The problem with talking about IVF is that anyone who knows anything about it has lived their experience with some degree of trauma.
So reports appearing this week proposing increased access to IVF as a means to solve Australia’s declining fertility “problem” hit in the tenderest part of the body. It’s the bit that may not hold a baby but carries a deep awareness of patriarchal values. Greg Hunt – former health minister in the Coalition government – is heading a “sweeping review” of the conspicuously unsexy “national fertility policy” and announcements have been made.
Hunt was always a progressive holdout in the increasingly conservative western centre-right movement where he has spent his political career; I, as a feminist, wholeheartedly support the practical recommendations of his review. He has identified that the 40 state and territory IVF-related laws intersect to structuralise discrimination as well as inefficiency. The review recommends establishing uniform national fertility law, guaranteeing equal rights for same-sex and single-by-choice birthing parents and ditching the ridiculous must-be-unpregnantly-banged-for-a-year current definition of “infertility” (yes, true). It also proposes an expansion of reproductive health services and removing economic barriers to accessing reproductive care.
This should be unqualified good news – especially in a week where Hunt’s old US confreres in the Republican party have used their Senate numbers to block a bill package from the Democratic party called “the right to IVF act”. The ideological foundation to Republican opponents seems to be a conviction that IVF insults God by expanding a role for science in conception, destroys some unformed embryos they insist are people, affirms the “non-traditional” family structures they don’t like and – perhaps most dastardly – challenges limits on gendered opportunities in life they would prefer to maintain.
Happily, in Australia, we’re not like that. Expanding IVF access – yes, America, even to LGBTQ+ prospective parents and single people who may or may not own cats – has near-universal electoral support.
Yet the way the recommendations of Hunt’s review have been framed have that unmistakable fresh scent of old patriarchy. The Sydney Morning Herald reported Hunt’s recommendation announcement not with a celebration of the advancement of human rights but with a warning that “Australia’s birthrate has halved in 60 years”, declining from 3.5 births for each birthing parent in 1960 to 1.63 in 2022. It then noted the “median age of mothers has jumped” from 25.4 in 1971 to 31.9 in 2022. Within the term “emerging fertility problem” – used to headline the article – lie two unspoken assumptions that indicate that even the appearance of progress on reproductive rights remains ideologically entwined with the present rightwing madness in the US.
The first assumption is that declining fertility is a “problem”. As I’ve written before, it’s a problem to finance bros modelling the future of capitalism; they’re well aware that declining populations shrink the size of future markets to sell stuff to. Reducing the number of available workers also makes workers realise their true market value, obliging profiteers to share more of the good stuff with their employees. It’s an economic lesson the west learned in the wake of the plague.
The second assumption is – just one more time – that women’s choices are to blame. It’s no feminist fun to consider that queer, trans or single people in our Australian sisterhood are only receiving due rights to plump markets da ladies have abandoned with the selfish decision – just look at those generational birthing age differences! – not to get knocked up by geographically available rando manchildren before we’ve worked out for ourselves what kind of adults we may ourselves wish to become.
In the realm of ideology, belief is more persuasive than fact. Suggestions that intersecting issues of lack of childcare, changed social expectations, men shirking childrearing responsibilities, plastic accumulations in the balls or rays from space may be the cause of declining birthrates are irrelevant when the fertility discourse has become a platform to perform dominant political values.
If you’re trying to fathom how the Republican VP candidate JD Vance’s relentless anti-woman pronatal authoritarianism has in any way entered the political mainstream, it’s because the former venture capitalist and his pals are preoccupied by the same two concerns. The issue for Republicans is that if you’re already ideologically wedded to life-begins-at-conception positions and habitual homophobia/transphobia and then add electoral spice by demonising immigrants to the point of social violence, compelling women into a physical reality of endless reproduction is a policy solution to the population challenge possessed of brutal, terrifying simplicity.
In Australia, hopefully, expanding the franchise of parenting through reproductive technology might affirm values more important than the profit projections that may have inspired it. “Every child wanted, every parent willing” is an old pro-choice slogan that applies as a social value beyond an immediate political demand.
But the environmental slogan “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell” is also pertinent. The US reproductive nightmare threatened by Vance and his ilk should inspire all Australian women to consider that the ability to determine the shape of growth, its timing or whether it happens at all has a greater power. And don’t the misogynists know it?
