
59n15, 60n35
and FINRRAGE, 7, 100, 107,
111, 112, 146, 166, 209,
234
political consciousness of, 166,
232, 233
writings of, 32–36, 56, 149, 187,
191, 193, 201
Harradine, Brian, 92, 103
Hawthorne, Susan, 204
Hickel, Erika, 87, 160
Hidden Malpractice: How American
medicine mistreats women,
The (Corea), 37–38
Hogg, Caroline, 161
Holmes, Helen Bequaert (Becky),
37–41, 54, 72, 202
Hormonal stimulation, 31, 70
Hoskins, Betty, 54, 72
House of Commons (UK), 78, 80
House of Lords (UK), 103
Hubbard, Ruth, 41, 87
Human Embryo Experimentation Bill
1985 (Australia), 60n31,
92, 120n65
Index 301
Human Fertilization and Embryo
Authority (HFEA, UK),
21n1, 46, 119n46, 160,
200
Human ova
213n14
death during retrieval, 83
donation of, 2, 82, 92, 140,
194
for experiments, 30, 32, 35, 36,
78, 103, 164, 172n62, 195,
211n6, 249
process of retrieving, 31–33, 49,
79, 80
Human Reproductive Rights Studies
Commission (CEDRH,
Brazil), 142–143
Hynes, Patricia, 189, 250n6
I
Ince, Susan, 84
India, 112, 121n79, 234
and FINRRAGE activities, 81,
106, 108, 114, 148, 149,
153, 238
first IVF child in, 31, 58n1, 69,
124n108
population control in, 87, 97,
148, 167
sex selection in, 54, 106, 149
surrogacy in, 1, 171n40, 212n7,
248
women’s groups in, 149, 165,
171n40, 238
See also Bhopal gas leak
Indian Council of Medical Research,
58n1, 171n39
302 Index
Infertility
causes and prevention of, 84, 98,
189
counselling for, 162, 166, 190,
201
feminist engagement with, 32,
181
high-tech solutions for, 37, 70
inducing for population
reduction, 57, 109, 149
IVF as treatment for, 31, 71, 80,
95, 161
male, 35, 51, 70, 118n43
self-help groups, 82, 84, 93, 191,
208
women’s experiences of, 8, 83,
161, 190
Infertility (Medical Procedures) Act
1984, 50
See also Australia, regulation of
IVF
Infertility: Women speak out about
their experiences of
reproductive medicine (ed.
Klein), 190, 191, 195
Ingalsbee, Timothy, 15, 16, 222
Institute for Cultural Action
(IDAC), 203
Institute on Women and Technology
(US), 189
International Co-ordinating Group
(ICG), see FINRRAGE
International Public Hearing on
Crimes Against Women
Related to Population
Policies, 156
See also FINRRAGE meetings,
Comilla (1993)
International Tribunal of Crimes
Against Women, 100
International Women and Health
Meetings (IWHM)
Amsterdam 1984, 71–76, 81,
141, 150, 115n5–n8
Manila 1990, 151–152
International Women’s Health
Coalition (IWHC), 155
In vitro fertilisation (IVF)
in cattle, 55, 87
and choice, 92–93
and control, 42, 43, 79, 95, 231
development of, 29–31, 47, 48
doctors, 48, 52, 59n24, 76, 92,
140, 193
as experimentation, 69, 95, 192
feminist engagement with, 32,
43–45, 149, 150, 164,
213n22, 241
feminists for, 39, 42, 45, 78, 80,
92
first children of, 29, 31, 37, 47,
48, 58n1, 69, 70, 123n109,
169n2
lack of follow-up studies, 38, 58,
212n12, 213n14
media coverage of, 47, 50–52, 83,
93–95, 198
process of, 32, 82, 198
public resistance to, 36, 51, 79,
82, 120n71
public scrutiny of, 43, 91, 162,
166
regulation of, 36, 50–52, 78, 86,
87, 91, 94, 97, 98, 100,
103, 189, 231 (see also
individual countries)
research about, 48, 82, 84,
