Dialectics of Reproduction

The Politics of Reproduction

Mary O'Brien, midwife and author of The Politics of Reproduction, analyzed the dialectical, historical, and material aspects of the reproductive process. She argued that the physical labor involved in women's reproductive experiences affirms women's connections with their children and integration into the human species, whereas men's discontinuous experiences negate such connections and integration.

Patriarchy enables the reconciliation of this negation for men, by allowing them to claim ownership of the products of women's reproductive labor. O'Brien believed that men and women perceive the world differently because men and women have differing reproductive consciousness as a result of patriarchy. Women's experiences of reproduction are shaped by their location; women worldwide are still lobbying for legal abortion, maternal and child health, childcare, and security for themselves and their families. In a strictly patriarchal society, women are all but absent from most decision-making positions; they are particularly vulnerable to abuses in reproductive technologies.

O'Brien suggests social theory that accounts for women's experience must begin with the process of human reproduction, which is mediated by the intersections of biology, culture, and politics. O'Brien finds the material base of male domination in the separation of male sexuality from reproduction. While maternity is confirmed in the act of giving birth, paternity can be an abstract and uncertain knowledge. O'Brien suggests that men's domination of women arose through the discovery of the link between sexuality and reproduction. In her 1978 article “The Dialectics of Reproduction,” Mary O'Brien argues that women's physical experience of bearing children automatically affirms their connection with their children, while male consciousness of the reproductive process is necessarily discontinuous because they do not experience pregnancy and childbirth. Paternity remains an abstraction about which there will always remain some uncertainty, because in the process of conception, men ejaculate their semen into the woman's body (what she calls “the alienation of the seed”) without knowing if one of their sperm (or that of some other man) will result in a child.

...