UCLA Center for the Study of Women

At the same moment President Obama affirmed that “government should not intrude on our most private family matters,” Amy Agigian, this year’s invited speaker for the CSW Annual Roe v. Wade lecture, brought to light for her audience the near-impossibility of either privacy or choice for women in an era of assistive reproductive technology. Government policies regulate women’s fertility and their access to fertility through interlocking webs of social and biological factors, creating double-binds both for women who need fertility and for women who provide fertility. Agigian argued that structural inequalities linked to race, gender, class, and location exacerbate biological factors that negatively impact fertility, such as age and health, and that these combine to knit women together not by choice, but rather, through lack of choice. Commenting on President Obama’s statement, Agigian observed that it is heartening to have a president who is capable of uttering the phrase “reproductive choice.” Yet, as Agigian explicated upon in her talk, “Ties That Double-Bind Us: Feminism and the Fertility Industry,” both “privacy” and “choice” are complicated matters for women who are or wish to become mothers in an era of assistive reproductive technology.