118n42, 196–201
resistance to, 2, 41, 50, 88, 100,
139, 154, 193, 241, 242

success rates, 71, 84, 93, 95, 98,
118n46
as treatment, 3, 70, 71, 171n39,
189
women’s experiences of, 79, 83,
84, 134, 161, 162, 188,
190, 191, 200, 208, 245
See also New reproductive
technologies (NRT)
Ireland, 9, 82, 96
Israel, 60n32, 81, 82, 191
See also Solomon, Alison
Israel, Giselle, 143
(Issues in) Reproductive and Genetic
Engineering: Journal of
International Feminist
Analysis (IRAGE), 102,
122n92, 200–203, 213n22
advisory board and editors of, 7,
201
columns in, 172n57, 207
conference reports in, 104, 152,
202
IVF Australia, see Monash IVF
J and FINRRAGE-Australia, 134,
Jamison, Andrew, 19, 20, 184, 185,
187, 204, 205, 223, 226,
235, 236
See also Cognitive praxis paradigm
Jansen, Sarah, 84, 86, 87
Japan, 82, 201, 234, 250n1
and eugenics, 107, 119n63, 167
FINRRAGE in, 81, 82, 114, 191,
207, 212n10, 227, 238
See also Finrrage-no-kai; Soshiren
Johnston, Ian, 162
Index 303
Jones, Georgeanna, 30, 36, 37,
117n26
Jones, Howard, 30, 36, 37, 71,
117n26
Jones Institute for Reproductive
Medicine (Norfolk,
Virginia), see Jones, Howard
Journal of Feminist Theory and
Practice, see Beitrage zur
Feministischen Theorie und
Praxis
K
Kane, Elizabeth, 202, 212n9
Karkal, Malini, 153, 171n44, 204
Kaupen-Hass, Heidrun, 107
Keane, Noel, 70, 90, 102, 115n2,
202
Kelly, Petra, 89
Kershaw’s Cottage Hospital, 31
Keyser, Loes, 203
Kishwar, Madhu, 54
Klein, Renate
in Britain, 43–45, 77, 78, 103,
234
147, 161–164, 172n62,
231, 232, 250n5
at FINRRAGE meetings, 81, 82,
87, 100, 117n34, 153
at Groningen, 54–56
political consciousness of, 111,
207, 232, 233
writings of, 59n20, 76, 104, 106,
109, 155, 156, 172n62,
188, 200, 201, 204, 213n14
(see also individual books)
304 Index
Knowledge
access to, 47, 72, 73, 241, 242
credibility of holder of, 13, 98,
161, 205, 244, 245
embodied, 75, 151, 232
and evidence, 122n88, 161
FINRRAGE and collective, 9,
56–58, 95, 101, 141, 142,
161–163, 183, 195, 203,
206–210, 232–235
formal production of, 75, 208,
233
forms of, 3, 6, 14, 41, 75, 86,
106, 206–209, 237
increasing, generating, building,
39, 44, 45, 71, 97, 108,
139, 166, 201, 249
practices in FINRRAGE, 111,
133, 138, 139, 187–189,
239, 240, 246, 247
radicalisation through, 41, 141,
229
as resistance, 167, 182, 196, 229,
243
about science and medicine, 32,
38, 231
scientific, 3, 4, 10, 12, 13, 32,
205, 225, 235, 244
in social movements, 3, 4, 11–16,
19, 105, 123, 137, 161,
166, 199, 205, 222–228,
230, 244–248 (see also
Cognitive praxis)
sociology of scientific, 10, 224,
225
as strategy in FINRRAGE, 82,
98, 99, 165, 167
warranting of, 6, 13, 84, 135,
227, 230, 233, 234
from women’s experience, 3–6,
136, 138, 144, 227, 230,
231, 233, 238, 239, 249,
251n7
Koch, Lene, 100, 135, 137, 200,
208, 210, 213n22, 234
Koval, Ramona, 160, 191
Krannich, Margret, 96, 101,
122n91, 140, 209
Kuhn, Thomas, 205, 225
Kumar, Anand, 58n1, 124n109, 149
Kumar, Corinne, 170n24
L
Laborie, Francoise, 139–140
Laparoscopy, 30, 70, 83
Lasch, Christopher, 36
Latin America, Caribbean, Asia,
Africa and Pacific
(LACAAP) countries, 153
See also Global South
