Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Gender Equality
- Introduction
- PART I CONSTITUTIONAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART II POLITICAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART III SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART IV SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE CITIZENSHIP
- 13 Sexual Citizens: Freedom, Vibrators, and Belonging
- 14 Feminism, Queer Theory, and Sexual Citizenship
- 15 Infertility, Social Justice, and Equal Citizenship
- 16 Reproductive Rights and the Reproduction of Gender
- PART V GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- Suggested Readings
- Index
- References
15 - Infertility, Social Justice, and Equal Citizenship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Gender Equality
- Introduction
- PART I CONSTITUTIONAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART II POLITICAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART III SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART IV SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE CITIZENSHIP
- 13 Sexual Citizens: Freedom, Vibrators, and Belonging
- 14 Feminism, Queer Theory, and Sexual Citizenship
- 15 Infertility, Social Justice, and Equal Citizenship
- 16 Reproductive Rights and the Reproduction of Gender
- PART V GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- Suggested Readings
- Index
- References
Summary
I anticipate that the title of this chapter may be puzzling to many readers. Although infertility creates differences – inequalities – in people's opportunities to reproduce, these differences appear to be a misfortune, a source of private sorrow for those who wish to have children but not a matter to which considerations of justice or citizenship apply. Justice, after all, pertains not to the givenness of biology, but to social and political arrangements that are under human control. And citizenship has to do with a public status whose connection to the intimacy of reproductive life seems remote at best. But discourse that talks about infertility simply as a medical disability obscures the social, economic, and political factors that contribute both to the variations in the incidence of infertility and to the unequal resources available to different sectors of the population in attempting to overcome infertility. Nancy Hirschmann makes a similar observation about the discourses surrounding disability: a medical model of disability “conceptualiz[es] disability as a unique and discrete problem of particular individuals,” while a social model of disability “views disability as a problem created by society,” one that “encode[s] hierarchies of power and privilege.” Neither disability nor infertility, however, is simply a piece of personal bad luck whose remediation is the responsibility solely of the individual. Differences in the occurrence of and ability to treat infertility, combined with other differences in reproductive life influenced by state action, deeply implicate issues of both social justice and equal citizenship.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gender EqualityDimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship, pp. 327 - 344Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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