Selective Termination of Pregnancy and Women's Reproductive Autonomy

Abstract

The "demand" for selective termination of pregnancy is a socially constructed response to prior medical interventions in women's reproductive processes, themselves dependent on cultural views of infertility...Thus, the technological "solutions" to some forms of female infertility create an additional problem of female hyperfertility -- to which a further technological "solution" of selective termination is then offered. Women's so-called "demand" for selective termination of pregnancy is not a primordial expression of individual need, but a socially constructed response to prior medical interventions...Fetuses do not acquire a right, either collectively or individually, to use a woman's uterus simply because there are several of them present simultaneously. Even if a woman is willingly and happily pregnant she does not surrender her entitlement to bodily self-determination, and she does not, specifically, surrender her entitlement to determine how many....