Latin American and Caribbean
Women’s Health Network,
155
Lavage, see Embryos, flushing of
Law Reform Committee of the
Family Law Council
(Australia), see Family Law
Council
Leeton, John, 30, 47, 59n24
Liberation or Loss? Women act on the
new reproductive technologies
(Canberra 1986), 92, 99,
162
Lingam, Lakshmi, 149
Living Laboratories: Women and
reproductive technologies
(Rowland), 193–194

Lublin, Nancy, 39, 211n3
Lund, see FINRRAGE meetings,
Sweden (1985)
M See also Test-Tube Women: What
Made to Order: The myth of
reproductive and genetic
progress (Spallone and
Steinberg), 85, 117n34,
118n44, 188, 189
Making of Oppositional Consciousness,
The (Mansbridge), see
Mansbridge, Jane
Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves, The
(Davis), see Davis, Kathy
Man-Made Women: How new
reproductive technologies
affect women (Corea et al.),
56, 72, 188
Mansbridge, Jane, 15–17, 227, 228,
236
Matter of Life, A (Edwards and
Steptoe 1980), 29–31, 79,
80, 198
Mazhar, Farhad, 153, 203
McBain, John, 30, 59n24
McNeil, Maureen, 31, 185, 197,
213n18
Medical Research Council (UK), 31
Medical Tribune, 84
Merchant, Carolyn, 203
Merton, Robert, 224, 226, 233
Mies, Maria
career of, 6, 112, 136, 233, 235,
250
and FINRRAGE, 1, 85, 87, 153,
170n24, 209
Index 305
political consciousness of, 111,
232
writings of, 109, 124n111, 145,
188, 203, 251n7
Minden, Shelley, 40, 41, 83, 188
future for motherhood? (eds.
Arditti, Klein and Minden)
Monash IVF, 47–51, 70, 79, 83,
116n19, 118n46, 120n72,
191
as IVF Australia, 93, 94, 121n73
Monash University, 47, 93, 94, 191,
202
See also Monash IVF
Morgan, Robin, 37
Motherhood, 34, 90, 101, 230
social pressure towards, 45, 76,
97, 164, 166, 198, 242
Mother Machine: Reproductive
technologies from artificial
insemination to artificial
wombs, The (Corea), 37,
186–188, 209, 211n4, 232,
241, 249
Movement intellectuals, 13, 186,
204–211, 244, 245
Munoz, Alejandra, 212n9
N
Nagaoki, Satoko, 153, 165, 204,
207, 212n10, 233
See also Japan; Soshiren (Japan)
Napier, Lindsay, 190, 191
Narigrantha Prabartana, 204
National Bioethics Consultative
Committee (Australia), 94
306 Index

National Coalition Against resistance to, 74, 77, 97, 104,

Surrogacy (US), 146, 212n9 165, 187, 190, 229, 232,
National Feminist Network on New 233, 241
Reproductive Technology, See also Contraception; In vitro
see Australia, FINRRAGE in fertilisation (IVF);
National Health and Medical individual technologies
Research Council New South Wales Women’s Advisory
(NHMRC, Australia), 51, Council, 94
53 Nogerete (Switzerland), 134
National Health Service (NHS, UK), Non-Aligned Women’s Movement of
31, 78, 209 Greece, 238
National Perinatal Statistics Unit Norplant
(NPSU, Australia), 93 in Bangladesh, 75, 108, 109,
National Science Foundation, 37, 116n10, 204
60n32 in Brazil, 142, 143, 207
National Women’s Studies international campaigns against,
Association, 202 108, 211n6, 236
Nayakrishi, Andolon, 124n115,
251n7
New Jersey Supreme Court, 212n8 O
New Reproductive Technologies (eds. Oakley, Ann, 4–5
McNeil, Varcoe, and O’Brien, Mary, 199
Yearley), 197 Obsolescent Mother, The (Grossman),
