area of discourse on what women are for: surrogate motherhood. A
man, married to an infertile woman or on his own, wants a baby;
he buys the egg and the use of the womb of a surrogate mother— a
woman who w ill accept the introjection of his sperm through artificial insemination, gestate and give birth to what is contractually established as his child. In vitro fertilization— in which the egg is
extracted from a woman surgically, fertilized in a petri dish, then
vaginally introjected into the female— expands the possibilities
of surrogate motherhood. The uterus is exempt from the immune
response. Scientists already are able to remove the egg of one
woman, fertilize it outside her body, then introduce it into a second woman’s uterus, where it will gestate. * T hey have not done so, but there is no technological barrier to doing so. These two
reproductive technologies— artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization— enable women to sell their wombs within the terms of the brothel model. Motherhood is becoming a new branch of
female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to
the womb for experimentation and for power. A doctor can be the
agent of fertilization; he can dominate and control conception and
* According to Gena Corea, an expert in these technologies and their
effects on women, “men are hoping to fertilize an egg
body (in vivo), flush it out and then transfer that embryo to another
woman.
1982. The pure sadism of this seems outstanding.
reproduction. Women can sell reproductive capacities the same
way old-time prostitutes sold sexual ones but without the stigma of
whoring because there is no penile intrusion. It is the womb, not
the vagina, that is being bought; this is not sex, it is reproduction.
The arguments as to the social and moral appropriateness of this
new kind of sale simply reiterate the view of female will found in
discussions of prostitution: does the state have a right to interfere
with this exercise of individual female will (in selling use of the
womb)? if a woman wants to sell the use of her womb in an explicit
commercial transaction, what right has the state to deny her this
proper exercise of femininity in the marketplace? Again, the state
has constructed the social, economic, and political situation in
which the sale of some sexual or reproductive capacity is necessary
to the survival of women; and yet the selling is seen to be an act of
individual w ill—the only kind of assertion of individual will in
women that is vigorously defended as a matter of course by most of
those who pontificate on female freedom. The state denies women
a host of other possibilities, from education to jobs to equal rights
before the law to sexual self-determination in marriage; but it is
state intrusion into her selling of sex or a sex-class-specific capacity
that provokes a defense of her will, her right, her individual self—
defined strictly in terms of the will to sell what is appropriate for
females to sell.
This individual woman is a fiction—as is her w ill—since individuality is precisely what women are denied when they are defined and used as a sex class. As long as issues of female sexual and reproductive destiny are posed as if they are resolved by individuals as individuals, there is no way to confront the actual conditions that perpetuate the sexual exploitation of women. Women by
definition are condemned to a predetermined status, role, and function. In terms of prostitution, Josephine Butler, a nineteenth-century crusader against prostitution, explained the obvious
implications of its sex-based nature:
M y principle has always been to let individuals alone, not to
pursue them with any outward punishment, nor drive them
the desire of making money, sets up a house in which women
are sold to m en . 12
This is the opposite of what the state does when prostitution is