New reproductive technologies 34
(NRT) off our backs, 8
affect on all women of, 72, 73, Ohana, Graça, 143
243 Oldham Area Health Authority, 31
ethical, legal and social Oliveira, Rosiska Darcy de, 153,
implications of, 58, 159 170n24, 203
feminist engagement with, 43, 53, Oppositional consciousness
54, 56, 57, 72, 81, 135, alternative, 35, 36, 85
164, 186 as conscienceness, 19, 20, 22n10,
feminist writing on, 40, 182–184, 76, 136, 163, 228, 229,
186, 192–200 232, 243
in East/West, North/South, 109, definitions of, 16–20, 229
149 forms in FINRRAGE, 95, 136,
epistemic community around, 166–168, 226, 227,
100–102, 107 231–235, 242, 243
knowledge about, 3, 4, 40, 58, egalitarian, 39, 45, 157, 239, 245
165, 166, 169 and identity politics, 16, 17, 113

liberatory, 39, 89, 113, 153, 158,
191, 226
liberatory-alternative, 111, 113,
237, 242
relationship to control, 17, 166,
229
Orland, Barbara, 202–203
Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS,
Boston Women’s Health
Collective), 114, 158, 187,
230, 231
See also Davis, Kathy
Overseas Development
Administration (UK), 156
P 155
Palacios, Marcelo, 100
Pappert, Ann, 190
Pareda, Sixto, 100
Parliamentary Inquiry into Surrogacy
(Australia), 250n5
Parliament of Australia, 92, 94, 103,
250n5
Parliament of Germany (Bundestag),
87, 90
Parliament of the United Kingdom,
46, 54, 78, 80, 94, 95,
117n28, 198
Patel, Vibhuti, 106, 148, 149, 209,
234
Penselin, Ulla, 105
See also Rote Zora
People’s Health Network (India),
153
People’s Perspectives on ‘Population’
(periodical), 153, 155, 203,
204
Index 307
People’s Perspectives on ‘Population’
Symposium, see FINRRAGE
meetings, Comilla (1993)
Pfeffer, Naomi, 32
Philippines Organising Committee
Coalition, 151
Policy Research for Development
Alternative (Bangladesh), see
UBINIG
Politics of Innovation: The discovery,
dissemination and regulation
of in vitro fertilisation in
Britain, The (Burfoot),
199
Population control
coercive policies for, 73, 144, 154,
FINRRAGE research on, 73, 101,
108, 109, 142, 146, 204
embodied perspectives on, 73
methods of, 87, 97, 156, 204
Population Council, 155
Population policy
in Bangladesh, 73, 74, 76, 211n6
donor organisations and, 112,
148
feminist, 152, 154, 155
in India, 148
in Japan, 119n63
mainstream, 73, 74, 155, 170n20
resistance to, 88, 203, 211n6
as topic for FINRRAGE, 167,
247
Postgate, John, 34
Powell, Enoch, see Unborn Children
Protection Bill
Preimplantation (genetic) diagnosis,
35, 82, 91, 167, 189, 242
308 Index
Prenatal diagnosis
in Germany, 91, 104, 167, 203
in India, 109–111, 135
in Japan, 82, 167, 208
for sex determination, 33, 109
Professionalisation
and activism, 158, 159, 233, 236,
246
and FINRRAGE, 158, 159, 168,
246
and social movement theory, 233,
236, 246
Project Group on Assisted
Reproduction (PROGAR),
163, 172n59
Protiroadh/Resistance Network
(Bangladesh), 150, 204
Q Ecology (India), 153
Queen Victoria Medical Centre
(QVMC, Australia), 47–49,
52, 162, 244
Qureshi, Sabera, 150
R Right-to-life movements, 36, 46, 51,
Rans, Martha, 170n24
Raymond, Janice
at Amherst, 37–39
career of, 37, 40, 41, 158, 208,
212–213n13
in FINRRAGE, 77, 92, 146, 167
at Groningen, 54, 56, 57
political consciousness of,
232–233
writings of, 43, 123n94, 189,
194, 195, 201, 202, 204
Reagan, Ronald (President), 36
Reconstructing Babylon: Women and
technology (ed. Hynes), 189
Rede de Defensa da Espécie Humana
(REDEH), 143, 146,
170n20, 203
Reed, Candice, 47, 162
See also Australia, IVF in
Reis, Ana Regina Gomes dos
in Brazil, 83, 106, 140–143, 207
in FINRRAGE, 83, 106, 138,
170n24, 182, 186, 240
organising Rio, 138, 141, 143,
144, 146, 203
Reproductive Brothel, The (Corea), 54,
87, 188
Reproductive rights, 41, 56, 114,
115n5, 142, 151
Research Foundation for Science and
Resource mobilization theory
(RMT), 222, 223, 226
Richardson, Jo, 80
Riegler, Johanna, 99, 121n82, 140,
200
Rights of Women (UK), 43, 77
71, 188
Rivkin, Jeremy, 146
Rose, Hilary, 4, 32–35, 56
Rote Zora, 88, 89, 104, 105,
119n57, 123n102
See also Penselin, Ulla; Strobl,
Ingrid
Rowland, Robyn
in Britain, 78, 103, 116–117n21,
234
expertise on IVF of, 208, 245

and Family Law Council, 51, 92,
159
in FINRRAGE, 7, 69, 77–79, 82,
120n66, 134, 140, 147,
160, 161, 163
at Groningen, 54–56
political consciousness of, 161,
231–233
research on AID, 48–50, 52,
118n43
resignation from ethics
committee, 49–53, 59n22,
59n24, 77, 116n19, 244
writings of, 54, 91, 92, 111, 188,
189, 193–195, 201, 250n5
Royal Commission on New
Reproductive Technologies
(Canada), 146, 147, 160
Royal Women’s Hospital (RWH,
Australia), 47, 48, 162
RU 486, 204, 211n6
S and social movement studies, 3, 4,
Saheli (India), 110
Sama (India), 149, 150, 164,
171n40
Sandoval, Chela, 16–17
Sarachild, Kathie, 230
Satzinger, Helga, 87–90, 207, 248
Scarlet Woman, 32
Schleiermacher, Sabine, 107
Science
constructivist approaches to, 14,
182, 224–226, 235
disillusion with, 40, 41, 233
feminist critique of, 17, 53, 106,
168, 197, 221, 242
Index 309
and FINRRAGE women, 83, 96,
101, 206–208, 233, 234,
239
and Nazism, 90, 107
normative, 10–13
of NRT, 4, 29, 30, 39, 69, 194,
195
as progress, 46, 71, 87, 246
and the public, 11, 44, 46, 88
and social movements, 13, 14,
205, 223, 245
and society, 3, 33, 90, 165, 192,
235
as value-free and neutral, 3, 102,
196, 246
women’s bodies used for, 30, 36,
43, 164, 189, 192, 211n6
Science and technology studies
(STS), 15
feminist contribution to, 3, 4, 17,
183, 197, 198
and FINRRAGE, 183, 184, 199,
233, 234
12, 224, 235, 236
Science for the People, 41, 88
Scientific freedom, 36, 192
Scientific knowledge, see Knowledge,
scientific
Scutt, Jocelynne, 163, 172n57, 191,
202, 208
Second International Interdisciplinary
Congress of Women, see
Women’s Worlds (Groningen
1984)
Self-determination, 101, 104, 106,
111, 113, 114, 150, 152,
158, 210, 243
310 Index
Senate Select Committee on Human
Embryo Experimentation
(Australia), 160
Sex determination, 37, 167
See also Sex selection
Sex selection, 33, 36, 44, 167
in India, 106, 109, 111, 148, 149,
171n40
See also Sex determination
Shakti Collective (India), 149
Shiva, Vandana, 153, 203
Silent Spring, The (Carson), 185
Skaggs Foundation, 201
Smelser, Neil, 13, 221, 222, 225,
244
Social movements, 204, 223
difficulty in defining, 236, 244
as knowledge-producers, 226,
244, 245
and oppositional consciousness,
227–228
and science, 12, 13, 225, 235
study of knowledge in, 3, 10–15,
184, 222, 223
Social Movements: A cognitive
approach (Eyerman and
Jamison), see Cognitive
praxis paradigm
Social movement theory (SMT), 3,
11, 12, 205, 222, 225, 244
Society for the Protection of the
Unborn Child (SPUC), 78
Solomon, Alison, 190, 191
See also Israel
Soshiren (Japan), 119n63, 165, 191,
207, 212n10
Spallone, Patricia (Pat), 136, 137,
201, 207, 234
writings of, 85, 98, 189, 192,
193, 196, 200, 210, 212n12
Spanish Parliamentary Commission
for IVF, 100
Spare Rib, 8, 45
Spender, Dale, 40
Sperm donation, 33, 48, 120n68,
190
Spinifex Press, 204
Steinberg, Deborah Lynn, 84, 85,
100, 134, 197–199
Steinem, Gloria, 37
Steptoe, Patrick C., 30, 31, 34, 35,
42, 47, 77, 79, 198
Stichting Rhea (Netherlands), 238
Stolcke, Verena, 99, 103
Strobl, Ingrid, 105
See also Rote Zora
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The
(Kuhn), see Kuhn, Thomas
Stop Surrogacy Now, 172n62
Superovulation, 48, 79, 162, 201,
213n14
Surrogacy
in Australia, 50, 51, 152, 173n63,
250n5
campaigns against, 146, 173n62,
202, 211n6, 212n9
commercial, 51, 70, 90, 98, 108,
160, 164, 189, 190, 194
enforceability of contracts, 90,
115n2, 249
feminist support for, 45, 92
in Germany, 90–91
in India, 1, 171n40, 212n7, 248
in the US, 70, 90 (see also Keane,
Noel; Whitehead, Mary
Beth)

T population policy in, 97, 108,
Taboada, Leonore, 99, 100, 209
Technologies of confirmation, 167,
189, 196, 241
See also Amniocentesis;
Preimplantation (genetic)
diagnosis; Prenatal diagnosis
Technology, 36, 106, 113, 154
as liberation from childbirth,
33–34
as neutral, 11, 15, 17, 42, 101,
102, 168, 182
and society, 3, 44, 192, 237
as a tool of domination, 90,
166
See also In vitro fertilisation (IVF);
New reproductive
technologies (NRT)
Terra Femina (Brazil), 156, 203
Test-Tube Under Test (Éprouvette
l’éprouvée), see FINRRAGE
meetings, Paris (1991)
Test-Tube Women: What future for
motherhood? (eds. Arditti,
Klein and Minden)
influence of, 54, 56, 74, 167,
172n57, 185, 186, 212n10,
232
writing of, 40–42, 78, 87, 189,
190
Thatcher, Prime Minister Margaret,
76–77
Theories of Women’s Studies (Bowles
and Klein), 40
Third party reproduction, 51, 194,
248
See also individual technologies
Third World, 16, 55, 72, 73, 89
Index 311
112, 203
women, 55, 72, 73, 188
women in FINRRAGE, 75, 86,
99
See also Global South
Third World Network (Malaysia),
153
Tonti-Filippini, Nicholas, 52, 161
Trafficking, 89, 159, 194, 213n13
Tribunal of Medical Crimes Against
Women, 100, 107, 147
Trouble and Strife, 8, 32, 45, 103
Trounson, Alan, 30, 48, 59n24, 83,
116n19, 188
Tsuge, Azumi, 165, 195, 208,
212n10, 250n1
U
UBINIG
and FINRRAGE, 123n108, 146,
152, 153, 156, 165, 236,
238
as research organisation, 73–75,
112, 115n9, 123n115, 203,
204, 211n6
See also Akhter, Farida; FINRRAGE
meetings, Comilla
Ullerstam, Martha, 56
Unborn Children Protection Bill, 103
Union Carbide, 109–110
United Kingdom (UK), 7, 8, 96,
191, 197
IVF in, 31, 36, 69, 169
regulation in, 21n1, 43, 160,
172n59, 198
See also Britain
312 Index
United Nations Conference on
Environment and
Development (UNCED),
144, 170n22
United Nations Decade for Women
(1975–1985), 151, 155,
156
United Nations Fund for Population
Activities (UNFPA), 155
United Nations International
Conference on Population
and Development (ICPD,
Cairo 1994), 144–146,
151–156, 158, 203, 240,
246
Université des Femmes, 96
Unnayan Bikalper Nitinirdharoni
Gobeshona, see UBINIG
United States of America (US)
feminism in, 16, 158
feminist engagement with NRT
in, 41, 56, 146, 186, 187
NRT in, 36, 37, 93, 94, 189
political context of, 37, 182, 223,
224, 232 (see also Amherst
(1979))
United States Agency for
International Development
(USAID), 155
US National Academies of Science
and Medicine, 21n4
V Germany, Bonn Congress
Vandelac, Louise, 139, 140, 146,
160, 240
Victorian Law Reform Committee
(Australia), 81
Victorian Standing Review and
Advisory Committee on
Infertility (VSRACI), 50,
161, 162
Voluntary Licensing Authority (UK),
46
W
Wagner, Marsden, 100, 102,
122n87, 139
Waldschmidt, Anne, 139, 201
Waller, Louis, see Waller Committee
Waller Committee, 50–52, 92,
120n68, 162
Warnock, Dame Mary, see Warnock
Committee
Warnock Committee, 43–46, 59n15,
69, 77–80, 98, 198
Watson, James, 35
Weikert, Aurelia, 99, 121n82, 140,
199, 200, 213n21
Whitehead, Mary Beth, 115n2, 189,
212n8, 212n9
See also Surrogacy
Wilkens, Linda, 72, 100, 134
Winkler, Ute, 170n24
Women Against Gene and
Reproductive Technologies, see
Germany, Frankfurt
Congress (1988)
Women Against Genetic and
Reproductive Engineering, see
(1985)
Women Against Pit Closures, 76
Women and Labour conference
(Australia), 91–92

Women as Wombs: Reproductive
technologies and the battle
over women’s freedom
(Raymond), 194, 196,
212n13
Women in Medicine (UK), 43,
59n15, 77
Women, Procreation, and
Environment, see
FINRRAGE meetings, Rio
(1991)
Women’s Centre (Bochum), 104
Women’s Declaration on Population
Policies, 155
Women’s Emergency Conference on the
New Reproductive
Technologies, see
FINRRAGE meetings,
Sweden (1985)
Women’s Global Network for
Reproductive Rights
(WGNRR), 115n5,
150–152, 158
Women’s Health Centre (Frankfurt),
104
Women’s health movement, 57, 111,
149, 150, 158, 231, 243
Women’s liberation movement
(WLM)
and consciousness-raising, 19, 56,
227, 230
influence on FINRRAGE, 85,
113, 227, 239
Index 313
legacy of, 16, 106
Women’s Reproductive Rights
Campaign (WRRC, UK),
43, 45
Women’s Rights Junior Ministry
(France), 139
Women’s studies, 4, 40, 60n32, 77,
157, 235
and FINRRAGE, 113, 200, 233,
234, 238
Women’s Studies International Forum
(WSIF), 40, 42, 188, 201
Women’s Worlds (Groningen 1984),
60n32, 81, 92, 100,
116n19, 121n82
‘Death of the Female?’ panel at,
54–58, 182, 183
emergence of FINRRET from,
71, 72, 185–187, 242
proceedings of (see Man-Made
Women: How new
reproductive technologies
affect women (Corea et al.))
Wood, Carl, 47–51, 59n24, 93, 94,
188
World Bank, 74, 154, 155
World Health Organisation (WHO),
100, 122n87, 139
Z
Zakharov, Olive, 60n31, 120n65
Zmroczek, Christine, 45